Today I watched Eno for the second time.

The movie is generated via custom software that pulls from many hours of interviews with Eno, so that each screening is a unique experience, showing a different facet of the same artist. Since Eno followed the footsteps of John Cage, with his musical practice being deeply interwined in generative approaches, using a generative documentary becomes not just a technological gimmick, but a very fit and expressive medium for walking paths that linear filmmaking is not interested in covering.

It is also very energizing to finally claim back the word 'generative', which over the last 2 years has been appropriated by corporations to sell us their uninspired GenAI products. I studied Computation Arts before GPT 2 was even a product, and back then folks like me would proudly say that we were doing "Generative Art": we were focusing not just on the product, but on the process, encoding the rules for an autonomous system that could then evolve without our direct intervention and generate coherent but fascinating variations of itself. We would look at boids simulations, cellular automata or agents of different kinds and marvel at the emergence behaviour that appeared from seemingly simple rules that we coded by hand.

We'd study the early works of people like Casey Reas (Process 20) or the latest media works of Kyle McDonald (https://kylemcdonald.net) and Zach Lieberman (http://zach.li/) and dissect them and try to reproduce their essence to learn more about what made them compelling to us.

These days the adjective 'Generative' has been tinted with a very different colour, so it's very refreshing to go back at the origin of what generative art really stands for.

If you're looking for an intimate but uplifting insight one a very peculiar figure of the 70s/80s/90s/2000s then Eno (2024) is good way to spend a few hours. It will be streaming soon on enofilm.com and it might be showing soon in a theatres close to you.

And if you need further reassurances, the director is Gary Hustwit, who also authored the famous documentary on Helvetica Helvetica .

https://www.hustwit.com/eno