I Restored 77 Million Paintings

In 2006 I bought a DVD called 77 Million Paintings. It’s an obscure multimedia generative art project by Brian Eno that ran on Windows 2000. You start it up, and it slowly crossfades different layers of a visual canvas selected from a bank of hundreds of transparent images, and backed by an ambient soundscape. It’s a meditative and minimalist app.

Every piece of software is married to the hardware it runs on, but we don’t usually notice this when using modern software on modern hardware. There is a seamlessness to modern software. And while software doesn’t wear down like a physical object, over time it begins to show the constraints of its original container. As with any other medium, each era of technology brings its own texture and character.

When I saw Gary Hustwit’s 2024 movie Eno at Sundance, there was a scene where Eno showed an old Windows box he has in his studio that’s been set aside to run 77 Million Paintings on an old CRT.

We’re now sitting on 50+ years of digital history, and there’s a lot worth preserving. Rhizome is an organization in New York City that works to preserve digital art and net art, like old Macromedia Flash websites that can no longer run on a modern browser.

Inspired by this old DVD, I did a generative art project with artist Petra Cortright in 2018 for Rhizome’s Seven on Seven conference:

I scripted Photoshop for this project, and it was a lot of fun working with Petra and her beautifully layered digital paintings.

But, back to 77 Million Paintings. The other day I had the idea that Claude could probably do something with this old DVD. I dumped the contents onto my Mac and pointed Claude at it. Claude discovered that it’s an old Macromedia Director app. And it got Eno’s app running in an emulated Windows 2000 environment using qemu, but it was not a smooth experience. Apple Silicon at emulating 25-year-old hardware. So I asked Claude rewrite it. It was able to decompile the original app, derive the crossfading algorithm and timings, audio layering, alpha channels, etc. and rebuild it as a modern Swift app. And now I have a running copy of it!

This made me feel optimistic about the use of coding agents to restore and preserve old software projects. It would have taken weeks to do what Claude did in a few hours. It’s very good at translation, and modernizing old software is a form of translation.

The original DVD had high-quality images and sound (by 2006 standards), so 77 Million Paintings looks great on a modern display. I’m delighted. Since the material is copyrighted, I can’t post my results. Instead, I let it run for an hour and posted a video:

I hope you enjoy it.