'77 Million Paintings' poses interesting questions about what's an original artwork, giving everyone access to the same opportunity to view art, while ensuring everyone has a unique viewing experience. 77 Million Paintings is intended to occupy that downtime so that, instead of having a dead hole in the wall, you have a living picture." If you're not actually watching television, what you have is a big black hole in the wall. People now have larger screens, but these big objects sitting in their rooms are dormant for a lot of the time. The screen is not being used to tell a story - which is what screens normally do - but to show a painting that changes all the time. 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. I'm about to show you nine pictures created by Brian Eno which even he has not yet seen.