Eight time zones ahead of Los Angeles, Brian Eno's cellphone is ringing. He's cycling along the Thames River towpath, savoring the shank of a summer afternoon. "Could you call back in an hour?" he asks politely.
The appointed moment arrives and Eno is ready to chat, having come to a temporary halt in the tranquillity of his London home. Like his fellow harried humanoids, the British multimedia artist intimates that he's constantly trying to carve out a few minutes of quiet, contemplative space for himself within the manic, tech-driven modern world.
Of course, Eno, 61, has been a pioneer of that world and a proponent of new artistic technologies for decades: first as a keyboardist for the definitive glam-rock ensemble Roxy Music; then as the producer of countless albums by U2, the Talking Heads, Coldplay and other sonically promiscuous bands; and in his prolific audio-visual collaborations, ranging from the Microsoft Windows six-second start-up jingle to the sound design for the Spore(2008_video_game) video game to the soundtrack for Peter Jackson's upcoming feature film adaptation of Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones." Eno's seemingly inexhaustible list of projects and artistic partners has earned him a reputation as a kind of creative perpetual-motion machine. But he confesses that he, too, struggles to keep the 24-7 pace from overwhelming him.
"I think it's very, very difficult, and I'm not very good at it, to tell you the truth," he says. "I've noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it's far enough in the future. And then I look in my calendar and see things looming closer and think, 'Oh, now I've got to do it!' "
Luckily, Eno's restless endeavors often produce oases of calm reflection for his listeners and viewers. Exhibit A is one of his most recent projects, "77 Million Paintings," a multimedia installation that will be unveiled today at the University Art Museum of Cal State Long Beach.
It consists of a wall of 12 computer-operated monitors of varying dimensions, displaying a procession of constantly mutating images that group and regroup into a virtually limitless series of configurations. The protean "paintings" are accompanied by Eno's ambient original score.
Eno also designed the installation's computer software and hand-drew the interchangeable images on slides, using etching tools and paintbrushes. Most of the configurations are abstract, but Eno occasionally added variety by tossing in found art culled from magazines and elsewhere.
