Brian Eno Interview in Wired

Here's some of it:

Wired News: What drew you toward working with generative art and generative music?

Brian Eno: Well, part of it is that it's an extremely good value (laughter) because it was possible to make a lot of work from a very small amount of original material. That was one thing I found very interesting, because once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music -- not like a record that you'd put on and which would play for a while and finish. I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn't want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing. So I developed two ideas in that way. Discreet Music was like that and Music for Airports. What you hear on the recordings is a little part of one of those processes working itself out. Theoretically, the processes were infinite but unfortunately, recordings aren't of infinite length. So you sort of had a diagram, or really you got a "still" from the piece. That was really the best way of explaining it.

***

WN: How much of a relationship does place have with how you think the audience perceives 77 Million Paintings? You know, where it's installed, whether they're viewing it at home or in a gallery.

Eno: It makes a lot of difference. First of all, if people go somewhere to look at something, they've already made a commitment of time. They are therefore likely to make a bigger commitment. It's unlikely that they'll ride all the way across town, look in and leave in 15 or 30 seconds. You'll probably think just because you made that long journey, you'll stay longer. [Brian Eno would make an excellent online marketer -jh]

If you want to feel like a talentless dummy, go read the rest of the article.