Vtape

Back to school with Vtape! ✏️💻🎒📚

You may have noticed our flashy new posters around town! That’s because we’ll now be releasing news of our monthly video programming in 4-month cycles, so you can get ready for what’s coming (or add it to your syllabus)!

Swipe through to see us in good company👀

And as always, hit the link in bio or head to Vtape.org to stream this month’s video for free! A critical and moving documentary by the award-winning filmmaker Gail Maurice.
Gail Maurice Jesi Jordan Christine Negus

Congratulations to Zacharias Kunuk and Skawennati for winning the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts! They join 38 other Vtape artists who have received the award since its inception in 1999. Read the full list of winners in the caption below.

Repost Canada Council for the Arts 🎉 🏆 It is an honour to announce the 2026 winners of the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts (GGArts).

Please join us in congratulating and celebrating Chung-Im Kim, Roger Lee, Faye HeavyShield, Carole Itter, Zacharias Kunuk, Lyne Lapointe, Marie-Jeanne Musiol and Skawennati.

Discover this year’s winners and watch their video portraits: https://en.ggarts.ca/

📣📣Vtape is hiring!
Technical & Collections Manager

Application Deadline: 8:00 p.m. EST, Sept. 17, 2026
Start date: Oct. 5, 2026 (negotiable)
Location: On-site in Vtape’s downtown Toronto offices
Position: Permanent, full-time (35 hours/week)

Vtape is seeking to hire an experienced, focused and productive individual to fill the role of Technical & Collections Manager at Vtape.

The selected candidate will work closely with other Vtape staff, and will have knowledge and experience with analogue and digital media formats and playback devices; some experience in the organization and management of collections; some relevant post-secondary education; an interest in and knowledge of media arts; and will have good general knowledge of contemporary art practices. Excellent organizational capacities, written and verbal communication skills, and an ability to work both independently and as part of a team are critical. Any formal training in media technology, digitization, and collections management would be a definite asset. A significant level of computer literacy is a must. Fluency in English (written and oral) is a requirement; proficiency in French would be an asset. Experience in repair of electronic devices would be valuable.

As an employer committed to equity, Vtape welcomes applicants from equity-seeking communities, including racialized and Indigenous persons, persons with disabilities, and persons of diverse sexual orientations and identities.

For more information and to apply, follow the link in our bio 🌐

VIDEO OF THE MONTH:
Thirst (2007) by Gail Maurice

For the month of September, leading up to the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation on Sept. 30th, Vtape presents Gail Maurice’s Thirst. Nearly twenty years after the video was made, despite progress in some communities, the issue of clean drinking water remains prevalent in Indigenous communities across Canada. With characteristic humour and anger, Maurice highlights the absurdity of official responses to this ongoing crisis.

🎞️ Now streaming on Vtape.org
🌐 Link in bio

Image credit: Thirst (2007) by Gail Maurice

☀️YCW Summer Interns, 2/2 🎞️

Hello! I’m Ryan, a student of the F+PPCM program here at TMU in the film & video stream. I’ve been spending my summer between two internships:

At , I’m processing stills for their website as well as digitizing some of their recent acquisitions. One project I took over myself was the works of curator and artist Greg A. Hill, mostly on BetaCam. With the help of the other summer interns, we are also helping clean and digitize some works of Kyoko Michish*ta, which involves a lot of cleaning of open-reel and U-matic tapes, as well as coming up with an internal policy for tape baking since many of them are too degraded to simply clean. Part of the internship at Vtape involves the consistent management of magnetic decks which are often difficult to maintain and require expert care. With the help of Vtape’s current technical & collections manager (and F+PPCM alumni!) Dylan Adamson and now-retired co-founder Kim Tomczak, we are ensuring that these decks can continue to process artists’ videos for distribution and access.

At the Peterborough Museum & Archives I’ve been helping
audio-visual archivist (also alumni!) Bo Pickett in scanning and colour correcting the films of Frederick Lewis Roy. Pickett had previously saved the films—dating from the mid 30’s to about the late 40’s and all on 16mm—from a flood in 2006, and now that the
conservation project is done we are preparing the films for both an exhibit at the museum as well as a screening of some of the finest reels in the fall. The project is being done through the ScanStation we have on campus through our program, and the colour correcting is being done with DaVinci Resolve. You can get a sense of the original magenta-faded film versus my correction in one of the videos here, as well as a small snippet of one of the films, including colour footage of the 1939 New York World’s Fair!

☀️YCW Summer Interns, 1/2 🎞️

Hi! We’re Brody Weaver and Janina Malapitan, and we’re the Young Canada Works interns for this summer, working at Vtape as Collections Management Assistants.

This summer we worked primarily with the video works of two artists: Mike MacDonald (028) and Kyoko Michish*ta (2137). Our tasks included the inspection, cleaning, and digitization of the respective artists’ works on video formats like U-Matic, ½” open reel, VHS, and Betacam. We also conducted research and experiments on a preservation technique known as tape baking.

Janina Malapitan is a film preservation student in Toronto Metropolitan University’s master's program, Film + Photography Preservation and Collections Management. Janina’s forthcoming research concerns decentralized archival methodologies in resource-scarce environments, with a focus on Philippine archival practices as they relate to experimental films produced in the country between the 1980s–90s.

Brody Weaver is a writer, media artist, and archivist-in-training living and learning between Halifax, NS and Toronto, ON. She is in the MI program at U of T, studying Archives and Records Management with a collaborative specialization in Women and Gender Studies. From 2024-2025, Brody was the Digital Archivist at the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative, and since moving to Toronto, she has worked as an Education Consultant for The ArQuives. Her writing and art can be found in C Mag, Femme Art Review, Peripheral Review, Visual Arts News, and Wikipedia.

Photos:
1. Brody (left) and Janina (right) in front of a Mike MacDonald tape they helped to digitize
2. Collage of stills from various digitized works this summer
3. A peek into the U-Matic deck 🐸
4. A very high-tech piece of tape baking equipment (food dehydrator)
5. A how-to guide for handling videotapes, as demonstrated by cartoon ½” open reel tapes, found inside of multiple Kyoko Michish*ta tape cases
6. Time code notes handwritten by Mike MacDonald, inside the cassette case for source materials used in channel A of his 1999 video installation "Medicine Tent."

VIDEO OF THE MONTH:
Our August video was selected by our YWC summer interns, Brody Weaver and Janina Malapitan. Here is what they had to say!

"In better than awful (but still pretty sh*tty), Christine Negus offers a tongue-in-cheek recipe for turning individually experienced trauma into collectively witnessed spectacle. Rather than sulk and process in isolation, invite your loved ones over to watch. Throw a party. Be resilient. Cope. Distract them, and yourself, from the depths of your wounds. ‘This is a very kind act on the part of the victim,’ Negus’ voiceover attests. Enlisting the affects of a tell-your-story confessional culture, better than awful asks viewers to consider the tendencies that enable, promote, and monetize trauma-as-commodity. With characteristic wit, Negus leaves unaddressed what happens next: after everyone has gone home, the freshly traumatized host is left to clean up messes literal, emotional, and metaphorical. As mid-2000s pop-punk musician P!nk might say, ‘this used to be our funhouse / but now it’s full of evil clowns.’ Healing is anything but spectacular." —Brody

"Christine Negus’s better than awful (but still pretty sh*tty) begins with a dusk-darkened sky and a countdown to fireworks. Booms, bursts, and the Boss (‘Born in the USA’ soundtracks this work) provide the summer night setting as a wry voice begins to instruct the viewer on how best to throw a party when something horrifyingly bad is about to happen. Absurdity catalyzes the catharsis achieved by Negus’s work, which focuses on violence and victims’ trauma. The voice identifies treats the victim / party-host should have ready that assuredly make awful things better, like ‘chocolate cake’ and ‘sparklers when available.’ An apotheosis is reached when the voice finally aligns with the image, describing the ideal light show for party guests: a sublime comet that explodes like fireworks into brilliant shrapnel, annihilating us, and all of our traumas, into oblivion. The perfect party, for the witnesses and the victim, for the spectators and the spectated alike." —Janina

🎞️ Now streaming on Vtape.org
🌐 Link in bio

Image credit: better than awful, by Christine Negus (2015)

Vtape Summer Closure, August 17–28
☀️
Vtape will be closed from August 17th to the 28th. During this time, we will check email and phone messages less frequently than usual. We will be back at the office on Monday, August 31st, and will respond to any inquiries received while we were closed as quickly as possible.

LOST TAPE—NEWLY RESTORED + AVAILABLE AT VTAPE 📼 📼

The brilliant English sound artist, composer, and video artist Stuart Marshall (1949-1993) was one of the first media artists to take on AIDS as a central subject matter. Marshall was a co-founder of London Video Arts, and part of a generation of video artists who made work for broadcast or community television as well as for gallery and festival screenings: at the time, BBC Channel 4 frequently featured challenging work by independent artists, and in North America, community-access cable offered broadcast opportunities for artists. After his death from AIDS-related complications in 1993, Marshall’s video Kaposi’s Sarcoma (A Plague and its Symptoms) (1983) was thought to be lost. Although it was produced for SAW Gallery’s 1983 International Festival of Video Art, and both London Video Arts (now LUX) and Vtape distributed Marshall’s work, this title was not on our shelves and was nowhere to be seen for decades. In 2024, however, PhD researcher Conal McStravick located a copy at SAW Gallery in Ottawa. SAW loaned the tape to Conal, who brought it to Vtape, where Kim Tomczak and Dustin Lawrence worked on recovering and digitizing it. McStravick believes that Kaposi’s Sarcoma may be the first AIDS activist video ever produced, and we are proud to say that it is once again available for public presentation, educational use, etc., through both Vtape and LUX Distribution (UK).

Part of Vtape’s mission is to preserve and make accessible historical video and audio works like this one. Follow the link in bio to read more about this video.

Image credit: Kaposi’s Sarcoma (A Plague and its Symptoms) (1983), by Stuart Marshall

We are proud to announce two participants for this year's Curatorial Incubator v.20: Lost Histories, Found Futures—Luísa Cruz and Kourtney Jackson!

Vtape would like to thank our 2026 Curatorial Incubator jury, Danica Pinteric and Heather Canlas-Rigg, for carefully and thoughtfully considering the eighteen excellent proposals we received for the current Incubator cycle. Making these decisions is always difficult!

For more information about Luísa and Kourtney's projects, please visit our website. And look out for the Curatorial Incubator screenings in fall 2026!

Luísa Cruz
Kourtney
dan
_______heather