Everybody Loves a Lover

Janna Jones writes about the history and resonances of ‘Love Tapes,’ Wendy Clarke’s 1980s video project.

By Janna JonesDecember 27, 2025

• Television

• Cultural Studies

• Film

IN ONE OF Wendy Clarke’s Love Tapes, a young Black man sits in front of what looks like a tiled subway wall. “Most of the time,” he says, “I’m really afraid of machines and sharing. But through experiences like this, I’m able to stay in touch with it and keep from being afraid of it, by using the machine, and see that it’s only going to do what you let it do or tell it to do.” As he speaks, he watches himself on a video monitor, slowly moving his head out of the frame, then traces his hand across the screen. “It’s amazing,” he concludes. “My face is very imperfect.”

This moment—intimate, tentative, technologically self-aware—could easily be a TikTok confessional or Instagram story. Yet it was recorded in 1980, inside a video booth at the World Trade Center in New York, as part of Clarke’s participatory video project, the Love Tapes. The subject’s insight captures the core argument of Clarke’s project: technology is not an autonomous force but a pliable tool, and its meaning shifts depending on how we choose to engage with it. Long before the rise of social media, Clarke invited hundreds of strangers to record three-minute monologues about love, creating a vast analog archive of emotional expression. These tapes are now housed at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research and are accessible online through the University of Wisconsin. Watched today, Love Tapes offers a vivid prehistory of social media, anticipating the aesthetics of direct address and emotional candor and affirming our power to shape technology as a tool for both self-reflection and performance.

¤

The project originated in 1972, when Clarke and her mother, Shirley Clarke, recorded themselves talking and applying stage makeup. Shirley, celebrated for her bold, experimental films including The Cool World (1963) and Portrait of Jason (1967), passed on more than technique to her daughter—she instilled a restless curiosity about what cameras could do. As Clarke and her mother talked, she saw her own image reflected back at her on the monitor. Moving and adjusting her body in response, she discovered that this instant feedback loop was not just novel but also transformative.

For Wendy Clarke, this was the essential feature of the video camera. In the early 1970s, video was uniquely capable of offering real-time self-fashioning, an experience that would later become central to digital media. It wasn’t until five years later, however, that she fully grasped the artistic potential of this feedback loop. Having purchased some secondhand video-dating tapes, she was able to commit to experimenting with the video camera. In the late 1970s, video offered singles a new and convenient way to present themselves and connect with others, marking the medium not only as an artistic tool but also as a social technology reshaping intimacy and self-presentation. Clarke began recording herself talking about love until she ran out of things to say—90 minutes later. Reviewing the footage, she realized that the monitor helped her engage in a dialogue with herself.

This discovery would become the conceptual foundation for the Love Tapes. Clarke’s next breakthrough came during a visit to Los Angeles, where her mother was teaching in the film and video department at UCLA. Invited to lead a workshop in one of her mother’s graduate classes, Clarke shared her early experiments and encouraged students to create their own love tapes. They selected Nat King Cole’s “I’m in the Mood for Love” to accompany their recordings and established the three-minute format that would define the project. After taping their videos in a studio, the students returned to the classroom to watch and discuss each other’s work—an early instance of participatory media practice.

From this modest beginning, the Love Tapes evolved into one of the most significant participatory video projects of the 20th century. Alongside early video diaries and community media initiatives, Clarke’s work helped lay the groundwork for today’s culture of digital self-disclosure. She believed that if everyone in the world made a love tape, we would have a more complete portrait of the human condition.

In 1980, Clarke and her friend Suzanne Grayson pitched the idea of the Love Tapes to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and the management team agreed to let the Love Tapes be produced at the World Trade Center for three weeks. Clarke edited together 43 minutes of Love Tapes, and it aired on channel 13, WNET, the PBS outlet in New York City, the night before the video project began at the World Trade Center. At the end of the channel 13 broadcast, there was an intertitle that invited people to come to the World Trade Center to make their own Love Tapes, and, as a result of the broadcast, hundreds of people lined up at the project’s first public exhibition to record their reflections on love.

Given this debut, it is perhaps no surprise that the Love Tapes quickly garnered significant attention and acclaim for their radical approach to participatory media. The project’s broadcast on PBS and its installation at the Museum of Modern Art in 1981 introduced Clarke’s work to a broader audience, while critics praised its emotional depth and democratic ethos. Since their debut, the Love Tapes have continued to resonate, appearing in exhibitions at institutions such as the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan and the Arts Center at Governors Island.

The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research’s recent digitization and public release of Clarke’s archive has further cemented the project’s legacy, allowing new generations to engage with its intimate and unfiltered portraits of human connection. Scholars and archivists have lauded the collection not only for its artistic significance but also for its ethical commitment to preserving ordinary and marginalized voices.

¤

When an individual arrived to make their Love Tape, they faced a few decisions. For one, they needed to know what they wanted to say about love; they also had to choose a song and background image. Clarke and her collaborators put together a list of three-minute songs that were played on a cassette tape recorder. The list of songs included jazz, rock, classical, pop, and nature sounds. Two of the most popular song choices were “Call Me” by Blondie and “Funkytown” by Lipps Inc.—both released around 1980, thereby creating a distinctive time capsule for the Love Tapes. The participants also designed a background image, selecting posters or wrapping paper glued onto a foam core board. One of the most frequently chosen images—and perhaps the most poignant—was a photograph of the World Trade Center neighborhood, an area that would be changed forever two decades later.

Once a participant chose a song and background image, they were ready to make their Love Tape. Sitting in the booth that had been built by the Port Authority Teamsters, Clarke or one of her collaborators told the participants where to look (either the camera lens or the video monitor) and instructed them to start talking when the music began. Once their three minutes were over, they watched their video and decided whether they wanted to keep or delete it. If they decided to keep it, they signed a release. With three monitors outside the booth at the World Trade Center, participants, friends and family, and passersby were able to watch freshly produced Love Tapes together.

While the finished videos are vital, Clarke has emphasized how the process of making a Love Tape—recording it, reviewing the footage, deciding whether to keep or erase it, and then watching it with others outside of the Love Tapes booth—is equally essential to the project. She sees this sequence as a catalyst for self-inquiry, offering participants an opportunity to consider their emotions and relationships through the lens of technology. Although the experience itself is fleeting, vanishing once participants leave the booth, the result is a remarkable archive of ordinary people grappling with one of humanity’s most enduring and complex subjects—love.

Clarke’s Love Tapes anticipates what critical theorists now call “mediated intimacies”—technologies shaping emotional expression and connection. Scholars such as Feona Attwood, Jamie Hakim, and Alison Winch argue that intimacy in late modernity is increasingly experienced through media interfaces, blurring the boundary between public and private. While some of the New York City Love Tapes are self-conscious and theatrical in their delivery, most of the three-minute monologues seem emotionally honest and vulnerable. The camera functions as a mirror more than a stage, and the results are often messy, awkward, and deeply personal. Clarke’s work reminds us that media can create a space for self-discovery—where the goal is not necessarily to impress but to understand.

While they share their thoughts about love and life, the participants routinely express joy when seeing themselves on-screen. A young white man with brown curly hair, with the World Trade Center image behind him, looks at himself with fascination as his Love Tape begins: “I really don’t know what to say. Um, I’m kind of nervous. Never seen myself on a picture before—on TV. But to talk about love and different kinds of love: I love my mother. I love my lover. I love different kinds of things. I love New York.” He stumbles a bit, seemingly overwhelmed by the immensity of the topic and the fact that he can watch himself on the monitor. “I’m just sitting in front of a camera. I love to see myself.” His delight in his own reflection illustrates the empowering potential of video, transforming passive spectatorship into active authorship, with users reclaiming control over how they appear and what they say.

Other participants barely have time to look at themselves, so focused are they on defining “love” for the camera. As classical music plays, a young white woman with dark circles under her eyes gazes into the lens, explaining how her mother’s love is the best kind of love. “She has loved me unconditionally, regardless of what I have done. I’ve experienced a lot of feelings, a lot of lifestyles, and acted out a lot of whims,” she explains. “But she loved me through it all, unconditionally.” As the music ends and the door to the booth opens, she looks surprised, as if she had forgotten where she was. She smiles and says to the person at the door: “That was amazing. I love this.”

¤

The video camera, which became a popular consumer item by the end of the 1980s, was still a novelty to the average person at the beginning of the decade—to the point where some subjects trip over what they want to say, flustered by the presence of the camera and monitor. A young Black woman, her face highly expressive, explains that falling in love is a wonderful feeling. “I love it, and I wouldn’t mind doing it again and again and again. So, to everyone that’s in love in this big city—hope to everyone that you enjoy it as much as I feel I do.”

She stops talking. The music continues, and she stares into the camera for an excruciating 45 seconds. When the door opens, she smiles, explaining: “I froze. I forgot everything I wanted to say.” Even in silence, her agency is evident. And because she chose to keep the tape, she transformed a moment of technological awkwardness into an authentic record of vulnerability—proof that imperfection can be embraced by both creators and consumers. In this vein, one of the most striking differences between the Love Tapes and today’s TikTok or Instagram videos is the contributors’ unfamiliarity with the camera and monitor. This technological awkwardness—visible in the way participants look at themselves with fascination and hesitate before speaking—creates a rawness that stands in contrast to the more polished social media videos we watch today. While the millennial pause reflects a brief, self-conscious delay before speaking on camera, the pauses in the Love Tapes are more dramatic and uncomfortable.

The differences go deeper than just technological literacy. Social media videos are not only framed by user names, hashtags, view counts, and a cascade of comments; they are also influenced by algorithms and the “infinite scroll.” By contrast, Love Tapes offers the potential for a quieter, more focused experience. It is an alternative vision of what social media might have created: the possibility for an intimate exchange between speaker and viewer, mediated only by camera, background music, and image (and, by now, the 45 years between its creation and our viewing).

But to focus solely on these differences would be to overlook the ways in which Love Tapes also foreshadows dynamics that have come to define our camera-and-confessional culture. In the early 1980s, self-recording was a rare and often awkward experience, though as the decade wore on, it became a trendy way to meet like-minded singles. Projects like Clarke’s Love Tapes exemplify this early phase of media self-disclosure. As technology advanced, the 1980s and ’90s introduced home camcorders and reality TV formats like those seen on Love Connection (1983–99) and The Real World (1992–2019), which brought confessional-style self-presentation into mainstream entertainment. These formats blurred the line between private reflection and public performance, laying the groundwork for the participatory ethos of the internet. By the early 2000s, platforms like YouTube, and later Instagram and TikTok, transformed media self-disclosure into a ubiquitous, algorithmically driven practice.

In revisiting the Love Tapes, we encounter a project that not only captured the emotional fabric of its time but also foreshadowed the mediated intimacies that define our own. Clarke’s work provides a critical lens on this trajectory, reminding us that social media is not exclusively performative; we have the capacity to use it as both a mirror and a stage. Love Tapes also reveals that the longing to be seen, to speak candidly, and to connect through technology is an enduring human impulse, one that adapts as technologies evolve. Just as analog video gave way to reality TV, and then to algorithm-driven social media, today’s platforms will inevitably transform again, reshaping the ways intimacy and identity are expressed and disseminated.

Today, at 81, Clarke lives among her donkeys and dogs in Taos, New Mexico, where she continues to expand the archive—a testament to her unwavering vision. Recently, she added recordings from the United Kingdom, using the same process she established in 1980, in a gesture that bridges decades and geographies. This persistence underscores the project’s relevance: Love Tapes is not only a historical record but also a living reminder that we hold the power to shape new (and old) technologies into constructive, perhaps even tender, spaces of our own making.

¤

Featured image: Still from Love Tapes, 1980.