Though generally better known as a musician and producer, versatile Brit Brian Eno has art school roots, and has created a stream of visual works paralleling his music career. These two forms of expression fuse in Eno’s installations, linked by his long-running “generative” theme. Conceptually this refers to a system in which once the artist has set the initial parameters, the work itself goes on to generate endless permutations, in installations composed of the overlapping of “infinite music” and “endlessly changing paintings.” “Ambient Kyoto” is an excellent opportunity to take in several of Eno’s installations, including 77 Million Paintings, The Ship, Light Boxes, and his latest, Face to Face.

When 77 Million Paintings on the first floor was shown publicly for the first time, at Tokyo’s Laforet Harajuku in 2006, it struck me very much as a visual work projected on screen, but here in Kyoto it came across as an installation composed precisely to suit the space. At the back of this space, with its forest of thin wooden pillars, and small piles of sand on the floor, multiple displays are arranged in various shapes, including a cross and a swastika, with the images on displays of the same size slowly changing in unison. Sometimes concrete images appear, sometimes abstract, combining to generate a virtually infinite number of paintings, as the title suggests. Sofas are provided to enable visitors to settle in and savor this procession of images. While compact Genelec speakers installed on all four walls send out quiet, deep sound, a Bose column speaker placed in the corner occasionally emits what seem to be noises. Time passes with no beginning or end either visually or aurally.
True to its title, Light Boxes on the second floor consists of three light-emitting boxes, situated along the length of the room. Inside, the boxes are partitioned, the light from LEDs installed within changing color at a very slow pace, crossing and interfering in the boundaries between sections. This is complemented by the ambient tones flowing from small Sonos speakers mounted on the opposite wall, suffusing the space with an extraordinarily pleasant sensation of time passing at a fraction of its usual rate.
The third floor is split into two galleries, the first of which presents Face to Face. On three displays mounted one above another run endless visuals of the faces of 21 real people morphing into different faces pixel by pixel. The face of a man becomes that of a woman, that of a white person, a black person; an old person, a young one…The faces change so naturally that even if you fix your gaze intently on them, you will struggle to pinpoint the moment of their transformation. You simply notice suddenly that it is a completely different visage. Perhaps differences in sex, race, and age are more subtle than we realize. In similar fashion to the second floor, tension-filled sound plays from wall-mounted Sonos speakers, driving us to keep engaging with face after face after generated face.
Rounding off the exhibition is The Ship. Unlike the other galleries, the visual element here is confined to a speaker-as-object positioned near the entrance, with the rest of the installation consisting of a multichannel version of Eno’s album The Ship released in 2016 playing amid dim light. The work is dominated by voice elements—Eno’s singing, vocoder, and reading by actor Peter Serafinowicz—and features various configurations of instruments including guitar, strings and synthesizer. The usual approach to playing multichannel works is to line up several identical speakers and localize the sound according to the volume from each, however this work is distinguished by the use of Genelec and Bose speakers, plus Fender, Vox and Roland guitar amps to play the guitar parts through guitar amps, harnessing the texture of each different speaker to play the sound, not dissimilar to the way Morimura Yasumasa deliberately used radio cassette players and studio monitors of various sizes for different parts in his Faces or Voices in the Darkness recitation drama, part of “Morimura Yasumasa: My Self-Portraits as a Theater of Labyrinths” that ran at the Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art from March 12 to June 5. These are speakers not as stage hands but narrators, each with a unique role.
The Ship takes as its theme the sinking of the Titanic, and finishes with the resonating vocals of Eno singing Velvet Underground’s I’m Set Free, so unlike the other exhibits, has a beginning and end. Soaking in echoes of I’m Set Free, and in that liberated state of mind entering 77 Million Paintings on the first floor once more, is wonderful. You really do feel like you want to forget reality and escape to here. There may accordingly be a tendency to criticize this work as “escapist.” Yet we cannot help but note how grand it is to have on this earth an artist who strives to create such feelgood spaces, and the support crew to help make them reality, because this exhibition is the product of the efforts of not just the organizer but a sizeable staff, and if lots of people went on to make these splendid spaces across the globe, the real world might even, little by little, turn into something more pleasant. Something that starts with the wildest fancies of a single artist can, with the involvement of many other people, revolutionize the very world itself. “Brian Eno Ambient Kyoto” was an exhibition that made me want to believe in such naive dreams again.
Kunisaki Susumu
Director, RITTOR BASE


※BRIAN ENO AMBIENT KYOTO is being held through August 21 at Kyoto Chuo Shinkin Bank Kyu Kosei Center.
https://ambientkyoto.com/