Before and After Science: The Generative ‘Eno’ Documentary (2024)

Eno is both a joyous meditation on human creativity and an earnest rolling of the dice that gives control over to a soulless software

Even Brian Eno’s punkest stunt doubles as a feat of ingenuity. In 1990, he pissed in Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain when it was on display at MoMA. To pull it off, he crafted a custom rig of plastic tubing with galvanized wire then went to the exhibit and waited for the right moment. Fittingly, it’s a brazen act but it also betrays some modesty. Five other people have allegedly followed suit and used Duchamp’s urinal; but Eno was the first. This amusing act of high-art/low-art communion — two figureheads of readymade art meeting in the metaphorical bathroom — is not mentioned in Eno, Gary Hustwit’s documentary about the iconoclastic glam rocker, record producer extraordinaire, ambient music inventor, installation artist, video painter, cultural zelig, and estimable egghead philosopher. At least, it wasn’t a part of the version of Eno that I saw.

How could this be? Well, Eno reflects its eponymous, sometimes-mononymous subject in form as much as content. That is, Eno is a generative piece — the first generative feature film, so says the marketing machine promoting the movie — and thus an extension of Eno’s decades-long interest in systematizing art. A bespoke algorithm — a code-based decision tree built into software named Brain One (an anagram for Brian Eno) — developed by Hustwit and digital artist/engineer Brendan Dawes, over a period of five years, reshuffles the available data and produces a new output (see: movie) in advance of each screening. So, the documentary changes each time it is shown, with new pre-edited modules exchanging places and the order of information relatively unpredictable. Some versions have even been created live in the theater in real-time. Either way, the aleatory Eno feels like an event, eliciting that exhilarating feeling that everything that happens will happen today.

I experienced Eno in Burlington, Vermont, on Oct. 27, 2024. This version of the film will not be shown again. It does not self-destruct upon completion or anything, but it is time-stamped and archived and hereafter associated with a specific moment and exhibition. According to the filmmakers, there are 52 quintillion possible combinations. I don’t know if Duchamp plays a supporting role in any of these permutations, but the source material fed to the algorithm is vast. The data set of Eno is a closed system rifling through “ethically sourced” material from approximately 500 hours of archival footage and some 30 hours of new, present-day interviews with Eno, all shaped, indexed, tagged, and fed into the custom software. There’s more than a bit of William Castle to this idea. But it’s also an odd hook: Eno effectively promises to deprive you of the full Eno experience. You go in expecting to see but a fragment of the whole.

How do you distill a life and a body of work, especially one as sprawling and varied as Eno’s, into a single cohesive piece? How do you distill the unquantifiable nature of human creativity into an hour and a half text? The solution that Hustwit — a documentarian best known for his Design Trilogy (Helvetica, Objectified, and Urbanized) and producing acclaimed rock docs Mavis! and I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco; Eno did the music for his 2017 documentary Rams, about German industrial designer Dieter Rams — devises is pure avoidance. Just as there is no one monolithic work that can stand in for Eno’s oeuvre, there is no definitive version of the documentary about him, and there never will be.

Many essential highlights are accounted for, weighted so that they are more likely to appear: Roxy Music, U2, David Bowie, Talking Heads, Eno’s reverence for The Velvet Underground (and his famous quote about The Velvet Underground & Nico), an ambient music primer, etc. Told through synecdoche, small details ripple to represent entire periods: say, an improvised tape loop that led to a U2 classic, or chance competing oblique strategies birthing one of Bowie’s most out-there compositions in Berlin. Accounts from other Eno screenings confirm that a handful of key segments recur with some frequency: Roxy Music performing “Virginia Plain” on Top of the Pops, the inception and recording of “Pride (In the Name of Love),” and the co-creation of the Oblique Strategies cards with Peter Schmidt among them. A common refrain is that people generally crave more Devo.

Many, many chapters were missing from the particular cross-section I experienced, including, yes, little to no Devo. Eno’s foundational work with Robert Fripp, on the likes of (No Pussyfooting) and especially Evening Star, is not covered. This version skips past the ambient dry run of Discreet Music, the landmark Ambient 1: Music for Airports (not to mention Eno coining the name for a genre of music that is “as ignorable as it is interesting”), and Ambient 2: Plateaux of Mirror to focus instead on the discovery of Laraaji busking in Central Park and the making of Ambient 3: Day of Radiance. You have to imagine a version of Eno where Jon Hassell or Harold Budd get their moment in the sun. In fact, Eno’s rapidly evolving ’70s solo run is mostly distilled to a story of personal crisis where a looming deadline and a tearful studio breakdown begat “Spirits Drifting,” the closing track on the crown jewel Another Green World. There’s no mention of his avant-glam debut, Here Come the Warm Jets, or art-pop masterworks Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) or Before and After Science.

No Cluster, Roedelius, or Zvuki Mu, or Brian’s pronounced footprint in the European avant-garde. No Obscure Records, the limited-run, short-lived label he founded in 1975. No No New York compilation, an epochal document of the no wave movement. No Dune soundtrack playing with Toto. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts doesn’t get a segment, only hinted at in the Afrobeat influences he injected into Remain in Light. The film didn’t take the temperature of Fourth World music, consequently, or dive into Eno’s influence on hip-hop sampling. No Roger Eno, even: Brian’s brother, also a musician, and an acolyte of minimalism and contemporary classical himself, with whom he’s held an ongoing musical conversation over many years, compiled in Mixing Colours. No Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, also with Roger, as well as fellow U2 producer Daniel Lanois. Actually, longtime collaborator Lanois only made a brief, wordless cameo in the U2 segment. Eno’s ahead-of-the-curve adjacency to shoegaze, including work on Slowdive’s Souvlaki, is not hinted at. His britpop bona fides get a shout only via his Producer of the Year award for James’ Laid (with the sight gag of Bryan Ferry presenting). Coldplay is basically entirely absent. And no Windows 95 startup jingle.

It doesn’t close the circle on John Cale with mention of 1990’s Wrong Way Up. No Jah Wobble (Spinner), either. In fact, this version spends a curious amount of time on the abandoned ’90s curio My Squelchy Life. Eno digresses about mathematician John Conway’s Game of Life — calling it one of the great works of the 20th century — but Eno doesn’t get into Spore, the god game created by Sim City mastermind Will Wright that Eno worked on and created generative music for. No mention of Eno precursor 77 Million Paintings, either, a digital art software/DVD combo that randomized music and visuals. Jon Hopkins is spotted playing some intense synths in the Small Craft on a Milk Sea sessions but isn’t identified. No Karl Hyde or the invigorating late-career downtempo of High Life. No In Conflict, his collaboration with Owen Pallet, or Finding Shore, with Tom Rogerson, or Secret Life, with Fred again, or his forays into modern indie and electronica elder statesman respectability — not even a needle drop of MGMT’s wacky Congratulations homage. And no footnote for the Afrotropical spider Pseudocorinna brianeno.

Eno is devoid of Talking Heads talking heads, except for Eno himself. Though, the famous friend/collaborator tasked with playacting an oblique strategy card is Laurie Anderson, much to the delight of this particular audience. She pulls “do nothing for as long as possible” and gamely grinds the documentary to a halt. Without other voices interfering, Eno avoids feeling like punctuation or a eulogy. It’s satisfying but always feels unfinished — an open-ended android text. It’s tone is warm, almost suspiciously agreeable and crowd-pleasing, while also not being entirely interested in rehashing, repackaging the hits, or being at all conclusive. What Eno captures more than bullet-points is the impression of Brian Eno as a character, a savvy dilettante, and a captivating philosophizer. Eno is rich with atmosphere; it conjures an ambient-cinema vibe that lingers more as a sensation than as a fact-filled memorandum. It unlocks the utopian potential that once defined this technological age, and which animates Eno’s entire career. It’s forward-thinking but also imbued with nostalgia for a time before existential fear eclipsed innovation.

In this becalmed cyborg cinema, linear time and cause/effect are narrow constructs. Most documentaries are content to yada yada the thin spots with montages. Rare is the movie — the documentary, no less — that encourages you to savor its information and time gaps. By design, Eno is a blocky, episodic collage that plays fast and loose with the last 60 years of art-pop, with Eno’s kinetic brain as the prism for assessing its progress. Scrambled interludes provide a visual signature tying eras together: a fractal mosaic, the mathematical and the organic combined in a pixelated motif. The movie touches on the synesthetic fusing of sound and vision that is a tenet of Eno’s career. It’s both immersive and solipsistic; the dialectic your mind creates as sequences collide is fluid. In this continuum, Eno is the byproduct of the next wave of technology catching up to Eno’s unassuming mad science.

Eno is a work of science-nonfiction inside and out. Like any good sci-fi, Eno is both intellectually stimulating and latently dystopian. It’s pitched as a quantum leap but also has an unshakable feeling of an evolutionary dead end. It puts forth the idea of a filmmaker as a proprietary tech developer. Or the filmmaker as a safety net for the unpredictable momentum of the machine processes. Its mellow temperament and artisanal quality appeals to a certain sophisticated New York Times-core, public-radio-ready sensibility but this is also a fertile, ambiguous open text. Every moment is a rabbit hole of information and possibility. And Eno is depicted as a man just as liable to zero in on a microscopic detail in a song he worked on — a nearly imperceptible marker of its genesis — as he is to marvel over a clump of spiders on a leaf, cheerfully photographing them on his phone as they scatter. Eno is hopeful, ebullient, and not not Orwellian. “Pay no attention to the software behind the curtain,” says Hustwit. But is that truly possible, or advisable?

Eno delivers what most music documentaries promise but very few actually deliver: an authentic meditation on the work of being an artist. It’s a picture of privilege but also a purifying idyllic environment. You could view Eno as a compelling rejoinder to the currently thriving bio-doc industrial complex, of salacious movies churned out across all major streamers that only feel generative and algorithmically determined because they are so hastily assembled and cookie-cutter. Eno takes the known quantity of the tasteful bio-doc outline and lightly destabilizes the gestalt of the form. The approach is meant to make the film more unpredictable and performative — like a setlist, with the crowd-pleasing hits interspersed among the deep cuts and the arrangements changing each night — and, in its own way, it also echoes minimalist classics like In C and The Well-Tuned Piano that continue to evolve and change with each presentation over many years, conceptual pieces that are never truly complete. And Eno is, by design, formulaic to the nth degree. Incidentally, it’s a stone’s throw from Dada pop-art hijinks like Nothing, Forever.

By rewiring the system of decision-making, the documentary lays bare the centripetal selection processes that go into making film, or music, or art in general. Pacing, repetition, rejection, negative space, arrangements, conflict and harmony, etc.: these are all inputs made intuitively, sometimes randomly. Here, the orthodoxies of film editing are turned into hard-coded digital presets. Eno explores how beholden all media are to the patterns of both human and machine schematics, and how these increasingly blur together to the point of being indistinguishable. Isn’t most of the content we consume these days algorithmically determined anyhow? Embracing machine learning is thus an idea perfectly poised between high-art critique and popular mass market acquiescence. Eno’s infectious inquisitiveness and undimmed enthusiasm gives him (and Hustwit by proxy) license to dabble in AI-adjacent technology, leaning headlong into this uncertain terrain as the rest of the world recoils in the face of its outwardly dangerous possibilities. Eno is an honest, earnest attempt to engage with the thorny potentials of rolling the dice and giving over control to a soulless collaborator.

And yet, the Behind The Music peaks and valleys, trials and tribulations, and the arc of stardom are not of concern here. The only mention of Eno’s family life is when he flips past drawings in one of his notebooks made by his daughter when she was 2 years old — “her abstract period,” he quips. The conspicuous exclusion of personal biography — Eno is effectively born at the tape-loop device in Roxy Music and the rest is history — says as much about his personality and his desire for privacy as any stock home video. It also precludes Eno from upending the impenetrable mythos of Eno. It reinforced the Eno brand. Fortunately, it’s an endlessly fascinating and humane brand. The nature of the randomness is such that seemingly insignificant detours — e.g. video camera experiments in his NYC apartment or illuminated ziggurats turned into gallery exhibitions — can stand shoulder to shoulder with monoliths like Low or Ambient 4: On Land. In its shapelessness and sincerity, Eno has much to say about impermanence and mindfulness in this dark age.

Eno is a genius who finds potential in paralysis, a man who envisions countless outcomes and chooses optimism. He writes in his journals sideways, from the edge of the page down to the spine. He uses a cursor on his computer with a giant red transparent circle around it. It’s at once relatable and surreal and entertaining to watch him browse YouTube for the U2 song he helped usher into existence then flip off the obnoxious commercials that play before the video. There’s a pure joy to this documentary, a sense that creativity is a miraculous adaptation. With his ruminations ranging from amusingly pointy-headed to achingly profound, Eno is always charming and twinkling. The immaculate setting of his home studio, where we spend much of the runtime, with minimalist geometric colors carefully arranged on the off-white walls in the background, suggests portraiture — thoughtfully composed scenes that reflect the nature of the subject, his work and domestic space one and the same.

What this bio-doc really gets at is the grand mysteries of the supercomputer of the human mind, with its incredible capacity for accelerated innovation and self-destruction in equal measure, often simultaneously. Our psyches are remarkable operating systems that are tragically susceptible to colonization. But Eno functions in a manner similar to Eno’s role as a studio wizard: you feel your creative potential waking as you watch. Eno himself has pulled away from being an author of his own works, choosing instead to create systems that create works, like a benevolent god. This was once an analog pursuit, but now he develops apps, artistically minded meditative iOS environments such as Bloom, Trope, Air, and Reflection, which produces endless permutations of his 2017 album Reflection. Eno expands the reach of this germination while also offering a thoughtful treatise on the paradoxical liberation of relinquishing control. It’s the sunny side of chaos theory.

Like many an Eno project over the last half-century, Eno pierces the bubble of an insular world and makes it broadly accessible. It builds on the generative legacies of postmodernists like Georg Nees, Vera Molnár, Steina and Woody Vasulka, and Sol LeWitt but it renders the machine as non-threatening, affectionate, and even collaborative. Eno is an artist drawn to working with light as a medium, so it makes perfect sense that he would be attracted to the sandbox of cinema, the popular art form of shadow play. Eno 1.0 was actually avant-garde — tipping the balance toward installation rather than cinema. At the Venice Biennale in 2023 Hustwit removed the rules from the generative software and chucked all the footage and Eno’s back catalog into the program. The resulting film was 168 hours long with jagged edges and a disregard for narrative logic. That I would love to see.

But the (infinite) final version(s) of Eno dissolves into something more inviting and satisfying: a compelling ode to the wonders of the ever-expanding human organism, as well as the cinematic spectacle. It conjures an exuberant experience with an experimental veneer. It taps into the awe and dread of being an insignificant piece of a cosmic whole that cannot be fully perceived or understood, even as it focuses on a supremely consequential life. When you zoom out and take in the scope of all the harmonious randomness that surrounds us moment to moment you can see the rhythms locking into place, and science looks magical. The same could be said for the art of film. Eno is a technical marvel and, if Hustwit’s startup Anamorph gains traction, a harbinger of the shape of movies to come. Its retro-futuristic vision is beautiful to behold even as it’s disconcerting to stand on the precipice.

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