Video Art Video Shop
Video Art Video Shop is a pop-up library that collects the unseen video art and experimental film projects of artists and amateurs that are collecting dust on shelves and in personal archives. As the head librarian, I lovingly ingest these items into my temporary library, symbolically re-instating them into the art historical archive, before offering them to the public for redistribution. Visitors to the library can browse the collection and even sign up and take a video home. In exchange, I only ask that they allow me to follow up in one years time to find out what they did with their loan – did it simply sit on another shelf gathering other dust?; was it re-used or re-mixed into a new artwork?; was it screened and shared with others?; or did something more unlikely became of it…
Video Art Video Shop has made stops in 2022 at:
RMIT University Bowen Lane
(Upcoming) Two Sixty Makers Market 10/9/2022
And will continue to pop up in various locations until the end of the year.
If you would like to submit work to the Video Art Video Shop, please download the VAVS Submissions form, and email jesspicable (at) gmail (dot) com .
Project Background
This pop-up video library is part of my PhD project – “Video Libraries: Forgotten but not gone”. The video shop, ubiquitous fixture of the home entertainment ecosystem for over 30 years, is now obsolete. As Netflix’s reign has proven supreme, the torrent of video shop closures has slowed to a trickle. The majors have left town, after briefly morphing into faceless DVD dispensers in supermarkets and malls. The indies that were holding on have one by one shuttered. With the swift passing of this era, we barely have the opportunity to stop and ask – what was the video library? Scott’s practice-led PhD project uses a range of documentary and participatory artistic strategies to investigate the relationship between artistic communities and video libraries (both commercial and institutional) as well as what the model of a video library has to offer artists and citizens in an algorithmic-driven present and future.