Desktop Diary #1

some things I saved to my desktop last month

Hi everyone and welcome back to my blog. Blog, what a beautiful word. It just sort of rolls off the tongue. Blog. Much nicer to say that Vlog. In lieu of a monthly favorites post (see last month’s), I’m going to share some things I saved to my desktop.

What sits on my desktop is a good indicator of what I’m interested in, working on, and thinking about. In a way, it’s a more telling account of what I’ve been up to than anything I could write. It’s a vision board, a diary, a messy room.

For the past 3 years, I’ve been uploading the contents of my desktop to the Internet, creating what I refer to as Desktop Dumps. Every time I get the urge to clean my desktop, I have to first upload it. Creating the Desktop Dump is time consuming, sometimes taking me days to complete. There’s pleasure in the process of slowing down and considering all of the individual files I’ve collected. I wrote about this practice on the blog back in 2021 and recently performed a collaborative Desktop Dump for Screen Walks. You can browse the Desktop Dump Archive here.

This is a screenshot I took from the comments section of a recent Instagram post. In the post, I’m in a yellow terry cloth bikini drinking a Starbucks Pink Drink. The user munch148294856303720584308 comments, “Why she always consuming shit?” Good question. Perhaps at the crux of my entire art practice. I often use comments and online interactions in my work, this will find its way somewhere soon.

In April, I had the pleasure of speaking at Brown for the Ivy Film Festival. I was recently sent the recording of my talk; I really loved how prominently the Big Gulp full of Diet Coke I had on the podium was featured. Naturally, I had to take some screenshots. I will share a link once the talk is available.

I was sick all last week, so I spent the weekend indoors, scrolling Tumblr. A large portion of the images saved to my desktop come from Tumblr, usually in the form of .gifs or .pngs that I’d like to save for a rainy day. You never know when a glitter graphic that says “Vodka Girl” might come in handy! My scrolling led me to this Tumblr, which hasn’t been updated in the last 4 years, and is full of transparent .pngs of mostly baked goods and flowers. Transparent images, especially of cute things, used to rule Tumblr. On Saturday night, I saved over a hundred images from this blog onto my desktop.

The other type of image I save while scrolling Tumblr (aside from .gifs/.pngs for a rainy day) are images I’d like to maybe recreate. I got this photo from one of my favorite Tumblr blogs, xvisualtreasure09x. There’s something so visceral about those red wood chips in the KFC parking lot. I have plans for this image. First, it’ll get printed out and hung up on my wall, then I’ll try my best to make my own version of it. My attempts at recreating are never exact, the image acts more like a loose guide or direction for my thoughts. Almost everything I have been making lately stems from an image I’ve downloaded.

I think I found this picture of an Ariana Grande cardboard cutout in the rain on Twitter. I’m not sure if this a popular meme amongst Ariana Grande fans or what, but it feels so perfectly in line with my relationship to my own image online. On April 18, I tweeted:

i want to be printed out and hung up and crumpled up and discarded and stepped on and ripped up and worshipped and folded up and stowed away and peeling off of the wall

You know what I mean?

I’ve been going back through old Tumblr posts, because I like to make myself feel extremely weird and fucked up by revisiting the past! I <3 to suffer. Actually, I’m mostly doing it for this blog and am weighing if the mental toll is worth it. That said, I am always excited when I come across an old screenshot. This was taken in 2011. I had not yet graduated from college but I was about to. Based on the Photo Booth thumbnails, it appears that I was at work, listening to The Cure on my iTunes. There’s nothing particularly interesting about this screenshot, other than the passage of time. This is why I’m so pro screenshot. I want to remember what my computer’s interface looked like a decade ago. We forget that the things we interact with on a daily basis—the mundane windows and folders and websites—are subtly changing in front of us. My computer crashed in 2013, so I lost everything I had taken from roughly around that time, unless it was uploaded to the Internet. Finding this is special.

You can see the images talked about above and more in my latest Desktop Dump.