Petra Cortright is a traveler, an internet artist who currently resides in California, whose work plies the territory of webcam performance, computer graphics and graphic art, animated .gifs, the webcam music video, other sortings of media that are bejeweled with web gems, and other videos that artfully hype the youtube-dance-video come what may.

Petra Cortright was born in 1986, in Santa Barbara, California, and has has resided in New York City, New York; Portland, Oregon; Toyko, Japan; and Berlin, Germany. She is a member of the Nasty Nets Internet Surfing Club, Loshadka Internet Surfing Club, and Computers Club. She has studied at Parsons School of Design in New York and California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Click here for Petra’s C/V and bio.

Her work has made its way ‘cross the interview and o’er the international scene, including the New Museum in New York, the Venice Biennale, Adbusters Magazine (Nov/Dec ’08 issue), the sixth annual Stan Brakhage Symposium (2010, Film Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder), the (now defunct) New York Underground Film Festival, and  her Endless Pot of Gold CD-Rs installation (Nasty Nets collaboration) piece exhibited at the 2009 Sundance International Film Festival.

Petra and her work makes the internet splash, with her work snagging brickbats and inciting plaudits. In August 2007, Petra’s work stirred some dirt with a puzzled Patty Johnson, artfagcity.com founder and veteran art-blogger:

Four days ago Tom Moody posted Petra Cortright’s webcam video and since then I’ve been struggling to articulate why the aesthetics of this piece of [sic] go beyond taking a few clip images from the web and slapping them on a video. Unlike a David Shrigley piece, which uses humor so obvious its value requires no explanation, a cam featuring a still figure, dancing pizzas, and falling snow to an electronic beat may require a little more discussion.

…………………………………………………………………………….

Probably the most amusing aspect of this work lies in the fact that it’s basically a documentation of a live performance, in which you watch someone concentrate on their computer screen for the duration of a song. I realize this comment tends to incite a host of responses most of which begin something to the effect of “So why am I looking at this?”, and while there’s no response to this if you don’t find the redundancies of web surfing that so many net artists like to highlight funny, there’s also a level of virtuosity in the live arrangement of gifs etc, that needs to be called to attention.

Patty seemingly warmed to Petra’s internet work with an near-end conclusion of, “Cortright’s webcam piece succeeds because her dancing pizzas are unexpected, and the snow and lightening seem almost delicately placed.”

Petra’s work speaks for itself, and Patty of artfagcity makes a peppery bullet point: love-it-or-hate-it, multiple viewing explicate. Her work verily is an internet new-media culture thing. Below is a seven question interview with Petra Cortright.

sparkling (2010)

(1) What corner of the Internet do you call home?
gmail/gchat/gtalk since i live in an “isolated” place so its where i talk to all my friends. fb/fb chat doesn’t feel very solid. the fb chat format is annoying and i really dislike being sent actual information in a fb message — i always forget to reply because they get buried so fast under some type of event invite messages

SYSTEM-LANDSCAPES-2007

(more…)