The Recovery Channels

The Recovery Channels consists of footage from the loose video tape I collected off the streets of New York for eight years, starting in 1998. I found tape hanging in ribbons from trees, wrapped around lampposts, fire escapes, and fluttering around on traffic islands. Sometimes, they’d still be in their broken cassette shell on a street or sidewalk.

After being meticulously cleaned and restored, I digitized the footage. With the help of Eyebeam Atelier, each “find’ of tape was encoded to work with a remote control so that you could browse a TV that played only The Recovery Channels (a play on The Discovery Channel). My collection totaled fourteen hours of footage viewable on 38 different channels. The diverse material included a Chinese action movie, hip hop videos, a ballet, an educational video on geriatric depression, instructions for how to use the Netscape browser, an episode of Barney, and a lot of professional as well as amateur pornography. This piece was made at a time when VHS videotape was gradually disappearing in favor of digital technologies, and now, The Recovery Channels acts as an archive of locally sourced, cast-off media.