Day of Light: A Crowdsourced Film by Multimedia Genius Brian Eno

Over the past sev­er­al years, we’ve seen exper­i­men­tal artists adapt grace­ful­ly (or cash in, if you’re cyn­i­cal) to the user-gen­er­at­ed world we live in now. While the pre­dictably unpre­dictable Flam­ing Lips have been at the inter­ac­tive media game for a while in their own weird way, we’ve also seen Bjork branch out into mul­ti­me­dia with the Bio­phil­ia iPhone/iPad app to accom­pa­ny the album of the same name, and last week we cov­ered Philip Glass’s for­ay into the app mar­ket with his Glass Machine remix­ing app.

Not ever to be out­done, producer/composer/multimedia genius Bri­an Eno released his own app last year, Scape, which allows users to gen­er­ate their own ambi­ent com­po­si­tions on their i‑devices. Scape’s release came just before that of Eno’s lat­est ambi­ent album, Lux, a col­lec­tion of sound­scapes that were ini­tial­ly installed in art gal­leries and air­port ter­mi­nals. On the album’s release date this past Novem­ber, Eno had more in store for fans. He streamed the entire album online at four dif­fer­ent times dur­ing the same day: sun­rise, day­light, sun­set, and night.

Lis­ten­ers were invit­ed to upload pho­tos of each time of day, under the gen­er­al theme of “play of light” (a title Eno con­sid­ered for the album). Eno and his team then curat­ed their favorite images, from all over the globe, and edit­ed them togeth­er into the short film above, enti­tled “Day of Light.” The idea, he says, was to “make a col­lab­o­ra­tive, gen­er­a­tive work… to see what hap­pened if you just made a space for it to hap­pen in.” Judge the results for your­self. Does this prod­uct from the minds and eyes of the Eno col­lec­tive add up to more than the sum of its parts?

Relat­ed Con­tent

Bri­an Eno on Cre­at­ing Music and Art As Imag­i­nary Land­scapes (1989)

Bri­an Eno Once Com­posed Music for Win­dows 95; Now He Lets You Cre­ate Music with an iPad App

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness