#art #VintageMedia #VHS

'In Stories Seen and Heard (2025), Polish artist Kuba Święcicki transforms discarded VHS tapes and cassette recordings into a monumental woven installation, asking what happens when obsolete technology becomes a craft material.'

https://www.designboom.com/art/vhs-tapes-cassette-recordings-yarn-woven-archive-collective-memory-kuba-swiecicki/

Designboom: VHS tapes and cassette recordings replace yarn in a woven archive of collective memory.”In Stories Seen and Heard (2025), Polish artist Kuba Święcicki transforms discarded VHS tapes and cassette recordings into a monumental woven installation, asking what happens when obsolete technology becomes a craft material. Encountered as part of Visteria Foundation’s Craft Days […]

The Register: Blockbuster new Raspberry Pi project turns any screen into old-school VCR. “Anthony Caccese, a principal product lead for enterprise platforms at Oak Ridge National Laboratory by day and a Raspberry Pi tinkerer by night, recently published an open-source project called 240-MP on GitHub. It’s a simple concept: Text-based menus that look like an old-school VCR interface, but with […]

Digital Preservation at the University of Cambridge Libraries and Archives: Digging for Data: Recovering Files from Forgotten Word Processing Systems. “The collections we work with contain disks from machines that were once used professionally but are now largely forgotten. While imaging the disks themselves was possible, none of our usual tools, or others we could find online, were able to […]

CD-ROM Journal: A Trip to 90s Kansai: Exploring the XD FirstClass Network BBS. “XD-submit Vol. 1, as it turns out, is a promotional disc for a Kansai-area bulletin board system (BBS) called XD FirstClass Network. As I started digging into it I assumed this would be sort of a basic information kit, a digital pamphlet or something, but it’s something a lot more exotic: a functioning archive of […]

The Quietus: Rotting Tape and the Gentrification of African Pop: Why We Must Save the Nollywood Archive. “VHS magnetic tape is incredibly fragile and has a limited lifespan, especially when stacked haphazardly in the un-airconditioned corners of Lagos living rooms or the labyrinthine, corrugated-iron warehouses of Alaba International Market. As I write this, thousands of original films from the […]

Turned up in my Calishat Snaps: Tristan Davey’s Punch Card Archive. I think it launched around February 2025 but I’m not sure. “At their peak of use, in the 1950s and 60s, hundreds of companies around the world printed millions of punch cards every month. Yet within a few years of their obsolescence they all but disappeared from the public consciousness. This archive captures a small selection […]

Tom’s Hardware: Relive the PC magazine cover disk era with 758-strong archive.org CD-ROM collection — 1.2TB treasure trove also includes Floppy Disks from as early as 1993. “Earlier today, our sister site PC Gamer revealed that there is now a treasure trove of its cover disks (floppies, CDs, and DVDs) archived and ready to enjoy. PC Gamer’s headline highlights the 758 cover disks on the […]

Library of Congress Blog: A (tiny) recording of Amelia Earhart’s 1932 London speech, played for the first time. “When her memoir, ‘The Fun of It,’ came out a few months later, her publisher (who was also her husband and promoter, George Putnam) threw in a nifty promotional gimmick: a tiny 78 rpm record of a snippet of that speech, tucked inside the back cover. A little over nine decades […]

Harvard Gazette: Time has not been kind to VHS. “After winning the battle for dominance with the Betamax cassette, the VHS ushered in an era of amateur filmmaking, home movie collections, and video store rentals. Recognizing the value of the new format, Harvard curators quickly began amassing materials on VHS. Though no single tally of Harvard’s VHS holdings exists, a 2018 count of […]