567890Who remembers the days when we had to rewind the tape after watching a movie? And when the asshole who used it before you forgot, and you had to sit there for five minutes rewinding before you could use the tape? Who remembers how they used to wear out every time you used one, until eventually, the tape was 10% movie, 90% static? I think it’s safe to say that the video tape was actually a terrible format, after literally searching up the words “VHS tape” into the RMIT Library, and every article on the first page was about getting rid of VHS tapes. The only thing positive about them is our childhood memories that we associate with them. “20 years from now, unlike vinyl records, kids won’t find a single redeeming quality in VHS tapes. But they do bring back a lot of memories because they’re physical mementos from a time that we all grew up in, like vinyl records for our parents’ generation” (Unknown. 2016). Don’t get me wrong, back in the day, VHS had a massive impact on society. For example, “home video in its VHS phase rescued obscure and forgotten films from the 1950s and 1960s and returned them to popular consumption” (James J. Ward. 2016). I appreciate the VHS tape, and where it got us to today, but unlike other mediums, which we have started using again for nostalgia purposes, it should not be brought back as a standard format.
Back in the day, VHS tapes were the standard form of video storage. I remember, we used to go down to Video Ezy after school on Friday night, and basically rent out enough to fill the entire weekend. But occasionally, the movie (especially the older ones), would have a huge chunk missing due to overuse. As Helmut Kobler puts it, “analogue videotapes degrade with time and repeated play. Plus, VCR tapes are just not very convenient to keep around, as they take up a lot of space to store” (Kobler, Helmut. 2004). Now, I’m not saying DVDs don’t do this, because they do, but generally, they are a lot sturdier than VHS tapes. When the Camcorder (video camera and recorder) came out for consumer release in the 1980s, it also used to record onto tape. And so, all of our childhood memories were recorded onto this shitty format that have already erased a good third of them. What I’m basically trying to say is that the nostalgia of the medium should not be confused with the nostalgia of the content on said medium. Relying on a VHS tape to keep family videos is like relying on a lumen print to save important documents. So, if you’ve got any old home videos you can still salvage, record them onto a DVD format, and keep a digital copy stored in a computer somewhere.
What I wanted to do with my media piece was express the importance of creating a digital copy of any memories you would like to keep. I know it sounds a bit pretentious, but using a first-person video format, with VHS tape-like visuals, I wanted to express how important memories deteriorate and fade away due to this format.
<Unknown. Nostalgia in Artifact VHS Tapes Similar to Vinyl Records in University Wire; Carlsbad. Oct 19, 2016>
<James J. Ward. Grindhouse Nostalgia: Memory, Home Video and Exploitation Film Fandom in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. Oct 24, 2016>
<Kobler, Helmut. in Put Your VHS Tapes on DVD in PCWorld.com. Nov 30, 2004>