Thinking inside the box: Brian Eno, music, movement and light

ABSTRACT

‘In total darkness, or in a very large room, very quietly’ [Eno, Brian, and Peter Schmidt. (1979). Oblique Strategies. The Authors.]

This article considers how Eno has used simple but innovative ideas, programmes and processes to inform his films, apps and installation work. Avoiding spectacle, noise and complexity, Eno and his collaborators have produced an array of intriguing and engaging visual art works. In T. The New York Times Style Magazine, Eno stated that he ‘was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way music changes’ [Eno, Brian. (2013). ‘The Record Producer, Sound Conceptualist Futurist and Artist Extraordinaire on the Academy Couch.’ New York: Red Bull Music Academy. Accessed April 14, 2014]. Kingsley Marshall and Rupert Loydell use remix, juxtaposition and creative writing, along with more traditional research methods, to cast light onto the ways in which appropriation, process and collaboration have informed Eno’s creative output. They use Eno’s own words, along with critiques of his work, and writing by those who have inspired him, to consider how Eno creates his quiet rooms and visual music. Each consecutive response here was dictated by the turn of an Oblique Strategies card.

KEYWORDS:

• Eno
• Oblique Strategies
• collaboration
• remix
• visual art
• sound

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Kingsley Marshall is Head of Film at Falmouth University, specialising in sound design, filmmaking practice and philosophical approaches to film. His academic research is primarily orientated around the use of sound in film, and the cinematic representation of the real, including historical figures and events. He has contributed to two books that consider the representation of US presidents in cinema, both published by Palgrave Macmillan. A larger research project, entitled ‘The Unification of Film Sound’, interrogates the use of sound in representations of war, with a paper focused on The Hurt Locker appearing in Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews (University of Mississippi Press, 2014). With Rupert Loydell, he has presented papers on Eno at conferences in London and New York, publishing the first of these in Brian Eno. Oblique Music (Bloomsbury, 2016).

Rupert Loydell is Senior Lecturer in English with Creative Writing at Falmouth University, the editor of Stride magazine and a contributing editor to international times. He is the author of many books of poems, including The Return of the Man Who Has Everything (Shearsman, 2015) and Love Songs for an Echo (original plus, 2016), and the editor/co-editor of several anthologies including Yesterday’s Music Today (Knives, Forks & Spoons Press, 2016). His previous writing about Eno has been published in The Journal of Creative Writing Practice, Brian Eno: Oblique Music (Bloomsbury, 2016) and by Smallminded Books. He has also published in the journals New Writing, Punk & Post-Punk and English.