Bri­an Eno once wrote that “it’s pos­si­ble that our grand­chil­dren will look at us in won­der and say, ‘You mean you used to lis­ten to to exact­ly the same thing over and over again?’ ” That spec­u­la­tion comes from an essay on what he calls “gen­er­a­tive music,” which is auto­mat­i­cal­ly pro­duced by dig­i­tal sys­tems in accor­dance with human-set rules and pref­er­ences: “like live music, it is always dif­fer­ent. Like record­ed music, it is free of time-and-place lim­i­ta­tions.” These words were first pub­lished near­ly 30 years ago, in his book A Year with Swollen Appen­dices. Today, he has at least one grand­child, whose hand­writ­ing fig­ures in one of the music videos from his lat­est solo album. That par­tic­u­lar work may be non-gen­er­a­tive, but his inter­est in the con­cept of the gen­er­a­tive in art endures.

This year, Eno even stars in a gen­er­a­tive doc­u­men­tary about his life as an artist, music pro­duc­er, and “son­ic land­scap­er” direct­ed by Gary Hus­twit, best known for Hel­veti­ca and oth­er non-fic­tion films on design. The New York Times’ Rob Tan­nen­baum writes that Eno “is unlike any oth­er por­trait of a musi­cian. It’s not even a por­trait, because it isn’t fixed or sta­t­ic. Instead, Hus­twit used a pro­pri­etary soft­ware pro­gram that recon­fig­ures the length, struc­ture and con­tents of the movie.” This suit­ed both Eno’s pro­fes­sion­al phi­los­o­phy and his antipa­thy to the con­ven­tion­al doc­u­men­tary form. “Our lives are sto­ries we write and rewrite,” Tan­nen­baum quotes him as writ­ing in an e‑mail. ‘There is no sin­gle reli­able nar­ra­tive of a life.”

In fact, there are about 52 quin­til­lion dif­fer­ent nar­ra­tives, to go by the esti­mate of pos­si­ble per­mu­ta­tions of Eno Hus­twit has giv­en in inter­views. “We could make a 10-hour series about Bri­an, and we still wouldn’t be scratch­ing the sur­face of every­thing he’s done,” he told The Verge. “I just added a bunch of footage this past week that’s going into the Film Forum week two runs, which has nev­er been in the sys­tem before.” Not only do “we get to keep dig­ging into the footage and bring­ing new things into it, but we also get to keep chang­ing the soft­ware. And I don’t know, in a year from now, what the film will look like or what the stream­ing ver­sions of it will be.”

What Eno did­n’t have to clar­i­fy in 1996, but Hus­twit has to clar­i­fy in 2024, is that this kind of gen­er­a­tive film isn’t gen­er­at­ed by arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. Empha­siz­ing that “the data set is all our mate­r­i­al,” includ­ing 30 hours of inter­views and 500 hours of con­ven­tion­al­ly shot film, Hus­twit frames his enter­prise’s cus­tom soft­ware, acronymi­cal­ly called Brain One, “as more like gar­den­ing.” That metaphor could have come straight from Eno him­self, who’s spo­ken about “chang­ing the idea of the com­pos­er from some­body who stood at the top of a process and dic­tat­ed pre­cise­ly how it was car­ried out, to some­body who stood at the bot­tom of a process who care­ful­ly plant­ed some rather well-select­ed seeds.” Even­tu­al­ly, “you stop think­ing of your­self as me, the con­troller, you the audi­ence, and you start think­ing of all of us as the audi­ence, all of us as peo­ple enjoy­ing the gar­den togeth­er.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Eno: A 1973 Mini-Doc Shows Bri­an Eno at the Begin­ning of His Solo Career

Watch Bri­an Eno’s “Video Paint­ings,” Where 1980s TV Tech­nol­o­gy Meets Visu­al Art

Bri­an Eno on Cre­at­ing Music and Art As Imag­i­nary Land­scapes (1989)

How David Byrne and Bri­an Eno Make Music Togeth­er: A Short Doc­u­men­tary

Watch Anoth­er Green World, a Hyp­not­ic Por­trait of Bri­an Eno (2010)

Watch Bri­an Eno’s Exper­i­men­tal Film “The Ship,” Made with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.