In a 2010 episode of the long-running BBC documentary series Arena, British producer and ambient music pioneer Brian Eno is showing the audience his obscure instruments and studio paraphernalia. “I’ve been arguing for a long time for synthesisers that had inconsistencies built into them,” he says, prodding a C scale into a synth, which spews out fluctuating tones and textures that change from one key to the next. “It’s fantastic,” he beams. “It’s a total surprise machine!”

A new documentary film on Eno, by American filmmaker Gary Hustwit, could also be called a “total surprise machine”. Created in collaboration with artist Brendan Dawes, who Hustwit says is “the reason that this thing exists”, the film is programmed to generate different cuts from a vast pool of material, a mix of archival footage and new interviews recorded in Eno’s Suffolk home. Although small sections of the film remain fixed, most of the scenes change each time it’s shown, revealing different slices of Eno’s career – his work with Roxy Music, David Bowie, Talking Heads, U2, and his solo output – as though you’re listening to multiple versions of an album or seeing different nights of a tour.

While he didn’t want it to be anything as laboured as a ‘masterclass on creativity with Eno’, Hustwit did want to capture what his mind is like. “I think in a lot of ways, he is very much a designer. When he’s talking about working with Bowie and his role of recontextualising the recording process or verbalising different approaches to whatever they’re doing, I think it’s very much like design thinking and what designers do when approaching a creative challenge.”