BiblioVault - Books by Hilderbrand, Lucas

The Bars Are Ours

Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America,1960 and After

Lucas Hilderbrand

Duke University Press, 2024

Gay bars have operated as the most visible institutions of the LGBTQ+ community in the United States for the better part of a century, from before gay liberation until after their assumed obsolescence. In The Bars Are Ours Lucas Hilderbrand offers a panoramic history of gay bars, showing how they served as the medium for queer communities, politics, and cultures. Hilderbrand cruises from leather in Chicago and drag in Kansas City to activism against gentrification in Boston and racial discrimination in Atlanta; from New York City’s bathhouses, sex clubs, and discos and Houston’s legendary bar Mary’s to the alternative scenes that reimagined queer nightlife in San Francisco and Latinx venues in Los Angeles. The Bars Are Ours explores these local sites (with additional stops in Denver, Detroit, Seattle, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Orlando as well as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Texas) to demonstrate the intoxicating---even world-making---roles that bars have played in queer public life across the country.

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Feedback

The Video Data Bank Catalog of Video Art and Artist Interviews

Kate Horsfield

Temple University Press, 2006

Founded in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement, the Video Data Bank is the leading resource in the United States for videotapes by and about contemporary artists. The collections include seminal works that, seen as a whole, describe the development of video as an art form originating in the late 1960s and continuing to the present.The first printed catalog of the Video Data Bank's complete holdings, Feedback offers readers essays on the history of media arts, the Video Data Bank, video activism, experimental performance art, and the On Art and Artists Collection. It includes 325 frame grabs and stills from some of the collection's most important pieces and outlines the styles and directions taken by artists throughout the entire history of video art. An indispensable guide and reference for artists, students, teachers, and collectors, Feedback is an essential book for any film and video bookshelf.

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Inherent Vice

Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright

Lucas Hilderbrand

Duke University Press, 2009

In an age of digital technology and renewed anxiety about media piracy, Inherent Vice revisits the recent analog past with an eye-opening exploration of the aesthetic and legal innovations of home video. Analog videotape was introduced to consumers as a blank format, essentially as a bootleg technology, for recording television without permission. The studios initially resisted VCRs and began legal action to oppose their marketing. In turn, U.S. courts controversially reinterpreted copyright law to protect users’ right to record, while content owners eventually developed ways to exploit the video market. Lucas Hilderbrand shows how videotape and fair use offer essential lessons relevant to contemporary progressive media policy.

Videotape not only radically changed how audiences accessed the content they wanted and loved but also altered how they watched it. Hilderbrand develops an aesthetic theory of analog video, an “aesthetics of access” most boldly embodied by bootleg videos. He contends that the medium specificity of videotape becomes most apparent through repeated duplication, wear, and technical failure; video’s visible and audible degeneration signals its uses for legal transgressions and illicit pleasures. Bringing formal and cultural analysis into dialogue with industrial history and case law, Hilderbrand examines four decades of often overlooked histories of video recording, including the first network news archive, the underground circulation of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a feminist tape-sharing network, and the phenomenally popular website YouTube. This book reveals the creative uses of videotape that have made essential content more accessible and expanded our understanding of copyright law. It is a politically provocative, unabashedly nostalgic ode to analog.

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