The Internet, as you know, is a vast and strange place, chock full of subcultures doing all sorts of things. And some of them are…well…curating Vine compilations, putting them onto VHS, carefully crafting distinctive packaging (complete with colored tapes!) and distributing the resulting “art pieces” via Etsy. Just hypothetically speaking, of course. But why would anyone want to do this? Why would anyone want to buy this? And what does the fact that, despite its surface weirdness, the resulting object probably makes a certain amount of aesthetic sense to you…say about our relationship to the media (and the entire digital landscape) in the contemporary moment?

To learn more about this wild, wild world, we talk with Travis Wagner, an assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences at Urbana-Champaign, whose latest research has focused on the “retroconversion” scene in all its tape-dubbing glory. Does 2010s horror deserve VHS-era static? What are the deep urges beneath nostalgia for physical media? Was the ‘90s really the last good time in American culture? Is the ownership of magnetic tape really an act of rebellion against the digital automation of an algorithmically-driven, surveillance capital world? Bust out your Walkman, hit the play button and decide for yourself.

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