VHS Activism Archive

VHS Archives considers how to store, transfer, share, research, and reactivate media collections facing obsolescence. It is a database of one VHS collection with information, citation, and in some case digitization that can lead to more.

Go to VHS Activism Archive

← Long Hauling

#100hardtruths-#fakenews:
A primer on digital media literacy

Fake News Poetry Workshops:
Radical digital media literacy

FemTechNet:
A network of hundreds of international scholars and artists.

Feminist Online Spaces:
Building & Linking Principled Sites in Collaboration

Ev-ent-anglement.com:
an experiment in digital embodied collective feminist media praxis

PerpiTube:
Repurposing Social Media Spaces:
www.youtube.com/PerpiTubeSpace

WordPress Blog:
aljean.wordpress.com

YouTube Class: youtube.com/mediapraxisme

Media Praxis Online Publication: www.mediapraxis.org

Alex Juhasz on Vimeo

VHS Archive: A Brooklyn College graduate course and GC Center for Humanities Working Group exploring what to do with our soon-to-be-obsolete but always-beloved collections.

Women of Vision:
Research Meeting on Feminist Film and Video History, NYC 1994

Really Fake

Really Fake takes up story, poetry, and other human logics of care, intelligence, and dignity to explore sociotechnological and politico-aesthetic emergences in a world where information overload has become a new ontology of not-knowing.

AIDS and the Distribution of Crises

By invoking the terms “crises” and “distribution” in the title of this volume, we draw from and reflect on AIDS: how is it one (or many) of the outcomes and expressions of crises that are made ordinary and exceptional at the same time? How are these durations and intensities of crises experienced in specific contexts? For AIDS, the critical suspicion around the inflation of crisis rhetoric might appear to brush up against historical and political refusals to recognize the catastrophic consequences of the virus.

Sisters in the Life: 25 Years of Out African American Lesbian Mediamaking (1986–2011)

25 Years of Out African American Lesbian Mediamaking (1986–2011). Alexandra Juhasz and Yvonne Welbon, Editors, 2018.

VHS Activism Archive

The VHS Collection held here, 184 items strong, first sat on my office shelves, commencing in the 1980s in NYC, moving to Philadelphia in the 1990s, to Claremont CA from 1995-2016, and then back to NYC, growing in number and interests over the years. In that final return, I wondered what to do with all those tapes, now in a format that was nearly impossible to use, as well as becoming every more fragile. For twenty or so years, I had used these workhorses to teach and for my research in queer feminist media praxis, with core attention to AIDS, feminism, experimental and activist media, anti-racism, queer, lesbian, gay and trans media, and documentary. The collection looks like me, these areas of activism and culture over those years, and also like my extended community of fellow teachers, scholars, artists, and activists from around 1980-2000 when VHS stopped being a well-supported medium for production, collection, or exhibition.

Long Hauling

A series of essays highlighting the stories of “long COVID” survivors and community efforts to use the lessons learned from other viruses to provide care for patients during the early months of the outbreak.

Long COVID: We Are Here!

Relational Space Gallery online exhibit. A fearless exploration into the long-haul experience.

Metanoia Online

What happens when we center HIV history around Black women’s experience and contributions to AIDS Activism?

Metanoia: Transformation through AIDS Archives

Curated by What Would an HIV AIDS Doula Do? (collective members, Katherine Cheairs, Alexandra Juhasz, Theodore Kerr, Jawanza Williams), Metanoia: Transformation through AIDS Archives is an archival examination of community-based responses to the ongoing AIDS crisis in the USA.

Beyond Story

With Alisa Lebow. An online, community based manifesto. Not everything should be molded into a story. There are many ways to shape a documentary.