Recorded VHS Tape and Canning Jars

By “preserving” recorded VHS tape in canning jars, I am fulfilling a vision I had about fifteen years ago. My goal was to create something visually interesting that might trigger a double take, and to comment on the ultimate folly of trying to save everything.

Growing up in rural Vermont, canning was a normal part of my childhood. My parents made insanely good applesauce and also canned tomatoes from our garden which my mother used in a delicious bolognese sauce in the wintertime. We never had a VCR and we / I never owned a video camera, but my father did have multiple shelves filled with boxes of 35mm slides which to my knowledge he never looked at (they are now in a trunk in my sister’s garage). So the idea of “archival waste” planted a seed in my brain when I was very young.

Throughout human history we have figured out ways to preserve things: food, materials, stories.

Canning was invented in the early 19th century. It is in one sense very modern, and in another very quaint.

Video tape was invented in the mid-20th century. It is also, somewhat ironically, both modern and quaint. But whereas with canning sometimes food is preserved and never eaten, the scale of this “waste” with VHS tape is exponentially larger: we suddenly find ourselves having the ability to capture and record more data than we – or anyone – will ever have time to consume.

Footnotes:

1. My original vision for this project was to use only tapes that had “home movie” themes and nothing commercial. When I finally started work on this project in 2023 I found it surprisingly hard to find non commercial VHS tapes. Thrift shop owners laughed and said “I got rid of those years ago, but I have lots of DVDs!” I didn’t have any luck online either (lot of pirated movies and lots of technical stuff). Even my personal network didn’t yield anything; people had either gotten rid of their tapes or were never going to get rid of them. Finally, on a road trip last fall, my friends Kif and Jamie generously shared a stash they had, and I combined those with two commercial tapes to round out the collection.

2. When I started work on the project I planned to “can” 24 tapes. I reduced that number to six for three reasons: it was hard to find tapes that were meaningful to me, I am a fan of done is better than perfect, and the project itself is about the folly of trying to preserve more than we need.