ꗃ₊˚⊹Recovery Key⚠︎ᝰ.ᐟ
:( try again
I’m spending Thanksgiving (November 28) at the Centre Pompidou for a talk and screening of some of my video works. Please come if you are in Paris! It is free and open to the public.
Dollz Tarot is back by popular demand! A 78-card tarot deck illustrated using drag and drop dress up dollz. I love this flip through video by Rose Honey Ritual.
I’m back. Did you notice I was gone? I don’t think anyone is sitting around hoping for more emails. The last time I was here, I was just about to stage the first public performance of my play Trivial Pursuit. After months of rehearsals, script rewrites, and nights spent at home with my laser printer, it was showtime. Trivial Pursuit, starring Maya Man, Mackenzie Thomas, and Maya Martinez, premiered at PAGEANT to three sold out crowds.
As someone whose artwork is predominantly distributed online, I rarely know how, when, or in what context my work is consumed. And while there is a thrill in operating this way, there is something satisfying about doing things in a more linear manner: working hard on something and getting to see your efforts play out in front of an audience in real time. I write, we rehearse, I edit, I freak out, we pull it together in the nick of time. You come, you sit, you clap, we all go home.
A piece I upload to the internet can live on in perpetuity (until it gets removed, the website decays, etc.) but Trivial Pursuit remains something you either saw or you didn’t. Generally, I don’t need permission to show my work—I can just dump it online with as much or as little fanfare as anyone is willing to give it, and move on with my life. I feel a little uneasy carrying this performance around with me, with no place for it to rest until it hopefully gets to come out again. In the meantime, you can watch a recording of Trivial Pursuit on PAGEANT’s Patreon.
A few weeks ago, ahead of my first lecture for the “Performing Online” class I teach at NYU, I got locked out of my Macbook after restarting my computer during an attempt to connect to the school’s Wi-Fi network. As a wave of panic washed over me, I remembered that I changed my password during play rehearsals so that my performers could more easily log-in to my computer. We never ended up using the password because I had figured out a way to disable the computer's “sleep” function. I also neglected to write the new, easier password down.
What could it have been? I tried: play, HEART, trivial, trivialpursuit, pursuit, maya, mackenzie, molly, apple, dior, cherry. Each password attempt was met with more and more hostility from my device: you’ve been locked out for one minute, five minutes, 15 minutes, one hour, three hours, eight hours, and so on. Eventually, my laptop had abandoned me, confusing me for an intruder, and would no longer let me attempt to log-in. Instead, it presented me with the option to input a mysterious “recovery key,” something I should have written down when I unknowingly enabled this security precaution when first setting up my Macbook.
After a disappointing visit to Micro Center’s Knowledge Bar, I had to accept my fate and take my laptop to the all-knowing Apple Genius Bar. I asked the employee who was helping me how often people came in with my same problem. She said similar cases to mine comprised roughly 60 percent of the people she saw. The other 40 percent were cracked screens. She then told me that my only recourse was to wipe the device and do a factory reset.
I lost video documentation of Trivial Pursuit and any of the images and promotional materials that were in my giant, unorganized “TRIVIAL PURSUIT” folder. Fragments of the production are scattered across cloud storage, Google Docs, other computers, hard drives, and social media. Trivial Pursuit softens in my mind. The urgency to do it again dissipates as its components lie, strewn about.
The last time I lost this much data was roughly a decade ago, after my 2011 Macbook Pro crashed. I can’t remember the details of the crash, but anything I made between approximately 2011 and 2013 that wasn’t already online is gone. While the platforms I upload to are volatile and unreliable, there have been many times that I’ve had to rely on them as archives. The original version of my 2012 piece, Inbox Full, does not exist, but the YouTube rip is in the Centre Pompidou’s permanent collection.
Each week, as I prepare lectures for “Performing Online,” I rely on other artists or institutions to provide adequate documentation of the work I want to show. I dig for ancient uploads and rummage through artists’ websites for descriptions. If I’m lucky, I get an artist statement, some video documentation, maybe even an emulator. At worst, I do my best to convey what I can with a screenshot.
Born-digital artworks and performance have a lot in common: both succumb to the slippery nature of documentation. When all that is left is a memory, a photograph, some notes, or a shaky recording, what becomes “the work?” Is telling you that it happened enough? I’m reminded of this at every turn. Will my upload outlive my file? Will my upload outlive my life?
Resources and readings on documentation I’ve been thinking about lately:
Performance Talks hosted by Jeanette Bisschops
In Between Performance and Documentation by Dragan Espenschied for Rhizome (2023)
Talking to Myself: The Ongoing Autobiography of an Art Object by Adrian Piper (1970-73)