BRIAN ENO

Opening Reception: Wednesday, April 13, 2016, 19:00–21:00
Exhibition Dates: April 13–July 3, 2016
Opening Hours: Tuesday–Saturdays, 13:00-21:00, Sundays 12:00-20:00

Protocinema presents Brian Eno’s sound and light installation, The Ship, 2014, at Alt Art Space. This installation consists of a wide range of sound sources: found and appropriated, high quality and lo-fi which create an immersive and evocative composition. The Ship reflects on failure, loss and conflict, its starting point is the sinking of the RMS Titanic in April 1912 as “an analogy to the approach to the First World War” [1] and reflects on our current global condition.

Alt's inaugural season is dedicated to examining issues of authorship in art, such as appropriation, re-contextualization, sampling, re-purposing. Many of the objects and sounds in Eno’s installation will be familiar, others unrecognizable, deconstructed and/or altered. The audio-speakers, themselves, have been modified. The idea of asking questions of authorship brings up how things are presented or manipulated and how that affects meaning, or “interpreted meaning.” In this case, Brian Eno expands on the approach he used in Music for Airports, 1978, a record designed to calm air passengers against fears of crashing, which was created by layering tape loops of differing lengths to create and audio-picture. “Humankind seems to teeter between hubris and paranoia: the hubris of our ever-growing power contrasts with the paranoia that we're permanently and increasingly under threat. At the zenith we realize we have to come down again....” [2]

Brian Eno’s new album, The Ship, will be released on April 29, 2016, by Warp Records.

Brian Eno is an English musician, composer, record producer and visual artist known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music and generative painting. As a visual artist he has been exhibiting since the late 1970s and has been showing his work regularly since, from Tokyo to Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro to New York, London to Madrid. His work is dedicated almost exclusively to the possibilities that the medium of light provides. In 2009, Eno was given the very rare invitation to exhibit on the iconic sails of the Sydney Opera House in Australia. This was achieved using an array of powerful projectors with the light thrown across Circular Quay. The installation consisted by Eno’s own software 77 Million Paintings, a piece that creates an ever-changing, albeit at an almost imperceptible speed, light painting. "By allowing ourselves to let go of the world that we have to be part of every day, and to surrender to another kind of world, we're allowing imaginative processes to take place."

[1.], [2.] Brian Eno.