Brian Eno’s Face to Face for Mexico: Exploring Patterns and the Art of Transformation

Brian Eno’s latest art piece, Face to Face for Mexico, is the result of his exploration of 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 despite never actually existing.

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 often uses well-known gadgets in unconventional ways in his works, subverting their intended purposes to create something unexpected. For Face to Face for Mexico, 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.