Genesis Device

Drawing to accompany Time is Away’s Another Green World Revisited episode on NTS radio (October 2021), a rethinking of Eno’s 1975 album Another Green World, made using Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies as a guide.

References etc.

  • After Raphael (1972), Tom Phillips.
  • Votive Picture attributed to Raphael (1495–6) which inspired the above.
  • Photograph of Eno reading in bed from the reverse of the album sleeve.
  • Album title and artist is replaced by a lyric from Sky Saw.
  • Fibonacci sequence: three golden spirals alluding to Tom Phillips’ interest in the Golden Section.
  • Genesis Device simulation from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) — the first instance in a feature film of an entirely computer generated sequence. The Genesis Device is a missile-like rapid terraforming technology. (Plus, of course, Phil Collins.)
  • “Define an area…” text: generated by an online version of Oblique Strategies (Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s card-based system for aiding creativity.
  • Speech bubbles: in addition to being a recurring trope in recent drawings, they allude to the aesthetic of Tom Phillips’ multi-decade work-in-progress, A Humument.
  • Viking One, a spacecraft sent to Mars by NASA, launched in August 1975. It carried a biology experiment the purpose of which was to look for evidence of life. In the same year, the Soviet physicist and chemist, Nikolay Nikolayevich, proposed electrolysis of Martian water to obtain oxygen as a strategy for terraforming the planet. (Furthermore, one is Eno backwards.)
  • Drips: ‘In 1968, [Eno] won a small school award for his performance of a George Brecht piece called Drip Event, whose score, in full, was “Erect containers such that water from other containers drips into them.”’ (Pitchfork)
  • Stream: ‘As a child, Eno had designed houses, blueprints, sketches for fantastical and improbable places, filled with labyrinths and secret passageways. Trees grew through the middle of rooms, streams ran indoors.’ (Pitchfork)
  • Text on right from I’ll Come Running, based on We Love Peckham mosaic by Tom Phillips on Bellenden Road, SE15.