Unabashedly nostalgic about analog media, Lucas Hilderbrand's book is an analysis of the industrial, legal, and cultural history of videotape. Offering what he terms an "aesthetics of access," Hilderbrand demonstrates that the development of videotape ushered in cultural and legal innovations which remain relevant in the digital world. He then offers "case studies" of a video bootlegging aesthetic embodied in the development of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, the underground circulation of Todd Haynes's Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, and the feminist network represented by the Joanie 4 Jackie video chain letters. Reading Hilderbrand's study, I found myself reconsidering both my childhood spent interacting with videotape and my adulthood as a consumer of DVDs and other digital media. It's rare for a scholarly work to come so close to home for me, and the extensive bibliography has left me hungry to read more on the subject of sound and video recording. (

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andystardust | Apr 26, 2009 |

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Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0822343762, Paperback)

In an age of digital technology and renewed anxiety about media piracy, Inherent Vice revisits the recent analog past with an eye-opening exploration of the aesthetic and legal innovations of home video. Analog videotape was introduced to consumers as a blank format, essentially as a bootleg technology, for recording television without permission. The studios initially resisted VCRs and began legal action to oppose their marketing. In turn, U.S. courts controversially reinterpreted copyright law to protect users’ right to record, while content owners eventually developed ways to exploit the video market. Lucas Hilderbrand shows how videotape and fair use offer essential lessons relevant to contemporary progressive media policy.

Videotape not only radically changed how audiences accessed the content they wanted and loved, but also altered how they watched it. Hilderbrand develops an aesthetic theory of analog video, an “aesthetics of access” most boldly embodied by bootleg videos. He contends that the medium specificity of videotape becomes most apparent through repeated duplication, wear, and technical failure; video’s visible and audible degeneration signals its uses toward legal transgressions and illicit pleasures. Bringing formal and cultural analysis into dialogue with industrial history and case law, Hilderbrand revisits four decades of often overlooked histories of video recording, including the first network news archive, the underground circulation of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a feminist tape-sharing network, and the phenomenally popular Web site YouTube. This book reveals the creative uses of videotape that have made essential content more accessible and expanded our understanding of copyright law. Inherent Vice is a politically provocative, unabashedly nostalgic ode to analog.

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:16 -0400)

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