Chapter 48 VHS: a posthumanist aesthetics of recording and distribution Jem Noble ‘O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?’ From Among School Children by William Butler Yeats (Finneran 1996) In 2009, the year ater Japanese electronics manufacturer JVC (Japan Victor Company), creator of the VHS format (Video Home System), ceased production of the last line of stand-alone VHS video recorders (Broadcast Engineering 2008), I undertook an artist’s residency at VIVO Media Arts in Vancouver, Canada—part of an eight-month stay, dwell- ing in the city with my partner and son—to consider the aesthetic qualities of VHS video as a dwindling feature of home-video practices. I was interested particularly in the qualities of degraded VHS image and sound with respect to the circularity of relations between the materiality of VHS technology, the engineered recordings it has potentiated, the practices these have both aforded, and the transformative efects of such practices on its materiality as they are evidenced in degrading picture and sound quality. My focus was drawn to the phenomenon of video rental as a spatial practice bound up with the material particularities of home-video technology and as a context of its intensive use associated with increased ‘wear and tear’. With the generous assistance of VIVO and Limelight Video, my family’s neighbourhood video library, my residency developed around a single rental VHS tape with respect to this idea. he following chapter comprises a katachrestic presentation of difering registers from my research into the material-social circumstances through which the home-video phe- nomenon emerged, into speciic aspects of the tape’s history, and into the physicality of the medium, in order to provoke understandings of interconnectivity among these fac- tors—part of their relational ontology—for aesthetic consideration. I draw on concepts of relational ontology and object ontology in philosophies of semiosis and performativity, rather than from the speciic discourse of ‘object oriented ontology’, approaching objects as provisional, unfolding distributions of material and immaterial aspects and relations (physical, social, and conceptual)—existentially equal constituents of form (Bains 2006),