Posts tagged: 77 million paintings
I Got Inspired
Every once in a while, I get inspired to create something. Sometimes it’s a music idea and sometimes it’s something more tactile. I was watching Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings last night and got a surge of inspiration. One of the combinations of art produced a silhouetted figure with various degrees of splatter art making up the insides. I didn’t get a screenshot of the Eno art but here are 3 small pieces inspired by it.
I’ve always liked working with the shapes of people without going into the details of those people’s appearances. I like leaving out things like facial expressions and emotional body language on purpose so you can focus on the overall common shapes and attributes that go along with those commonalities. I might do more of these but there’s a ‘tactile’ bug approaching me and I thing I’m going to be doing something more hands-on next.
Brian Eno’s ‘77 Million Paintings’
I’ve been hooked on watching Brian Eno’s latest visual music installation, 77 Million Paintings, quite a lot lately. Since the actual installation is still making its way through museums and galleries across the globe, I’ve been enjoying the PC/Mac DVD software version that lets you experience the installation on your computer’s monitor.
I’ve always been fond of Eno’s generative work (Ambient 1, Neroli, Thursday Afternoon) and the art generated by 77 Million Paintings is no exception. I love the concept of self-generating music that never ends. The songs on albums like Ambient 1: Music for Airports are but fractions of the actual music created during those sessions.
One of the things that is interesting in this, and about generative work in general, is that the artist doesn’t actually know exactly what the result is going to be.
I really think Eno missed a golden opportunity with this software though. Instead of creating a stand-alone art program, he could have created an open software system for creating generative paintings in addition to the stand-alone program. He could have opened up the basic rule sets and image choices, letting users create their own paintings or share ’sets’ of paintings over the internet. I’m sure the basic functionality could be designed in Flash using PNG transparencies and various overlay effects. I would love to see an open project for software like this develop on the web.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRkNrWp6tLg
Brian Eno – 77 Million Paintings
