Decoding Eno’s generative structure ⊗ Against the ideas of the nineteen-hundreds ⊗ Utopia is Oblivion

I spent virtually all week at MUTEK Forum and the Future Festivals Summit, met a lot of people, had some great conversations, and watched a lot of inspiring talks and panels. That means I’m a bit late on my normal research, so only two and a half featured articles this week (the first is a two parter), but also a bunch of links to things I saw, as well as stuff I spoke about with various participants and share (or re-share) here. There are at least 2-3 talks that I’m hoping become available in some form later on, but for now click through to your heart’s content.

Procedural portraits: Decoding Eno’s generative structure

I’ve been meaning to share one article or another about Gary Hustwit’s new Eno movie. Maybe I was unknowingly waiting for this “two-part exegesis” by Justin Pickard? One thing’s for sure, I’m deeply regretting not grabbing tickets for the Montréal showing. Justin links to a bunch of other articles and goes into much more detail than anything else I’ve seen so I’d say it’s the best piece(s) so far on what went into the creation of the film and its nearly infinite variations, as well as some of the implications for the ‘shape’ of films and what we might see next.

Hustwit and Brendan Dawes (artist and programmer) had over 500 hours of video archive, notebooks, Eno’s work, and the creator himself over hours of interviews, to create this new form of documentary. They transform Eno’s extensive personal video archive into a dynamic database, creating a viewing experience that encourages active participation and interpretation. The experience aligns with Eno’s own artistic philosophy, enabling a fluid exploration of his career, and providing a nuanced representation that reflects his non-linear approach to creativity.

About 25% of the film is fixed (start, end, and some waypoints) and the rest is algorithmically re-arranged, creating a different version every time. One could watch the film hundreds of times and never see every bit of video included in the corpus of the movie. Even though it’s been referred to as “generative media,” it doesn’t share much with generative AI, more like gardening (interview at The Verge) than the industrial scale extractivism of GenAI. In terms of ‘future of media,’ other than the algorithmic ‘composing,’ I’m especially intrigued by the fact that Hustwit still keeps adding material. It’s not a finished oeuvre but an evolving database. In a way, each version of the documentary is simply a view to the database, in some ways closer to a museum rotating its collection than to a classic movie.

The documentary’s custom Brain One software acts as both interpreter and creator, embodying Manovich’s model of user interaction with databases. It queries the database, interprets the metadata, and constructs narrative paths, effectively ‘performing’ the role of a user engaging with the archive. This process closely resembles Eno’s own methods, in which rules and randomness combine to generate unexpected outcomes. […]

By recreating the process of drawing and ‘following’ an Oblique Strategies prompt, ‘Eno’ doesn’t just inform viewers about Eno’s methods – it allows them to experience an analogous process of constrained, chance-driven creativity. Each viewing of the film becomes a ‘draw’ from its database, fostering procedural empathy by allowing viewers to engage with Eno’s creative process in a singularly immersive way. […]

‘Eno’ may succeed where VR’s promises have fallen short. Rather than projecting viewers into Brian Eno’s body or immediate physical environment, the film creates a conceptual space where viewers can engage with the procedures and systems that have shaped his work. By aligning viewers with its subject through structural mimicry and engagement, ‘Eno’ demonstrates that empathy need not rely on sensory immersion. […]

‘Eno’ points to a future where documentaries are not static artifacts but dynamic, evolving systems. By allowing audiences to experience, and not simply observe, their subjects’ processes and prevailing contexts, such documentaries could offer more nuanced, multifaceted depictions of complex topics and individuals.

Against the ideas of the nineteen-hundreds

Paul Graham Raven interviews Karl Schroeder on “worldbuilding (of course), narrative as an analytical tool, leaving behind the ideas of the nineteen-hundreds, and much more.” Parts of it are useful exchanges for practitioners in foresight, speculative design, and science fiction, but Schroeder’s view on twenty first century fiction is worth a read for anyone broadly interested in the topic and/or in imagining better futures.

Specifically: “we want to ground our vision of the future in what our present reality is. And it’s not what it was supposed to be fifty years ago! Everything is different. So I’m looking for the ground of all of these changes, in some ways—to say well, here’s a firm basis that we can start from, and then build our way up in talking about what the twenty-first century’s future has to look like, compared to what the twentieth century thought it would be.”

If we’re going to describe a utopia now, we have to describe how we get there, or we have to justify it—because we’re in a deep hole that we have to dig ourselves out of as a species right now, and everybody recognizes that. […]

You’re not trying to be right about the future any more, what you’re trying to do is lay down some design principles or design ideas that people could actually use right now, in both thinking and adjusting their actions towards the future. […]

So he is creating rocket ships, he’s creating electric cars, he’s creating robots, he’s creating neural interfaces—all of the imagined wonders from the 1900s. What he is not doing is asking himself, what are the wonders of the twenty-first century? And what are the things that we need right now? Arguably the thing that we need right now the most is a way of extremely rapidly decarbonizing, um, our entire infrastructure. […]

We’re often dealing with organizational transformation; foresight is often a exercise that companies engage in when they’re looking for new products, but just as often, that search for new products or services hides a deeper need for something else.

Utopia is Oblivion

Note: In this overview of my time at MUTEK Forum, I’m including people/projects with something related and interesting online. A surprising number of people don’t have anything recent or directly related online (😱).

→ Two of my favourite parts of the Festival Futures Summit were Drew Hemment’s talk, part of which you can read on HOLO; Trajectories for Future Festivals, and Liam Young’s talk riffing on his not new but always impressive movie, Planet City (TED talk).

→ For me, the highlight of the Forum itself was David McConville and Dawn Danby’s immersive talk in the SAT’s Satosphere, mixing Buckminster Fuller’s work (the event and keynote are named after his book Utopia or Oblivion), maps, history, utopias, colonisation, infrastructure, water, and community design with the crazy visuals made possible by the venue. The talk was brand new so there’s no online version yet, but you should have a look at McConville’s Valorizing the Sphere, their studio site, the Living Infrastructure Field Kit they are working on in LA, and regen.earth, which lists hundreds of regenerative projects, “micro utopias.”

→ During the panel on Wilding AI, Alice Jarry drew my attention with her project Fossilation (electronic imprints on bioplastic membranes) and her mention of Maria Kuptsova’s ARBOR, “a cyborganic living object, bio-artificially grown by the means of intelligent technologies.”

→ Linda Zhang went into some detail on the multiple projects she’s run with her local community. Inspiring: Planting Imagination: Community Co-Design for Chinatown Toronto.

→ During her panel, Giovanna Borasi of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) mentioned their project Living Lands, which goes well beyond the territorial acknowledgement and its (sadly) sometimes empty performance.

→ Finally, Montréal is home to a thriving scene of creators of digital art and immersive experiences, here are some favourites from MUTEK’s Village Numérique: Duetti: Musical Furniture by Daily tous les jours, Iregular’s evolving collection of projects, and Martin Messier’s Cycles.

§ Links for people met at MUTEK (and readers of course): Jon Evans’ Exadelic (TESCREAL tech bros, dark magic, and time travel) ◼ We are closing in on zero-carbon cement ◼ Deb Chachra’s How Infrastructure Works ◼ The oldest world map in the world (a round map, like those in the Danby/McConville talk) ◼ I couldn’t find the original article I’d read about an employee-owned company reaching $1 billion in sales, but Graybar exceeded $3 billion in second quarter net sales.

§ Actually, everyone’s life is weird. “Most of my friends have life paths that go something like this: they got ruinously obsessed with something to the exclusion of everything else and then worked on it. And eventually that failed or succeeded and then they got ruinously obsessed with something else and started working on that. And it turns out that if you’re obsessive enough the credentials thing sort of goes away because people are just like, oh, you’re clearly competent and bizarrely knowledgeable about this thing you’re obsessed with, I want to help you work on it.” (Via Doug Belshaw.)

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

Rethinking the relation between human and nature: Insights from science fiction
“Facing the accumulation of data that suggest near-future dramatic changes in our way of life, current visions of transition are anchored in an incremental paradigm that excludes radical change. Using science fiction literature and cinema, this article aims to build such drastic change hypotheses and explore the political–ecological features of future societies emerging from a rupture phenomenon.”

Long-term governance: the Declaration on future generations
“The present is overwhelmed with complex global challenges–polycrises that threaten to persist into the future. In this context, the need for a framework that necessitates policymakers consider long-term impacts when making decisions has never been more critical. The United Nations’ report, Our Common Agenda, proposes a landmark solution: a Pact for the Future and a Declaration on Future Generations.”

Foresight 2024
Fifteenth anniversary issue of the Centre for Strategic Futures’ biennial publication covering research into international megatrends and emerging issues.

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

No one’s ready for this
Facepalm. “An explosion from the side of an old brick building. A crashed bicycle in a city intersection. A cockroach in a box of takeout. It took less than 10 seconds to create each of these images with the Reimagine tool in the Pixel 9’s Magic Editor. They are crisp. They are in full color. They are high-fidelity. There is no suspicious background blur, no tell-tale sixth finger. These photographs are extraordinarily convincing, and they are all extremely fucking fake.”

Figure 2 Humanoid Bot
Speech-to-speech “reasoning.” Its “human-scale hands are equipped with 16 degrees of freedom and human-equivalent strength which enables a wide range of human-like tasks.” The Vision Language Model (VLM) “allows the humanoid to understand what it sees and make quick, common-sense decisions based on visual input.”

Nvidia unveils AI model StormCast for advanced weather prediction
“The new model is expected to enhance weather prediction at the mesoscale, a scale larger than storms but smaller than cyclones, which is crucial for disaster planning and mitigation.”

Asides

• 😍 🖼️ 🌳 Trees Are the Seeds of Human Creativity in an Uncanny Series by Ethan Murrow. “Enigmatic characters extoll the monumental plants along with their fundamental contributions to the arts. Paper and wood appear frequently as materials used in various creative endeavors like books, ornately designed furniture, and cellos, drums, and banjos.”
• 😍 🎨 🇯🇵 Isometric Drawings of Sento, Kissaten and other Japanese Establishments by Honami Enya. “Japanese illustrator Enya Honami uses a style of architectural rendering known as isometric drawings to faithfully recreate cross-sections of Japanese public bathhouses, or sento.”
• 😱 🧠 🥽 Microplastics Found in Human Brains. “The new study unearthed microplastics in the livers, kidneys, and brains of human cadavers, with brain tissue containing up to 20 times more plastic than the other organs. More concerning, the brains of people who suffered from dementia contained significantly more plastic than the brains of healthy people. The findings, which are still undergoing peer review, were shared by the National Institutes of Health.”
• 🍄 🟫 🟧 🟨 Pairs well with Jarry’s Fossilation above. Mushroom Color Atlas: A Rainbow of Dye Colors. “The Mushroom Color Atlas is a resource and reference for everyone curious about mushrooms and the beautiful and subtle colors derived from dyeing with mushrooms. But it is also the start of a journey and a point of departure, introducing you to the kaleidoscopic fungi kingdom and our connection to it.”
• 💩 💩 Enshittification is coming for hardware. Dumb idea? $1,700 “smart” bassinet loses features if you buy it used and Peloton announces $95 “used equipment activation fee”. “Happiest Baby this summer added a $20 monthly subscription fee to several of the Snoo’s ‘premium features,’ which are controlled by a smartphone app.”
• ☀️ 🇦🇺 🇸🇬 World’s ‘Largest Solar Precinct’ Approved by Australian Government. “An ambitious plan to build a massive solar farm in remote northern Australia that would transmit energy by submarine cable to Singapore is a step closer after the Australian government granted environmental approvals for the 30 billion Australian dollar ($19 billion) project”
• 🔴 💧 🤔 Hopefully Elon leaves asap. Mars water: Liquid water reservoirs found under Martian crust. “The findings come from a new analysis of data from Nasa’s Mars Insight Lander, which touched down on the planet back in 2018. The lander carried a seismometer, which recorded four years' of vibrations - Mars quakes - from deep inside the Red Planet. Analysing those quakes - and exactly how the planet moves - revealed ‘seismic signals’ of liquid water.”