lossless

Bearing in mind the distinct aesthetic quality, viewing experience, and physical properties of the VHS tape, how do you interpret the significance or role the VHS tape plays in digitization, remediation, cinema, and DV?

This is a big question! I believe that the cultural & social issues are the most significant part of this discussion. Ad hoc distribution of VHS tapes spread experimental film to the margins. Every cinephile I know has a library of precious tapes. These were distributed in many cases without blessings of filmmakers, and typically bootleg tapes do not show the work at its best.

VHS removes viewing conditions most filmmakers expect: largish screen, comfortable chairs, clean projector [usually 16mm], and a careful projectionist. VHS promises anyone with nothing more than a cheap player and a television to see the work. Note that this is more than VHS can deliver.

Filmmakers argue that seeing a VHS tape of their work isn't really seeing the film at all. VHS provides a diminished experience resembles the original only in superficial ways (narrative, program length, audio quality, etc.). Most arguments note a difference in the experience of the work, adn these tend towards intangible things such as missing the flicker in the room, transmissive vs. reflected light, missing the presence of other people in the room, missing the intended duration of the work (VHS allows interaction with the program), etc.

The role of VHS tape in distribution has been much accelerated by bittorrent sites. We pirates of experimental cinema are starting new collections of DVDs and digital media files (MPEG, AVI, DIVX, and others). A friend of mine recently showed new work in Buenos Aires to students who had seen her work on the web. This disturbed her of course, mainly because the files they downloaded looked even worse than VHS!

That's a start but please check back. I'll keep working on this question.

You mentioned that the music in the second film was constructed by manipulating and mashing together sound bytes from the films in their original form. Did you try to reduce the sound and images from the original films to the same mathematical medium (or form of data)? If yes, how did your representations of the sound data v. time compare to the image data v. time? Were you able to detect any sort of mathematical harmony between the sound data and the image data during happy, frightening, or otherwise emotionally provocative scenes of the original films? Is there any graphic or otherwise mathematical correlation between the manipulated sound “data” we heard and the manipulated image “data” we saw in your films?

-Blanca Myers