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77 Million Paintings

Field	Value
name	77 Million Paintings
type	video
artist	Brian Eno
cover	77 Million Paintings by Brian Eno.jpg
released	2006
genre	Ambient
label	All Saints

77 Million Paintings is a digital art software/DVD combination by British musician Brian Eno, released in 2006.

The release consists of two discs, one containing the software that creates the randomized music and images that emulate a single screen of one of Eno's video installation pieces. The other is a DVD containing interviews with the artist.

The title is derived from the possible number of combinations of video and music which can be generated by the software, effectively ensuring that the same image/soundscape is never played twice.

An accompanying booklet includes a piece by Nick Robertson describing the intention behind the software, and an article by Brian Eno ("My Light Years") describing his experiments with light and music.

The software was developed by Jake Dowie for both Windows and Macintosh operating systems.

First Edition

Far from containing 77 million paintings, the software consists of 296 original works which are overlaid and combined up to four at a time in a simulation of simultaneous projection onto a common screen. The various images are slowly faded in and out asynchronously before being replaced by another random element. Also, the music that accompanies the paintings, if played on a Mac G5 or a Windows PC, is randomly generated in a similar way, so the selection of elements and their duration in the piece are arbitrarily chosen, forming a virtually infinite number of variations.

In conjunction with this, Annabeth Robinson (AngryBeth Shortbread) recreated the performance in Second Life by building the performance in a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE).

Second Edition

A second edition of "77 Million Paintings", featuring improved morphing and a further two layers of sound, was released on 14 January 2008.

Installation CD

Released in a numbered edition of 1000, only on the Japanese label Beat Records in 2006 via license from Opal, 77 Million contains 9 audio tracks generated at the March 2006 Laforet, Tokyo installation of 77 Million Paintings.

Project evolution

77 Million Paintings projected onto the Sydney Opera House in 2009

77 Million Paintings has evolved beyond the domestic environment. It continues to be shown in multiple-monitor configurations in art galleries and is projected onto iconic buildings around the world. In 2009, Eno was invited to project 77 Million Paintings onto the sails of the Sydney Opera House.

References

"77-million-paintings-brian-eno". The Long Now Foundation.
Dunne, Aidan. "Art in Focus: Brian Eno – 77 Million Paintings".
"77 Million Paintings – Art & Electronic Media".
O’Riordan, Alan. (2019-01-26). "Art review: Brian Eno at the RHA, Dublin".
Kuang, Cliff. (2009-04-15). "Brian Eno Paints in Light Using Sydney’s Opera House as a Canvas".
(2018-03-22). "Brian Eno on immersive installations using video game technology: 'In terms of our understanding of what it is, we’re right at the beginning'".

Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

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