‘I was commissioned by the Paris Biennalle des Jeunes and the British Council to make an installation. They also chose “Stuart Marshall and many up-and-coming artists from Europe and the USA, including Marina Abramovic, and Laurie Anderson. I decided to make a work which used the rivers of London and Paris. Shooting on the Thames proved to be rather difficult as the Crown ‘owns’ the skyline of London! On the Seine a young artist from New York acted as my assistant – John Sanborn, who had been working a lot with Nam June Paik, and was obviously to become a very significant artist and later director. Mine and Stuart Marshall’s pieces were the largest video works shown so far in France, and equipment was very scarce. It didn’t help that, as I was to shoot half the work in Paris, I had to use their SECAM colour system and half the monitors would have to be PAL and half SECAM. In the end Sony Europe came to the rescue after some very fraught days.’ Stephen Partridge