My light years

For over forty years Brian Eno (full name Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno) has been redefining the relationship between sound, image and perception through his ambient music, generative art and audiovisual installations. My Light Years, held in the spaces of Parma's Ospedale Vecchio, is his first large solo exhibition in Europe and is dedicated to his research on light and sound as artistic mediums, a journey that includes video paintings, generative works, light boxes and immersive environments. 
Eno is the father of ambient music and a pioneer of generative art, conceiving his works as open, constantly transforming systems in which image, colours and sound slowly mutate without ever repeating. His idea of art is of a sensory landscape, capable of involving the body and altering our perception of space. 
In the Grande Crociera of the Ospedale Vecchio, the historic architecture of the former hospital is an ideal container for works exploring slow time. The first video paintings of the 1980s—Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan, Thursday Afternoon and New York Portraits—show Eno’s desire to engage with painting in movement: images are slowed down to become almost static, rippled with almost imperceptible variations of light.
The subjects of his portraits seem to follow the visitor with their gaze, and infinitesimal changes of expression generate the sense of a presence. For the viewer, the large distances between images and the continuities between sound and light, create a sensation of being part of the scene and sharing in its suspended time. The result is almost hypnotic: nothing particular happens, and yet it is difficult to refrain from watching. 
The exhibition itinerary also includes his celebrated Light Boxes, luminous sculptures in which colour seems to dissolve into soft pulsating fields, and 77 Million Paintings, a large generative audiovisual installation with live visual combinations created algorithmically. 
This is an exhibition that avoids the spectacular and the monumental, instead building a quiet relationship with the Ospedale Vecchio’s historic spaces. The works are displayed as bare presences, experiments in superstructure, accompanied by a soundtrack specially composed for Parma. 
Furnishings by Edra—the exhibition's technical partner—contribute to the dimension of pause and contemplation with the inclusion of soft informal islands, designed for listening and relaxing during the visitor’s passage through the exhibition. 

SEED, a second section of the exhibition, is on show at the San Paolo Monumental Complex, continuing the itinerary and amplifying the story of Eno's creative universe in Installation for Giardini di San Paolo, a site-specific audio work created together with Turkish writer and journalist Ece Temelkuran. The work was designed to inhabit the city of Parma’s times and spaces, inviting the public into a shared experience of listening for approximately three months. A synthesis of the resulting field-recorded sounds and conversations will be pressed into vinyl and printed in a single copy by Eno himself for the permanent collection of the Casa del Suono. A gesture transforming the exhibition into a sound memory, and leaving a mark of the collaboration between the British artist and the City of Parma.to