Transforming Humanity: Brian Eno’s ‘Face to Face for Mexico’: An Artistic Exploration of Patterns and Pixelation

Brian Eno has created a new art piece that explores the concept of patterns and the potential combinations that can generate unexpected works of art. He used a small set of still photographs of people’s faces, which were slowly and almost imperceptibly transformed pixel by pixel into new faces using specially created software. This process created a long chain of ‘new humans’ that formed between each real human, resulting in 170 thousand new faces being born.

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 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.