TAPE Collective

We are fundraising for equipment needed to achieve our goals of archival A/V media preservation and education for all!

T.A.P.E. Collective offers low-cost to FREE museum quality transfers to any and all patrons who seek these services for their personal home movies. We’ve accomplished this crucial memory work for the past year, and plan on expanding our reach to as many communities that are in need of it, including distribution of hard drives! We will accomplish most of this work via grant writing but this initial fundraiser will set us up for long-lasting success!

Here is a list of the equipment pieces we are seeking to purchase, some immediately crucial. The entire list has been double checked with current institutional lab setups:

Time Based Corrector ~ $800 - $1000

Audio Patch Bay ~ $200

VHS-C Camcorder ~ $200

VHS-C Adapters ~ $100

JVC VCR ~ $300

Hi8/Digital 8 Deck ~ $400

Cassette Deck ~ $300

Reel to Reel Audio Deck ~ $400

Analog to Digital Converter ~ $400

Capture Device ~ $300

Audio Analog to Digital Converter ~ $300

Audio Line Booster ~ $400

Rack Sliding Shelves ~ $400

Analog Waveform Monitor ~ $200

D.I. Box ~ $70

Analog RF Monitor

Color CRT

Magnetic Viewer

Repair fund for our accessible equipment rental

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Please read below for more about TAPE Collective Los Angeles:

TEACH ARCHIVE PRESERVE EXHIBIT

Since its inception as a 501c3 nonprofit at the end of 2023, T.A.P.E. Collective has created opportunities for engagement with the physical and material analog image. From preservation efforts, exhibition, and hands-on educational workshops, we have welcomed over 50 volunteers from our local community in Los Angeles to the TAPE collective and have provided skills training, facilitator training, and community around achieving our mission of greater access to analog media tools and resources.

A central focus of ours is to provide low-cost and FREE digital transfers of magnetic, tape-based, personal home movies and amateur media. We are providing 10-bit, museum quality preservation for media that is often left out of the preservation conversation afforded to institutional archives, with many filters as to what gets archival attention and funding.

Uniquely, we also offer low-cost repairs and mold-cleaning! A service that is simply not provided by most for-profit digitizing services. We have rescued many tapes whose images are beautifully intact and transferred after repairs and cleanings.

We have accomplished this via our strong and dedicated volunteer base, our diversified income streams – including arts education, membership and equipment rental – and by expanding the concept of an archive.

Currently, we run our main operations out of space donated to us by the Whammy! Analog Media storefront in Los Angeles. Given our current limited space, we do not seek to house personal physical media at this time, but to teach our patrons how to properly archive their media themselves at home, and usually by doing the things they have already been doing - including not throwing away primary source materials comprised of their tapes and film! We are also seeking consent for appropriate and interesting clips to contribute to a growing artist/research re-use collection that we are currently building for public use!

So far our current equipment can only provide archival quality transfers to common VHS formats and MiniDV. By donating today, you will help us expand what tape formats we can work with, and enable us to bring greater quality transfers to A/V magnetic tape based media across the board.

Thank you for considering a donation, please visit our website at tapeanalog.org to learn more, rent equipment, become a member, and read more about our mission to digitize home media!

Video graphic up top provided by Sean McGuirk.