If you live in Kyoto or are trav­el­ing to Japan in the next two months or, who knows, maybe you have a whole lot­ta miles saved up on your cred­it card, Bri­an Eno has a career-span­ning exhi­bi­tion going on at the for­mer wel­fare cen­tre of the Kyoto Chuo Shinkin Bank.

The above live stream record­ing fea­tures a selec­tion of pre­vi­ous­ly released ambi­ent work, along with a pan­el of Japan­ese “Eno Experts” chat­ting about the musician/producer/artist/thinker. They play selec­tions on vinyl, show clips from rare Eno doc­u­men­taries, even man­age to dig up a LaserDisc of Thurs­day After­noon and a CD-Rom of Head Can­dy.

Ambi­ent Kyoto is Eno’s first large-scale exhi­bi­tion in Japan, and fea­tures the instal­la­tions “77 Mil­lion Paint­ings,” “The Ship,” his con­stant­ly shift­ing “Light Box­es,” a stream of “The Light­house,” Eno’s SONOS chan­nel of his unre­leased archive, and a new work called “Face to Face,” which the exhi­bi­tion site describes thus:

This work began with a small group of pho­tographs of the faces of 21 real peo­ple, each in a sin­gle still image. Using spe­cial soft­ware, the image slow­ly changes pix­el by pix­el from one real face to anoth­er. This cre­ates a long chain of “new humans” between the real faces of each and every one, such as those who did­n’t actu­al­ly exist, inter­me­di­ate humans, and more than 36,000 new faces, 30 per sec­ond. can do.

Yes, you say, that’s all very nice, but what’s on sale at the gift shop? Here you won’t be dis­ap­point­ed. There’s vinyl and CD albums, an exhib­it cat­a­log, t‑shirts, tote bags, and box­es of Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strate­gies. And only in Japan can you get this: a box of Japan­ese sweets designed to look like one of his light instal­la­tions.

The exhib­it is afford­able (around $20) and you can stay as long as you like. Eno con­tin­ues to fas­ci­nate and make art in spaces where he’s often the first to start exploring—-certainly in terms of ambi­ent and gen­er­a­tive art he has been a pio­neer. In an inter­view near the end of the eight-hour live stream he describes his career:

“I just don’t see any­body else doing [these instal­la­tions]. And I know it’s pow­er­ful. So I think wow, I’ve got this all to myself. So instead of shoot­ing arrows at some­body else’s tar­get, which I’ve nev­er been very good at, I make my own tar­get around wher­ev­er my arrow’s hap­pened to have land­ed.”

Learn more about the exhi­bi­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to “Bri­an Eno Day,” a 12-Hour Radio Show Spent With Eno & His Music (Record­ed in 1988)

Bri­an Eno’s Advice for Those Who Want to Do Their Best Cre­ative Work: Don’t Get a Job

Bri­an Eno Lists the Ben­e­fits of Singing: A Long Life, Increased Intel­li­gence, and a Sound Civ­i­liza­tion

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

Few artists have antic­i­pat­ed, or pre­cip­i­tat­ed, the frag­ment­ed, hero­ical­ly indi­vid­u­al­ist, and pur­pose­ful­ly oppo­si­tion­al art of moder­ni­ty like William Blake, a man to whom the cliché ahead of his time can be applied with per­fect accu­ra­cy. Blake stren­u­ous­ly opposed the ratio­nal­ist Deism and Neo­clas­si­cal artis­tic val­ues of his con­tem­po­raries, not only in prin­ci­ple, but in near­ly every part of his artis­tic prac­tice. His pol­i­tics were cor­re­spond­ing­ly rad­i­cal: in oppo­si­tion to empire, racism, pover­ty, patri­archy, Chris­t­ian dog­ma, and the emerg­ing glob­al cap­i­tal­ism of his time.

Nowhere do we see Blake’s visu­al rad­i­cal­ism more in evi­dence, argues Julia M. Wright in a 2000 essay for the jour­nal Mosa­ic, than in his Laocoön, a work that not only seems to presage the mod­ernist col­lag­ing of text and image, from Braque to Rauschen­berg, but also looks toward hyper­text with its non­lin­ear­i­ty, frag­men­ta­tion, and inter­tex­tu­al­i­ty: “By com­bin­ing as many as four dif­fer­ent media in Laocoön — draw­ing, writ­ing, engrav­ing, and sculp­ture [in his depic­tion of the clas­si­cal orig­i­nal] — Blake puts into play their dif­fer­ent prop­er­ties, engag­ing the debate in the­o­ry as well as prac­tice.”

Through an art of visu­al pas­tiche, Blake resists the Neo­clas­si­cal idea that visu­al art and poet­ry were mutu­al­ly exclu­sive for­mal pur­suits that could not coex­ist. (View a larg­er image here to read the poems and slo­gans that sur­round the image.)

We can see the influ­ence of Blake’s rad­i­cal­ism every­where, from zine art to the Blakes repro­duced on the skin of spe­cial edi­tion Doc Martens (the artist was also an enthu­si­as­tic defend­er of the Goth­ic over the Clas­si­cal, Wright points out). An art like Blake’s demand­ed a rad­i­cal process, and he con­ceived one through his pro­fes­sion­al skills as an engraver, an art he began learn­ing at the age of twelve. “Right from his ear­li­est child­hood,” notes the British Library video at the top, “Blake was dri­ven by two extra­or­di­nary and pow­er­ful aspi­ra­tions. On the one hand as a poet, on the oth­er as a painter… so how was he going to bring these two togeth­er in a form that would enable him to pub­lish his own images in illus­tra­tion of his own poems?”

The video demon­strates “Blake’s inno­va­tion” as an engraver and print­er. The print­ing process at that point involved a num­ber of dif­fer­ent spe­cial­ized work­ers, some respon­si­ble for set­ting text, and oth­ers for sep­a­rate­ly print­ing images in blank spaces left on the pages. Blake’s process “enabled him, with the excep­tion of the paper, to be respon­si­ble for every stage in the pro­duc­tion process, from writ­ing the poems, mak­ing the draw­ings, using the stop-out var­nish to write his text, etch­ing and print­ing the impres­sions.”

He began work­ing out his meth­ods as a teenag­er, and they allowed tremen­dous cre­ative free­dom through­out his life to cre­ate per­son­al works of art like the “Illu­mi­nat­ed Books” (from which the oth­er two images here come): con­tain­ers of his com­plex mythol­o­gy and some of his most pas­sion­ate engrav­ings. You can learn even more about Blake’s DIY print­ing process in the video fur­ther up from Ash­molean Muse­um. Blake’s futur­is­tic art drew heav­i­ly from the past — from Renais­sance mas­ters like Michelan­ge­lo, for exam­ple — as a means of cre­at­ing an alter­nate art his­to­ry, one that opposed the val­ues of dom­i­na­tion and oppres­sive sys­tems of order.

His for­mal and polit­i­cal rad­i­cal­ism is per­haps one rea­son Blake became one of the first artists to pop­u­late an online archive, with the launch of the Blake Archive all the way back in 1996, “con­ceived as an inter­na­tion­al [free] pub­lic resource that would pro­vide uni­fied access to major works of visu­al and lit­er­ary art that are high­ly dis­parate, wide­ly dis­persed, and more and more often severe­ly restrict­ed as a result of their val­ue, rar­i­ty, and extreme fragili­ty.” Vis­it the Blake Archive here to see high res­o­lu­tion scans of hun­dreds of Blake’s prophet­ic works, all cre­at­ed from start to fin­ish by his own hand, and learn more about his per­son­al and com­mer­cial illus­tra­tions at the links below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William Blake’s 102 Illus­tra­tions of The Divine Com­e­dy Col­lect­ed in a Beau­ti­ful Book from Taschen

Enter an Archive of William Blake’s Fan­tas­ti­cal “Illu­mi­nat­ed Books”: The Images Are Sub­lime, and in High Res­o­lu­tion

William Blake’s Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Illus­tra­tions of John Milton’s Par­adise Lost

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness