14 VIDEO PAINTINGS

14 Video Paintings is actually video that was used in two different exhibitions. Both videos were originally filmed in portrait format. Eno came to doing the first one accidentally due to him having a professional video camera and no tripod. He had to lay the camera on it's side when he first started to experiment and film the New York city skyline from the apartment he was at. He found the video he made took on more of painting quality when people viewed it. Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan was the result. He liked that enough to use the format again for Thursday Afternoon.

Each piece of MMoMM is just a simple static shot of the New York skyline filmed between 1980 and 1981 from various apartments Eno occupied, that were all high up. Most of the buildings in the skyline aren't the most familiar landmarks, but what makes the video material interesting is the clouds and interplay of light and shadow on the buildings as they go by. Eno culled the most interesting shots for the video. Though the home video version of MMoMM wasn't put together until 1987, the exhibition piece predates the revolutionary music video/art/music piece Koyaanisquatsi by Philip Glass of '83 and Tangerine Dreams Canyon Dreams of '89. The music on MMoMM is taken mostly from the ambient album Ambient 4/On Land with a little from Music for Airports. The seven parts here are the first of the fourteen video paintings.

The remaining seven are Thursday Afternoon. Here the music is continuous and the videos are seven different video portraits of a friend of Eno, Christine Alicino, always naked at least from the waist up if not completely nude, dry and in water, in motion. Some of the portraits are clearly shot, in others the video is distorted or treated in some fashion. The music here is also available in a CD version also called Thursday Afternoon. I find the video version to be more entertaining for some reason that I can't quite put my finger on.

Thanks to these videos now being available in DVD format, you get the option of watching them on your TV in either the vertical or horizontal format. If you watch vertical, it looks kind of pinched on a wide screen. But, if you want to lay on your couch and watch it horizontal, you'll need to use headphones to get the music in stereo instead of mono in your right ear.