Today my boyfriend showed me Brian Eno's "Thursday Afternoon" on Youtube and I found it to be an absolutely fascinating piece of video art.
He calls it a video-painting and also composes the music to accompany the images. Video for Eno is like a form of painting with light. The images shift slightly and slowly, then fade in and out. The images themselves are very carefully selected. In "Thursday Afternoon" showcases the body and face of a woman, in different postures and poses. It's really relaxing and helps the viewer to sit back and focus on the slow transformations that take place throughout our lives.
It was made in 1984 and features seven "video paintings" of actress and photographer Christine Alicino, a friend of Eno's, and has a running time of 82 minutes. It was filmed in "vertical format" which meant the viewer had to turn the television on its side which, in many cases, affected the picture tube's color purity adjustments. The DVD reissue presents it in both portrait and landscape formats so that this is no longer necessary.
The content is a series of images that stay static for some time and then slowly move forward, often to pause again. Various video techniques were implemented, such as image feedback, to create a very different interpretation of video and the nude.
"I was delighted to find this other way of using video because at last here's video which draws from another source, which is painting .... I call them 'video paintings' because if you say to people 'I make videos', they think of Sting's new rock video or some really boring, grimy 'Video Art'. It's just a way of saying, 'I make videos that don't move very fast"
