Brian Eno’s latest art piece is a testament to his fascination with patterns and the potential combinations that can generate unexpected works of art. Using a small set of still photographs of people’s faces, he transformed them pixel by pixel into new faces using specially created software. This process resulted in 170 thousand new faces being born, forming a long chain of ‘new humans’ that resembled real people but never actually existed.
In a video released by UNAM Cultural Diffusion, Eno shared his inspiration for this installation, revealing that it stemmed from his fascination with transformations seen in pop music videos, superhero movies, and children’s toys like Transformers. He found the idea of people and things becoming other things to be very intriguing, prompting him to explore the concept of ‘creating’ new human beings.
Eno is known for subverting well-known gadgets in unconventional ways in his works, creating something unexpected from their intended purposes. For Face to Face for México, he expressed his joy in discovering the quiet drama of slow change and the ability to envision a universe of people who never existed but could have. These new faces all resemble real people despite never actually existing.