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Ambient
Lightworks
Alongside
his celebrated ambient Music for Airports, the musician and producer
Brian Eno instigated another transit-centred new media project,
his ambient video. Here Kevin Eden traces its origin, from Eno
turning a video monitor on its side in a New York loft, to the
realisation of a new form of artwork for public spaces.
by Kevin
Eden
INTRODUCTION
The
seven colours of the rainbow have increasingly been linked to
the seven notes of the diatonic scale.. The French Jesuit Louis
Betrand Castel describes inventing a 'colour organ' around 1750,
and Scriabin, the Russian composer, had what is called synaesthesia;
a strong colour association with musical tones, and composed 'Prometheus'(1914)
to which an optional part for "Tastiera per luce", or keyboard
of light, was written. In the visual arts various abstract film-makers
and animators such as Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger
and Len Lye, have used the idea of coloured light to accompany
a musical soundtrack. However, these experiments all use the medium
of film and, in the end, remain cinematic in conception and experience.
Only Ludwig Hirschfeld-Macke, in his Bauhaus experiments of 1922,
succeeded, albeit briefly, to use pure light projected onto coloured
glass. Only by using acetylene flames along with various rheostat
settings, changing light sources, dissolves and
fade-outs
could he achieve anything purely abstract. With the advent of
audio and video technology these two mediums could be thoroughly
unified, and at the forefront of this pioneering experimentation
is Brian Eno.
Pictures courtesy of Opal
LISTEN
TO THE QUIET VOICE
Brian
Eno is among the most influential and admired figures in today's
popular music. He's produced many respected solo records and been
a guiding influence on some of the best known recordings of the
last twenty five years, including those of David Bowie, U2 and
Talking Heads Yet outside of the rock music milieu Eno has forged
another, and equally influential path. The source of this other
path is often seen to originate from two events.
In
1975 two, not unconnected, events were to shift Eno's perspective
of not only his own music making but the role it had to play with
the listener. In January of that year Eno was involved in a road
accident that left him bed-ridden for some time. A friend, visiting
him, brought along a record of 18th Century harp music. After
having put the record on Eno realised that the amplifier was set
at an extremely low level and that one channel of the stereo had
failed. Too weak to alter this situation, and as it was raining
at the time, what Eno heard was a new way of listening to music
- as part of the ambience of the environment: "just as the colour
of the light and sound of the rain were parts of that ambience."
Since this insight Eno has released six solo 'Ambient' albums.
He's stated, "I believe we are moving towardsa position of using
music and recorded sound with the variety of options that we presently
use colour - we might simply use it to 'tint' the environment,
we might use it 'diagrammatically', we might use it to modify
our moods in almost subliminal ways. I predict that the concept
of 'muzak', once it has shed its connotations of aural garbage,
might enjoy a new and very fruitful lease of life. Muzak, you
see, has one great asset: you don't have to pay attention to it.
This strikes me as a generous humility with which to imbue a piece
of music, though it is also nice to ensure that the music can
offer rewards to those who do give it their attention."
This
concept of music as ignorable as it is listenable was to have
far wider consequences from when Eno made the above statement.
The second event, was the publication of 'Oblique Strategies'
with artist Peter Schmidt. 'Oblique Strategies' are a box-set
of over 100 cards with a short, cryptic statement or aphorism.
They are to be used as a technique to prompt intuition and escape
blind alleys in various creative pursuits. Like many of Eno's
procedures the idea for the cards had its origins in his experiences
with Roxy Music. Working in the recording studio, Eno noticed
that interesting ideas and sounds that arose by chance were constantly
passed over and lost forever. Sometimes the musicians were so
caught up in the task at hand that these special moments went
completely unnoticed. To combat this tendency, Eno began to compile
lists of reminders designed to open his eyes to the aleatory occurrences
of the recording process. Eno transcribed 64 or so of these messages
- some technical, some conceptual, some just plain cryptic - onto
a deck of small cards. Whenever he was unable to decide what to
do next he would pick one of the cards at random and try to apply
it to his problem. Shortly afterwards, Eno discovered that his
artist friend, Peter Schmidt, had produced a similar set of observations
to aid his own work as a painter. The two decided to combine their
cards, produce some new ones that did not arise specifically from
their work, and publish the pack as a box-set. With the subtitle;
'Over one-hundred worthwhile dilemmas', Eno explained that their
function was: "simply to bring the consciousness one has as a
listener to ones consciousness as a composer - to deal with things
in a much more studied way." Perhaps the best known of the cards
is the first one that Eno formulated: 'Honour thy error as a hidden
intention'. Its injunction to keep a watchful eye on the secret
workings of chance could stand as an epitaph to Eno's entire career.
INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE
After
Foundation Studies at Ipswich, Eno studied at Winchester Art School
between 1966-69 for a Diploma in Fine Art. By this time he had
read John Cage's 'Silence'. Cage had been one of the first composers
to signal the shift of emphasis from the purity and repeatability
of a work as a predetermined pattern of sounds, to the ideas of
or process used to generate it. By concentrating on behaviour
rather than results and process rather than product, as proposed
by Cage, Eno's period at Winchester was spent delving into the
textual processes that could be used to generate music, so that
his approach to painting and sculpture became increasingly conceptual.
During this period Eno constructed a number of 'sound sculptures',
in which the distinction between the sculptures function as an
art object, and its potential as a music generator became even
more blurred. Throughout his career Eno has explored questions
that have preoccupied him, in one form or another, since his time
at art school: What is the function of contemporary art? What
are the psychological and cultural origins of this kind of work?
What does the audience gain from exposure to it? As a student
Eno felt that the platitudes of the liberal humanist art establishments
were completely out of key with his own experiences of art and
music. For answers to his questions Eno looked partly to cybernetics,
the science of organisation and control, and partly to biological
theories of evolution and adaptation.
Over
the years Eno has drawn inspiration from the works of a number
of writers and thinkers, but two theorists were particularly important
in the development of his ideas during the mid 1970's. The first,
Stafford Beer, is the international authority on the cybernetics
of management. The second, Morse Peckham, a Professor of English
at the University of Pennsylvania. In Biology a species periodically
throws up random mutations, but only those suited to dealing with
the changing conditions of its local environment survive. Survival,
in turn, reinforces the characteristic within the species as a
whole; if the characteristic is more effective than the one it
replaces it will eventually dominate. Like computers and the animal
kingdom, humans also learn by mutation. But the behavioural innovation
that new ways of doing things require are often resisted because
they lead to unacceptable increases in the rate of error. To gain
the full benefits of change, Eno thought, people would have to
learn to accept and endure the temporary increases in error that
arose from the process of mutation. In his 'Brain of the Firm:
The Managerial Cybernetics of Organisation', Stafford Beer furthered
the discussion on self-organising and mutating systems, whether
they be ecological, biological or electronic. Beer uses the term
'heuristic'in his book; his definition specifies a method of behaving
which will tend towards a goal which cannot be precisely specified
because we know what it is, but not where it is. For example,
an heuristic instruction to reach the top of a mountain would
be 'keep going up', whereas an algorithmic instruction would be
'go up 200 yards, turn left at the rock, up another 400 yards,
past the ravine...'. Heuristics prescribe general rules for reaching
general goals. By arguing that for dealing with unthinkable systems,
such as biological mutation, or computer-designed error it is
normally impossible to give a full specification of a goal, so
that moving in some general direction will leave you better off
(by some definite criterion) than you were before. By thinking
in terms of heuristics is at once a way of coping with proliferating
variety. The one heuristic of Beer's that Eno still refers to
when discussing all of his working methods is: 'Instead of trying
to organise it in full detail, you organise it only somewhat;
you then ride on the dynamics of the system in the direction you
want to go.' By now Eno was convinced that contemporary art must
have something to do with biological processes, and with the modification
of behavioural patterns. Exactly where this link lay continued
to perplex until, in 1970, he discovered 'Mans Rage For Chaos:
Biology, Behaviour and the Arts' by Morse Peckham. Eno was to
spend the next four years coming to terms with its contents. In
his book Peckham attempts to establish a relationship between
art forms that many scholars have classified as quite different
phenomena: poetry, painting, architecture, and music. He does
this by challenging the widespread assumption that the social
and psychological function of the arts is to transform the chaos
of human experience into a reassuring vision of order and unity.
The opposite, he argues, is the case. Day to day human experience
is not chaotic. Our perceptions are continually engaged in imposing
order on the flux of information that reaches us through our senses.
If this did not happen we would be powerless to act. In Peckham's
view, what art really offers the perceiver is an escape from the
orderliness of life. The arts, far from being characterised by
order, exhibit a profound disorderliness: art creates expectations
in its audience precisely in order to violate them. 'The distinguishing
mark of the perceiver's transaction with the work of art is the
discontinuity of experience, not continuity; disorder, not order;
emotional disturbance, not emotional catharsis...'Peckham wrote.
All of the arts, whatever their formal dissimilarities, expose
the perceiver to this kind of disorientation. Two terms used by
Peckham in the course of his discussion were especially important
to Eno. The first of these is the concept of 'cognitive tension'.
This is the feeling of deep unease that results when we realise
that our mental models of how the world works - the assumptions
by which we live - are not adequate to describe the world as it
really is. Peckham argues that high degrees of cognitive tension
can only be endured in conditions of 'psychic insulation'. By
this he means settings which are sufficiently cut off from the
rest of life to allow the individual to lower his defences and
expose himself to disorientation. To Peckham - and to Eno - the
arts provide their audience with a safe area where there is no
physical risk, and little real psychic risk. In the insulated
settings in which works of art are created and perceived, artists
and their audiences can experiment with ideas, attitudes, and
behaviour that might, in real life, have disastrous consequences.
In a phrase of Peckham's that became Eno's credo during this period:
'Art is the exposure to the tensions and problems of a false world
so that man may endure exposing himself to the tensions and problems
of the real world.' The idea that art has a biological function,
as an 'adaptational mechanism' necessary for our survival as a
species, went a long way to resolving the uncertainty that Eno
felt about the relevance of the arts. As Peckham puts it: 'Art
is a rehearsal for the orientation that makes innovation possible.'
Throughout the 70's and 80's Eno tried to put into practice, through
his music, many of the lessons learnt either at art school, or
through reading.
IN
TOTAL DARKNESS, OR IN A VERY LARGE ROOM, VERY QUIETLY
In 1978, whilst living and working in New York, one of those chance
incidents that Eno thrives on occurred. According to Eno, "a suspicious
looking character" came into the recording studio and asked him
if he wanted to buy some video equipment very cheap. Eno accepted
and anxious to try the equipment out he set up the camera without
consulting the handbook. As he didn't have a tripod for the camera
and it would not stand upright he laid it sideways on his window-sill
overlooking the rooftops of New York. Naturally the picture was
sideways on too, so Eno turned the TV screen on its side. What
he saw was, "the most exciting thing I'd ever seen on TV...unlike
any other video I'd seen before...First of all there was nothing
happening, which I'd never seen on TV before...it was looking
to downtown Manhattan and there were the Twin Towers, the tops
of a few buildings, and clouds, and there on the screen were the
Twin Towers, clouds and an occasional bird would fly by." As an
original Panasonic industrial camera, it did not have many of
the standard light, focus and colour pre-sets that many new ones
have. Therefore the image he saw looked strange because the camera
hadn't been set up correctly and was incapable of getting anything
right; the colours shifted and the contrast was over dramatised.
Each
day Eno left the camera tor ecord for 2 - 4 hours and in the evening
he would watch it back. Sometimes Eno would focus on the studio
of the School of Art across the road and watch the students going
about their work. Looking at these videos in the way he did; leaving
them to run without having to sit and watch them constantly, because
they were so slow in terms of action, Eno felt he had developed
a new medium of video art: the video painting. He wrote "I want
paintings, I don't want drama, I don't want action or narrative,
I want pictures." From this seed Eno developed his 'video paintings',
accompanied by his own 'Ambient' music. In July 1979 he was offered
the chance to exhibit at The Kitchen, New York. By now Eno was
using 3 or 4 monitors to create a piece entitled 'Two Fifth Avenue'.
A critic for The Village Voice was somewhat perplexed: 'Is it
music, is it sculpture, is it video, or is it some strange personal
hybrid of all three? Whatever, it's like seeing Monet's 'Rouen
Cathedral' happening in real time - the buildings appear like
constantly woven and re-woven plaids and ecstatic chanting, like
scores of unseen angels, giving the ensemble a spiritual aspect.'
Throughout
1980 Eno exhibited 'Two Fifth Avenue' across America. A most unlikely
invitation came in June when he was asked to install it in the
Marine Air Terminal of New York's La Guardia Airport. By now Eno
had released ambient music album 'Music For Airports'. The music
accompanied the video. "When I go into an airport I always find
myself buying some magazine that I really don't want to read and
sitting there getting fed up and feeling nervy and so on." He
was to say. "In an airport you have this captive group of people
who don't really have options; so you can create a place where
you can introduce some sort of meditative calm for a while. I
guess I'm looking for some feeling of luscious silence, a feeling
of solitariness."8 'Two Fifth Avenue' was activated by timers
- from 7 to 8 a.m. and 9 to 10 a.m., and from 4 to 5 p.m. and
6 to 7 p.m. - to coincide with the terminals peak hours. Short
breaks in the hour-long performance allowed the tape to rewind.
Reactions were mixed, ranging from enraptured enthusiasm to impatience
and total nonchalance. But Eno remained resolute in his plan to
bring 'meditative calm'. "Soon after the monitors go on, you start
to realise that nothing's going to happen. It lets you off the
hook in a way. You know you can sit there and look around and
drift back to it whenever you want. So your approach to it is
quite different from reading a magazine, where you're put in the
position of having to search and concentrate all the time."
The
structure of 'Two Fifth Avenue' reflected the function of the
terminal and airport: tone, images, people and planes arrive and
depart, each group with its own logic in apparently random patterns.
The whole is at once an orchestrated unit and a series of disconnected
entities. In this abstract sense the work relates to the airport,
or in a similar sense, a train or bus station, restaurants or
museums. In an airport you catch yourself listening to patterns
and textures of sound. Conversations and machine noise circle
around; climaxes, lulls, and ironic sequences of events draw your
attention to abstract features of the environment and away from
the details and mechanisms of your situation. You begin to notice
architecture, music, light and space, and the dynamics of human
interaction.Because 'Two Fifth Avenue' was entirely open ended
it drew attention to these aspects of the airport; it is an extension
of the traditional role of the airport facilities.
By
the end of 1980 Eno had developed another 3 or 4 monitor piece
entitled 'White Fence', which was shown, albeit briefly, in Grand
Central Station, New York. In 1981 Eno had constructed a new piece,
using elements of the previous two, to create a single screen
video painting, 'Mistaken Memories Of Mediaeval Manhattan', which
has been shown in numerous exhibitions all over the world. Whilst
the first two video pieces were mostly of buildings, 'Mistaken
Memories' was of horizons and skyscapes; drifting clouds, rain,
smoke, light and shadows, birds and aircraft. Comprising of seven
vertical format pieces, all using Eno's own music from 'Music
For Airports' and his 1982 album 'On Land', the pieces: Dawn,
Menace, Towers, Light, Empire, Appearance, and Lafayette range
from 3 minutes to nearly 13 minutes in length . One critic wrote
that: 'the lack of separation between the elements [audio and
visual] suggests that this tape is less a rigorous investigation
into the conditions of ambience, and more an introduction of the
devices of the popular media into an art gallery context.'10 These
notions could not have been further from Eno's mind: "The pieces
and music that accompany them arise from a mixture of nostalgia
and hope, and from the desire to make a quiet place for myself.
They evoke in me a sense of 'what could have been' and hence generate
a nostalgia for a different future. It is as though I am extracting
from this reality (the one the camera is pointed at) the seeds
of another, creating a shift of emphasis. My assumption is that
by giving it attention it will be nourished and will thus be seen
to exist: that which is recognised has a reality."
In
July 1983 Eno accepted an invitation to provide an inaugural exhibition
at La Foret Museum, Akasaka, Tokyo. Arriving in Japan with little
more than some tapes and a handful of ideas jotted down in his
notebooks, Eno set about creating an environment that would fill
the immense gallery space. He was unsure how to expand his usual
3 or 4 monitor works into a large-scale installation. His intention
was to construct a multimedia 'landscape' constituted of 'oases
of mood', and began by putting together 24 soundtracks of his
ambient music. These were fed into 42 speakers, of varying sizes
and shapes, which were hung throughout the gallery at diagonals
from ceiling to floor. The soundtrack, however, was not purely
musical; Eno added naturalistic elements to his quiet melodic
structures, among them a recording of frogs (which repeated every
25 minutes), another of crickets, which played through tiny speakers
that were de-activated whenever a set of photo-cells was triggered
by someone's approach. Visually, the overall atmosphere of the
installation was effected by two grids of a hundred spotlights,
each of them focussed on the ground in such a way that its patch
of light would overlay with that of its pair on the other grid,
thus inducing a 'fringe' whose intensity was adjusted, very slowly,
by a control panel of dimmer switches. The 36 video monitors showed
both old and new images, assembled in an apparently haphazard
manner. They included sequences of landscapes, beach scenes, waves,
skylines, cityscapes, and a white fence, as well as a set of nudes
and portraits. The latter originally eleven seconds in duration,
were slowed down and extended to five minutes, and like the other
videotapes were repeated constantly and not synchronised to each
other or the soundtrack. "The way the sound installation worked
was that each of the speakers has a unique sound source. Therefore
you get music that is different at every point in space. If you
stand at one point you're going to hear mostly two speakers, and
you're going to hear vestigial versions of those further away.
If you stand in the middle you're likely to hear everything. So
that's the mix point, but it isn't the preferred point, there
isn't a preferred point with this music, the idea is that at any
point in the place should operate in some way. So it was different
at every point in space. I also wanted it to be different at every
point in time as well. All I did was use four auto-replay recorders,
so when they get to the end of the tape it just turns round and
plays the other side, like a very long loop. So I just made very
long loops, one was say, 23 minutes, others 27 minutes, etc, and
then I set them all running. What that means is that the overlap
is always different, they effectively never repeat. I calculated
it would finally repeat after 112 weeks!" It could be said that
this installation was not only avisual culmination of ideas that
Eno had been pursuing with his video paintings, but also the final
outcome beyond his own masterly ambient album, 'On Land', where
he conceived making a landscape in which to construct, in music:
"a geology, and then a geography, and then a landscape that sits
on top of it. And then I wanted to populate these places with
creatures, some of which might be, eventually, human."
STATE
THE PROBLEM IN WORDS AS CLEARLY AS POSSIBLE
By
the time of the Japanese installation Eno had accepted an invitation
to exhibit at the ICA, Boston, in December 1983. Eno immediately
agreed on condition that it was a joint exhibition with his painter
friend, Michael Chandler. As the date for the exhibition grew
closer Eno had doubts that his video paintings would work when
placed in a gallery with Chandlers paintings,
which
were generally very small, painted in dark, muted, soft colours
with tiny detail, therefore
requiring
a certain kind of attention. Eno thought that placed against his
videos with all their colour glaring out that no one would pay
attention to the paintings and just watch the monitors. His immediate
thought was to create a video piece that would not conflict with
attention on the paintings. Writing to Chandler, Eno expressed
his doubts and discussed the idea of creating a piece that could
make the same claims on one's attention as a painting does. "You
don't sit and stare at a painting; you look at it, you move around
it, you look away, you look at it again. You constantly alter
your position in relation to it. A painting doesn't have the magnetic
and stabilising effect that a television screen does. The other
thing about a painting is that you don't look into it, if it's
a contemporary painting, whereas you do look into a television
screen, you ignore the container and look into the image. And
in fact it is an image, a TVscreen is nearly always used as a
re-presentation of another reality." Eno realised that the only
way for his video pieces to work with the paintings was if the
video screens could somehow illuminate the pictures by using the
monitor in the way a light bulb works. By the end of the letter
Eno was exploring the possibilities of using the TV as a light
transmitter, not as an image transmitter. "It's very flexible;
whereas light bulbs exist to be still and mono-coloured, TV images
exist to constantly change, and to change at whatever speed you
choose. It's not easy to work with lamps and spotlights and computer
controllers, but video is a highly flexible medium. When you make
up a video tape, what you do is to say to the television set,
at this point in time you will be blue here, yellow here, green
there... and this next point you'll be green there, pink to purple
there... The important thing about this understanding of video
was that it solved the problem at hand because it meant that I
could make objects, and they really used video and justified the
use of video, without becoming TV."16 In fact, what Eno constructed
was five card and perspex ziggurats entitled 'Crystals'. These
structures were constructed on upward facing TV monitors. By means
of specially prepared video tapes the light from the monitor was
directed into these structures which thus underwent continuous
colour change. They were reminiscent of looking at stained glass
windows and showed Eno's first shift towards complete abstraction.
Whilst in San Francisco, in 1984, Eno had made seven videos of
a model friend, Christine Alicino. The important innovation with
this video, entitled 'Thursday Afternoon', was Eno's concept of
video as a 'painting'. That is to say, one doesn't normally sit
in front of a painting for hours upon end, whereas TV is usually
associated with this habit. Again, using the vertical format,
'Thursday Afternoon' is a series of seven extremely slow moving
pictures of a female nude, that are reminiscent of Impressionist
painting. The video then enhances a room, as a painting would,
but is not necessarily its focal point. "The eventual acceptance
of this approach (to TV) presupposes changes not only in the viewing
habits, but also in the physical design of the television monitor
itself. Among many other possibilities, one can expect flat screens
in a wide range of sizes which can be wall-mounted and placed
in a wide variety of locations, so that a house might contain
several picture screens, each with its own built-in playback system."
 Pictures
courtesy of Opal
By
allowing the viewer the option of watching or ignoring the video
piece Eno had successfully developed the concept of ambient video
to accompany his own ambient music. A month earlier Eno was able
to further develop his video-art at 'The Luminous Image' exhibition,
held at The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. As well as exhibiting
'Crystals', originally made for Boston, Eno introduced a new form
of video-painting. Rather than constructing a three-dimensional
structure over the upturned monitors, Eno again used the specially
prepared video tapes and the light they transmitted to project
onto a flat opaque sheet of plexiglass. The light from the screen
was directed by folded paper and cardboard guides onto the surfaces
located several inches in front of the monitors, which in turn
are completely concealed. [See Appendix A] Due to the extremely
slow and controlled rate of change in the colour and hue of these
translucent paintings visitors didn't have to wander round and
look at each piece but could sit down in the semi-darkness and
stay for as long as they wished.
 Pictures
courtesy of Opal
Over
the next two years Eno honed and developed these 'paintings' with
installations across Europe creating perhaps 30 in total. By 1986
a further development, 'Living Room', had been added to the installations.
These constructions were on a much larger scale than monitors
would allow. Using coloured light projected onto them the intensity
of each colour was automatically adjusted in such a way that no
configuration was ever likely to repeat. Placed in a secret corner
of the main installation, viewers could sit on and watch these
bars of iridescent light flare into life, to gradate and fade,
whilst speakers in the corners of the room relayed Eno's ambient
music. Like his 1983 Japan installation, Eno was now utilising
multi-speaker systems with various sound sources to create unique
sound clusters as the visitors wandered around. In these beautiful
installations the setting is active, not passive. The environment
is more that the sum of its parts; it is the experience. These
environments have to be given time. The effects are physical and
cumulative. Once the visitor has adjusted to both the low light
levels and the slow-moving rhythms, it is not uncommon to stay
for several hours, moving contemplatively from zone to zone. The
installations are tranquil - they reduce stress and offer a kind
of secular solace
.  Pictures
courtesy of Opal
With
this in mind Eno began to formulate his ideas towards the concept
of 'The Quiet Club'. Eno first intimated at this when he gave
a talk following the opening of an installation in Copenhagen
in 1986. "I used to go to clubs now and again, but I gradually
stopped because I couldn't find one that did the kind of thing
I wanted. The accent on a club is towards somehow speeding you
up, presumably with the idea of obliterating what is assumed to
be an otherwise average existence. Well I wanted the opposite
of that. I wanted to find a place that would actually be slower,
bigger, more open and would make me think in some interesting
way. Clubs, in fact, prevent me from thinking. So I started to
make music in places that would, I thought, create this atmosphere."
"The Quiet Club,' if fully developed, would be somewhere between
an art gallery and a reading room. A place where people could
meet and talk, or simply be alone to watch the video paintings.
A space to allow people to think in creative, and hopefully, new
and innovative ways.
From
1986 to 1989 Eno's installations were shown across the world using
various permutations of the sculptures, paintings and 'Living
Room', usually under the title 'Place #...', depending on whichever
was next. In 1988 'Latest Flames' and 'Relics, Charms and Living
Rooms From the Recent Past Found Amongst Strange Trees' were premiered
in San Francisco and Berlin respectively. They showed a continued
sophistication for the medium both in terms of design and structure
and in the use of colour and colour theory. In May 1990 Eno made
a rare British installation in the basement of the Todd Gallery
Soho, London. Entitled 'Contemporary Data Lounge' comprised of
an oblong monitor overlaid with perspex screens, various light
tubes and sculptural shapes, and a grid laid on the floor, the
'Data Lounge' was suffused with the slow change of colour, shapes,
and symbols that are the stock of Eno's installations. An almost
religious atmosphere was emphasised by the ambient soundtrack."...I've
thought a lot about public spaces and how they aren't used very
well. They're kind of ignored spaces, nobody thinks they're wonderful
to put their work into... I like the idea that people walking
through Soho could have a few minutes of a different kind of experience
form their normal day." In June of the same year, Eno also created
a large installation using projected light onto the Triennale
Building, in Parco Sempione, Milan. This installation reflected
Eno's interest in Darwinism, the use of natural sounds and random
choice and was called 'Natural Selections: Eclipses, Mutations
and Living Data'. Using computers to control faders on the slide
projectors, various colours and images were projected across 12
windows that slowly changed and developed throughout the evening.
CONSULT
OTHER SOURCES
"As
the works developed I became more certain that the primary material
of the video artist is not stories. It is not concepts. It is
not even images. It is light. by manipulating light the video
artist
can tell stories, display concepts and generate images. But he
can also simply play with light. Video technology presents the
artist with the most versatile ight-controlling machinery available."
With this statement Eno has consciously distanced himself from
a large body of contemporary video-artists who, in the main, use
the video monitor to either construct sculptural works or to display,
or relate, a televisual experience. What Eno has done is align
himself with a group of artists whose non-objective, non-narrative,
non-figurative works date back to the first quarter of the 20th
Century. In particular, Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich stand
out as the artists whose use of colour, form and shape can be
seen as an influence on Eno. He readily acknowledges this influence
and sees himself as a contemporary inheritor of their tradition.
When asked how he felt about the criticism that his videos are
merely decorative Eno responded by discussing the works of Kandinsky
from 1912-15, and Malevich. "I find it revealing that Kandinsky
acquired the license for what he was doing [1912-15] through having
a background in decorative arts - his fairy tales, illustrations,
Jugendstil, mythologies, and so on. In those contexts you're allowed
to be fanciful and brightly coloured without having to defend
it. In a way it was decorative art, and decorative art has an
enviable
freedom
in some respects...When I was about 9 or 10 I got my first oil
painting kit and I started doing Malevichs. And I keep having
this feeling that video is in about the same position as painting
was in 1906 - just on the brink of doing something really significant.
I'm now finding extraordinary possibilities that I hadn't foreseen.
At first I found it extremely difficult to take all this technology,
which was designed to present images in a more and more perfect
way, and say to myself, 'Actually I'm not going to use it for
images, I'm just going to use it for light.' It seemed to be denying
the essence of the medium. But I was reading a book on Kandinsky,
and it occurred to me that, to judge by his writing, he went through
something very similar. With a huge tradition of figurative painting
behind him, Kandinsky probably thought: 'Can I really get away
with painting pictures that aren't figurative?'." In June 1987
Eno wrote a brief article entitled 'Only Decorative Art?', after
overhearing someone say that the Boyle Family's work was 'only
decorative': "...I began wondering, what a strange set of values
had led us to the position where we were prepared to make such
a firm distinction between 'Fine Art' and 'Decorative Art', and
where the first group are accorded all the respect and admiration,
befitting their genius, while the second group are rarely discussed,
and certainly not in the same league. "...To erect a fence at
an arbitrary point along this axis is a disservice to everybody:
it downgrades the validity of those on one side, and it confines
the imagination and usefulness of those on the other: they become
frightened of being seen as entertaining, or populist."
On a political level Eno is adamant to stress that his work does
have political resonances, in that he sees it more as a behavioural
changer, rather than a didactic tool. "The decision to stop seeing
yourself as the centre of the world, to see yourself as part of
the greater flow of things, as having limited options and responsibility
for your actions - the converse of the 'me' generation, 'do your
own thing' idea - that is political theory."
Eno
has argued that the problem with existing political systems is
that they disregard the problems of adaptation, and fail to recognise
that the environment will develop and change regardless of their
attempts to control it. Like Stafford Beer, Eno believes that
it is the structure of the system that ultimately governs behaviour.
If you want to change the behaviour of the system you must first
change its structure. "To attempt to invest art with a political
role is a paradoxical proposition which attempts to say 'I will
direct my non-goal directed behaviour
towards
this specific end'. It's a confusion of terms." "There are plenty
of other ways of being political. Anything that creates change...
or encourages a questioning of codes at any level, seems to me
to be a political statement. Anything that suggests different
forms of personal relationships is a political statement."34 The
belief that Art serves as a behavioural changer ties into a number
of statements of Morse Peckhams that Eno picked up and adopted:
First, Art has a biological function, it is an 'adaptational mechanism'
necessary for the survival of the species.' and second that 'Art
is a rehearsal for the orientation that makes innovation possible.'
Whilst Peckham's statements are theoretically abstract they can
be easily applied to Eno's own working practices, and in particular,
his video installations. By letting the audience initially overcome
the disorientation of the installations; the low light, the slow
pace of the music, the slowly moving visuals, Eno allows them
to question how they fit into, or interact with it. Eno himself,
whilst setting up the installations, has been constantly surprised
at unforeseen events, occasional clusters of sound and/or visuals
that he could not have planned for. "I think one of the most interesting
experiences that art can give you is the experience of uncertainty,
of feeling simultaneously moved and seduced by something, but
also of not knowing why... What is it about that particular twist
in that melody that gets you every time? Or the way this colour
works against that?...Now that feeling, that mixture of bliss
underlined by a kind of uncertainty is a great feeling, that's
the one I want to rehearse all the time... I want to be able to
be in unfamiliar situations and not find that too threatening."
Eno's friend and collaborator the late Peter Schmidt, once said:
"One of the functions of art is to offer a more desirable reality;
a model as it were, of another style of existence with its own
pace and its own cultural reference.' Eno believes this statement
is far more wide reaching than simple escapism; as it continually
urges the audience to compare the reality they have with that
created by the work. "I see nothing wrong with escapism... why
shouldn't we escape? We're all perfectly happy to accept the idea
of going on holiday, nobody calls that escapism... I think what's
interesting about the idea of using art to create other realities,
more desirable realities, is that it can give you a mental place
from which to pull your own reality. You can start to pull towards
that, start to practice ways of dealing with things, start to
internalise that place, but you don't always have to have it with
you. I think there are hundreds of thousands of realities, and
we build new ones all the time. That's what humans do, they constantly
build realities, and constantly get rid of them. That's what we
have to do... To pretend that this is some way artificial, and
that ultimately the destiny of man is to sit down and find the
one reality that works for all occasions, doesn't make sense to
me. The sense that I want to make is to increase my vocabulary
of realities, to have more and more of them to draw on, to be
able to mix them together, to collage them, not to put them in
hierarchies, to be able to say this is more important now because
it does the job now." These 'models of reality' shape and mould
the audience's behaviour and interaction within their culture.
By being exposed to something that does not fit these models the
audience is open to disorientation (cognitive tension) and has
to, therefore, adapt their behavioural patterns and in
turn
influence changes in their culture. The fact that people are willing
to sit quietly for some lengths of time in such an absorbed way,
without any obvious reference points, or need for narrative or
explanations is something new and important."... my central concern
is what happens to people when they see one of my pieces, what
they feel and experience. I'm interested in making these things
work for people and want to know how comfortable it is to be in
the place. Is the temperature right? Can someone sit there? Do
they get a good view of things? These are not the kind of things
artists have been trained to think about for most of this century.
It has, however, been the concern of people putting on more spectacular,
less arty events - things like circuses and fairs. I don't feel
myself to be part of the fine art world - what I'm doing merely
fringes on it."
Eno's
ability to combine and gather together many, at times disparate,
elements to create new conditions is at the heart of all his work.
His early records were not rock music, but records about rock.
His ambient music is the fulfilment of a search for 'organic'
unpredictability and grain'. It's been called soporific, boring,
waterbed music, but it isn't. Unlike 'New Age' music's flawless
emulsions, Eno's ambient is fabulously complex. It can be enjoyed
at any level of concentration, either subliminally or as an utterly
absorbing, engulfing experience. His audio-visual installations
cannot be simply described as rooms (large or small) with music
and light sculptures, but are about creating a womblike environment
one enters into where a feeling of mystery or unease is created;
where rationale can be suspended for whatever duration and allow
the audience to explore. One popular music paper called him a
'freelance theorist, random ideas generator, agent provocateur
and gentleman musician'. With this role Eno has pursued the idea
that exciting things happen on the edges of cultural space, rather
than at the centre. That by navigating situations, encouraging
experimentation and dabbling, new and far more interesting results
occur. He believes that one should go out to an extreme and then
retreat to a more comfortable position. He ultimately believes
that the artists role and function is to acknowledge that the
world is a confusing place, and that one either becomes frightened
by it or celebrates it in some way. "One of the motives of being
an artist is to recreate a condition where you're out of your
depth, where you're uncertain, no longer controlling yourself,
yet you're generating something, like surfing as opposed to digging
a tunnel. Tunnel-digging activity is necessary, but what artists
like, if they still like what they're doing, is the surfing."
APPENDIX
A
TECHNICAL
DETAILS OF CONSTRUCTION OF VIDEO PAINTINGS
The
shapes made within the construction trap a group of colours within
the space between the video screen and the internal surface of
the structure.
Unlike
paint, which when mixed together aspires to black, light when
mixed aspires to white.
The
video screen itself projects various colourfields that each go
through various permutations.
e.g. TV
monitor divided into 4 colourfields.
(1)
moves through violet to yellow
and back in 2min 11sec.
(2)
from magenta to green and
back in 1min 36 sec.etc.
Different
colourfields configurating as well as time cycles can be used.
VENICE
1 (1985) 120cm by 30cm.
Illuminated
by 20" TV monitor.
Plexiglass
surface. Inside the construction of cardboard, folded paper and
aluminium foil, internally lit from TV monitor.
TV
monitor consists of slowly moving series of colourfields (see
above). Areas of light are trapped within internal structures
and aspire to a new colour. Other areas create shadows, or hues
due to the surface of the construction being larger than the monitor.
Brightness
decreases from (L) to (R) as monitor installed at (L) hand side
of screen. (R) hand very subdued colours/hues.
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