Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures
Abstract
Video shops have offered a key paradigm of film distribution, alongside and between the cinema and streaming platforms. They were a blended space between the non-located frontal ontology of the streaming platforms that dominate home movie distribution now, and the highly localised, illusive, black box proscenium of the cinema. In this presentation I will posit the video shop as a lived space which combined fruitfully with pragmatic and ocular-centric industrial merchandising to inadvertently hold and support webs of knowledge and community production. This, I will propose, in turn filtered out into the general culture via artists, filmmakers and academics who frequented and helped maintain these sites. Patterned into the high street scene—amongst laundromats, take away food outlets, milk bars and news agencies—going to get your videos of a Friday night in the 1980s and 90s was fulfilling a basic act of maintenance like buying milk and bread, cleaning your clothes, getting dinner or paying your bills. Referencing my documentary archive of first person interviews, site studies and other artistic works, I will propose that it was precisely the hapticity of the video shop, its interiority, embodiments and potential as a lived space, that enabled multiple forms of discovery to occur there. I will further explore how the “cognitive congeniality” of the video shop, and the “poor image” of VHS may have combined to create a kind of memory palace, activated by artists, filmmakers and academics circulating in those spaces, who went on to remix and renew film culture and video art through this activation. Video shops as lived spaces were also a bleeding edge for the non-specialist public to access specialist screen cultures for the first time, and I will also propose that the video shop was an important social space for receiving and defining identity amongst atomised or unconnected communities of incipient artists.
Jessie Scott is a practising video artist, writer, programmer and producer who works across the spectrum of media arts in Melbourne. She was a founding member of audio-visual collective Tape Projects and co-directed and founded Channels Video Art Festival. She is currently completing a practice-led PhD with the support of a Vice Chancellor’s Scholarship, at RMIT University in the School of Art. Her research concerns the relationship between video shops and libraries and artistic communities in Melbourne.