52 Quintillion Versions! Some Are Even Good!

After managing to miss showings of it by weeks or even mere days when it has been screened in either cities nearby or those I’ve been visiting (missed it by days in SF twice, even), thanks to the global livestream yesterday, I finally got to see Eno, the 85-ish minute, “different every time it’s shown” documentary on Brian Eno (obv.)¹

And…well. Having seen two of the 6 generations of the film over the past 24 hours, I can’t help but think there’s a great 160 minute cut hiding across the different generations. Which is not to say it isn’t good…but because the spine of the documentary remains fixed, with digressions here and there (maybe you’ll see Eno take the piss out of Bono while they’re recording Pride, maybe you’ll see some footage of Roxy Music, maybe you’ll get the admittedly amusing ‘repetition’ Oblique Strategies card that threatens to replay the entire previous sequence, etc), I don’t think it will hold up to that many repeated viewings, because the versions just don’t seem to be different enough. Which makes me think that a longer, more traditional cut would have been better after all. At least Eno comes across well; not taking himself seriously, or just seriously enough, yelling at the YouTube ads when they get in the way of him showing music, or giggling over the insanity of the Windows 95 startup brief.

(things I didn’t see in the edits I watched, but I think exist in other versions: an old interview with Sandi Toksvig, which I am curious about, because I wonder if it’s something from No. 73, and in the second edit, there’s a brief flash of the PAUL MORLEY KLAXON, so obviously, I was sad I didn’t get to see the full thing. Curiously, there were only a few flashes of the ‘so famous, it got parodied at least twice’ performance of Virginia Plain on TOTP, instead mainly using footage from European music shows…)

I think this would break the way of how Eno and Hustwit viewed the concept, and his feelings towards generative art in general, but I would prefer a way of being able to turn the “cybernetic dial” and get even 60 minutes of Eno talking about Stafford Beer, or the “Horny Eno dial” to get an edit that is much more in the vein of various diary entries from 1995. Being able to either consciously or randomly alter the complete documentary structure around concepts would make it a more attractive offering. Or just give me three hours of footage to watch.

Having said all that, the Q&A FaceTime thing afterwards last night gave me an idea of using embedding models with the Bluesky protocol that I will have to try and build in the next month or so. And who knows, this time I might actually finish something.

Anyway, off to San Francisco in the morning for a week. If you see me, why not say “haven’t you been promising a tech blog for quite some time now, eh?”