In Her Own Space: Petra Cortright on Art, Life, and the American West

This conversation took place between artist Petra Cortright and Leyla Fakhr, Artie Handz, Jamie Gourlay and Ivan Zhyzhkevych (Lonliboy). The live recording can be found here.

Leyla Fakhr: Thank you so much for joining us last minute, Petra. I know it’s not easy, especially with a new baby. We're really excited to have you here—we're all big fans of your work. 

I’d love to ask, you initially gained a lot of recognition with your YouTube videos, and then transitioned into creating digital paintings. Do you ever think about returning to that kind of work, or have you moved on from it? You seem very much like a painter to me. I was looking at your work recently, and it feels so textural, so painterly. How do you see the relationship between your YouTube videos and your paintings? Do they sit separately, or is there a connection?

Petra Cortright: I think I do have a painter's brain, and that's why I had such a hard time in school. I dropped out of two art schools. At the time, in the early 2000s, if you wanted to work with a computer and be creative, graphic design was your only option. But being a graphic designer means constantly making changes based on someone else’s feedback, and I hated that. I'm a brat. I couldn't do it. Like, I want to use this color or this image. And that's it. Like, fuck a client that's going to tell me to change my work. Even in school, with a hypothetical client, I hated it. So I was a terrible student. I didn't find my place for a long time.

I started using Photoshop when I was about 15, in 2002. I have a half brother who's 14 years older than me and he's a graphic designer. He kind of boosted my skills at the time, and I was also online a lot, Googling around and self teaching with Photoshop. There was a kind of loneliness where I couldn't find like exactly where I fit in, and the videos that I ended up doing were really related to loneliness. I mean, my laptop was my studio. I was young, I always lived with roommates, but my computer was my space. I was always making images and wallpapers and posting on Live Journal or MySpace or whatever.

At the same time, I had this other energy for videos. It was at a time where there wasn't even a front-facing camera built into the computers yet, so I had an external webcam. The first one I actually made was technically for a school assignment.

I was at Parsons, and they wanted us to check out all this really expensive video equipment, which I didn't want to do because I was lazy. And I didn't want to be in charge or like be responsible for all the expensive equipment that I like also didn't really feel like learning how to use, like just like, you know, like film cameras and stuff. And I also didn't want to work with anyone else in the class because I didn't like anyone. Because again, I was a brat and like a horrible person and I just wanted to work by myself.

So I went to Staples in like Union Square and bought a webcam for $19.99 because that was all I could afford. And then I just like did my project with that because I could do it all myself. And then that webcam came with these built-in effects. And I was like, this is weird. Like, who is this for? Why are people making this software for this dumb camera? And then I started looking around on the internet and there was more webcam work, like weird stuff to download. And I always had a Windows, like PC computer. So there was much more interesting stuff available for that at the time, and I just started making all those videos. And then YouTube was really new, this was like 2006, 2007, and I would upload the videos to YouTube because it was easier to do that than to just pop them onto a USB to bring them into class, and I thought that was kind of funny. And then because you could do keywords and I would throw up all these spam lists that I had, just massive amounts of like keywords, and I was just messing with stuff all the time.

I think my whole point to all of this is like, yeah, the videos were of a certain mindset at a certain time when I was like young and by myself. Now I'm just not anymore. And the painting is a different, it has a much calmer energy. It's not so BPDs, so like a young person. I do love that energy, but it's also like, you want to do things authentically and not so performatively. Maybe I'll do it again when my kids are older, I don't know.

Leyla Fakhr: That makes a lot of sense what you just said, it related more to a certain era in your life. And I think especially as a woman, you want to know how you come across. There is something definitely pertaining to age and also that time in history where it was kind of mind boggling that you could just upload that anybody could be like internationally available on YouTube at any given moment. It was kind of crazy that I know it was existing for a while before that, but it just sort of becomes suddenly common knowledge and this whole world of potentials just opened up.

Am I right to think that you're married to, to also to a painter, right? You're married to Mark Horowitz. And am I right to think that he also around the same time documented his whole life on YouTube as well. did you, did you know about this?

Petra Cortright: Yes, he did. I learned about him at Parsons. His only saving grace when I met him was that he is such a weirdo. And I was like, you're that weirdo, though. He was like a verified known weirdo. Otherwise, I would have been like, get away from me. But he was really funny and nice.

I mean, our work is very different. He's very collaborative and loves to bounce ideas off of people and I need to like, lock in by myself. But yeah, we do have a lot of like early YouTube parallels, and then parallels with painting as well, but he's an oil painter, like proper oils. It's nice because at our house, his is a classic art studio with the big windows and light and all the textures. And I go in there and take pictures of all his textures and steal them for my painting backgrounds.

Artie Handz: I'll hop in here. I live in Marin, but I'm a long time Southern California resident. I went to USC. Most of my friends are from Santa Barbara, so I know the area quite well. Looking at those works and the kind of landscape kind of paintings that you have in the works that were like the long 12 minute videos where the kind of fires and these pieces are kind of disappearing and stuff. I found it interesting that you were talking about your earlier works talking about kind of like loneliness and that whereas now I think these pieces like you have a very obvious sense of place in Southern California. You've shown works out in the Palm Springs and kind of that Joshua Tree area from Santa Barbara. So I kind of wanted to hear about Southern California, what it means to you, and that kind of sense of place.

Petra Cortright: Yeah, I mean, especially after like spending. I mean, this is like and this is kind of also related to like the webcam videos as well. I mean, when I was younger, I moved around a lot. was in I was actually in the Bay Area for one semester. I went to CCA. That was the first art school that I dropped out of. Made it a whole semester. And then I was at Parsons for a couple of years in New York. I was in Berlin, like moving around a lot.

Every time I would move, I'd always make like a new webcam video because I just had a different background or different like environment to make them in. But as I've gotten older, I mean, you get wiser as you get older, obviously, and I've just really leaned into my love for California. I love the American West actually. And two, wait, three years ago, we bought a place in Montana (my mom's side of the family is from Montana). I grew up in Southern California, but I spent a lot of time in Montana as a kid. And I just realized like how big a part of me, these landscapes are just the vastness of everything and like the scale. I just love it. I love the light quality. love the big mountains, big canyons, being able to see for a really long time.

I actually struggled living in other places because I felt like I couldn't see for a long time. When I lived in New York, I was always living in some shit hole basement apartment with five roommates. And you're just rat level, which is not even the nice New York. I'm sure there's plenty of people who can see far in New York, the more money you have, like the higher you can go there. Anyways, I liked Berlin because I felt like there was more space, but I just realized I'm a person that really likes space, which is a very American thing, along with big cars. I also realized my life doesn't really feel real unless I drive, like if I have a car.

Leyla Fakhr: That's so funny because my life doesn't feel real when I can't walk anywhere. I feel the opposite.

Petra Cortright: Yeah, well, I mean, Europeans, I'm sure, feel like that. It probably feels like some, I don't know, you just kind of have to lean into what, like an upbringing or something. Or some people want the total opposite. I don't know, but I just realized, it's like whatever, like fuck it. I love cars, I love California, it's fine. Yeah.

Artie Handz: I mean, you're preaching to the choir here, although I've lived in New York and I love walking and I love living in a walkable city. My family is from Wyoming, Northeastern Wyoming, and we are generational cattle ranchers. And so we go up there every summer and I take my three young boys and we go up there and exactly what you said is just go up there and see the space because you know we live in in Marin but we're in the city and it's you know people and energy and all that and that serenity and just like the landscape and being able to see for to the end of the horizon you know like you don't get to see the horizon that often anymore there's always something in the way so that's just something I'm just excited to talk to you about because all everything you're doing is like really resonating for me as someone who lives in California and has some of same interests.

Petra Cortright: Yeah, no, that's so amazing. I think also too, like, I think for like a big part of my life, especially like in the art world as well, I almost feel like, I mean, there's been times where I was like almost, I don't know how to say like, I mean, the art world is so, it's so New York centric, it's so European centric that like,

I think I felt at times, not ever embarrassed, but just maybe even apologetic to be American or be from the West or something. And now I'm just like, actually, that's just who I am and I really like these things.

Leyla Fakhr: But isn't LA kind of having a bit of a renaissance of an art hub?

Petra Cortright: It always, it goes in like circles, it's cyclical, like, it's like LA's cool and then it's like, no, it's actually shitty and like it just goes around and you know, cause like, there's waves.

Leyla Fakhr: How much do you guys, I mean, you and Mark both being artists, how much do you hang out with other artists? How much is that part of your life?

Petra Cortright: Well, it's this neighborhood is amazing. I mean, we're out in the east in Pasadena and there's so many people who live out here. Like John Raffman lives 10 minutes away. So and they have a kid to mean we really like live. You know, I mean, it's like once you're a parent, you're kind of on like a different schedule. I love how I like, you know, I have like my whatever, I guess like just seeing on social media, like I love seeing like younger people going out and stuff like, I'm like, good for them. It's really cute like to see all the people like partying in LA. I'm in like trying to be asleep by 9 15. But yeah, like the for the parents, there's actually so many artists out here and it's really, it's really nice. I like to think that I have time to hang out but I absolutely don't. I have to like backtrack all the time thinking like, yeah, I have time to hang out. But right now again, I don't, especially with like a baby again. My oldest is, well, he's in like my, we're like in the kindergarten like school routine now. So one of them is like at school part of the day. But yeah, for like, I'm still recalibrating.

Leyla Fakhr: Your kids are young, it’s impossible to have all that energy when you have young children. Before we were touching upon how 'NFT' is a very, very dirty word. It'd be great to hear your perspective on it because I struggle with it. I think Jamie struggles with it too because we still have quite a lot of friends and artists who are not in the space. And I still find that when I'm explaining to ex-colleagues what I'm doing, it's amazing, even though they trust me, they know me, and they think what we're doing is great, there's still a bit of hesitancy around that word. I find myself bringing in artists that they love and they know, and then I get a different kind of reaction because they can see it through the light of the artist's work.

But I'd be curious to know two things. One, when did you decide to put a work on the blockchain? And two, how do you decide which works to sell in the more traditional way and which works to sell in a, you know, on the blockchain because your work is very digital, full stop. So yeah. Yeah.

Jamie Gourlay: And also, how do you think about the stigma yourself? Does it affect you in any way?

Petra Cortright: I mean I've been through so many phases, like there's been dumb words associated with everything I've ever done. Like I said, there was no such thing as a digital painter when I was in school. You had to be a graphic designer. But titles change like every five years. Early on it was 'media artists' and then it was 'net artists0 and then was fucking post internet artists, like the big bad one. And then it was whatever it is now.

I don't really care about words so much. I always care about the work. If people are doing something cool online, I usually enjoy being a part of it. I've also cycled through internet subcultures over the years and, I don't know, I'm just kind of always logged on and here for the ride, I guess.

Jamie Gourlay: I guess there's a difference here though, in that it's not just a word, it's actually an artwork that doesn't physically exist, which kind of wasn't a thing before. How do your galleries think about the fact it doesn't exist in a physical form? How do your collectors, fellow artists? I didn't get it until I'd own a digital artwork. It's pretty hard to get it until you have a digital artwork. How do you feel people on that side of the fence feel about?

Petra Cortright: Yeah, I agree with that. Once you start getting them, there's like something that clicks. It's like a little bit of an addiction. And it is really hard to explain until you're like, 'but I want that one too'. You just have to start and get one. And then you want another one. 

Jamie Gourlay: I mean I'm guessing between the few of us here we’ve got to have over 5000.

Artie Handz: Sounds like a drug.

Petra Cortright: That's amazing. It took me forever to even figure out how to engage in this world because digital art was always looked down upon. It still is. The perception is that it's a digital painting, it's not a 'real' painting. I've dealt with that for so long that none of this stuff really phases me. I'm just gonna like keep making JPEGs because I've always made JPEGs. It's fun to print them out, it's also fun to put them on the blockchain. But it's the same thing I've always done. The terminology doesn't change that. I just keep doing what I've done for 20 years.

Jamie Gourlay: I have very few friends in the art world who own NFTs and it's really frustrating. Have you tried to get people interested, or does it feel like there's just no point?

Petra Cortright: I think my philosophy was just like to post things, make it available, but not necessarily preach to people one way or the other. I'm more comfortable with like people making their own decisions. I just always try to make things that I feel are like beautiful and accessible.

Within the traditional art world I have been so extremely limited in what I can produce and what I can show because there has to be a restriction on physical things. It's just the basics of supply and demand. I make so much more than I can ever exhibit in like a traditional gallery setting. The scale like with NFTs and what's possible with digital art is so much nicer for my practice. So I just love to have be able to have both.

I mean, it's nice to make physical things as well of course but I especially the way that I work with the paintings and all the layers and the endless variations, and I don't even work generatively, I do everything like myself. Well, actually that's not true. I do have Photoshop scripts that I run and all these different things that can help me make more versions if I want to. So it's half and half, but I always like having my hand in the work as much as possible because that's what's fun to me. I'm not like a big code person.

Jamie Gourlay: Do your galleries give you any kind of advice on this? I mean you've got a great gallery in Berlin. Do they sort of say why are you doing this? Don't do it. Or do they feel like, no, that's Petra's thing, let her do it.

Petra Cortright: Yeah, mean, I think they're very just like, I think it's, it's also just complimentary as well. It's not like, I'm always looking like, I think that if anything, or like, I don't know, I always, I think like an advice to artists or like anyone really, I mean, I see so many situations in the art world that I think are so like lose, lose, like I don't know why. I mean, I'm such a prolific maker. like, just like the idea of making things really scarce or limited is like, kind of bothers me. But I mean, I'm always looking for like win-win situations. Like I want to be able to make, you know, like release digital things and physical things. Like I want to do everything. I don't just want to, and it's usually possible. I think people lie to themselves and like, but if I, you know, this thing that I'm doing might hurt this other thing. But I never, I try not to think in those terms. I think it's like a very false way of thinking and usually kind of a mistake. It's like you can actually just do whatever you want.

For the most part.

Leyla Fakhr: I just want to say you inspire me so much. I've worked with so many artists and I always hear that, you know, the only way to really have made it back in the 90s and 00s was graphic design. And I think that, to commit to yourself, to say, no, fuck that, I’m not doing that, it’s inspirational. As an artist, I could see how scary it would be diving into digital art given the kind of hostility it still experiences to this day at times.

Petra Cortright: I'm probably glassing over how painful it actually was and how difficult I made things for myself and my family. Maybe there should be a big warning sign. I mean, it's always that risk reward type of thing.

Leyla Fakhr: Did you ever make your earlier YouTube videos available for sale?

Petra Cortright: Yeah, so the first show I ever I sold work at was at this legendary gallery in the net art world called And/Or, run by Paul Slocum in Dallas, Texas. He had shown like shown artists like Corey Archangel and Michael Bell-Smith. It was a two-person show in 2008, and Paul wanted to show the webcam video that I had made. And he was like, the first one, the one that's in MoMA, which I think is so funny. But anyways, he asked how much I wanted to charge, and I was like, ‘I don't know, Paul, it's a webcam video that I uploaded to YouTube. First of all, am I gonna get in trouble for selling this to someone?’ And I didn't believe that anyone was gonna even buy it, so I barely considered the whole idea about putting a price on the stuff that I was creating. I thought sure we can sell it because I need money, but it was almost a joke to me. I was just so uncomfortable with even saying a price. I wished we could just do like 10 cents per YouTube view. So that's what we did. He wrote an algorithm for it.

The price fluctuated a little bit, but it was around $2,000, which I thought was insane. And we sold it on a DVD. The collector really liked the idea of it. So that's how I continued to sell the YouTube videos or the webcam videos for a long time, 10 cents per view on YouTube. And the prices would kind of fluctuate.

It was just also a way for me to not feel like I had blood on my hands or like I could detach myself from like this idea of selling things as it wasn’t up to me, it was up to the internet. But then of course I was like doing the insane keywords that would bump up the views (I started doing that before the pricing). It was just really for fun. But then that got me into some trouble.

Artie Handz: I wanted to ask you about your use of language. Earlier we were discussing your like proto-SEO language, right, and I was watching a few videos last night and in some of your typing it was free and it’s all lowercase and misspelled. I do this too. I don't type in uppercase and I used to be a lawyer. So I don't know for me, I think like fuck grammar and all that. And I probably swear too much, but it's sort of, you know, going against that. So I was wondering if you have a similar thing or why you kind of choose to use that language.

Petra Cortright: Yeah, I’ve always been super interested in it and growing up on the internet, you learn to speak in a certain way. Even like, you know, something as simple as like you said capitalization, it's more casual to speak in all lowercase, and that's what I prefer. I still write emails to this day in all lowercase. Like I refuse to give in to that level of professionalism, unless it's something to do with my son's school as I don't want to seem like a crazy person. But other than that, if it's just on me, I usually come across as the voice is different. 

All the titles of my paintings, they kind of come from these SEO lists. I don't remember a single title of a painting, not a single one, because they're really crazy. And also growing up on the internet, different websites had different acceptable ways of speaking and early YouTube was really rough. Not as rough as forums, I mean, depending on which forum, but there are levels of banter that I really appreciate and there's this kind of thing to like give someone a hard time, but like everyone knows you’re just having a laugh. So although I've had such a hard time, I think like the last decade with all the wokeness that’s creeped into everything and people getting banned for this or that, I think it's so silly. 

I've just been really interested in the way that people speak online and I've really enjoyed it. But that is what got me in trouble with the keywords that I put on the videos because there's a lot of really, really bad words in there. People accuse me of profiting off of racism and all this, but it's like, you single out and cherry pick certain things from this big list of everything, especially these words that are really supposed to provoke a reaction, but then there's other stuff in there, it’s everything. I don't know, I'm really, very interested in it. Everything in my work always has a lot to do with internet language.

Artie Handz: I think it's, that's fascinating. I honestly never used Twitter at all before joining the space three years ago. And I feel like I've completely changed how, how I speak to people on the internet, through spending three straight years, thousand days straight on Twitter, you know? I definitely think it's really interesting as well.

Leyla Fakhr: I think you also have a slightly different persona, right Petra?

Petra Cortright: Yes, definitely. I think like most people, you know, I've met a lot of people online over the years, and the majority of my social relationships have been from meeting people online and everyone's always really nice and low key in real life, in person I mean. But I also don't believe that there's no difference to me in person or online. With social media today, people have a really hard time realizing the differences between a persona online and what's actually going on just behind the scenes or whatever. 

I think the freedom to speak online in the last decade has been much more difficult than it used to be for sure. Hopefully that can stay open, because I really believe in free speech. And it's so interesting to kind of see the different stages over the years of life, like stylistically the way that people speak on early Twitter was so boring. It was like people would just send like the dumbest little thought that was like, you know, ‘I had a burrito for lunch’. And there were no likes or, you know, it wasn't even an interactive website when it first came out. It was just like, you would send a thought into the ether and that was it.

Everyone made fun of Twitter for so long. It was just kind of a joke. A lot of people had food Twitters just so they could say what they had eaten. That was kind of a thing. I've been participating in these things for so long, way before there was any I guess incentive, incentive for likes or anything like that, which was good for me, very low stakes, no reason to do things other than to just do it art for art's sake.

Leyla Fakhr: I really like that. I read that in many of your interviews that you're one of the least pretentious artists that I know. You're sort of like, don't attach meaning, don't make it political, I'm just really enjoying creating, but a lot of the subjects that you're exposed to will reflect in your work naturally. 

I was wondering if you could go a bit more into the works that you're releasing for SOLOS, BURNT UMBER BROKEN SILVER AMERICAN SPIRIT? What the thinking was behind them? You're building on a couple of series of works that you had done in the past.

Petra Cortright: Yeah, I have them open on my other screen. It's a continuation of these American Western landscapes. They're a little bit like wildfire paintings. That's sort of the big thing on our side of the, I guess it's like east of the Mississippi, the water.

That's the catastrophe that is kind of on everyone's minds, especially with the hurricane right now. And then west of the Mississippi is fire. So it's just like, you get to pick your flavor of this ominous natural disaster thing if you live anywhere in America. I mean, anywhere in the world, really. 

Fire is always such a big part of life here. I don't really have necessarily like a political statement about it. I mean, the fires could be handled way better. But they’re also very beautiful. This sounds silly to say, but they’re extremely cinematic, I mean, the smoke clouds, like the insane mushroom clouds that come from them, and the light insane when there's fires. And light is very important to painters. So it gets this like crazy red, pinks, orange. It just looks totally apocalyptic and beautiful.

I like working with this kind of imagery. And then there's a lot of doors in these paintings and kind of like passageways, which are not a very difficult metaphor. In the last couple of years I've had to like go through a lot of things, like literally.

Leyla Fakhr: It gives it a real surrealist quality.

Lonliboy: I relate with them all very heavily because I lived through the San Gabriel fires in LA and then I lived through Hurricane Katrina and right now I'm in North Carolina, and I’m two hours away from where all that is going down right now. 

It's very relatable, this juxtaposition of the different flavors all around the world. And it is beautiful in a sense, you know, how people respond to it, but the fact of the matter is that nature is causing these things, and there is a beauty in the rebirth of everything that comes after it as well.

Petra Cortright: Yeah, for sure. I weirdly always like to be reminded that there are things that are much more powerful than like humans. I mean, the San Gabriel mountains are right behind our house. I love seeing things that are bigger than me that make me feel small. It makes me feel very human and sane.

Lonliboy: A lot of people, when they look at an expansive landscape like that, they want to get lost, they want to be alone, there is a sense of loneliness or solitude to them. Do you feel that way when looking at these expanses or do they make you feel something completely different?

Petra Cortright: That's a really good point. I started painting these things to go back to something. I'm sure there's like some very Freudian with the psychology behind that. But it's no secret that with all my paintings I want to be there mentally.

That's always a very guiding thing. I always hope I never want to tell anyone what to feel about my work. I feel really proud if people find any kind of moment of escapism with my works, I think that's a very important function of art, to be able to go somewhere else and not necessarily be reminded of whatever is actually going on, to be able to go to another place.

Leyla Fakhr: Your works also have a nice like juxtaposition of that heaven and hell, the idyllic landscapes and the fires. I like that they're not all sugarcoated, that there’s always an undercurrent of danger.

Petra Cortright: Yeah, it's nice to have a balance and not have things be too saccharine, it's not so interesting.

Leyla Fakhr: Completely.

Artie Handz: Earlier you talked about your love for California, but also the American West. As someone who shares that with you, I feel like these are like very honest love letters to the American West. It's beautiful, it’s gorgeous. It's also fucking on fire.

Petra Cortright: Yeah, it will also kill you. It's rough.

Artie Handz: Yeah, I love them. I just love them.

Petra Cortright: I mean, my measure for art is literally what I want to hang it in my house, what I want to look at. It's so simple. People can like overcomplicate things so much. I love a work if children like it. I feel like that's always like a good test to pass. If you need an essay to understand the work and a kid is not engaged, I mean, sure, I guess that's a style, but I personally like things to appeal to more ages and be really simple. Like, would you want to look at this image? Would you want to live with it?

Artie Handz: Yeah, I think it's a very guttural reaction to your work. It's not like, ‘let's think about the 10 different things this is saying’, but you feel something immediately. It is very powerful in that way.

Leyla Fakhr: How does your husband feel about digital paintings given that he he works in oil that's quite textured and thick in comparison to flat digital paintings? I feel like you've got the same sensibilities actually, but yours is digital and his isn't.

Petra Cortright: I mean, he gets mad at me that I can make 50 paintings in a day and he has to wait for this round of paintings to dry before he can finish them. There's of course a lot of jokes about that all the time, and I’m probably really annoying about it. But he actually started incorporating digital processes. Two artists can't live in the same place without there being some cross-pollination. I've showed him how to do a lot of stuff in Photoshop that has really helped his paintings.

He helps me by having all these beautiful textured things that I go and steal. Anytime he makes like a really nice underpainting, I'm absolutely using that in my work, but I always try to change it a little bit. It's also really nice not to work the same exact way. If we worked the same way, I don't know if I could stand it.

Leyla Fakhr: We're looking forward to your release on Verse at the end of October. Do you have any other upcoming exhibitions that we should look out for?

Petra Cortright: Yes, this Saturday Mark and I are both involved in this thing called Luminex in LA. It's these big projections. It's only one night, but they rent out outdoor parking lots and then project onto buildings. I think it'll be really crazy.

Then I'm in some museum shows this fall, a group show at the Torrance Art Museum, a group show at MCA Chicago, which is doing a big survey of the history of painting. A ton of artists are in there. That one opens in November. I'm probably forgetting stuff right now. LACMA. PST ART is the event Getty is doing right now. It's like an umbrella of a lot of different museums and galleries in LA. And I think LACMA is showing a piece in it.

Leyla Fakhr: Incredible, but mostly US it seems. Seems like we're going to have to make a business trip.

Lonliboy: I just want to say you have this banana piece on your website Petra that reminds me of this book I got when I was like six where you cross your eyes and then it’s an optical illusion. 

Petra Cortright: My god. Is it the BUNNY BANANA one? I made that when I was in Tokyo for three months in 2009. That was really, it was very cliche, but it was very lost in translation time. I was engaged to another net artist. I don't want to, feel like he'll be mad if I say who it was.

Leyla Fakhr: Now we all want to know Petra. Thanks. We're going to Google after this.

Petra Cortright: It's fine. Raphael Rosendahl. Anyway, he had a residency in Tokyo at the time, so I just tagged along. I had nothing to do. He would go to his residency every day and I was just alone at the apartment, making webcam videos.

Lonliboy: I think a lot about flash preservation and porting in general when I think about early works on the internet. I was just wondering what your perspective on that is in general, because if I recall correctly, there are a few pieces that integrate flash plugins that can't be viewed anymore?

Petra Cortright: So I downloaded the last version of the flash debugger or whatever Adobe wanted to call it that they had released on their website. I actually have a hard copy of it. If anyone needs it, they can email me. It's literally the last way to view Flash. I have made a ton of work in Flash.

I think some museums have some of my flash work and they've asked for screen recordings. I'm terrible at this stuff. Like I'm so reckless with everything, I'm so proud of myself I actually just backed up my main computer.

I find I always get to this point where things can become so chaotic and I'm like, okay, this will be like a really, really bad, it's time to back up the files now. I crashed a computer earlier this year and like lost a bunch of stuff. I treat my machines very poorly and run them into the ground.

But I feel like they work for me, I don't work for them. I melted several graphics cards, and like, especially with webcam videos, I'll open like five different shitty webcam programs and feed the video feed through and it just kind of, you know, the fans like going crazy. I don't think I like optimize settings very well. 

I could probably do it better, but that would take too much time. I'd rather just like make something. I think really hard on my machines and then they just die. But it's fine. I'm trying to back things up.

I mean, I have some major issues with Adobe. Don't even get me started. I mean, I hate the cloud-based software. All of it is so horrible. It's just for profit. I feel like a loser every time that I pay the money to subscribe to the Adobe Cloud.

I like hard files. I'm very much of a desktop person. I don't like the cloud. I don't like phones. I'm also just older. I'm used to these kind of things. I don't know where going with this.

Artie Handz: On the impermanence of Adobe and the various software we use, at least we can counterbalance a little bit with the permanence of the blockchain, right? Unless it's on IFPS and if you pay enough and some of those aspects as well. 

I just really wanted to thank you so much for coming to SOLOS and bringing us your wonderful work and for spending a full hour with us when you're so busy. I know you have a new child at home, anytime when they're napping or not on top of you is a precious time. So we really, really appreciate it.

Petra Cortright: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, thank you. I'm so excited.