Michael Myerz, 29, an experimental hip-hop artist in Atlanta, with a modest collection of VHS tapes, finds the medium inspiring. Some of what Mr. Myerz, in his job search, is, according to him, to repeat the sounds of a strange, obscure movie on VHS that I would have seen at my friend’s house late at night after his parents were asleep. He described his work as “mid-lo-fi”. “The quality feels raw, but warm and full of flavor,” he said of VHS.
For collectors like April Bleakney, 35, the owner and artist of Ape Made, an art and screen printing business in Cleveland, nostalgia plays an important role in the collection. Me. Bleakney, who has between 2,400 and 2,500 VHS tapes, sees it as a path that connects her to the past. She inherited some of them from her grandmother, a children’s librarian with a large collection.
Me. “Bleakney’s VHS tapes are a huge nostalgia, ” she told a 1980s child. ‘I think we were the last to grow up without the internet, cell phones or social media’, and to hold on to the ‘old analog’, she feels ‘very natural’.
“I think people are nostalgic for the aura of the VHS era,” said Thomas Allen Harris, 58, creator of the television series Family Pictures USA and a senior lecturer in African-American studies and film and media studies at Yale. University. “So many cultural points of contact are rooted there,” he said. Harris said about the 1980s. It was, he believes, ” a time when Americans in some ways knew who we were. ‘
The VHS band, of course, had a lifespan. This medium, developed in Japan in 1976, brought to the United States in 1977 and discontinued in 2006 when films no longer changed on tape, brought home this kind of entertainment.
Not only were the gourmets able to watch in the hallways of video stores on Friday nights, but they could also put together home movies, from the artistic to the crazy. In an era that preceded DVR technology, they were able to record television sections with the record-breaking function of the now-closed video recorder.