«Infinite Music»
Brian Eno in Conversation with Thomas Oberender
Thomas Oberender: One consistent aspect of your work is the shift from an object-based understanding of art to a more process-oriented interest in art. And this shift changes a lot: it affects both production methods and presentation styles and alters our understanding of what the artwork actually is. It opens the experience of art a lot more towards the agency of the audience. Works of art are no longer regarded as finished products, but rather situations in a constant state of flux. Everything began, I would say, with your education at Ipswich Art School. What kind of art school was it that you attended in the late 60s?
Brian Eno: I had a very lucky choice of art school. In fact, I originally chose another school, because the well-known art school in my part of England was in a town called Colchester. But my parents didn’t have any money and I couldn’t get a grant from the local education committee to go to Colchester. So, I rather reluctantly ended up going to this other art school, called Ipswich Art School. I went there in 1964 and I was there for two years. It was a very small college and it didn’t really have a good reputation. But it just so happened that at exactly that time a very charismatic teacher, Roy Ascott, had taken over that college. And he had hired a whole lot of new staff, very interesting new people, who were cyberneticians, mathematicians, painters, sculptors and installation artists. They weren’t the kind of people you would normally find in an art school in the 60s. And the whole approach of the college was very surprising to me as a 16-year-old turning up with my little box of paints thinking I was going to do pictures of nudes, if I was lucky. There were no nudes (laughs), we didn’t even use the paints. We were set projects that were very, very different from anything I could imagine at the time. For instance, we were told to go out and buy all the newspapers that were available for a particular day, to find one topic that they all had in common and then make a presentation of that topic but not using language at all.
TO: It sounds like there was no training to be a good artist in the traditional sense of drawing and other traditional techniques.
BE: Yes. However, people who were interested in the craft of painting were not discouraged, but they weren’t encouraged either. The sense was that we were learning to be creative and to think about situations.
TO: Can creativity be learned?
BE: I think it can, actually. One thing I took away from that college was that there are always perspectives on any working situation or any thinking situation that are fresh and new.
TO: One important teacher that you had at Ipswich was Tom Phillips. He was exceptionally influential regarding your interest in music. I think he also recommended you books like Stafford Beer’s Brain of the Firm, the cybernetic bible of the time.
BE: It wasn’t Tom who recommended Stafford Beer’s books to me. It was my girlfriend’s mother, Joan Harvey. She had found this book about the application of cybernetics to management and organisation in the local library, and she thought: »Brian will like that”— and she was absolutely right. It was a life-changing book.
TO: Because it was so absolutely different from anything that is related to art?
BE: Yes, the book didn’t talk about art at all. In fact, most of the best books I’ve read about art don’t mention the word »art” once. They are not really books about art, they are books about humans, how they organise themselves, how they think and how they find value and meaning. There aren’t very many good books about art actually, and it’s partly because artists don’t feel an obligation to be articulate about what they do, whereas scientists do. Science must be a public language, it has to be something that can be testable, otherwise it isn’t science. It has to be able to put itself into a language, so that you can go and test what’s being claimed. Art doesn’t have to be a public language, and often takes a sort of perverse pleasure in being a very private language. I sometimes think that artists hide behind a smoke screen, in particular the idea that: »If I think about it too much, it will all disappear”. It’s the idea that art is a kind of balloon that you keep blowing up and you have to keep it away from any sharp objects, like serious criticism. To get back to Tom Phillips: what made him very important to me, was that he was a very critical thinker and he was very intellectual. And he really wanted you to have clear ideas, to articulate clear ideas. That was not typical of art teachers at that time.
TO: And he recommended you Terry Riley’s music.
BE: Yes, he was really the first person that connected me up to the idea that I could make music. Now, I didn’t play any instruments, but I loved music and by that time I already had quite a big collection of records and very strong opinions about them. It wasn’t until I discovered via Tom Phillips people like John Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, Cornelius Cardew and so on — all of that group of mid-sixties composers — that I realised there was a whole new idea about music which I could take part in.
TO: What was the new idea?
BE: I think the idea was that music could be a set of processes; it didn’t have to be a set of particular skills. So whatever skills you had, even if that only consisted of being able to bang a glass on a table, you could construct music around it. So, for instance, Christian Wolff wrote a piece called Stones, in which he said: »Collect some stones and bang them together”. I could do that.
TO: I think this was the time of a very high appreciation of formalism and abstraction. The enemy of this epoch in art was figurative painting. How is your relation to the opposite of formalism, the figurative moment, today? In painting it seems to be making somewhat of a comeback.
BE: Of course, formalism has a quite different meaning in music than it does in the visual arts. Music was always an abstract art. This is why people like Kandinsky said: »I want to make paintings that are like music”. Because painters, who were stuck with the idea of a tradition of representation, looked at music as an escape route: »Here is an art that is entirely abstract and always has been entirely abstract”. Nobody listens to a piece of music and says: »What’s that meant to represent?”— which people often do with paintings. What happened around the turn of the 20th century was that painters decided they wanted their paintings to be a set of shapes and colours that make something happen to you. So, this is a move away from the idea of painting as a sort of transmitter of information, a story, a narrative, a picture or something like that, to the idea of art as a trigger, as something that makes something happen. The thing that makes something happen can almost be arbitrary; it doesn’t have a history of content in a sense.
TO: When I look at your development as an artist, it immediately starts with questioning the boundaries, the limits of an artwork. The »ambient music” concept you invented in the mid-70s is an infinite game in the sense of James Carse. It could theoretically go on forever and tends to generate an environment of its own, something that perpetually surrounds us, that modulates and changes yet remains an utterly pervasive atmosphere aimed less at development than at duration. This kind of music absorbs us. Instead of standing opposite this work, listeners are immersed in it: it surrounds us with the situation it conveys, just like this Hexadome construction, for example, for which you composed a work. The inner architecture of the Hexadome blends ambient sound and video screens to create an atmosphere that can’t be seen from the outside.
BE: A lot of things happened in the 60s and the 70s in terms of questioning not only what an artwork could be, but what an artist could be, and what a member of the audience, the so-called »listener”, does. I always used to say that every new form of art requires a new form of listening or a new form of viewing. One of the funny things I remember is, when my album Music for Airports came out in 1978, a critic wrote a review that was meant to be the biggest put down review of all times, where he said: »This music has no beat, no melody, no theme, no structure”. I thought: »That’s exactly what I was after”. I was very pleased and I wrote and thanked him.
TO: If I compare your works I see two big bodies of work, and they can hardly be separated: it’s your work as a musician and your work as a visual artist. In the late 70s, you started a career as a visual artist who made exhibitions, installations and visual objects. From there, you started to create bigger environments, like the Quiet Clubs. From very early on, your work represented the interplay between music and visual music, meaning visual works that in combination with sound create an ambient situation that I can enter. You also created a new understanding of what video art is. Your 77 Million Paintings is a computerised creation of an endless work, an ever-changing painting that glides from one image to the next. Comparing this work to your apps, in which you playfully combine sound and visuals, I would say that you create artefacts which fuse hearing and seeing. These artefacts are created at the exact time that I experience the artwork itself.
BE: I think in the way that I’m using these senses I am trying to pull them together. Really, when I started doing what we now call »ambient music”, I had the idea to make music that you could treat like a painting.
TO: In what sense?
BE: What happens when you put a painting on the wall in your house? You don’t sit there for the next 35 years staring at it all the time. You live your life and occasionally look at the picture, and it’s part of your life, it’s part of the ambience of your life. Music wasn’t really like that. You’d put a record on and you’d sit in the perfect position, with the speakers nicely arranged, and you’d sit and listen to the music and it would finish and then you would put another music on. Music was an experience that required attention and had a distinct beginning and end to it. I thought: »What would happen if you could make music that didn’t have a beginning and end, that was infinitely long?” So that was the first start: to make music that was slow enough or still enough to feel like a painting. On the other hand, I was now working with light and carrying on with some of the experiments I’d been making in art school. And I wanted to make objects that were like paintings but changed very slowly. And so, I realised: »Oh yes, I’m trying to make paintings that are a little bit like music”. I was trying to make music like paintings and paintings like music. Gradually these ideas sort of pulled together in the form of installations. I think it has very much to do with an idea that you mentioned at the beginning, which is the move away from making objects to enabling processes, to making things that carry on. This has led me to the idea of the artist as a gardener, more than as an architect.
TO: Your work also plays with the division between private and public. After your 77 Million Paintings you were one of the first artists to develop apps. Your video paintings are works that seem to wait for an audience and want to be seen by many people. Ideally, they should be viewed on a large screen. That screen does not react to us or respond to our input. It broadcasts. Apps, however, are usually experienced privately. They react to us and we create what they show us. How does this apply to a structure like the Hexadome, which can also be considered a kind of instrument?
BE: There is a big difference between something you hold in your hand and something that holds you in its hand. If you go into the Hexadome, you are in the middle of something. Immersion is a very important part of it: the idea of making something you walk inside and that surrounds you, that happens all around you, that in a sense makes you feel small.
TO: Small doesn’t mean that you have no position, it means you are in the middle, you are the centre of something that surrounds you and seems to be infinite. You don’t see or feel a boundary.
Be: That is actually a very important point. When I first started making »ambient music”, it was actually for a particular functional reason and it came out of a particular incident. I was in bed after a car accident. I couldn’t move and a friend of mine came over to see me. As she left, I said: »Oh, can you put that record on?” There was a record of harp music by a Welsh lady. She put the record on and left. It was a very rainy, windy day, and the music was too quiet. I could hardly hear it, and one of the speakers wasn’t working properly. So, I was listening to the rain on the windows, and occasionally the loudest notes that this lady was playing on the harp. I couldn’t move, so I couldn’t get up to increase the volume. And I suddenly started realising that this was a very beautiful new idea of music, the idea of a music that you couldn’t hear the edges of. After a little while I couldn’t tell what was the harp and what was the sound of the rain. I thought: »What about a kind of music that made all of the rest of the world seem like it was part of the music?” So, you are listening to this music and you hear things and you think: »Is that music or is that a car going by? Or is that distant thunder or is that a bird singing?” And then after a while you stop asking that question. You think of it all as part of the music.
TO: How important was technology for this development? I believe without synthesisers and computers all this more generative processing would not have been possible.
BE: Yes. It very much anticipates the algorithmic era that we are now in. And this is why cybernetics and Stafford Beer were so interesting to me. Brain of the Firm has a sentence—there are a lot of good sentences—which described exactly what I wanted to do in music. The book is about management. There is no mention of music in the whole book. The sentence was: »Instead of trying to specify the system in full detail, you specify it only somewhat and then you let the dynamics of the system carry you in the direction you want to go”. Beer was talking about a new idea of organisation, a sort of bottom-up organisation, instead of top-down with the boss as the guy at the top who decides what everyone’s doing and they all report back to him and he sends down further orders. A lot of people still carry that old picture of organisation in their head. Alternatively, Beer is saying: »No, you create a system that is responsive, fast and densely interconnected”. Instead of everything being mediated through the hypothetical top person, there is a whole mesh of feedback loops through the system. Beer went on to build a cybernetic system of governance for the socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile. In fact, he worked with Allende until ten days before he was assassinated by the CIA and Pinochet, who understood the implications of a fully cybernetic government. They were smart enough to end the experiment. Stafford built this quite extraordinary system for Allende, which was based on so-called Telexes.
TO: Which were the text messages of the time. Even before the fax machine.
BE: Right, it was the text message of the day and it was the fastest form of communication. Interestingly, just in the last few years, people have started becoming very interested in Stafford’s experiment and reintroducing it into contemporary governance.
TO: What these kinds of systems aspire to is real-time processing of complex situations, be it in the economy or in politics: to be able to witness the effects of our actions immediately and respond to them. You started working with these open process elements quite early.
They are neither random, nor completely fixed. They are something in between.
BE: There is a nice word for it. It’s called »stochastic” — one of my favourite words.
TO: What does it mean?
BE: It means »indeterminate within certain bounds”. Imagine you are standing on the corner of a street and watch the colours of cars. The appearance of red cars is stochastic. You know there will be red cars and you can probably say that in an hour there are normally about 240 red cars, but you don’t actually know the order in which they are going to come. There might
be six of them that come up at once and then not a single one for a certain time. So, a lot of the most interesting processes are stochastic ones: you kind of know their statistical facts, but you don’t know their particular facts. In fact, a lot of the stuff that I’m doing with both music and lights I call »random” because people know what »random” means. But it’s actually not true. »Random” is not the right word, »stochastic” is.
TO: You are not only a gardener, you are also a mathematician. Neither are traditional figures of authority. I like that.
BE: That’s true. As an artist I don’t see myself as the genius that governs everything and everyone, but as someone who plants a seed in the world which then grows and evolves independently. Nature takes care of this quite autonomously: nothing ever stays the same.
Brian Eno works as musician, music producer, music theorist and visual artist. The talk »Infinite Music” took place on 31 March 2018 in the context of Brian Eno’s installation Empty Formalism which was presented in the ISM Hexadome at Gropius Bau.
In: CHANGES Formats, Digital Culture Identity Politics Immersion Sustainability. Berliner Festspiele 2012-2021, Ed. Thomas Oberender, Theater der Zeit, Berlin 2022, S. 176-185