Brian Eno - Peter's notes

> Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. > <cite>Brian Eno</cite> At least once a year for maybe the last decade, I’ve had the experience of finding out Brian Eno was involved in something great and having to revise my opinion of him upwards once again. Recently I had that experience twice in one evening. First, when I learnt that Eno [coined the word “scenius”](https://kk.org/thetechnium/scenius-or-comm/): > Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius. And second, that he [composed the Windows 95 startup sound](https://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Q-and-A-With-Brian-Eno-2979740.php): > Q: How did you come to compose "The Microsoft Sound"? > > A: The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I'd been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, "Here's a specific problem -- solve it." > > The thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long." > > I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel. > > In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time. <div class="video video--youtube"> <iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/I3Ak5VgyEoc?modestbranding=1" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div> Extracts from an [essay](https://longnow.org/essays/big-here-long-now/) on The Clock of The Long Now (c.f. [[Stewart Brand]]): > If we want to contribute to some sort of tenable future, we have to reach a frame of mind where it comes to seem unacceptable - gauche, uncivilised - to act in disregard of our descendants. Such changes of social outlook are quite possible - it wasn't so long ago, for example, that we accepted slavery, an idea which most of us now find repellent. > > [...] > > We don't yet, however, live in The Long Now. Our empathy doesn't extend far forward in time. We need now to start thinking of our great-grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren, as other fellow-humans who are going to live in a real world which we are incessantly, though only semi-consciously, building. But can we accept that our actions and decisions have distant consequences, and yet still dare do anything? It was an act of complete faith to believe, in the days of slavery, that a way of life which had been materially very successful could be abandoned and replaced by another, as yet unimagined, but somehow it happened. We need to make a similar act of imagination now. > > Since this act of imagination concerns our relationship to time, a Millennium is a good moment to articulate it. Can we grasp this sense of ourselves as existing in time, part of the beautiful continuum of life? Can we become inspired by the prospect of contributing to the future? Can we shame ourselves into thinking that we really do owe those who follow us some sort of consideration, just as the people of the nineteenth century shamed themselves out of slavery? Can we extend our empathy to the lives beyond ours? > > I think we can. Humans are capable of a unique trick: creating realities by first imagining them, by experiencing them in their minds. When Martin Luther King said "I have a dream", he was inviting others to dream it with him. Once a dream becomes shared in that way, current reality gets measured against it and then modified towards it. As soon as we sense the possibility of a more desirable world, we begin behaving differently, as though that world is starting to come into existence, as though, in our minds at least, we're already there. The dream becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward. By this process it starts to come true. The act of imagining something makes it real. > > This imaginative process can be seeded and nurtured by artists and designers, for, since the beginning of the 20th century, artists have been moving away from an idea of art as something finished, perfect, definitive and unchanging towards a view of artworks as processes or the seeds for processes - things that exist and change in time, things that are never finished. Sometimes this is quite explicit - as in Walter de Maria's "Lightning Field", a huge grid of metal poles designed to attract lightning. Many musical compositions don't have one form, but change unrepeatingly over time - many of my own pieces and Jem Finer's Artangel installation "LongPlayer" are like this. Artworks in general are increasingly regarded as seeds - seeds for processes that need a viewer's (or a whole culture's) active mind in which to develop. Increasingly working with time, culture-makers see themselves as people who start things, not finish them. > > And what is possible in art becomes thinkable in life. We become our new selves first in simulacrum, through style and fashion and art, our deliberate immersions in virtual worlds. Through them we sense what it would be like to be another kind of person with other kinds of values. We rehearse new feelings and sensitivities. We imagine other ways of thinking about our world and its future. > > Danny Hillis's Clock of the Long Now is a project designed to achieve such a result. My favourite Eno-involved record? For now it's [Finding Shore](https://open.spotify.com/album/0PBsQFEQvckJBqqeSUi1X2), with Tom Rogerson. <div class="video video--youtube"> <iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UZri_BOuRy0?modestbranding=1" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div> Favourite single? [Once in a Lifetime](https://www.youtube.com/embed/TGofoH9RDEA).