“And it’s usually not that. [Usually] it’s impossible to watch something for the first time, or experience it through the eyes of people who have never seen it before, but this time, every night the system … makes connections between different scenes that I’ve never seen in that sequence before. I’m still making new connections about Brian via that juxtaposition of scenes. The audience is also making those connections: you’re kind of telling your own story.”

Hustwit stresses two things about the computer program he calls Brain One (an anagram of Brian Eno). Firstly, it isn’t powered by artificial intelligence built on feeding in thousands of hours of other work and asked to reproduce something in that ilk, but generative technology that is “a combination of our intelligences as filmmakers and the programming”.

And secondly, he has not abandoned control of the film. All the available material, some of it newly shot, some of it from Eno’s private library, is material he has chosen.

“And that I think is the director role,” he says. “It isn’t crafting every second of the 90-minute film but it is curating what that the mix of things is and trying to arrange it so, or make the algorithms arrange it so, there is an arc to it, so that there is progression of Brian’s thinking, and as you are watching it you are seeing something that is engaging and feels like a conventional documentary in some ways.”

Eno screens as part of Vivid at the Sydney Opera House May 31-June 2.