New digital tools underpin much of our information economy. We sense them at work everywhere around us – in the networked machine interaction of the Internet; in the search algorithms of Google; and in the artificial intelligence of video games.

In Enlightenment, we use the same kind of techniques to solve a problem of our own making. We subject the coda of Mozart’s last symphony – which with its five interlocking themes is the most intricate of fugues – to similar scrutiny, setting up artificial intelligence processes to figure out on their own how the coda is put together.

We make this process visible by means of notational and gestural images, which draw on the score and on video fragments of the musicians playing their parts of the passage. Enlightenment generates new diagrams of understanding at each moment of its fleeting existence, simultaneously playing back its ever-closer approximations of the music.

This audiovisual search is itself the work of art – our aesthetic response to Mozart.

Do you need to figure out precisely how Enlightenment works? Not at all. Best to absorb it intuitively, letting its flow of imagery and sounds carry you on an unexpected journey back through time towards Mozart. By peering at Mozart’s Age of Enlightenment through the new lenses of the Information Age, we might see both eras anew.

– Marc Downie, Shelley Eshkar, Paul Kaiser
July 2007