VHS/DTV

10 Jul-10 Aug 2025

Overview

Viddy Horrorshow/Daytime Viewing (VHS/DTV) is a showreel presentation of artist moving-image.  The showreel is presented daily at TACO! across installed, multiple flat tv screens. 

VHS/DTV brings together moving image works by artists that problematise the status of the screen, selected through an open call. Each of the works presented share television as a reference point for video work.  Formats like the game show, the chat show, and the ad break are borrowed from, subverted, and reframed as foggily-remembered progenitors of today’s hyper-targeted, short-format, and ‘democratised’ digital moving-image economy.

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An old medium, built for mass consumption, built for the most mass of audiences. TV has been supplanted by the singular, by the insular. Where anyone used to be part of everyone, now you are you in particular.  If the DIY stream is associated with the digital device, the flow of the televisual must be a slow-moving torrent of high production value, low-intensity content.

You barely register the images that flash by. The voices wash over you. They may or may not be speaking to you. Or rather, they’re speaking to who you’re most likely to be, statistically, or to who you might want to be, idealistically.

The slow-moving torrents of daytime programming have splintered into singular hand-held screens that are so much more intimate, that address us not as some vague, general consumer but as exactly as the consumer that we are, or that we soon will be.  

VHS/DTV responds to that trace of a line zigzaging across the immediacy of the digital screen, and television as a historical communal form, with its constant stream of content for ‘everyone’, all the time.

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Artists

Aimée Neat
Charlie Osborne
Sophie Bates
Jacob Bullen
Joe Moss
Josh Wirz
Adam Knight
Chiemi Shimada
Brianna Beckford
Vont_Kant_&_The_Other_Guy
John Lawrence
Charlotte Yao
Jimmy Schaus
Serena Mirambeau Brey & Rosemary Moss
Chris Combs