Category Archives: MEDIA THEORY

SIGNAL/STATIC

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Though the VCR and accompanying VHS library were excellent tools for exploring ideaspace, live TV was my constant companion.

10 or so channels of broadcast signals, permeating the skies, dialed in through the static of a temperamental TV antennae.

It was definitely an imperfect connection to the global village, but there was a certain charm in trying to adjust the rabbit ears to catch just enough of the transmission to see the show. Unwound wire coat hangers adorned with tin foil, bent this way and that, until some random and arbitrary arrangement magically tuned in the desperately sought signal.

For bonus points this was often done on black & white TV sets, because though color TVs had been around for 2 decades already, those more expensive sets were usually reserved for adult spaces, and most other TVs I’d encounter as a kid were ancient, tiny, and lacking in color.

Then came one day the cable!

Video Home Systems

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A point of pride in my youth was figuring out how to program the VCR, which basically just meant scheduling when, what channel, and for how long the VCR would record. An unimpressive capability by current standards, but for a 7 year old in 1987, what wanted to watch late night hockey games, it was pretty neat. Hyperbolically marveling at the complexity of VCR programming was a staple of 80’s sitcoms and stand up comedy, and I very much enjoyed having a one up over the adults, no matter how arbitrary.

Though I wouldn’t unlock the true power of the videocassette recorder for a couple more years, when I stumbled upon the magic of AV inputs & outputs.

In addition to the VCR we also had a Camcorder, which was itself itself a miraculous gizmo, and while I had fun enough making terrible home movies, there was something even better that it could do…

The Camcorder recorded onto these small tapes, VHS-Cs, which couldn’t fit in the VCR. So if I wanted to watch something recorded by the Camcorder I’d have to use these yellow, red, and white tipped cables to connect the Camcorder’s output ports to the VCR’s input ports, at which point the signal would go from the Camcorder to the VCR to the TV. Even as a live feed, with the obligatory recursive feedback loops, But then! I noticed the Camcorder also had input ports and the VCR also had output ports, which gave me a crazy idea…

So let’s say, hypothetically speaking, I rented Batman (1989) from the local video store, and I put the VHS in the VCR, with the AV cables connected so the signal was going out from the VCR and into the Camcorder, and I pressed play on the VCR and record on the Camcorder, could I make my own copy of Batman?

My grand experiment. Too good to be true though, right?

Imagine my delight when this great work was accomplished!

It was a 2 step process whereby I had to record from the original VHS to a VHS-C and then back to a blank VHS.

I began earnestly and diligently archiving the sacred culture of my people on super long play magnetic tape. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Wrestlemania VI, The Great Outdoors, Robocop, everything that was good and awesome in my world went into the collection. My bootleg akashic records. Information do want to be free though :)))

The Same Roturns

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I’m a little bit too old to be a digital native, the media sphere of my youth was comprised of an electric meshnet of cable TV, the VCR, and a camcorder. With these now primitive tools I cobbled together my analog worldview.

One of my earliest memories, around the age of 3, is an obsession with the rewind button on the VCR. I had a VHS recording of the Looney Tunes short film “Duck Amuck” that I would obsessively watch over and over again. In the cartoon Daffy Duck gets into an argument with his animator, which escalates into a surreal metafictional hullabaloo. As soon as the story reached it’s epic conclusion, with a long press of a button, I’d return again to the beginning. An interactive, non-linear, medium aware, story circle, repeating again and again and again, until! I broke the RWD button. One of the first times I remember ever really getting into trouble as a kid.

Broken RWD buttons were epidemic in early 80’s VCRs, resulting in the proliferation of a separate device made just for rewinding VHS cassettes. Ours looked like a red sports car. It’s little engine roared as it rewound tapes back to their beginnings at incredible speed. VHS tape rewinding etiquette may eventually come to the attention of future anthropologists, wondering about the cultural significance of the ancient aphorism “Be Kind, Rewind.”