a meditation on the vhs tape

There’s something about VHS footage. It’s static, fractured nature has always been attractive to us…but why?

There is beauty in this… That even in the stillness of objects, there is still motion.

Let’s just look take a look at digital art movement vaporwave, or the popularity of VHS video mobile apps.

This is not only a call to the past, or a taste for nostalgia, this is a call to what very well may be a superior form of media.

It is somewhere lost between the super crisp high quality, auto focused video that we all have access to today, yet, far behind the 4k luxurious cinematic film experiences we see at the movies. This is something special, something close to home, something close to the heart, something….living.

The VHS footage is the living photograph. It is one step after the still film image, that moment when the image first gets a dose of the magic and starts to take on a life of it’s own. Even if the subjects or objects in the VHS footage are totally still, more often than not, the space in the image is still moving, still morphing, maybe even cutting in and out totally. Even with the “Pause” button, the image on the VHS tape was never truly still, but static, electrified, and shaking.

Somehow this blatant and obvious imperfection of technology better represents our memories and our experiences. Our memories are not perfect, our experiences are diluted with distractions, torn with emotion, blinded by thoughts, and hardly ever clear. The VHS was image perfected. For probably as long as we have video, we will always have those who want to capture the feeling of the VHS era.