Eno-bits

Selections from a Wired interview with Brian Eno, published May 1995, on the future of music and art:

• "Do you know what I hate about computers? The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them. This is why I can't use them for very long. Do you know what a nerd is? A nerd is a human being without enough Africa in him or her. I know this sounds sort of inversely racist to say, but I think the African connection is so important. You know why music was the center of our lives for such a long time? Because it was a way of allowing Africa in. In 50 years, it might not be Africa; it might be Brazil. But I want so desperately for that sensibility to flood into these other areas, like computers."
  


• "What people are going to be selling more of in the future is not pieces of music, but systems by which people can customize listening experiences for themselves. Change some of the parameters and see what you get. So, in that sense, musicians would be offering unfinished pieces of music - pieces of raw material, but highly evolved raw material, that has a strong flavor to it already. I can also feel something evolving on the cusp between 'music,' 'game,' and 'demonstration' - I imagine a musical experience equivalent to watching John Conway's computer game of Life or playing SimEarth, for example, in which you are at once thrilled by the patterns and the knowledge of how they are made and the metaphorical resonances of such a system. Such an experience falls in a nice new place - between art and science and playing."
  


• "Artists deal in this rather nebulous area I call 'the rehearsal of empathy.' You're rehearsing a repertoire of feelings that you might have about things, of ways of reacting to things, of how it would feel to be in this situation. How it would feel to be in that person's place? What would I have done? Such questions are the most essential human questions because they deal with how we negotiate as mental beings through a complicated universe. A lot of what's learned is quite uncodifiable, because it isn't the same for everyone. In fact, nothing's ever the same for anyone - and those very individuated reactions don't fit well into a scientific frame. Just as complexity theory has helped us understand that linear systems are a very special and limited case, so in some senses we see that the whole of science must deal with special and limited cases. But experiences of culture prepare us for acts of improvisation by getting us used to the idea of enjoying uncertainty."
  

Happy birthday to HL!