Brian Eno on Light and Time

“I don’t go for scale, I go for length. I just want things that can go on forever.”

In collaboration with the Red Bull Music Academy, m ss ing p eces recently produced a short film about Long Now Board Member Brian Eno’s visual art. Accompanying an exhibit of 77 Million Paintings and a lecture by Eno in New York, the film explores Eno’s experiments with light-focused images as a way of addressing our being in time. In a blend of pictures and words, Eno muses about his interest in conceiving visual processes, rather than products: his aim is to generate organic, ever-growing and ever-changing creations that ask us to surrender to their pace.

“If we look at what gardeners do, they think, well, I’ll put nasturtiums here, and I’ll have narcissus here, and I’ll have peonies over here. But they know that that’s just the start of a garden. A garden grows, and it grows unpredictably. You can specify the starting point, and you can hope that it’s going to turn out in some way that you like. But essentially, you surrender to the project. You surrender to the thing growing in its own way. And there’s a gracefulness in being able to surrender.”