CALGARY— Tired of staring at your television, watching a video of a blazing yule log through these long, winter nights? Experimental musician, Microsoft start-up-sound-creator, and visual artist Brian Eno has prepared a fine-art alternative to such monotonous programming: a multimedia exhibition that this week landed in Canada. (Don't worry if you're not visiting our brothers to the north, though — the piece is also available for home enjoyment on DVD).
The project, which has been on an epic world tour since debuting in Tokyo in 2006 and is now at Calgary's Glenbow Museum, is composed of a light-and-sound installation that was inspired, one voyeuristic night, by a blank TV screen Eno espied through the window of a lavish London apartment, in which a crowd was gathered for a dinner party. The screen struck Eno as a "missed opportunity," according to CBC news. "That ought to be a painting," he thought.
The product of this window-peeping is "77 Million Paintings," a computer-generated slide show composed of slowly shifting images of Eno's painted works, accompanied by recordings of his ambient music. The show's title is a nod to how many variations on artistic representation computer software can generate — an aspect of the work that has been enhanced as the show has toured, with Eno adding new paintings to the mix at each stop.
"You can think of an artist as someone who starts something rather than someone who finishes something," Eno told CBC. "I think of this as the pack of seeds that I've planted, and each time, a different bunch of flowers grows from it."
Of course, this is not the pioneering musician's first foray into the world of the visual arts. Before turning to auditory delights as a member of the band Roxy Music and then in collaboration with this likes of David Bowie, Talking Heads, and U2, Eno graduated with a fine art degree from the Winchester School of Art. Among other things, he curated the 2010 Brighton Festival, in which he also included "77 Million Paintings."
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