An ancient saying posits that you can never step into the same river twice. That also applies to the innovative documentary “Eno.” Filmmaker Gary Hustwit (“Helvetica”), collaborating with creative technologist Brendan Dawes, developed new generative software that draws from more than 500 hours of footage, as well as extensive contemporary interviews, to produce a unique version of the film each time it’s shown.
The approach fits the subject: pathbreaking English composer, producer and thinker Brian Eno, a onetime glam rocker who became famous for his work with Talking Heads, David Bowie and U2, and for christening an entirely new genre of music with his 1978 album, “Ambient 1: Music for Airports.” Now 76, the artist had long waved off filmmaker entreaties but was finally intrigued enough to take part in a technological experiment that mirrored a process he embraced decades ago.
“It opens up a whole other universe of ways to tell stories cinematically,” says Hustwit, joined by Dawes in a recent Zoom conversation from their respective offices in the Hudson Valley and Southport, England. “We come back and watch films again because we love that world that’s been created, but why does that world have to be exactly the same every single time?”
A 1972 photo of Roxy Music, with band members, from left, Phil Manzanera, Bryan Ferry, Andy Mackay (seated), Brian Eno, Rik Kenton and Paul Thompson (seated).
(Brian Cooke/Redferns)
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Since its world premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, “Eno,” which has been shortlisted for Academy Award consideration, has played in some 500 of its nearly limitless potential iterations (52 quintillion is the official estimate). “It’s a totally different beast,” Dawes says. “That’s the beauty of the system, is that you can keep adding stuff. It’s never really finished.”
In two recent screenings, the film shuffles a wealth of archival material (Eno in his peacock era playing with Roxy Music, in the studio with U2 and Bowie) with more recent conversations at Eno’s home studio, where he talks about compositional techniques, musical influences and creative philosophy. There are glimpses of the artist leading a public sing-along and headlining a speaking engagement before a packed audience. (Tellingly, he reflects on how he nervously prepared a written speech, then discovered he’d forgotten to bring it.)
These components aren’t necessarily any different than those in most music documentaries, although they focus strongly on ideas and concepts rather than a tidy biographical arc. But they are assorted and resorted in abrupt, unpredictable ways that keep the eyes and mind jumping. Hustwit estimates that about 70% of the scenes vary with each version, although the moments that bookend each are consistent.
Brian Eno in the documentary ‘Eno.’
(Film First/Brain One)
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“People are bored with the streaming experience,” says Hustwit, taking note of media saturation, social and otherwise. “We’re all filmmakers now. We’re experiencing audiovisual material all the time in a way we never have before as a culture, and that’s got to be reflected in the cinema.”
Although it may be easy to assume that the software used for the project might take over the role of a conventional film editor, Hustwit explains it was quite the opposite. “There’s much more editing involved than anything else, because we’re working with much more footage than you’re seeing in a given iteration of the film,” he says. The film’s editors, Maya Tippett and Marley McDonald, were “used to a very different type of storytelling in constructing a documentary. It was combining their need to control the story with Brendan’s desire to make it completely different, completely random, and celebrate that there’s no control. That push and pull allowed us to land on where the film is now.”
Audiences everywhere can discover that for themselves on Jan. 24. For the anniversary of its Sundance premiere, “Eno” will be livestreamed globally as part of a 24-hour event scheduled to feature DJ sets, special guests, multiple screenings of the film and a version of its prequel, “Nothing Can Ever Be the Same,” which was presented at the 2023 Venice Biennale as a 168-hour video installation. “It’s like a 24-hour Eno channel,” Hustwit says.
Going forward, the filmmakers are figuring out how to productively share what they’ve learned with other artists. “We want to tell stories,” Hustwit says. “We don’t necessarily want to crunch code. We want to see what the technology that we’ve created can do with other people’s ideas. I’m sure people are going to come up with ideas that are far beyond what Brendan and I could have dreamed.”
A former executive at Live Nation, the world’s largest live entertainment company, is suing the company, alleging that he was wrongfully terminated after he raised concerns about alleged financial misconduct and improper accounting practices.
Nicholas Rumanes alleges he was “fraudulently induced” in 2022 to leave a lucrative position as head of strategic development at a real estate investment trust to create a new role as executive vice president of development and business practice at Beverly Hills-based Live Nation.
In his new position, Rumanes said, he raised “serious and legitimate alarm” over the the company’s business practices.
As a result, he says, he was “unlawfully terminated,” according to the lawsuit filed Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
“Rumanes was, simply put, promised one job and forced to accept another. And then he was cut loose for insisting on doing that lesser job with integrity and honesty,” according to the lawsuit.
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He is seeking $35 million in damages.
Representatives for Live Nation were not immediately available for comment.
The lawsuit comes a week after a federal jury in Manhattan found that Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary had operated a monopoly over major concert venues, controlling 86% of the concert market.
Rumanes’ lawsuit describes a “culture of deception” at Live Nation, saying its “basic business model was to misstate and exaggerate financial figures in efforts to solicit and secure business.”
Such practices “spanned a wide spectrum of projects in what appeared to be a company-wide pattern of financial misrepresentation and misleading disclosures,” the lawsuit states.
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Rumanes says he received materials and documents that showed that the company inflated projected revenues across multiple venue development projects.
Additionally, Rumanes contends that the company violated a federal law that requires independent financial auditing and transparency and instead ran Live Nation “through a centralized, opaque structure” that enables it to “bypass oversight and internal checks and balances.”
In 2010, as a condition of the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger, the newly formed company agreed to a consent decree with the government that prohibited the firm from threatening venues to use Ticketmaster. In 2019 the Justice Department found that the company had repeatedly breached the agreement, and it extended the decree.
Rumanes contends that he brought his concerns to the attention of the company’s management, but his warnings were “repeatedly ignored.”
At the centre of Madhuvidhu directed by Vishnu Aravind is a house where only men reside, three generations of them living in harmony. Unlike the Anjooran household in Godfather, this is not a house where entry is banned to women, but just that women don’t choose to come here. For Amrithraj alias Ammu (Sharafudheen), the protagonist, 28 marriage proposals have already fallen through although he was not lacking in interest.
When a not-so-cordial first meeting with Sneha (Kalyani Panicker) inevitably turns into mutual attraction, things appear about to change. But some unexpected hiccups are waiting for them, their different religions being one of them. Writers Jai Vishnu and Bipin Mohan do not seem to have any major ambitions with Madhuvidhu, but they seem rather content to aim for the middle space of a feel-good entertainer. Only that they end up hitting further lower.
After more than two and a half years of research, planning and construction, Dataland, the world’s first museum of AI arts, will open June 20.
Co-founded by new media artists Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç, the museum anchors the $1-billion Frank Gehry-designed Grand LA complex across the street from Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. Its first exhibition, “Machine Dreams: Rainforest,” created by Refik Anadol Studio, was inspired by a trip to the Amazon and uses vast data sets to immerse visitors in a machine-generated sensory experience of the natural world.
The architecture of the space, which Anadol calls “a living museum,” is used to reflect distant rainforest ecosystems, including changing temperature, light, smell and visuals. Anadol refers to these large-scale, shimmering tableaus as “digital sculptures.”
“This is such an important technology, and represents such an important transformation of humanity,” Anadol said in an interview. “And we found it so meaningful and purposeful to be sure that there is a place to talk about it, to create with it.”
The 35,000-square-foot privately funded museum devotes 25,000 square feet to public space, with the remaining 10,000 square feet holding the in-house technology that makes the space run. Dataland contains five immersive galleries and a 30-foot ceiling. An escalator by the entrance will transport guests to the experiences below. The museum declined to say how much Dataland, designed by architecture firm Gensler, cost to build.
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An isometric architectural rendering of Dataland. The 25,000-square-foot AI arts museum also contains an additional 10,000 square feet of non-public space that holds its operational technology.
(Refik Anadol Studio for Dataland)
Dataland will collect and preserve artificial intelligence art and is powered by an open-access AI model created by Anadol’s studio called the Large Nature Model. The model, which does not source without permission, culls mountains of data about the natural world from partners including the Smithsonian, London’s Natural History Museum and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. This data, including up to half a billion images of nature, will form the basis for the creation of a variety of AI artworks, including “Machine Dreams.”
“AI art is a part of digital art, meaning a lineage that uses software, data and computers to create a form of art,” Anadol explained. “I know that many artists don’t want to disclose their technologies, but for me, AI means possibilities. And possibilities come with responsibilities. We have to disclose exactly where our data comes from.”
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Sustainability is another responsibility that Anadol takes seriously. For more than a decade, Anadol has devoted much thought to the massive carbon footprint associated with AI models. The Large Nature Model is hosted on Google Cloud servers in Oregon that use 87% carbon-free, renewable energy. Anadol says the energy used to support an individual visit to the museum is equivalent to what it takes to charge a single smartphone.
Anadol believes AI can form a powerful bridge to nature — serving as a means to access and preserve it — and that the swiftly evolving technology can be harnessed to illuminate essential truths about humanity’s relationship to an interconnected planet. During a time of great anxiety about the power of AI to disrupt lives and livelihoods, Anadol maintains it can be a revolutionary tool in service of a never-before-seen form of art.
“The works generate an emergent, living reality, a machine’s dream shaped by continuous streams of environmental and biological data. Within this evolving system, moments of recognition and interpretation emerge across different forms of knowledge,” a news release about the museum explains. “At the same time, the exhibition registers loss as part of this expanded field of perception, most notably in the Infinity Room, where visitors encounter the 1987 recording of the last known Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, a now-extinct bird whose unanswered call becomes part of the work.”
“It’s very exciting to say that AI art is not image only,” Anadol said. “It’s a very multisensory, multimedium experience — meaning sound, image, video, text, smell, taste and touch. They are all together in conversation.”
