Art House hosted a sold out screening of the first ever generative documentary on Jan. 8. The film, titled “Eno,” presented key moments of electronic musician Brian Eno’s career. The film, with only two Eugene theatrical showings in January, was devoured by fans, with guests turned away at the door due to overcapacity. The film inspired such an audience due the eccentric nature of its main character and the groundbreaking technology used to create it.

The generative technology used to create the documentary is the brainchild of Gary Hustwit and Brendan Dawes, who developed code which sorted through over 30 hours of interviews and 500 hours of film, according to the Verge. The result is a documentary which is unique with every showing.

Eno himself led a storied creative career as father of the Ambient music genre, with an extensive list of esteemed musical and multidisciplinary collaborators. However, his impact permeates deeper than the Ambient classics, widely regarded as pseudo-elevator music, which he is generally known for. Eno, unlike artists of his time, opted to fill a role which had yet to be created. In the changing times of the 70s and 80s, he furthered a new vision for music and the technology used to create it. He discussed the idea of operating under the presumption of change on Red Bull Music Academy, stating that education is “based on the idea that you have to educate people to fit into this society as it stands now, which is stupid because they aren’t functioning in this society as it stands now, but the one 12 or 20 years hence and that won’t be the same society at all.”

By showing the formation of society around his art, rather than vise-versa, his career elicits a confidence that the future generations of creatives, using adaptability and new perspective, can move the culture forward.

The early stages of Eno’s life saw him practicing fine arts, but during his time at Winchester School of Art he was lured into the glam rock revolution of the ‘70s. During his initial foray into the genre, he worked with Roxy Music, a popular UK band, as a synthesizer player.

Eno, who rocked long hair and makeup in typical glam fashion, was interested in subverting expectations of the time and found power in androgyny. In a 2001 interview he said, “I just wanted to look great. And looking great meant dressing as a woman! Or at least as some kind of new hybrid.”

Following his departure from the band in 1973, he embarked on a groundbreaking career as a producer and soloist. Like his time at Roxy, he relied on the musical machinery of the mid 70s to guide his creative process. The new machinery he pioneered provided exponentially more musical freedom than the analog instruments of the past. This newfound freedom proved to be a creative problem, so many options make deep exploration a near impossible task.

However, Eno found a solution to creative overload by setting his own limits, establishing parameters which allowed him to dive deeper and explore his creativity. The physical representation of his methods was “Oblique Strategies,” a deck of instruction inscribed cards which he used when facing a creative mental block. Included in the deck were phrases like “Turn it upside down” or “Distorting time”, which are meant to spark the imagination.

In a video for Red Bull Music Academy, he said “If you have a lot of options, you don’t have a lot of rapport with the instrument. If you have few options, your rapport keeps increasing because you understand the options better and better.”

Using this approach he created “Discreet Music” in 1975, which sparked the curiosity of David Bowie, who was recovering from a cocaine addiction at the time. Bowie was unable to listen to music other than the drawn out electronic album while on tour and resonated with Eno’s work.

The mutual admiration of the two artists resulted in a collaboration on three records known as “The Berlin Trilogy”, which consisted of “Low,” “Heroes,” and “Lodger”. Each record carries Eno’s distinct touch, a reverberating “Enossification” which would be a fundamental aesthetic throughout his production collaborations. Such style can be heard when comparing songs like “Heroes” with U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” on “Joshua Tree”, which Eno also produced.

While Eno grew as an artist, the technologies developed rapidly around him. Adapting to the times, he began to create generative music, a genre that relies on setting creative boundaries for a machine, which then builds the songs. With the new approach, he defined the ambient genre with 1978’s “Ambient 1: Music for Airports.” Inspired by the atmosphere of a German airport, he felt the architectural beauty needed a complementary soundtrack.

His experimental techniques built a new narrative surrounding electronic music. Rather than fighting the mechanization of humanity’s creative channels, Eno carved out a niche. During a conversation with Red Bull Music Academy, Eno said,“technology appears, it does something historical, then someone comes along and uses it for something never done before, then it’s redesigned with this new purpose in mind”.

This process gave birth to a genre of contemporary electronic music known as “glitch”. Described by Kim Cascone, an American composer in “The Aesthetics of Failure,”

It is from the “failure” of digital technology that this new work has emerged: glitches, bugs, application errors, system crashes, clipping, aliasing, distortion, quantization noise, and even the noise floor of computer sound cards are the raw materials composers seek to incorporate into their music.

According to Eno, this incorporation of imperfections results in a glitchy 21st century sound, which has been adopted into the mainstream through the likes of Snow Strippers and adjacent artists.

As machinery continues to weave its way into societal framework, experimental or avant-garde ideas which push the culture forward will continue to change. Such changes have produced negative traditionalist sentiments from the culturally aware. Rumblings of a vibe shift from“post-digital” to the “post-internet” have been circulating the internet culture space, with many claiming an end -or at least the end of an era- for experimental approaches to arts and culture, termed avant-garde. Since the avant-garde shifts the culture, the consequences of its disappearance would involve a cultural standstill and eventually collapse.

However, with exemplary minds like Eno leading the way, the next generation of creatives can weather the adversity of 21st century technological and social changes and create the art of the future. With the precedent set, young artists have a framework for constructing ideas which call into question societal standards and values, and will push the culture into the second half of the 21st century.

For those looking to stream the film, a 24 hour live streaming event will take place on Friday, Jan 24.