Brian Eno at the opening of the 258° academic year of the Accademia di Belle Arti (Venice)

Accademia di Belle Arti - Venezia: Year 258

On Monday 16th February at 11 am, the inauguration of the Academic Year of the oldest institution of high culture operating in the city will take place. It was born in 1750 from the will of the Serenissima Republic, while the University was rooted in Padua.
The ceremony will take place in the auditorium of San Servolo where the Academy has transferred, for lack of space in the headquarters of the (Former Hospital of) Incurabili, part of its teachings, in particular the subjects of the New Technologies in Art.
It is precisely for this reason that to hold the opening "lectio magistralis", was invited Brian Eno, self defined musician-not-musician, with a degree in Fine Arts in England taken in 1969. Devoting himself to music, Eno invented in the mid-70s, the "ambient music", this way theorizing a new way to make and enjoy music, while collaborating with, among others, U2, David Bowie, Talking Heads, John Cale, Laurie Anderson.
Poli-instrumentalist, sculptor, painter but especially a video experimenter combining images and sound, Eno creates alternative environments in which the audience can immerse themselves completely.
By visiting the laboratories of the multimedia laboratories of the Academy of Fine Arts of San Servolo, the audience will have access to a "sound environment" that evokes the process of demolition of reality theorized and applied by Eno.
A preview of "Imaginary Landscapes, a film on Brian Eno", the work that Duncand Ward and Gabriella Cardazzo have dedicated to him in 1989, has been presented in its entirety on Thursday February 12th, with the introduction by Gabriella Cardazzo in the headquarters of the Incurabili, along with Eno's video "Mistaken memories of mediaeval Manhattan" (1980-81).

[Brian Eno on his exhibition, Constellations | 77 Million Paintings]

[coming next: "77 Million Paintings" manifests itself as "PRESENTISM: Time And Space In The Long Now" at Palazzo Ruspoli in Rome | 20th February to 10th March]

UPDATE:

Brian Eno said the sort of Future proposed by Marinetti has had its day. "The kind of modernism the Futurists endorsed was sort of: smash the past, build the future and it's going to be rough."

"It very much fitted with ideas that were going around at that time in the century, and of course it had this very progressivist idea which then infected and was infected by what was going on in the rest of culture: the idea that we had to rebuild the world from scratch."

Eno's installation, in an ancient palace on Via del Corso, is at the polar extreme from the noisy, hyper-active, self-assertive art of the Futurists. "People enter a darkish room which has music coming from many different sources," he said.

"There are several large plasma screens on the wall and those form a continually changing, slowly moving painting; basically, a very complicated, extremely rich, coloured abstract picture. The important part about the motion on the screens is that it's very, very slow. It flies in the face of the Hollywood idea that people need more and more stimulation, that they have increasingly short attention spans.

"I'm absolutely convinced that that's the diametrical opposite of what's true... People who come to the shows say, 'I wish there was one of these in the city all the time.' And it makes me realise that there are things that people traditionally do – like go to church or sit in parks or daydream – which have become harder to do...

"So when people find a place where they can do that, they are pretty excited."

[via independent.co.uk]

Information:
[accademiavenezia.it]
[artspace.it]
[fondazionememmo.com]