Go to the website for screenshots!
On Saturday, October 7, there will be an opening of the exhibition by media artist Brian Eno. The exhibition, Blisses 1-87; KOANS 1-29 will be the international premiere of computer-generated screen and audio works made by Eno over the past decade. The exhibition will continue at the Partobject Gallery in Carrboro, North Carolina, until November 29.
Eno, who is most well-known for his ambient musical compositions, his early work as member of the English rock group Roxy Music, and his studio production work with musical entities like U2, David Bowie and Laurie Anderson, has long also made installational works in galleries and museumsóusing video, projection, light and sound.
Partobject is proud to premiere these visual works for video screens called Blisses by the artist. Blisses derive from a computer program designed by Greg Jalbert originally made for consumers to design their own screensavers. It is possible then to specify interacting sets of instructions which govern color generation. The nature of the program is that they never precisely repeat themselves. So, one can view a particular Bliss program and never see the same thing twice, infinitely.
The title of the exhibition specifies 1-87 and 1-29 and refers to the fact that three new Bliss programs/works and one new KOAN (Sseyo KOAN Interactive Audio Platform) program/work will be presented each day in the gallery during the twenty-nine days of the exhibition.
In addition to the screening of the Bliss visual works, Eno will present 29 KOAN audio works as an aural backdrop for the viewer. The KOAN works are the audio equivalent of the Blisses, in the sense that they also allow the artist to specify a large number of musical parameters and let them interact. The computer then plays several internal sound synthesizers according to the instructions generated in KOAN. The music in this exhibition, like the visual Blisses, is non-repeating.
Eno was a pioneer in tape-looping and other early forms of sonic manipulation which led him to the inevitability of these self-generating audio and video programs which will be featured in this exhibition.
Eno is a Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Art in London, Professor of Time Based Media at the Hochschule der K¸nste in Berlin, and is the author of A Year with Swollen Appendices, published by Faber, London, a diary of personal notations recorded in a one-year period in 1995.
Blisses 1-87; KOANS 1-29 by artist Brian Eno will open on Saturday,
October 7, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. Partobject Gallery is located at 103-C
West Weaver Street, Carrboro. Gallery Hours are Wed-Fri 12-6 p.m., Sat 11-7
p.m. For more information call: 933 2225.
www.partobject.com