brian eno | mistaken memories of mediaeval manhattan

These are stills from some of Eno's video paintings. He got a panasonic industrial colour video camera from a Foreigner roadie in the late 70s. There weren't any automatic controls (it was hard to do anything realistic with it) so he left it lying on its side staring out of his Manhattan apartment, gradually changing the light sensitivity levels at his whim. It's portrait, so apparently the reference to TV is lost: when you are in the proscenium arch shape you expect narrative, you expect things to happen.

We had it running in our studio over lunch. Music for Airports plays. People expected something to happen. The amplified minutiae was too much and not enough for some. We're 4 floors up, a small room in a tower block. The lack of air swells my glands, but we have access to a neat panorama of London that shifts with similar regularity, and it is stunning.

In the liner notes Eno mentions something about having to live high up in big cities: rooftops and clouds: the films arise from the desire to make a quiet place for myself. They evoke in me a sense of 'what could have been' and hence generate a nostalgia for a different future.