77 Million Paintings by Brian Eno
March 25th, 2006
I really need to get a passport. From March 24-April 3, Brian Eno’s new installation “77 Million” will be on display at the Laforet Museum in Tokyo. The exhibition takes it’s name from his forthcoming software DVD, “77 Million Paintings”, in which layers of his audio and video creations are continuously and randomly composed. On the exhibition’s Flash microsite there’s a short video about the software with examples, and they look great.
From Googling around the net, I also discovered that to produce both random video and music requires a G5 processor on the mac. A G4 will only get you random video and a regular old mp3. So that answer’s yesterday’s question of which Apple machine I’ll be getting. I’ll be getting a G5, and now I’ll be getting it soon, in order to run 77 Million Paintings on my 20″ LCD.
I’ve been to three Eno installations: one of Koan generative music pieces and Bliss paintings, an environment at SFMOMA called “Compact Forest Proposal“, and a purely audio installation called “Amagamate” in NYC. In the past, I’ve based vacations around Eno-related trips. Faith and I drove to North Carolina for the Koan/Bliss installation, and flew to San Francisco for the SFMOMA show. I took a day off work and flew to NYC to sit in the Amagamate installation for a few hours, and then promptly fly back.
But that’s not going to happen this time for a few reasons. First and foremost, I still don’t have a passport, and getting a rush one is both pricey and impractical. Secondly, a trip to Japan sounds really expensive, and I just got my credit card paid off. Lastly, although I took two years of Japanese in high school, that was a long time ago and I fear my vocabulary has diminished to the point of being capable of saying “excuse me”, “big”, “small”, and a smattering of other words.