Many years ago, when my first husband and I were getting to know each other, he made me four long “mix tapes,” cassettes of the music he wanted me to know about. My very favorite of all the works he shared with me was “St. Elmo’s Fire,” by Brian Eno. Here it is:

So guess what I did on Friday? I experienced “24 Hours of Eno”! There’s a new film that’s a documentary biography of Brian Eno, which has been available in theaters but on a very limited basis. When it was here in town it was for one night only, which sold out quickly, and an evening in a fully packed movie theater is no longer my idea of fun, so I signed up for learning when it would be available live-streamed. Friday was the day, billed as “24 Hours of Eno.”

The event included five showings of the movie Eno, along with a prerecorded conversation between the producer/director Gary Hustwit and Brian Eno, and a prerecorded panel discussion between Hustwit and four other members of the film crew. (There was also a fair amount of ambient music as filler, which gave me time to step back and think about what I was seeing, take a walk, and you know, eat dinner and all that.)

The point to the multiple showings, and much of the excitement about the event, was that this film is the first serious example of what they’re calling generative film-making. Each viewing is a different version! I read somewhere that there are more than 200,000 possible versions. In practice, the beginning and ending scenes are the same, as well as some common section anchors. During the panel discussion Gary Hustwit said that the versions are about 30% the same overall, and about 70% different. Version 4.120 started too early in the day for me; I watched versions 4.121, 4.122, 4.123, and the beginning of 4.124.

(In practice, at least for adjacently numbered versions like that, I was experiencing much more than 30% overlap. It felt like 4.122 only had maybe 40-50% new material compared with 4.121, and then for 4.123 (which strongly resembled 4.121), it felt like only 10% was new, so with 4.124 I was definitely getting diminishing returns, and as this version started at 3 a.m., I concluded I would be happier instead getting ready for bed.)

Anyway, back to the subject of the films. Like many British musicians of the 1960s and 1970s, Brian Eno (who is now 76) had been an art school student who discovered that there was very little going on in the world of painting, but that music had become a fertile ground for creativity, so that’s where they went. Eno, in particular, appears to think of himself much more as an artist than a musician. His musical career began as a member of the band Roxy Music, after which he had three conventionally structured solo albums (and by “conventionally structured,” I mean he was creating songs and organizing them together for publication as an album). My favorite of his songs was on one of these albums, Another Green World, and all three albums are simply wonderful.

After that, his career shifted. He began creating what he calls “ambient music,” music to be playing in the background while another activity is going on, perhaps to create a space for deeper focusing on that primary activity, and sometimes (as in the case of Ambient 1: Music for Airports) to put the listener into a more transcendent frame of mind without necessarily being aware of it. Meanwhile, he started working with other recording artists as a producer – U2, David Bowie, Talking Heads, Devo, and others. David Bowie described his contributions as “philosophical” – it seems that Eno’s focus was more on expanding the artists’ thinking about what they were doing and using wordplay and other techniques to help them make new connections and increase their creativity.

From watching the film, I can say that Brian Eno is an extraordinarily thoughtful person. He thinks – a lot. He’s kept diaries of much of it, stacks and stacks of them. He is very much aware of his creative process, and it looks like he has a lot of fun waking up and starting every day as an artist. He was saying so many thought-provoking things, too, that I was greatly enjoying my “24 Hours” of immersion in his way(s) of life and the insights he was sharing.

One point that kept coming across was the idea of all of human self-expression as art – that is, in contrast to the narrow understanding of art as something we go find in a museum or concert hall, this is the broader understanding of art as something everyone does, much or all of the time. But while it seems quite possible that Brian Eno is so thoughtful that at this point his ethical life is foundational to everything he does – he’s clearly concerned about politics and the planet – this overall ethical orientation is not something the rest of us necessarily share.

When he was talking about self-expression as art, for example, I started thinking about all of those January 6 protesters who had received presidential pardons this week. For some of them – like that guy known as the QAnon Shaman – their “visit” to the Capitol Building could definitely qualify as artistic self-expression. And that’s not to say that because it’s art it’s not also criminal. Some of the most notorious criminals treated their crime sprees as art projects.

This all got me thinking, then, about the ethics of art. I’d love to read more about it.

A simple example is consent. When we go to a theater to see a movie we’ve already heard all about, or to a concert hall to hear a performance of specific works, we are obviously giving informed consent to experiencing works of art. That’s at one end of a spectrum. If we’re just going about our day, and some loud and obnoxious art-thing suddenly appears in our faces, that’s obviously a lower level of consent, and if the art actually harms us, as in a work of terrorism, that’s at the far negative end of the consent spectrum. But we can’t always consent, because we share public space. If I decide to walk around downtown wearing a bizarre combination of colors with a plastic flower arrangement on top of my head, I’d be inflicting my self-expression fairly harmlessly on the other people downtown, but they wouldn’t really be justified in telling me to stop.

Much of the point of art is to get us to question our assumptions, so art will often be transgressive – breaking boundaries, showing us other possibilities.

On the other hand, much of the point of art is for us to lose our individuality, temporarily, in a greater whole – the Eno film includes the example of singing as a group, but most other group activities also qualify. We get caught up in belonging to the group and surrender our “selves” to the greater whole. Here the importance of ethics is obvious, because we cannot necessarily trust that the group dynamics will lead to outcomes we would choose if we could step back and think about them clearly.

In the film, art is almost always for good. It’s creative, intriguing, thought-provoking. There’s a moment, though, where they show Pete Townsend of The Who smashing his guitar on stage. In a voiceover, Eno mentions someone they’d learned about in art school, whose work suggested the desirability of destruction as an artistic act. Looking it up, I think it was Gustav Metzger. Clearly I’ll want to read more about that. What are the limits? Is it like irony, which is far more effective as a criticism than when it’s central to a program? Historically, when leaders start breaking their country’s systems, people suffer. A lot. I’m thinking of Chairman Mao’s program to “Smash the Four Olds” (China’s old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits), but other examples may come readily to mind for you. (!!!)

(This example showed me a potential down-side of generative film-making – the ways it complicates scholarly citation. When I want to say, “Eno said…” I can cite which version of the film I was seeing, if I happen to know it, but I can’t go back and verify it, and unless the full script is published somewhere, no one else beside the filmmakers can verify it either.)

In conclusion, I can strongly recommend the idea of immersing yourself for 24 hours in a work of art that gives you new ways of thinking about things, especially if you can do it in the company of a brilliant artist like Brian Eno. But as a cautionary note, I’d like to reiterate that much of the value of the experience is in the reflection – thinking through the implications and how it fits with your own values – rather than total immersion, where you’re giving up your own perspective to adopt someone else’s. A work like Eno supports the former, and in a world where we’re being encouraged to fall in line politically as part of our new leader’s personal art project, we need all the help we can get in clarifying where we ourselves stand.

Image source: https://floodmagazine.com/184622/24-hours-of-brian-eno-livestream-announce/