Hacker Cinema
Eno
2024 · Film · documentary · 80 min
Directed by Gary Hustwit
Visionary musician and artist Brian Eno — known for producing David Bowie, U2, Talking Heads, among many others; pioneering the genre of ambient music; and releasing over 40 solo and collaboration albums — reveals his creative processes in this groundbreaking generative documentary: a film that’s different every time it’s shown.
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2 comments on Hacker News
I'd have to see it to make any coherent comment .. but there is that word "Documentary".
Demoscene generative art is not often mistaken or confused with documentary.
Cutting edge is always interesting, this though is (or should be) a homage to what was once cutting edge .. literal tape loops and razors and the evolution forward.
I'm imagining there's a lot of audio and or text and or video that relates to Eno's life (biography) and artistic output (some structured, some generative).
To describe this experience as a generative documentary would imply cutting together pre existing "truthful" material along with some generated for the first time material with a healthy dash of reordering fragments while (ideally) preserving some notion of chronological tagging ( material from later in his life can appear first but ideally (IMHO) this is made apparent to the viewer ).
Speculation aside I'm in the dark, of course, I can't dash off to the Sundance Festival to actually experience whatever this creation is .. several times in fact if I'm to get a sense of what is meant by "never the same experience twice".
All things Eno raise technical questions that rabbit hole into labyrinths, this documentary about Eno raises another:
“Eno,” the portrait of Brian Eno that opened the Sundance Film Festival today, is a documentary that mirrors the spirit of Eno’s music in its very form. The director, Gary Hustwit (“Helvetica”), created it with generative software that allows the film to play in a different version every time you see it. Sections of it will land in a different order, and some won’t appear at all (replaced by others); the movie is reshuffled each time with an element of the random. How random? Well, it’s not as if the generative AI determines the order of everything. How does the director acheive a bespoke per iteration viewing in a dedicated theatre (there are a number of means).
Can this be reliably transferred to some "take home" experience that reliably captures the essence of what the director has done?
Is this just a markov chain of "shuffle" operations with transitions, can this be emulated with a .MKV file full of tracks and a modified player that can read embedded "next track" probabilities?
No Pussyfooting.