SOCIÉTÉ

Petra Cortright

I was at Parson’s and there was a video assignment. I went there for design and technology. I was maybe one of three women in the program. It was focused on game design. That was the only new media department, everything else was really traditional. We had access to cameras. You could go check out cameras in a different building. I was such a brat, I didn’t want to be responsible for expensive equipment. I didn’t want to go find where the other building was. I remember there was something else that I had to do that day. I lived in Brooklyn and I had to take the train home from Union Square and there was a big Staples there.

PC

It’s still there. I walked by it recently when I was in New York in the Spring when I went to see the video that is hanging in MoMA, I made a little pilgrimage to the Staples because that’s where I bought the first webcam. I just had this approach to making things. I never really thought about it much. I think I still had my Razor phone, the Motorola Razor.

PC

It was the really skinny one. I loved the quality of the images. That sensor, it was so beautiful. The light was really weird. You could get a lot of digital light leaks.

PC

Yeah, you could make really short, shitty looking videos and pictures. It was an early phone. This was 2007, so none of my computers had built-in cameras. It’s just so hard for people to remember a time before smart-phones and built in cameras, but they weren’t connected yet. If you wanted a video on your computer for Skyping or something you had to have a webcam. Right around this time, some of the newest models might have had them, but I had an older one. It was just a year or two before there was a standardization of the camera being built-in. There definitely wasn’t Photobooth. I didn’t have a Mac laptop either. I had a PC because I got really mad at Apple in 2004. A water droplet had condensed in my logic board and it was right before my Parson’s interview. Sorry, this is a bit rambling. It’s my origin story of using PCs (laughs).

This was right before my interview with Parsons and I ended up showing up to Parsons with fucking slides. They were digital paintings on slides. And they didn’t have a slide projector. So the interviewer had to hold up the slides to look at them. I knew how to make slides because it was this old school thing that a family friend in Santa Barbara had me do. My parents were artists, so I knew old school artists. So anyway, I was fucking furious at Apple and thought I would never buy an Apple product again. So I switched over to PCs and there was no camera and I got this Webcam that was twenty dollars from Staples, which was all that I could afford, and I hooked it up to my Think Pad and then I saw that it came with these little built-in effects. I remember thinking, “who is this for?!” It was this discovery that certain software had these effects, and I thought it was really cool and really liked it. Other people were checking out the cameras and I just knew that I didn’t want to work with other people. I didn’t have much respect for the others in the program, like the game designers (laughs). I wanted to work by myself, but I didn’t know how to film myself with a big camera—they were huge. Somehow it just made sense to work with something small, I was used to them. I had my Razor phone, I think my first camera was a Canon Elph. It was tiny. It was all I had wanted for my birthday when I was a teenager, so I could post photos on my LiveJournal. There was just this real desire to work privately and by myself. And to work with something that was very manageable that I felt comfortable manipulating. I remember checking to see if the files looked like the Razor photos. To me, I was so attracted to that image quality. I have never been interested in Super HD stuff. My whole life was on the computer. I liked the aesthetic and I felt proud of it, any kind of computer Internet aesthetic. I didn’t really think about it beyond not wanting to check out the camera.

I was young, I was 20. I was living with roommates and stuff and remember being locked in my room on the computer. That was my space.

PC

Same. Maybe this is fucked up to say, but I have this trait where I have never been concerned with mastery or being a technical person. I just want to get things done in a quick and effective way. Speed and ease are a really fun part of making work for me. It’s not fun if it is slow and tedious, some people crave that. I simply don’t. There is a huge barrier to entry. And some people love learning all those technical details. I kind of learn as I go. If something needs to be learned, I somehow manage to learn it: anytech stuff, 3D stuff. I learn via YouTube tutorials. It’s weird. I’ve been exposed to academia and shit like that, but I also approach things in this kind of self-taught, outsider way. I identify more with outsider artists and I feel like net artists were outsiders for a long time. I remember looking at traditional painting and thinking, “I don’t know how to do that, I’m never going to know how to do that.“ My mom was a painter and my dad was a master printer. He did lithographs and shit like that. He was a professor at USCB. He died when I was four. He probably would have had a pretty decent art career. When he died my mom stopped painting. I grew up around the ghost of art and the artworld, but I wasn’t in it. I wasn’t an art world kid by any means. It was a completely different kind of upbringing. And Santa Barbara is pretty provincial. My parents were really good friends with the woman who founded the New Museum, Marcia Tucker, but I never went there until I was in a show there much later, after she had passed away. So weird kind of stuff like that. My dad is in the permanent collection at MoMa.

PC

When you search the last name, we both come up. It’s a very emotional thing for me. Sorry, that was kind of a long answer.

PC

It’s probably the reason that I stopped making them. That work got high-jacked by a lot of other agendas that I never intended in the work. The whole selfie feminism thing got so out of control. It’s so surface level. I always viewed them as self-portraits. A selfie is this (demonstrates extending arm with smart phone and taking a photograph). It’s with a smart phone. My life has gotten significantly more complicated since smart phones. I’m like an older person, I liked the time when I would log on and I would be present on the internet. I would go on to chat and to connect with my friends. Now you’re being pinged at 24-7, you can’t even think. It’s horribly distracting, but we can’t go back. I don’t come from that culture. The videos are very personal and sincere. I’m a very sincere person. I think the videos were clever, but not in an academic way.