Screengrab from paradisenook_w_strippers.swf. Petra Cortright
Back in September during the NY Art Book Fair, Petra Cortright casually mentioned that it normally doesn’t take her longer than 20 minutes to make an artwork. Her e-book, published by Paul Chan’s Badlands Unlimited, took her maybe an hour.
Well, in a change of pace for the artist, this Saturday, Cortright will present a body of work she’s spent a little over a year putting together at Club Midnight in Berlin. The show combines what Cortright described to me as “super virus-y .exes that you install on windows desktops” as living wallpaper, with virtual strippers mouthing “click me” speech bubbles.
I’ve only seen a few files from the 100 plus images that will be presented, but I gotta say, I’m interested. Obviously, viral strippers aren’t symbols of the progress feminism has made over the years, but as an image artifact of the 90′s, I like them regardless. I realize liking computers and a 90′s aesthetic isn’t exactly an argument for the merits of anything, so next week I’ll be speaking to a few artists working with found .ZIP files and the like, in an attempt to broaden my own vocabulary. Sometimes, it takes more than one post to figure out why you like the things you do.
