Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

The Brooklyn Rail SEPTEMBER 2024 - by Charlotte Kent

GENERATIVE FILM'S POTENTIAL: ENO

For quite a while virtual reality, as headset or immersive cinema, seemed to be the next ground for film. The use of generative AI in film and television contributed to the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike (Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) and WGA strike (Writers Guild of America). The film Eno (2024) doesn't use generative AI, but generative practices, which introduces a necessary distinction. Generative art requires a deftness with code to write an algorithm that produces visually engaging iterations; the generative AI that so many are discussing (Midjourney, DALL·E, and Stable Diffusion) has people input a written or image prompt to get an output (more on different generative AI models). I say all this because Eno is a generative film, not a generative AI film (despite references to generative AI in reviews from Variety and others, which Hustwit and Dawes have had to clarify). Eno was five years in the making and though Gary Hustwit gets recognition as the director, the editors Maya Tippett and Marley McDonald as well as the generative artist Brendan Dawes were crucial participants in the project.

Eno isn't one film, but many, and the viewer's response is complicated by this iterability; now in its fourth generation, change is part of its discourse. The nature of digital is to make variation and modularity possible. A generative film takes advantage of that quality. Each screening differs but the "randomness" is structured. Hustwit's interviews with Eno plus archival footage (approximately four-hundred hours of film in a lockup was digitized by a conservation specialist) get remixed in different ways for each screening.

The film is structured around principles similar to those found in Brian Eno's ambient music and generative art, where the outcome emerges from establishing and altering rules and parameters. Speaking with Brendan Dawes about his efforts on the film, he explained that it follows a loose three-part structure where the start and end of the film offer related content, with the middle passage presenting the most variation. The philosophizing about art's role in the world at the end balances the earlier reflections on finding a life in art. There are two "pixel dream" scenes, each about thirty-seconds of abstraction generated in real time. Both screenings I saw included sections with David Bowie, but only some of the scenes were the same. The song Discreet Music came up in both, but only one version discussed how Bowie listened to it throughout the tour during which he overcame his addiction to cocaine, or how many parents have told Bowie it was the song played in the delivery room when their child was born.

To keep himself from becoming staid, Eno produced "Oblique Strategies" cards with Peter Schmidt; these shift perspective to alter an approach, eg. "a line has two sides," or "don't break the silence," or "twist the spine." In the film, different guests read one of a dozen cards. That text and film clip then designates what other content will be included in the particular generated variation of the film. This serves as a kind of feedback loop, an element of generative art and cybernetics, to which I will return. In both versions of Eno that I saw, Laurie Anderson was the reader. I did not realize the influence that card had on the film but would see it again just to track that element. Eno's music often focuses on creating an experience driven by mood and atmosphere, rather than a narrative, and the oblique strategies support that sensibility.

It's typical of film theory to differentiate the medium from live theater. Without revisiting any unnecessary competition between the arts, film allows an audience to watch without the pressure of responding "appropriately" (one reason I can't watch live comedy but delight in it once recorded); home viewing enhances this separation yet more. In a surveillance culture, this may offer a limited explanation for the declining audience in theaters or cinemas. If film (particularly within the scope of this privatization) allows a viewer to observe without being observed, what Eno made evident to me was that a generative film forces a viewer to be more aware of the contingency of their viewing.

"Only the art itself can discover its possibilities, and the discovery of a new possibility is a discovery of a new medium. A medium is something through which or by means of which something specific gets done or said in particular ways. It provides, one might say, particular ways to get through to someone, to make sense..." - Stanley Cavell, Types; Cycles as Genres in The World Viewed: Reflections On The Ontology Of Film

Generative film may be a medium, per philosopher Stanley Cavell, demanding something specific of us now. The technology of the film reel opened opportunities for a novel visual, sound, and performance art, and yet it was constrained by its physical entity: the angle of the camera and the continuous narrative established a designated experience. Though color and sound could be manipulated and interesting editing effects conjure strange new couplings, even once film went digital, it maintained those original constraints, despite adding fanciful visual effects through computer softwares. People bemoaned the colorization of black and white films, a process which led to softwares that automatically identified camera movements and identical objects, including actors (see Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television).

Those advancements then enabled computer generated images and digital rendering, which improved motion capture such that the former chairman of Image Metrics described the process as "soul transference... The model has the actress's soul" in a 2006 New York Times article (with opinions differing). Twenty years later, similar concerns remain - actress Scarlett Johansson's cease and desist letter to Open AI or why artist Holly Herndon created Holly+ to manage adoption of her voice. Before dismissing current worries with "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose [the more things change, the more they stay the same]," or running for some hill without internet service (though that is quite nice on occasion), capitalism's usurious model need not be the only one. Generative film has the potential to shift us out of a simple entertainment form (one that I also sometimes enjoy after a long day, collapsing in front of a screen) towards one that invites us to be circumspect about our own attitudes and interests.

The discourse on gaze in film specifies how critics (by which I mean any critical audience) observe the camera's situating them to observe in a particular way. Laura Mulvey famously articulated a power structure in Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema (1975). bell hooks invited reflection on how oppressed minorities produce a gesture of resistance in The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators (1992) that can support a critical consciousness. I think it is possible that generative film emphasizes the particularities of one's gaze; one is always aware that one is only viewing one version, that one is grasping at elements to make connections based on one's situatedness in life, on that day, according to a set of interests and preferences and beliefs. Though things stand out differently in watching any movie from one day to the next, because of the content and stylistic variations from one screening to the next in generative film, one becomes more responsible for interpretation.

The "object" of a generative film is inconsistent, so intention and meaning aren't anchored as easily by pointing to this or that. Formal readings require a fair bit of knowledge about the making of the film - including the editors' and generative artist's processes. Eno calls upon a hermeneutics to make us consider the games we play, their cultural and socio-political significance, in watching film.

Could there be a kind of solipsism or increased isolation of opinion, because it would be too easy to say: well, that is just what I saw? I worried about that "let's agree to disagree" breaking point. In musing on this concern over several days, I realized that misses the larger social context of uncertain references that challenge public discourse. Generative art and film provide a context for us to engage with the vulnerability and contingency, responsibility and self-expression in discussing such unstable objects. Visual art has always done this, but its audience is far more limited than that of film, television, and screen products. The question of criticism, of an ability to articulate judgment, within a diverse public sphere - doing so without becoming antagonistic - seems particularly relevant. I walked away from the first viewing thinking the film was largely about surrender, only to find another member of the audience at Film Forum, whom I randomly queried, had interpreted it to be about Brian Eno's sense of relationality. The responses to the film invite us to learn more about each other, and to explain ourselves, which often involves assessing one's privilege and position, possibilities and potential. Content in the film isn't the sole point.

Documentaries have an educational flair, but this documentary on Eno doesn't (just) tell us about his life and thoughts on art, like so many hagiographic explorations of an artist's metier. Eno the film is like his music. Conceptually always interesting, but you may like some bits of it more than others. Nevertheless, through the cuts, clips, and, yes, content, the generative quality of the film invites us to explore the question of creativity, by practicing and observing our own associations to ask what and why those ideas bubbled up for each of us.

Yet, Eno is not some completely abstract, artsy film. Dawes described his willingness to abandon narrative entirely, which makes sense as a generative artist who has been working in these kinds of contexts for decades, but Hustwit and the editors were right to temper that creative impulse in this introduction to a novel arrangement for film. Fortunately, Dawes was permitted to use the same footage, visual archive, and Eno's music to realize a 168-hour real-time generative work, Nothing Can Ever Be The Same (2023), in a collaborative effort with Hustwit. Art can push limits the way film's popular offering can't, but both engage in hermeneutics, which may be worth revisiting as a contrast to the language around ludology, gaming, and play, that has been popularized over the last decade. In contrast to Dawes's extensive work, Eno is approximately eighty-five minutes - slightly differing in each screening given the clips introduced into each variation - and so an exceedingly accessible film that presents the potential of generative film in the context of a musician and music producer known for drawing out the unexpected.

This issue of the unexpected, part of the conversation around innovation and avant-garde practices, appears in the discourse of cybernetics. In one clip in a screening I saw, Eno describes how repetitive music starts to filter out sameness for listeners so that difference stands out. Claude Shannon's information theory proposed that messages are "the forms of pattern and organization" distinct from the surrounding noise. Cybernetics gets associated with a process of command and control, massive military research projects post World War II, and an interdisciplinary research project that made equivalencies between humans and machines. It represents a shift away from hierarchical approaches to biological and social organization (like the Linnaean Classification System) to a systems orientation of behaviors, with feedback loops to self-correct and sustain the system. The bad side: controlling the information a system receives can direct its behavior (with malevolent potential of industrialized automation expressed by some early participants, like Norbert Wiener). The good side: participants in a system share responsibility for its outcomes.

This is the debate ping-ponging between the internet's algorithms creating dangerous informational filter bubbles that manipulate citizens, and the internet as a resource for citizens worldwide. Stated so simply, the complexities of the debate are lost, with assorted issues and stakes erased. The same thing happens around "AI," a meaningless term because it encompasses so much that it allows the argument to compare apples and oranges: the infrastructure of the internet to private corporations' social media algorithms; personal photo-identification softwares to drones; autocorrect to deepfakes; identification of genetic mutations in cancer treatment to pervasive data tracking by downloaded apps. That all these things may be on a spectrum does not mean they produce the same social, political, economic, intellectual, or cultural damage. We are challenged to engage with these technologies not as distinct objects, but as distinct operations - how, why, when, where, on and for whom matter.

Creating a song using a synthesizer, for which Eno is rightly famed, is not the same as manufacturing a political deepfake interview. The rise of public generators that have scraped content from the internet for massive data sets to sell the possibility of selecting from a set of text, image, sound, and video outputs should not be compared to the process that delivered Eno. Though both use algorithms, that doesn't make them the same. Humanism proposed a progress of knowledge through empiricism and the scientific method. It tempered the moral claims of supernatural agents and class structures over individual lives and the ethical standing of their welfare. It advocated freedom of thought, religion, speech, and it led to a lot of bad. It wasn't as equitable or free as claimed. Logic and rational thought had, by the twentieth century, come under suspicion, and some kind of balance between its productive application and its rampant rationalizing and standardizing still needs to be found in the twenty-first century.

I am not some fantasist of "a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony" (to quote Richard Brautigan's 1967 poem All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace) mainly because I think harmony too easily occludes the constant work of addressing the ways the systems in which we are embedded (dis)function - by the way, a show titled for that Brautigan poem at RedCat in LA presents art engaged precisely with alternatives to the u/dystopian attitudes surrounding "AI" proliferation. To return to the film at hand, when I saw it the first time, Brian Eno spoke about command and control as having constructed Western society, now entirely consumed by those cybernetic operations and having forgotten about surrender. In both versions, he talked about surrender as an active verb, a strategy to use, a means of adapting, and a way of learning to deal with circumstances. His active invocation got me thinking about the word, musing on its Latin root of "render" meaning to give back, or how digital artists render work, and why it need not feel defeatist but a kind of acknowledgment of the pains in the world.

Eno ends with Brian Eno speaking about the climate, which brought me to rethink his comments at the beginning looking at a leaf and how observing nature influenced his practice. In systems thinking, the autopoiesis of self-generating requires a system to maintain its boundaries through an openness to the environment. Some of what generative practices invite us to consider is to be neither isolated nor similar but both distinct and connected; there are ethical stakes in a metaphysic of this kind.

This film presents a variable environment. It's disconcerting to remember that there can't be a final peace - as many imagined after World War I and as many of us desperately seek for the world - just as there should never again be the atrocious fascist euphemism of a "final solution" because the difficulty of life is a changing situation. As Dawes said when we spoke, the film presumes to "trust the audience... If you give them an environment to play within, they will surprise you... they have to do some work and you know what, they do it." I want that to be true, but it can only be so by risking that trust - and risking social and educational contexts to attempt those cultural and political conversations.

The film Eno will leave you with questions. Film Forum is hosting a panel on September 15 between Gary Hustwit and Regina Harsanyi, Associate Curator of Media Arts at the Museum of the Moving Image, where the practice and possibilities of generative film will continue to unfold.