Desktop Diary #5
some things I saved to my desktop last month
This summer, I’m teaching a 10-week course at The School for Poetic Computation about screen images called Imperfect Pictures (assistant teaching by friends Will Allstetter and Kayla Drzewicki). 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. More information and details on how to apply here.
I haven’t been feeling very big brain lately. Maybe it’s good that I don’t have anything to dissect or untangle or make sense of. We could all use a break from trying to “unpack” every trend and consumption habit that we come across. There’s an urgency that being online encourages, which can leave me feeling a bit scattered if I let myself get swept up in it. Sometimes the answer is to slow down and watch a Godard film (I’m watching them all in order—at the end of the day, I’m just an indie chick with a bob haircut) or read a book about Internet art, and remember that everything I’ve been thinking about has been swirling around for a long time.
While I regain my strength and wait for my discursive mind to expand, let’s talk about some pictures. Some beautiful, some mediocre, some ugly. It’s time for another Desktop Diary. See the February 2024 Desktop Dump here.
I realize this is the second blog post (in a row!) where I’ve brought up Madison Beer, someone I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about normally. I took this screenshot while surfing my Instagram Explore page. I had just watched Man Ray’s L’Étoile de mer (The Starfish) and had an epiphany upon seeing the Starface pimple patches affixed to Beer’s face. I quickly created a side-by-side of a still from the film and the iPhone screenshot, printed it out, and hung it on the wall of my studio (my living room). Sometimes, when I’m scrolling Instagram, I have a PhD.
This is a photo of me at 17, posing in front of my parent’s garage. Unlike the majority of the photos of me as a teenager—shot by me, alone in my room—this was clearly taken by someone else, for purposes I can’t remember now. It resembles an ID photo and certainly never made it to the Internet. I found it while sorting through my highschool hard drive for my haircutsfolder project. When I was 14, I desperately wanted my lip pierced, and begged my parents to let me get it done. They said no, but after many appeals on my part, they agreed to let me get whatever I wanted pierced when I turned 17, hoping I would forget by then. My annoying ass did not forget and I dragged my mom to the tattoo parlor the day I turned 17. I however did grow out of wanting a lip ring and got a Monroe piercing instead. When’s the last time you saw someone rocking a Monroe piercing? The piercing alone dates this photo. Mine was short lived, it kept swelling and I eventually took it out a year later.
I’m suffering from beautiful image fatigue. Everything has been done. Every concept has been photographed. Go to Pinterest and look for a picture of a sunset or a hot girl holding a smoothie or a fashion shoot involving CRT TV and a model holding a camcorder. There’s plenty! Currently, I crave compressed pictures and Photobucket watermarks. I’m not the only one exhausted by pretty pictures. I’ve noticed an uptick in purposely “poor” images on Tumblr in particular, which is where I downloaded this squished photo of a woman on what appears to be the London tube.
Speaking of Pinterest, I’ve really enjoyed searching the term “museum aesthetic girl” to source images of anonymous, well dressed women watching video art. You have to dig a little to find the screen-based girlies, but they are there. Next time I have a show, I’m orchestrating this for the install shots.
This is a still from Maya Deren’s 1944 surrealist film, At Land. In this scene, Deren’s character happens upon two women playing chess on the beach. After watching them play for a while, the two girls suddenly appear on the same side of the chess board, and Deren begins to play with their hair. The girls smile, looking upward, but continue to move pieces around on the board. Deren then steals a pawn and runs away with it. This particular interaction feels relevant to some more narrative-based pieces I’ve been working on. I’m currently fixated on groupings of three and instability that underpins them.
In an attempt to augment the diaristic nature of the Desktop Dump, I’ve begun to download some of the advertisements I’m fed while browsing the web. Because they are often based off of my previous Google searches, little fragments of fleeting desires, they also function as timestamps. I had an adblocker extension enabled for a while, but found that I missed seeing these ads littered on my screen. I like trash, spam, visual clutter, and I often go deep into my email client’s spam folder to see if there are any sexy messages that got filtered out waiting for me. 💋👙🔥mollysoda,𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲❜𝘀 𝗮 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹❣️𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗰𝗵 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘆𝗼𝘂❗🍌❤️🔥
Beautiful image fatigue, YES. This speaks to me
so interesting !! i think the nature/beingness of the Desktop is fascinating. so much to unpack.