Procedural portraits (1): Decoding ‘Eno’s’ generative structure

[This is the first of a two-part exegesis on ‘Eno’ (2024), a generative documentary about musician and producer Brian Eno. This first post focuses on the documentary’s structure and how it reimagines the relationship between archive, database, and film. In the second part, I’ll show how this structure fosters a ‘procedural empathy’ for its subject, and consider the implications of this approach to documentary filmmaking.]

In this darkened cinema, Brian Eno’s home computer setup fills the screen. Dual monitors, a keyboard, knobs and dials, as he manipulates an arrangement in Logic Pro. Two concentric circles – orange and red – orbit his cursor like a target. This custom pointer, designed to improve visibility on large screens, is more than a passing detail; it’s a microcosm of ‘Eno’ (2024), a new generative documentary from director Gary Hustwit. The cursor detail exemplifies the film’s representation of the creative process. Just as Eno’s custom cursor guides his attention through a complex digital workspace, the film’s generative structure leads viewers through his creative landscape. Unlike films that pursue empathy through narrative or visual immersion, ‘Eno’ achieves understanding through shared experience: This, it suggests, is what it feels like to be Brian Eno.

At the heart of this experience is ‘Brain One’, custom software developed by programmer and digital artist Brendan Dawes. Drawing from a database of archival footage and newly-shot interviews, Brain One assembles an 85-90 minute sequence for each screening. Though the film’s production predates the recent surge of attention around generative AI, it provides a fresh perspective on authorship and creativity in media. In this, ‘Eno’ serves as both prototype and provocation. It invites us to reconsider the roles of audience, creator, and technology in narrative experiences, while demonstrating the potential of generative systems to connect viewers and subjects.

In ‘Eno’, the medium is the message. The film’s generative structure is not a technical gimmick, but a key aspect of its portrayal of Eno’s creative philosophy. By employing a database-driven, algorithmically-assembled narrative, it embodies its subject’s longstanding interest in systems, chance operations, and non-linear creative processes. This approach ensures form and content are tightly linked, offering viewers an experience that mimics Eno’s own methodologies.

Three modalities: Archive, database, film

The interplay of three core elements in ‘Eno’ – archive, database, and film – creates a singular viewing experience. By examining each element and their interactions, we can understand how ‘Eno’ takes a new approach to representing its subject’s life, engaging audiences, and constructing a narrative.

Archive as foundation

Brian Eno’s personal video archive, comprising 500 hours of footage, provides a foundation for ‘Eno’. Unlike formal institutional archives, this collection of home videos, studio sessions, live performances, and interviews captures spontaneous, unscripted moments that reveal Eno’s personality and creative process. This intimate access allows audiences to experience Eno’s work directly, while also providing a gateway to broader historical and cultural narratives. For viewers, Eno’s archive serves as a temporal reference point, connecting personal history with broader cultural milieus; from a youthful Bono and U2, to an interview with broadcaster Sandi Toksvig,¹ or Eno’s memories of his childhood exposure to African American music in pubs frequented by GIs stationed at US military bases in the east of England, in the aftermath of World War Two. These juxtapositions allow viewers to mentally map the interplay between personal experience and wider cultural flows.

Eno’s interaction with both personal and public archives, including YouTube, becomes a central theme of the film. Scenes of him revisiting old recordings demonstrate how he reinterprets and reflects on his past work. His clear frustration with YouTube’s interface (auto-loading ads met with expletives), contrasts with thoughtful reflection on personal recordings, illustrating the varied responses elicited by different archival forms. Where traditional archival practices have often prioritised preservation, ‘Eno’ approaches the archive as a dynamic, living entity, open to reinterpretation and future possibilities. This approach aligns with contemporary archival theory, which increasingly recognises archives as active sites of knowledge production. By digitising and tagging Eno’s personal archive, the film-makers have transformed it into a malleable, generative resource.

This transformation of Eno’s archive is crucial to realising the film’s generative structure. The resulting database serves as the film’s backbone, allowing a dynamic narrative assembly that tracks Eno’s own interests and workflows. The digitisation allows multiple narratives to emerge from the same source material, bringing archival tensions around preservation and interpretation into dialogue with the non-linear logic of the database, and shifting how we, as an audience, can interact with and derive meaning from Eno’s personal records.

Database as organising logic

The transformation of Eno’s archive into a database marks a key difference in the film’s approach. While the archive provides the raw material, the database structure enables the dynamic, generative assembly of visual sequences. The transition from static repository to interactive system tracks both the film’s distinctive approach and Eno’s own creative philosophy.

In producing ‘Eno’, director Gary Hustwit and his team tagged each digitised clip with metadata, while paying attention to the types of scenes and possible connections between them (※). This meticulous process not only preserves the archival material but also imbues it with new potential. Each tag becomes a point of connection, allowing the generative system to create meaningful juxtapositions and narrative threads that might not have been apparent in the original, chronological archive. Each piece of footage, each interview, each cultural touchstone is no longer a static record, but a dynamic element that can be endlessly recontextualised and recombined.

Reflecting an understanding of film as both information and experience, this process demonstrates what media theorist Lev Manovich calls ‘database logic’. Unlike traditional narrative, which follows a clear, sequential cause-and-effect trajectory, database logic presents information as a collection of items, each holding equal significance. Leading scholar of literature and technology N. Katherine Hayles extends Manovich’s concept, presenting databases as sites of encounter between machine capabilities and human needs.² This perspective is particularly relevant to ‘Eno’, where the database becomes a mediating structure between algorithmic processing and Hustwit’s directorial vision.

The documentary’s custom Brain One software acts as both interpreter and creator, embodying Manovich’s model of user interaction with databases. It queries the database, interprets the metadata, and constructs narrative paths, effectively ‘performing’ the role of a user engaging with the archive. This process closely resembles Eno’s own methods, in which rules and randomness combine to generate unexpected outcomes.

This database structure fundamentally alters viewers’ relationship with the documentary. Unlike traditional films where audiences passively receive a predetermined narrative, ‘Eno’ requires active engagement. Audiences must piece together the story, drawing connections between non-chronological elements. Each viewer will focus on different aspects, based on their own interests and prevailing contexts, further personalising the experience. By leveraging database logic, ‘Eno’ suggests that our understanding of a subject can be enriched by experiencing multiple, algorithmically-generated perspectives. This approach recognises the complexity of life and creativity, resisting the simplifications often required of linear narratives.

Film as generative performance

‘Eno’ transforms its archival foundation and database logic into a dynamic, performative act. While retaining the capacity for visual storytelling and emotional resonance, it diverges from understandings of film as a fixed, repeatable medium. Instead, ‘Eno’ actively demonstrates its generative nature, making the process of creation central to the viewing experience. Blending documentary content with elements of live performance, the Brain One software dynamically assembles a new version of the film for each screening.

Balancing directorial intent with algorithmic unpredictability, ‘Eno’ transforms its archival foundations into a dynamic viewing experience. Fixed opening and closing scenes featuring Brian Eno provide a consistent framing device. Alongside other ‘pinned’ scenes, occurring within specific ‘regions’ of the runtime, fixed elements comprise about 25% of the film, ensuring a narrative arc while allowing for significant variability. The remaining 75% draws from a combination of edited scenes and archival material, assembled into ‘modules’ of sequenced footage.

Without explicit performative elements, ‘Eno’ could easily be mistaken for a traditional, linear documentary. To distinguish itself and function effectively as generative media, ‘Eno’ must perform its generativity. The film makes some of its underlying processes explicit through on-screen software instructions, lines of code and filenames in monospace type, and visible transitions as the software loads new material. These elements evoke the aesthetics of live coding, where performers write and modify code in real-time. In a similar way, in ‘Eno,’ the visible process of Brain One selecting and assembling footage becomes part of the performance, ensuring the film’s generative structure does not pass unnoticed.³

‘Eno’ also adopts the practice of versioning. Each screening is marked with a date and version number, situating the audience in time and space. My viewing’s title card included ‘15 July 2024’ and was labeled a ‘Picturehouse cut’, specific to the UK cinema chain where I saw it. Destabilising the normally clear boundary between content and context, for me, this prompted an awareness of my viewing being but one possible selection from the film’s database; evoking the implied totality of the film’s source material and its latent narrative possibilities.

‘Eno’ composes a ‘field’ of narrative possibilities, allowing viewers to experience its subject’s core, enduring identity through non-linear means. By breaking Brian Eno’s life and work into discrete, recombinant segments, the film creates a space where, as in ambient music, precise sequencing doesn’t really matter. There’s little that’s truly load-bearing, in narrative terms. Unlike traditional documentaries, where certain key scenes or information are crucial for the narrative to make sense, ‘Eno’ is designed so that most elements can be rearranged or even omitted without compromising the overall understanding of its subject. With individual moments free to assume different meanings depending on their placement within the generated sequence, the resulting algorithmic shuffling supports a cumulative depiction of Eno as an artist ‘dedicated to the deconstruction of music and its making at a fundamental level, then recreating it in amorphous terms: feeling, landscape, peripheral perception, belonging’ (※).

Interplay of archive, database, and film

The interplay of archive, database, and film in ‘Eno’ creates a viewing experience that embodies its subject’s creative philosophy. This performative act of archival exploration, guided by database logic, challenges documentary conventions and the idea of single, fixed historical narrative. The Brain-One software serves as an interface, selecting and arranging database items into a film-like structure, using Eno’s personal video archive as a malleable, generative resource.

Challenging ideas of a ‘definitive’ film, the resulting work aligns with Eno’s own resistance to linear, fixed narratives, including of his own life and work. Interestingly, the film’s generative nature appears to have fostered a unique interview environment. Knowing no single version would be definitive, Eno seems more willing to explore tangents and personal reflections. The resulting interviews serve as a mediating layer, supplying contemporary context for the archival material and guiding viewers’ interpretations without imposing an overly rigid structure.

While the interaction between filmmaker Hustwit and Eno is still present, the film’s structure shifts the primary relationship to that between the viewer and the assembled material. The resulting film offers a contingent view of Eno’s life and work – ‘a scrapbook of scenes from [his] extensive video archives mixed in with footage of Eno in his home studio and garden in rural England, and his scattershot analytical musings on art and life’ (※).

The film’s non-linear structure requires active engagement from viewers, who must piece together the story by drawing connections between disparate elements of Eno’s life and work. By inviting viewers to immerse themselves in Eno’s world without the constraints of a rigid storyline, the film opens up alternative forms of knowledge, stressing mood and atmosphere. This approach to memory as a constructive, interpretive process allows viewers to experience Eno’s life as he himself might recall it, offering a nuanced, cumulative representation that a fixed cut could not provide.

‘Eno’ creates a viewing experience that diverges from established documentary formats. By using a generative system to mediate between archival material and new interview footage, the film embodies Eno’s approach to creativity, inviting viewers to engage in a process of meaning-making that mirrors his creative methods. This approach leads us to consider a new concept in documentary filmmaking: procedural empathy, where the very structure of the film fosters a deeper understanding of its subject.