Like the webcam videos Cortright has been working on since 2007, “smoking-vase-1” was filmed with no post production, just live use of standard webcam software. Similar to Instagram or Snapchat videos, the effects are part of the original recording, but by contrast, “smoking-vase-1” is not part of a networked system designed for data mining and facial recognition. The looping animation is slow, simple, and with a focus on beauty, which led Cortright to her choice of subject as well as the obsolete filter. To shoot “smoking-vase-1,” Cortright used an old 2014 Mac OS, which gives the image a vintage flavor. A favorite subject of her digital paintings, flowers are featured here as a fragile metaphor of time passing, of a relationship between the real and digital sphere that is ever evolving, never the same.
