Mood rings, lava lamps, liquid oil color projections.

No, these aren't a list of the accouterments of your average psychedelia-obsessed hipster -- they are simply the easiest starting place from which to understand Brain Eno's new 77 Million Paintings software.

Displayed over digital monitors, the software generates images that visually evolve over time in random patterns that would not repeat even if played continuously for a whole year.

Eno is known for musical innovations -- as keyboardist for Roxy Music in the 1970s; a solo artist with over 20 albums; founder of the ambient musical genre with his groundbreaking 1975 minimalist album "Another Green World"; and as the producer of a series of U2's breakout albums such as "Joshua Tree" and "Achtung Baby." But his educational background is actually in the visuals arts, having attended art school in Ipswich and Winchester in England. And though he is most famous for his musical projects, for years he has regularly worked with video installations, fascinated by the possibilities of the television screen as a "box of light."

Installations of 77 Million Paintings at the LaForet Museum Harajuku till April 3 are promoting the April 29th release of the software.

In an e-mail interview with The Japan Times, Eno said that the current exhibition is a continuation of previous projects. "I see 77 Million as the next stage in the evolution of my experiments with light. . . . This piece behaves exactly like my earlier installations but for the first time you can buy it and have it in your home rather than go to a gallery space to see it."

In 1996, Eno created Generative Music, a similar software designed to randomly compose music. Asked about the success of this first commercial project, he said "One has to use the technology that is available at the moment and in that sense these works become technological period pieces rather quickly. I think the value in that piece is how it worked rather than how it sounded."

And while much of his work has tested the limits of technology -- he was creating loops and samples before there was equipment designed for such purposes -- Eno is more an artist working with an instrument than a technician building new machines.

"Technology almost always carries with it restraints, but it is important to see that as a feature rather than a hindrance," he said, adding "This project utilizes what a computer is good at doing now, not what I would like it to do in the future."

Eno hopes that viewers will come to see video screens as the canvases of the 20th and 21st centuries, rather than devices where they passively absorb stories. Even mainstream video art is too limiting for him: "On the whole I don't find [it] very interesting . . . it adheres too strongly to traditional television and linear narrative performance."

Instead Eno is looking to create a visual experience whereby viewers can project their own interpretation onto the generated images. Like letting your thoughts wander while watching the passage of time and light across a scenic view, or the contortions of a burbling lava lamp, the ephemeral paintings thus become an open playing field on which you gauge your own inner states, free of any intrusive, controlling guidance.