Procedural portraits (2): Empathy and innovation in ‘Eno’

[In the previous post, I explored the distinctive structure of ‘Eno’ (2024), a generative documentary about Brian Eno. In this second part, I examine how this generative structure fosters a sense of ‘procedural empathy’, and consider its implications for documentary filmmaking and our understanding of creative processes.]

‘Characters or social actors may come and go, offering information, giving testimony, providing evidence. Places and things may appear and disappear as they are brought forward in support of the film’s point of view. A logic of implication bridges these leaps from one person or place to another.’ — Bill Nicols, Introduction to Documentary, Third Edition (2017)

Procedural empathy

The interplay of elements in ‘Eno’ not only shapes the documentary’s structure, but also fosters a singular viewing experience. The film’s generative structure allows viewers to experience Eno’s creative process as if from the inside, providing a deeper understanding than documentaries typically offer.

Writer and game designer Ian Bogost introduced the idea of ‘procedural rhetoric’ to describe how systems, particularly video games, make arguments. He argues that games and other procedural systems can make strong claims about how the world works through the processes they embody and the models they construct.¹ The art of ‘persuading through processes’ (computational or otherwise), procedural rhetoric encompasses processes as arguments, simulation as persuasion, and creators’ ideological expression through system design.

Where Bogost’s focus was on argumentation, ‘Eno’ extends procedural rhetoric into emotional engagement, fostering what we might call a ‘procedural empathy’ for its subject. Shifting focus from the system’s argument to its emotional and cognitive effects, the transition from rhetoric to empathy is not a leap, but a natural extension of Bogost’s ideas. Just as procedural rhetoric uses systems to make arguments, procedural empathy leverages these same systems to foster emotional understanding.

Originating from the German ‘Einfühlung’ (literally ‘feeling into’), the concept of empathy has undergone significant shifts over time. Initially, it evoked an aesthetics of ‘mirroring and analogy’ (※) where viewers would project themselves into objects, blurring the lines between the self and the observed form. But over the twentieth century, the concept shifted towards social cognition and interpersonal understanding, becoming central to discussions of how we relate to others and the world around us (※).

Today, empathy is commonly understood as the capacity to grasp and share the feelings of another subject. Where traditional documentary films seek to evoke this kind of empathy through narrative storytelling, ‘Eno’ takes a different approach. Rather than simply depicting Brian Eno’s experiences, it creates a system that mimics the generative qualities of his work, allowing viewers to ‘feel into’ his methods directly. This approach aligns with early conceptions of empathy as a means to penetrate objects’ interiors, but applies them instead to systems thinking and the creative process.

This procedural empathy can be seen as an evolution of Bogost’s ‘procedural enthymeme’², where the audience is expected to fill in the missing pieces of the argument. In ‘Eno’, viewers complete their understanding of Eno’s creative process through (knowingly) engaging with the film’s generative structure, supporting a deeper empathetic connection. As audiences experience different versions of the documentary, they come to understand the unpredictability and serendipity that characterises Eno’s creative process. The film doesn’t just tell viewers about Eno’s methods; it allows them to experience a version of those methods firsthand. Two key sequences illustrate this approach:

Do nothing: Emulating Oblique Strategies

How can a film emulate a deck of cards? Created by Eno and Peter Schmidt in 1975, Oblique Strategies is a deck of cards with instructions and gnomic phrases designed to break creative blocks and spur lateral thinking (※). These cards have become an iconic tool in Eno’s creative process, embodying his interest in chance operations and systemic approaches to art-making. The value of the deck is illustrated by an anecdote about Eno’s work with David Bowie on the ‘Heroes’ album. During recording, each drew a card without revealing it to the other. Eno’s card read ‘Try to make everything as similar as possible,’ while Bowie’s instructed him to ‘Emphasise differences.’ The creative tension born of these contradictory prompts led to rapid, dynamic changes in their collaborative process, demonstrating how chance-based constraints can spark unexpected outcomes.

In one newly-shot sequence in my ‘Eno’ screening, artist and musician Laurie Anderson, one of Eno’s long-time collaborators, draws a card that reads, simply: ‘Do nothing for as long as possible.’ Following this card’s instructions, Anderson sits in silence, looking straight down the camera lens. After an uncomfortably long pause, the scene shifts, triggering a sequence linked by ideas of absence, silence, and nothingness. This is one of a dozen possible cards shot (six drawn by Anderson, and a further six drawn by David Byrne). The draw is a branch point, with any of the twelve outcomes pivoting the film’s direction. By recreating the process of drawing and ‘following’ an Oblique Strategies prompt, ‘Eno’ doesn’t just inform viewers about Eno’s methods – it allows them to experience an analogous process of constrained, chance-driven creativity. Each viewing of the film becomes a ‘draw’ from its database, fostering procedural empathy by allowing viewers to engage with Eno’s creative process in a singularly immersive way.

‘In The Name of Love’: Depicting creativity

Another striking example is in the film’s depiction of Eno’s collaborative work. This sequence is particularly powerful as it combines intimate, contemporary footage with archival material to illustrate the full arc of Eno’s creative process. It begins with new footage of Eno revisiting his collection of microcassettes, which he has long used to capture initial song ideas. He explains his non-linear approach to songwriting, emphasising the importance of capturing fleeting ideas and the iterative nature of the creative process. As he listens to these tapes, we see him cringing with a mix of amusement and embarrassment.

The film then transitions to archival footage of Eno in the studio with U2. We witness young Bono scat-improvising melodies, details of Eno’s direction, and the other band members’ confused-but-game reactions. This demonstrates Eno’s role as a facilitator of creativity in others. As the session progresses, viewers observe the halting emergence of the now-iconic guitar riff and vocal melody of ‘Pride (In The Name of Love)’. By presenting these elements in sequence, ‘Eno’ creates a temporal bridge. This allows viewers to directly experience the uncertainty of early ideas, the vulnerability of sharing those ideas, and the collaborative effort required to bring them to fruition. That the studio footage features U2, a band that has achieved massive success, adds weight to the film’s argument. It demonstrates the cultural impact of Eno’s unconventional methods, highlighting the power of his collaborative approach to creativity.

Beyond the empathy machine

In both of these sequences, ‘Eno’ creates procedural empathy by modeling key aspects of Eno’s creative process. Rather than simply describing these processes, the film emulates them, allowing viewers to experience analogous versions of Eno’s creative journey. This approach creates a correspondence between the viewer’s experience and Eno’s methods, enabling viewers to develop a more intuitive, experiential understanding of his creative worldview.

Virtual reality has been hailed as an ‘ultimate empathy machine’, a framing and approach popularised by artist Chris Milk. This approach relies on immersive sensory experiences to simulate ‘being someone else.’³ From the vantage of 2024, Milk’s vision of VR’s potential to create empathy by simulating others’ experiences seems wildly naïve – not least the idea that showing VR films of Syrian refugees’ experiences to Davos attendees could have a meaningful impact. However, Milk’s earlier work did create affecting experiences. I vividly recall encountering his HTML5 interactive short for Arcade Fire’s ‘The Wilderness Downtown’ in 2010, which felt genuinely revolutionary at the time.⁴

While VR can provide immediate experiences, it often struggles to build lasting empathy. A focus on fleeting, high-fidelity moments comes at the expense of deeper cognitive and contextual engagement. However, ‘Eno’ may succeed where VR’s promises have fallen short. Rather than projecting viewers into Brian Eno’s body or immediate physical environment, the film creates a conceptual space where viewers can engage with the procedures and systems that have shaped his work. By aligning viewers with its subject through structural mimicry and engagement, ‘Eno’ demonstrates that empathy need not rely on sensory immersion.

While ‘Eno’ surpasses VR’s limitations in creating empathy for its subject, it also diverges from standard documentary approaches. Documentary film can itself be seen as an ‘empathy machine’, an earlier ‘attempt to make sensible to oneself the emotional experience of another via technology’ (※). From its inception, the genre has sought to bring viewers into the lives and experiences of others, fostering understanding and emotional connection through narrative techniques and visual storytelling. Challenging these earlier documentary conventions, ‘Eno’ uses media archives and database logic to compose a possibility space – a dynamic field where combinatorics and non-linear causalities generate emergent narratives that unfold differently with each viewing.

In a traditional documentary, filmmakers might have followed Eno’s career from Roxy Music to his solo work and collaborations, sourcing and sequencing newly-shot footage, archival material, and voiceover recordings to build a coherent narrative. Reworking the relationship between filmmakers, subject, and audience, ‘Eno’ shifts some of this curatorial role to its generative system, allowing for emergent narratives that more closely mimic Eno’s own creative processes. Viewers must piece together an understanding of Eno from non-chronological fragments. This approach allows empathy to arise organically from viewer-system interaction, rather than being dictated by a fixed narrative.

‘Eno’ as prototype and provocation

In its distinctive approach to documentary storytelling, ‘Eno’ serves as both a proof-of-concept and a challenge to established documentary practices, signaling potential shifts in how we create and consume non-fiction cinema. At once familiar and recognisably new, it challenges the idea of a ‘finished’ film, with the potential for ongoing updates, additional footage, and evolving narrative possibilities. The film’s dual roles as prototype and provocation are mutually reinforcing: its distinctive approach generates attention and discussion, validating its status as a prototype for future works of generative storytelling.

The film’s procedural empathy for Eno as a subject aligns with its structure. Eno’s work provides an ideal context for demonstrating the potential of generative filmmaking. However, Hustwit and Dawes’s co-founding of start-up Anamorph signals their belief in ‘Eno’s’ potential beyond Eno. With a patent pending on the generative system, Anamorph positions ‘Eno’ as a viable prototype for a new form of media, ready for wider industry adoption. By allowing for dynamic, evolving narratives, Anamorph’s technology could reshape documentary production, shifting it from a fixed, linear process to something more iterative; a sustained curation of content for dynamic, on-the-fly assembly.

The development of a physical interface for the Brain One software, in partnership with cult Swedish electronics company Teenage Engineering, further blurs the lines between cinema, technology demonstration, and live performance. Attracting attention from tech enthusiasts and wider creative community, this physical interface, ‘B-1’, translates the abstract concept of generative filmmaking into an interactive object. With the interface in use, the film’s ‘live’ screenings become performative demonstrations, evoking landmark tech demos like Douglas Engelbart’s ‘Mother of All Demos’, or even the 18th century chess-playing Mechanical Turk. While the Turk was later revealed as a hoax, all three examples showcase the power of live demonstrations in capturing public imagination. In deploying B-1, ‘Eno’ is not just a film or technological demo, but part of a longer tradition of performances that, like its predecessors, reshapes our sense of what’s possible.

As a prototype, ‘Eno’ demonstrates the feasibility and potential of generative filmmaking, offering a tangible model for future productions. However, its role as a provocation extends far beyond technical innovation. By rejecting the ‘finished’ work or preferred ‘director’s cut’, it challenges fundamental assumptions about authorship, narrative structure, and the role of the viewer. The film also prompts debate about the role of truth and representation in non-fiction storytelling, questioning whether a single, fixed narrative can capture a subject. As the industry grapples with generative technologies, ‘Eno’ not only shows how these tools can be used to enhance storytelling, but poses challenging questions about the future of the documentary, the role of the director, and the very definition of a ‘film’.

Conclusion

Documentary film offers a unique perspective on its subjects, providing a commentary that goes beyond simple indexicality. ‘Eno’s’ generative structure both honours and stretches this function. By reworking the typical linkages between footage and historical events into a dynamic, algorithmically-mediated process, the film challenges our understanding of what a documentary can be.

‘Eno’s’ generative approach redefines the roles of filmmaker, subject, and audience. The filmmaker becomes a system designer, curating a dynamic possibility space. The subject is transformed into a dataset, yielding new insights with each viewing. Audiences, in turn, become active interpreters. By transforming Eno’s personal archive into a dynamic database and using generative software to arrange the film, ‘Eno’ demonstrates how structure and chance can coexist in documentary storytelling.

But the potential implications of ‘Eno’ extend beyond a single documentary. For filmmakers, the film represents a proof of concept for new narrative structures. For technologists, it demonstrates the possibilities of generative media systems. For audiences, it presents a new kind of viewing experience. And for the industry, it suggests a new product category that could reshape how we consume and engage with documentary content.

As both a portrait and a prototype for further media innovations, ‘Eno’ points to a future where documentaries are not static artifacts but dynamic, evolving systems. By allowing audiences to experience, and not simply observe, their subjects’ processes and prevailing contexts, such documentaries could offer more nuanced, multifaceted depictions of complex topics and individuals. Moreover, ‘Eno’ holds a mirror to the database logics of our own, increasingly algorithm-mediated lives. By making its generative processes explicit, the film encourages us to reflect on the systems that shape our daily experiences and understanding. It reminds us that our perception of reality is always partial and contingent, shaped by the mechanisms through which we encounter information.

Against a charged backdrop of generative media and algorithmic curation, ‘Eno’ suggests that the future of understanding may lie not in fixed narratives, but in systems that allow us to explore and experience different perspectives. Such tools for fostering procedural empathy may become not just valuable, but necessary. More than simply a (procedural) portrait of Brian Eno, the film challenges us to rethink not just how we make and consume media, but how we relate to the world around us.