ོ༘₊⁺☀︎₊⁺⋆.˚ⲏₐₚₚᵧ ₘₒₙᴅₐᵧ☀︎⋆.*:･
ོ༘₊⁺☀︎₊⁺⋆.˚ⲏₐₚₚᵧ ₘₒₙᴅₐᵧ☀︎⋆.*:･
updates, deadlines, links ♥
Hello blog! I’m still suffering from head empty, or rather, head elsewhere but I wanted to pop in and point you to a few things of note.
Imperfect Pictures
I’m teaching a class about screen images at The School for Poetic Computation this summer and applications are due TODAY 4/15 BY 11:59PM EST.
Course description: How often do you try to take a picture of the moon only to realize it doesn’t look how you imagined? How many people are uploading their photos of the moon to the Internet at this very moment? Considering the ubiquity of screen images in everyday life, Imperfect Pictures examines our approaches to them: linking, clicking, saving, discarding, editing, dumping, forgetting. Participants will slow down to consider the role of photography outside of a “hi-res” context. We will look at and create ugly pictures, spam, compressed images, screenshots, facetuned selfies, .gifs, stock photography, boring images, useless images, memes, and badly performing social photographs.
This 10-week course will be taught over Zoom with the help of my assistant teachers Kayla Drzewicki and Will Allstetter. The application shouldn’t take you more than 15 minutes. Scholarships are available! If you’re reading this before the deadline, take it as a sign that we should make something ugly together <3. Apply!
Linking the g(URL)
Last week, the Syllabus Project published my syllabus about the Girl online. About it they write, “‘Girl’: she is the internet subject and object that the discourse never tires of. However many momentary trends she may generate, she is virtually ever-present; though her form and aesthetic evolves, the Girl represents something fundamental about the conditions of being online. Molly’s syllabus analyzes the Girl phenomenon across eras and mediums, deciphering how its disparate manifestations relate to gender, desire, aging, capital, performance, and power.”
Writing this felt pertinent in light of the “recent” girlification of the Internet, the discourse around it, and the subsequent boredom/backlash that has occurred in response to it. I was nervous to publish this because it felt “too late,” but I think that’s sort of the point.
“Girls have been on the Internet all along—using its tools, participating in it, shaping it, all while being revered and reviled for it. Girl discourse-ification turned Girl backlash is part of the natural progression. As someone who has been swimming in the deep end of Girl Internet for some time now, I’ve seen these cycles go in and out of style. I’ve watched the Girlboss climb the ranks, only to be demoted years later. In true Sad Girl fashion, I’ve uploaded videos of myself crying in front of my webcam. I survived Selfie Feminism. Where were you when Pantone named millennial pink the color of the year in 2016? Or when we decided that some women’s consumption habits were bad and referred to them as basic? We still do that, we just continue to change the terms. Every wave and iteration of Girl has passed through me since I started being a girl online 20 years ago.”
Read the syllabus here.
I did a virtual studio visit with Outland for their performance issue. We discuss my history with networked performance and my use of social media platforms as both host and catalyst for the work. We also touch on my obsession with archiving these somewhat volatile environments. Tune into our conversation here.
I’ll leave you with this essay by artist Izzy Dent titled, “Notions of Selves in the Age of Information.” It articulates a lot of feelings I’ve had about identity formation, making art, and accumulation #BeautifulImageFatigue.