The mentioned picture of Bach, sitting alone in a room, possibly communicating with God had already been shattered by 20th century artists like Duchamp who regarded their work as “a deliberate act of aesthetic indifference”. This gave birth to many sciences and, what many don’t realize, it has also given rise to a lot of different forms of art. The consequence that was brought about by many different researchers, notably Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking work Silent Spring on the use of DDT, was that you can never do one thing in nature.
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This bottom-up design also became an integral part of cybernetics and later of computer science.ĭarwin was a religious person and, according to Eno, this was one of the reasons why he didn’t explore the implications of his findings to the full extent, God and the idea of a divine order in nature a sense stayed on top of the creation for more than another century until a second insight appeared through the notion of ecology: Everything is interconnected, there is not only no bottom but just a web of nodes. Darwin however, stated that complexity comes from the bottom up and at no point we would need to assume that it requires a more complex intelligence above it – there is no head of the pyramid anymore because information flows from the bottom up. If you take a Boeing 747 as an example, it would be quite natural to assume that something more complex that the 747 must exist on top of it. In 1859, Charles Darwin published his book The Origin of Species and suddenly the idea of evolution stood in the room, which is actually stunningly counterintuitive – behind a complex object, as many immediately assume, there must be a greater intelligence that the object itself.
In his view, this is an image that too often still permeates the art world. An example of this model is the classical idea of the musical genius as impersonated in Giotto, Beethoven or Bach at the top and “bad” art like folk and pop music at the bottom. Information flows in one direction where intelligence is at the top and gets diluted on the way down to the bottom. This represents a classic pyramid-shaped model of organization and enlightenment. Here’s a recap:Īccording to Eno, pre-Darwin imperial Britain looked something like this: There was God, then came the king, gentlemen, horses, women and last the French. The honoraries return every now and then for workshops and lectures and last Thursday, Eno gave a talk which was titled Before and after Darwin. The University of the Arts Berlin gave Brian Eno their first 01 award in 1998, honouring his often visionary activities in both music and visual arts.