I recently purchased Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings (not to be confused with Sala’s One Thousand Paintings), which generates paintings on your screen by layering a set of images and slowly fading between them. The software is designed to emulate a 1970s slideshow installation that Eno built; many of the images are from the original slides. Most of them are abstract scratches, geometric patterns, color blocks and swirls, but some paintings have very clear imagery: rocket drawings, schematics, halftoned faces etc. Each time you run the program, it starts in a different place, so you’re always at the dawn of a new day of paintings. But patterns do repeat: the number of slides is limited, so there is definitely a style among the imagery—this is not pure randomness.

But I have to say that since I bought this program a month or so ago, I’ve only run it a handful of times. I ran it for friends once. Karl and I stared at it for a few minutes once. When you get it going, it really is captivating and beautiful, but because it’s a self-contained program, you really have to want to see it. The activation energy is high, especially because there’s nothing you can do in 77 Million Paintings but sit and stare (and listen—the soundtrack is also generated). The only thing you can manipulate is the speed of the transitions before the show starts. So it’s unlike a video game or a word processor or any other application on my computer. It has no real functionality; it’s all form. And that’s frustrating for me, because I never go looking for pure, self-contained form in my Applications folder. Every other program I have is about me somehow manipulating content of my choosing, and here comes Eno with this rogue Application to which nothing can be Applied. It’s a misfit.

A screen saver seems like the ideal venue for pure, self-contained form, doesn’t it? I’m really surprised that Eno didn’t take it in that direction, or at least provide the option. He must have considered it, but I couldn’t find an explanation in the packaging as to why it wasn’t a screen saver. In his diary, Eno went on and on about screen savers—he loved them!—so I’m baffled.

I can only guess why it it’s not a screen saver. When active, screen savers are not usually the center of attention. They’re a background element, something one might see across the room, or something one might not see at all because one is down the block having a sandwich. Eno may feel that his work should really have people’s undivided attention when it’s running, and that it would be an insult for it to exist only as background. That is, maybe he wanted the software to be as true as possible to its original museum context. Unfortunately, people do not use computers as they use museums, so I think the intent falls flat.