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Oceans of Time

Brian Eno, slow looking and deep listening

🌱 2022-07-31


Brian Eno, the music pioneer who came up with Ambient music, was tasked with making the windows 95 theme. Microsoft wanted a theme that does it all — inspiring, universal, optimistic, futuristic, etc. All in 3.25 seconds. Three Point Two Five Seconds. That was what struck Eno.

He laboured over each tiny piece of that soundtrack. Tiny jewels he called them.

In the end, he made 84 different pieces. Deeply familiar with every microsecond of it. When he went back to working on pieces that were 30 seconds long. He said, "It seemed like oceans of time"

Katrin Koenning, visual artist and an incredible teacher, once told me working with images requires slow looking. It took me many years to understand what that meant. What that entailed.

Tara Branch; psychologist, author and meditation expert, has this session she calls deep listening. In deep listening, you are listening to the world around you. In doing so, you start hearing yourself with a lot of clarity.

In any artistic practice, one wants to cultivate the patience to make those tiny jewels. We can start taming that scavenger by arming ourselves with slow-looking and deep-listening, we can start cultivating that freedom. To submerge ourselves in oceans of time.


sunset ocean


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