Brian Eno Bloom App Preservation Study

"The Bloom story really started for me way back in the ’60s, when I became interested in pieces of music that could write and create themselves…" ~ Brian Eno (from the article "Stealing Time with Brian Eno")

Bloom is a generative music app created by ambient composer Brian Eno and designer/developer Peter Chilvers for iOS. It is an example of one of the earliest (2008) interactive multimedia apps created for the iPhone. It is still available and incredibly popular in the App Store and has been optimized in High Definition (HD) for the iPad and iPad Pro. As the app's creators explain "Bloom's innovative controls allow anyone to create elaborate patterns and unique melodies by simply tapping the screen. A generative music player takes over when Bloom is left idle, creating an infinite selection of compositions and their accompanying visualisations."

This project is taking a documentation approach to preserving Bloom.

Documentation is especially useful for a proprietary creative work such as this one because of the challenges in ensuring that the app can be rendered in its original version or any of its subsequent iterations on different future platforms. The project seeks to document the "significant properties" of the work such that its "essence" could be reproduced by another creator/developer with a high degree of fidelity and integrity.

You can dive into the project here!