The making of Eno, the first generative feature film

Rich with access to hundreds of hours of never-before-seen footage and unreleased music, Gary Hustwit’s forthcoming documentary Eno employs groundbreaking technology to accomplish something that’s never been done before: a feature film that’s never the same twice. Hustwit and creative technologist Brendan Dawes have developed bespoke generative sof... See more

Rather than getting hung up on the technology itself, it’s worth thinking about how it works on us. The effectiveness of a generative artwork has a lot to do with the medium of its output. A single still image, for instance, affects us differently from a song, and they’re both different from a movie. That’s where Eno’s idea about the human brain “c... See more

Yet the two versions seemed to be fundamentally different movies. In the first version I saw, much of the discussion explored the way that pop musicians such as Eno and many of his collaborators — like David Bowie and Talking Heads — create and project an identity when they perform, making that persona part of their medium. In essence, it became a ... See more