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Join us for a journey into a maverick mind. Psychologist Tanya Byron meets a shapeshifting creative polymath with serious ideas about the future of humankind: Brian Eno.
“This is the start of something big… Inequality eats away at the heart of a society, breeding disdain, resentment, envy, suspicion, bullying, arrogance and callousness. If we want any decent kind of future we have to push away from that, and I think we’re starting to… There’s so much to do, so many possibilities. 2017 should be a surprising year.” Brian Eno
Brian Eno likes to think big. When Microsoft tasked him with composing a 3 ¼ seconds sound for Windows 95 he wrote more than 80 different versions. Shortly afterward he helped start The Long Now Foundation, whose clock will mark the passage of the next ten thousand years. Over more than thirty years he’s mastered art forms and created entirely new ones; helped bring out the best in other artists and in no small way shaped the nature of modern music.
He is a left-field avant garde maverick who helped make U2 and Coldplay two of the biggest bands on the planet; a perfectionist who spends weeks fine-tuning systems and modifying rules to create music that can never be repeated. His Oblique Strategies provided a framework that helps artists around the world get unblocked and find new and ingenious solutions to their creative troubles.
Now he joins us at the School of Life to talk about what he’s learned on that journey – and to reveal how he sees the future shaping up.
In The School of Life’s Life Lessons series, clinical psychologist, writer and broadcaster Professor Tanya Bryon explores the psyches of some of the most eminent figures in our culture – from politicians to CEOs, artists to philosophers. Now it’s time to explore what it’s like being Brian Eno.
What drives his creative process? How does he manage to accomplish continuously break new ground in not just one but many art forms – even, upon occasion, inventing new art forms – at an age when most of us would be contemplating retirement? As technology, inequality, populism and liberalism collide in global affairs, what does he think the future holds?