Petra Cortright​​​​​​​
Petra Cortright is a contemporary Californian Net artist, born in 1986. She’s had a computer since she could walk, and was spared the earlier era’s ideological warm-ups and tortured justifications. For Cortright, computers and social networks are as convenient as a watercolor set.
Cortright’s artwork is commonly all about being Petra, a unique state of contemporary being best explored through YouTube videos, graphic FX, slider bars, and pull-down menus. She comes across on screens as a Mariko Mori figure, although younger, blonder, suntanned, down-market, and with a subjectivity thoroughly fractured by social networking. Her “sick” aesthetic is all about digital media systems being coaxed, warped, tricked, or shoveled into unplanned and unplannable performance spaces. Unlike most new-media artists, who are as fussy about their precious hardware as any touring synth band, Cortright will work on almost any gadget available. Any venue is great, too. Art galleries, communal meetups, Twitter, Flickr, LiveJournal, Myspace, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube—New York, Berlin, Los Angeles, Mexico City—they’re all good.
Her material is scraped from the abyss of Internet pop culture: 8-bit clip art, animated GIF files, free screen savers. Polka dots, dinosaurs, sparkles, fake flames. This dazzling clutter is deployed within a twentysomething Millennial cam-girl universe of back rooms, torn stockings, black fingernail polish, lizards, kittens, chickens, and pug dogs. The affect here is not so much nostalgic “retro” as bottom-feeding punk thrift store, or, better yet, one of those giant, folksy automobile-crushing facilities from the Tarantino Los Angeles of Pulp Fiction.
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“Niki”, “Lucy”, “Lola” and “Viola”, are the virtual erotic dancers purchased by Cortright, from readily available online software, to populate her own synthetic and painterly landscapes and green screen voids. Presented within an immersive installation environment, which will include atmospheric audio components, these works self-consciously offer an infinite virtual redundancy in their repetition and absence of real-time.

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Cortright lifted full-motion, dancing strippers from a piece of software called VirtuaGirl. She then layered them against images of fantastical, fairy tale digital worlds. This collision of online fantasy fodder results in a sort of animated, e-book delving into the world of illusion and possibility every man can commonly find online.

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Petra Cortright’s VVEBCAM (2007) is a YouTube video in which the artist stares intently into a webcam as cartoonish clip art figures float around her face.

This early example of YouTube-as-medium departed from the usual tropes of the camgirl genre, lacking erotic innuendo or a direct address to the camera. Instead, it depicted Cortright as a computer user, deeply immersed in the consumer-grade visual effects available via her webcam.

Unlike a typical camgirl, Cortright also engaged in all-out flame wars with her commenters. She published the video with a list of accompanying keywords copied from spam accounts, thereby drawing in viewers who were trawling YouTube for titillating or offensive material, and cheating their expectations. Thus, the dynamics of YouTube as an early social media platform were incorporated into the work itself.

These spam keywords also led to YouTube’s decision to take down the video in 2010. Presented here is a new archival reconstruction of the VVEBCAM YouTube page, which situates the video in its original context for the first time in more than seven years.
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