Brian Eno, Light Music

In 2014, the renowned composer, producer and all encompassing art theorist Brian Eno ( see Socks’s post “Before and After Science“), worked on a series of six lightbox pieces.

The work and the accompaning studies focus on the interaction between a musical composition and self-generated seamless colourscapes produced by interwoven LED lights.

The artwork, presented as an exploration of time manipulation, without beginning nor end, could be even interpreted as a reflection on form without any need of exploring or rendering it in a physical way. Light painting and sound playing are two inseparable activities for the British musician, that with this work “encourages people to stay in one place for a while”. In fact, as he states: “If a painting is hanging on a wall we don’t feel that we’re missing something by not paying attention to it. Yet with music and video, we still have the expectation of some kind of drama. My music and videos do change, but they change slowly. And they change in such a way that it doesn’t matter if you miss a bit”.

Eno then adds:

(…) When I look back on what I’ve made over the intervening years it seems to me I’ve been trying to slow music down so it became more like painting, and to animate paintings so that they became more like music…in the hope that the two activities would meet and fuse in the middle.