Sound, light, action with Brian Eno

Design Indaba brings Brian Eno's 77 Million Paintings exhibition to Cape Town in February 2007.

Design Indaba brings Brian Eno's 77 Million Paintings exhibition to Cape Town in February 2007.

World-renowned music producer and sound/light artist Brian Eno will be showing his acclaimed 77 Million Paintings exhibition at the Michaelis Gallery in Cape Town.

This is the first time Eno’s digital light paintings, which are accompanied by a randomly assembled ambient music track, have been exhibited in a contemporary South African art gallery.

Eno, primarily known for shattering musical conventions as a founding member of Roxy Music and pioneer of ambient music, has created a computer programme that continually fuses his virtual paintings to create 77 million permutations.

More than 300 Eno paintings, most of them scratched or inked onto slides, were digitised to create 77 Million Paintings.  The constantly evolving paintings will be shown on a group of screens.

It’s been estimated that it would take over 9 000 years to watch the entire show at the fastest speed available on the software and it would take several million years to witness all the possible combinations it can create.

The exhibition will take place from 19 to 28 February at the Michaelis Gallery, 31 to 37 Orange Street, Gardens. Admission is free.

Installations of 77 Million Paintings has already been shown at both the 50th International Festival of Contemporary Music at the Venice Biennale and the Milan Triennale 2006.

Eno will also be a key speaker at the Design Indaba Conference to be held for the 10th time in Cape Town from 21 to 23 February.

He will join other dynamic and illustrious creatives – graphic and industrial designers, architects, trend forecasters and more – who will converge in the Mother City to address some 3 000 delegates on the latest creations, trends and events in their respective fields.

Notes to editors

Brian Eno is primarily known as one of the founding members of 1970s glam and art rock band, Roxy Music. His production credits include some of the most respected albums by Talking Heads, James, U2 and David Bowie.

Eno has become an iconic figure within international contemporary culture. As an artist, musician, ideologue and systems-maker, he has not only written, performed, recorded and produced some of the most intoxicating and original music of the last 30 years, but has also established a philosophy of cultural production which links the enquiring spirit of conceptual art to the broadest applications of popular culture and sociology.

Though more famous for his musical achievements, Eno has had a long career as a visual artist and has worked with generative light compositions in the same way that he has worked with generative music on classic albums such as Music For Airports (1978) and Neroli (1993). His visual work has been exhibited in galleries worldwide.

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