#vhs

[coffeeman73]

[luckkparker]

On Physical Media

When my nan first showed signs of Lewy body dementia, it became obvious that she would need to be moved from her single-story brick home in Fairlight into an aged care home — one with round-the-clock supervision.

It started with collapses in the supermarket. Then came the hallucinations — bugs crawling on the walls of her hospital room — and finally, she began confusing me for my mother. They never had a great relationship, so when I went to embrace her — in that clinically mangled bed — the rejection felt all the more saddening. She spoke to me, believing I was my mother.

“Make sure the kids get $100 from me. I know they’re worried about me.” I cried in that moment — an automatic response — a mixture of ego and a fear of mortality. “I didn’t realise you cared for me this much, Fran.”

A family meeting took place shortly after.

My father, his three sisters (at the time), and his brother discussed money, facilities, and next steps. This was two days after Christmas, 2023. By April, I was told that, as the only person in our family over the age of 18 and without full-time employment (ouch), it would be my responsibility to sift through every item in her bungalow and decide: What was sentimental? What was donatable? And what was trash?

I had inadvertently been training my whole life for this moment. My mother was a spring-cleaning fanatic. Like clockwork, once every three months throughout my entire childhood, I would be tasked with auditing the value of the objects in my possession — having to concretely prove how my pink bubble CD player added to my happiness and thus deserved the 30cm² of space it occupied in my bedroom.

How morbid — years of unknowingly prepping for the eventual collapse of my poor nan’s mind.

September rolled around. The cardboard boxes were ready — as were the jumbo reinforced black garbage bags. I thought I was ready too. How naive.

I started with her chestnut TV chest. 152 vinyls, ranging from Scottish choir hymns to Talking Heads. 65 VHS tapes — every Disney princess I wanted to be, now covered in dust and cockroach dung. Every single PG and G-rated film produced between 1999 and 2009 — the last year I had a sleepover in that single-bed room, adorned with nothing but flannel sheets and a strangely attractive portrait of Mother Mary on the bedside table.

I was sorting through the physical remnants of my childhood, unaware that my nan had curated every like, dislike, and fantasy of my youth. Now I was faced with the impossible task of determining the worth of my memories.

Keep, donate, or throw away.

Her living room, now devoid of most of its furniture and décor, began to flicker with projections of times gone by. I could see my brother and me cuddled up to her on the couch, laughing hysterically at our Pa’s flatulence. This fragment vanished as quickly as it appeared, only to be replaced with another. I saw my nan picking out a CD from her ridiculous collection to play as we tended to her rose garden, which surrounded a clay statue of Mary. Just as I saw my six-year-old self jump in the air at the sound of Mika, surrounded by deep reds in bloom — the vision faded. I was left staring at a now bone-dry garden and a lonely Mary, stained with white bird crap.

What could’ve been accomplished in a day by my mother — unsentimental and practical — was stretching into weeks for me. My father had to stage an intervention.

“Hi, cookie girl. I know this isn’t easy. Carmel’s a hoarder, after all, but we don’t have a lot of time left. We need to sell the house so we can pay for her care.”

My father was right. My nostalgia was delaying the truth: my nan wasn’t going to get better, and these things had no place in our lives anymore.

We hadn’t owned a media player of any kind in eight years, for Christ’s sake. Stan, Binge, Netflix, HBO Max, and Prime now housed my childhood — all for $69.97 a month.

I eventually finished sorting through my nan’s house — every item accounted for and distributed to its proper place. I did, however, keep three things for myself:

An LG 220K20D TV

An LG V8824W DVD & VCR player

Shrek 2 on DVD

A challenge to build my own media collection. A tribute to my nan.

-- Luckk

Nothing like holding my love

[aloneintemporaryplaces]

[peteneems]

[luckkparker]

Thinking on Framing Devices

The iconography that represents you.

Why that book? Why that bag? Why that blog on your screen?

Why do we collect these things that we never use?

Collecting dust until they're rediscovered in a moment of nostalgia, or panic whilst looking for a vape.

-- Luckk

[rivka-kopelman]

[deadsignaltv]

[sundaysplayzone]

[luckkparker]

Remembering in the digital age

I remember using the Internet Archive for the first time at the age of 13. I had become a certified weeaboo at this point in my life and was desperate for my own copies of Fruits magazine. The gaudy colours, mismatching of patterns, clunky accessories and superior sense of self conveyed by this street fashion documentation was earth shattering to me — how could people confidently dress so outrageously? Was I allowed to dress like this? With little access to money, and 7,820 kilometres of distance separating me from my potential as a fashion kid, I decided to go to the Internet Archive to source copies of these magazines. 

I would download these archived issues and print them at my local library — A4 stock standard paper had never been so valuable to me until this moment.

This wasn't just about downloading images. This was a formative act of cultural translation, of self-invention through the preservation of other people’s self-expression. It wasn’t about retro for retro’s sake; it was about seeing a possible future through the past, one I couldn’t find in my local surroundings. For artists like me (nostalgia artists who rely on digital archives as our material) the Internet Archive has never been simply a storage facility. 

It is a lifeline.

That’s why the current existential legal threat to the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine is terrifying. At a time when digital information is being deleted, rewritten, or quietly erased from the web, the idea that we could lose this open, publicly accessible repository of culture, knowledge, and memory is more than just unfortunate — it’s a kind of slow cultural lobotomy.

In many ways, nostalgia art isn’t about the past at all. Art that engages with feelings of nostalgia is about our relationship to memory, to access, to media decay and survival. When I work with screenshots, obsolete aesthetics, old LiveJournal entries, or jpegs from dead links, I’m not just mimicking an ‘vibe’. I’m asking: what did this mean to someone once? Who were they when they made this post? How does the shape of a MySpace profile page change our understanding of broadcasting, of self-presentation?

When media is erased, whether intentionally or through corporate obsolescence, it’s not just a loss of trivia or entertainment. 

It’s a severing of connections. 

We lose the texture of our collective memory. We lose the ability to understand how people felt, expressed, resisted, or dreamed in their own digital time. Knowledge becomes flattened to what’s commercially viable, or algorithmically favoured. And when that happens, our ability to communicate meaningfully across generations of internet use collapses.

As an artist working with digitally archived material, I rely on these fragments of history to challenge the present. To reimagine identity, expression, and narrative by returning to the discarded, the low-res, the cringe, the earnest. If the Internet Archive disappears or is dramatically limited, that material — and the potential for new readings and creations it offers — disappears with it.

It’s hard to talk about deliberate attempts by the Trump Administration to enact internet destruction without acknowledging the reality that the internet decays “naturally” all the time. The internet forgets all the time, and more importantly, it is made to forget. Websites rot. Domains shut down. Platforms delete unpopular opinions or copyright-infringing content without appeal. Without tools like the Wayback Machine, we’re left with an increasingly shallow internet, scrubbed of its context, cleaned of its character.

The erosion of digital archives isn’t just a problem for artists — it’s a problem for democracy, for history, and for education. 

-- Luckk

Internet Archive and 'The Wayback Machine' are Experiencing an Existential, Legal Threat.

Below is a link to a petition whose goal it is to save one of the most effective tools against digital censorship available to the public.

"At a time when digital information is being deleted, rewritten, and erased, preservation is more important than ever."

Signing this petition is FREE and takes less than 5 minutes.

Recently, user @we-are-astronomer was able to utilize Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to locate and preserve government articles DELETED from the NASA website by Trump Administration censors. For more information, their post can be found underneath the break.

If resources such as these are destroyed, we risk losing every digital article and file deleted under the Trump Administration's censorship. Without a method for restoring erased information, censorship proceeds unhindered. No body, no crime.

Collective action gets results. Do your part to protect public peace of mind.

[sepulchrypha]

BRONZE THAT MAKES OF NACRE REFUSE.

Sound Credit: "Pipe Organ Intro" --from BaDoink on Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/BaDoink/

[blackeneddeatheye]

[brazaesthetic]

Malt 90 (1988)

[wellwickedstuff]

[peteneems]

[foodbucketjesus]

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