Desktop Diary #3

some things I saved to my desktop last month

Hello and welcome back to another Desktop Diary. You can read previous entries here. Before we look at some images together, I’d like to mention a few events I have coming up. 

On November 2nd (this Thursday), I’ll be screening a selection of my video work alongside legends Cory Arcangel and Mike Kelley at Cinema Village. I’ll be showing never-before-seen pieces as well as stuff dating all the way back to 2011! The event is organized by NPCC and starts at 11pm. Buy tickets here. 

On November 16, I’ll be speaking with Claire Donato to celebrate the publication of her new book Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts. It starts at 7pm at Powerhouse Arena in Dumbo. More information on that here.

---

My compulsion to save images feels even more heightened lately. This may be coinciding with my return to Tumblr, my newfound interest in vision boards, or my ritualistic Desktop Dumps. For the past few years, I’ve been uploading the contents of my desktop to the Internet before decluttering and sending the files to their designated homes (folders). For the past few months, I’ve been writing about some of those files on this blog.

I did not intend to make this post on Halloween, but to celebrate, here's an image of Lindsay Lohan dressed as Carrie taking a picture with a fan in 2013. This was taken at a Halloween party at Foxwoods Resort & Casino in Mashantucket, Connecticut. There’s something slightly off about this photo. The fan she’s posing with is wearing two birthday hats and I can’t figure out if it’s her birthday or if this is some costume that I don’t know the reference to. It’s more fun to imagine this is a paid appearance at a My Super Sweet Sixteen style birthday party and she just happens to be covered in fake blood.

Is this supposed to be a wooden statue of Marilyn Monroe? Why does this feel like it’s somewhere in Michigan or Wisconsin to me? I’m having a hard time figuring out the scale of each individual component. The insects, which are presumably bees, feel superimposed. The dog in the background appears both small and large. Bugs crawling on things is a time–honored artistic trope and personal aesthetic choice of mine, mostly flies—but sometimes ants—will make their way into my work. I’m currently reading the book Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, and stopping to watch every film mentioned along the way. The first chapter mentions Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s seminal 1929 surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, which features multiple instances of ants crawling on hands. 100 years later and we’re still going loco for it. 

I found this picture my dad took of me while sifting through my Twitter archives. I spent a lot of time in the computer room, which also happened to be my dad’s office, in the early 2000s. My dad was pretty skilled with computers and would program them to shut down at 10:30 PM every night as a tactic to keep me from staying up all night chatting on AOL Instant Messenger. Later, that orange iMac was moved up to my bedroom (sans Internet), which my dad then programmed to automatically turn on and start playing the “F.U.N. Song” from Spongebob Squarepants, which acted as an alarm before school. He eventually got rid of that computer after I moved out, but I ended up buying the exact same orange iMac on Ebay in 2017. It’s sitting unplugged on my living room floor as we speak. F is for friends who do stuff together… 

I used to own one of these skirts and foolishly got rid of it—probably in some feeble attempt to reinvent myself. I regret this because the Google and Ebay search gods do not want me to own another one. What do you call this? Butt skirt? Panty skirt? Panty photo skirt? Underwear illusion skirt? Underwear illusion prank skirt? I’ve tried it all and to no avail. I’m just going to make one with an image of my own butt at this point. Would you wear a skirt with an image of a flat butt with maybe a pimple on it? Groundbreaking.

When I was working on my Memory Jog: Tumblr 2010 post, I ended up unearthing a bunch of long-forgotten Myspace-era glitter graphics. I’m particularly attracted to the hyper-specific long block of text ones. In a world before subtweets and cryptic Instagram stories, we had aggressive glitter graphics. For some reason, it’s my job to save all of them. My ever-growing folder of outdated .gifs and glitter graphics titled “VISUAL DIRECTORY” will be my contribution to Internet archeology. 

I recently paid a visit to one of my favorite Tumblr accounts, radioactivelingerie. She hasn’t been active in a few years and Tumblr has throttled her page due to “mature content.” I love the images of women she would share, mostly awkward or out-of-context fetish photography and video stills: a leg with green slime on it; a woman standing backwards on an exercise machine; a pair of women in bed surrounded by balloons. Upon revisiting her page, I realized that she had been playing with the tagging function and essentially writing poems within each individual post’s tags. Here’s an example:

#lucite #must love lucite #low: a jug in pain cries out from the untamed wilderness #i worship the products i buy#narcissism videos talk about gaslighting #on a loop at the abandoned dojo on the railroad tracks #cellulite cuties vs machine-based machinery #my grasp on reality is tenuous at best… #feast your eyes on my adorable genitals... they're hiding in plain sight #recoup my loses... call in yet another drone strike… #eggbeater beat off contest cancelled #five speeds to cool your soviet worries #sixteen volt make delightful synthcore jams for twentysomethings in nineteen-ninety-eight #orchestral manoeuvres in the dark mansplain a go-go kill kill record store clerk smugness.

I saved this one because it felt both hurried and posed, and because it is reminiscent of one of my favorite movies, Superstar.

You can see the images discussed and more in my most recent Desktop Dump. Browse the archive here.