If you do capture the images, Eno is making them available for non-commercial use, provided that the source is credited.Įno said: "I think of these things as visual music. There will be another goodie along in a minute. You couldn't hope to catch them all, so perhaps you should just let them all float by.
This might be a deliberate omission, since the software is defined by how the images mutate and the sheer number of variations there are. There's no built-in way to export images either, although you can hit print screen, use ALT+TAB to get the desktop back and then paste the screengrab into your favourite image editor. It would be fantastic if idle PCs could turn themselves into ambient artworks, instead of somebody having to switch the art on. There are only a couple of quibbles: the biggest is that there's no facility to have the software kick in as a screensaver. Although, if you think of it as 42 bytes per picture, it seems a bargain. You'll need to set aside 3GB of hard disk space to accommodate 77 Million Paintings.
The sound quality is a massive step up from Eno's previous generative music release 'Generative Music 1', probably because PC audio has moved on massively in the last ten years. If you're familiar with Brian Eno's ambient music CDs, you'll be at home listening to this DVD.
There are no beats, and there's no elaborate melody: just sounds to immerse yourself in. That means Eno's set the parameters for the music, but the computer works within those to recreate a new performance each time. The paintings are accompanied by a generative music soundtrack. You're extremely unlikely to see anything that closely resembles the following pictures anywhere else. That's not to say that there aren't plenty of images: even though one design motif has repeated in the time I've been using the software, I haven't noticed any similar 'paintings'. I'm guessing that a fair number of the 77 million paintings are almost indistinguishable, differing only slightly in colour or fade levels. Paintings continuously transform and change as new slides fade in and others fade away.
His latest project is ' 77 Million Paintings', a computer program for Windows or Mac that installs from DVD and creates paintings and music.īy combining and layering Eno's hand-made slides, the package is claimed to generate 77 million different artworks automatically. + reviews via outside.I'm about to show you nine pictures created by Brian Eno which even he has not yet seen. Maybe it was part of the experience - that asceticism de rigueur in the Presence of Art - but it only served to remind us constantly of our uncomfortable reality, when all we wanted was to get sucked into the envoûtement. It was a truly fantastic evening, with one bémol: apart from a couple of chairs and the rare beanie bag, people had to either stand, sit or lie on an uncomfortable wooden floor. The result is that having created the seed of the work it becomes unpredictable even to the artist himself." The software processes the music that accompanies the paintings in a similar way, so the selection of elements and their duration in the piece are arbitrarily chosen. To describe the 77 Million Paintings event as a slide show with Eno's signature ambient music would be reducing and totally unfair to what is actually a mesmerizing, avant-garde experience: "Each 'painting' is generated from a set of hand-made slides that are randomly selected and combined with specially developed software. He is also an incredible artist and forward thinker, who joined Danny Hillis and GBN's Stuart Brand as a founding member of The Long Now.
Eno is better known for his synthetic music and collaboration with the likes of Roxy Music and David Bowie.