🎀´✿.｡.:*thnks 4 th mmrs*¤,¸.•*🎀

a year in review

At the beginning of 2023, I decided to start regularly writing on this blog, one of my many portals online. This was done as an exercise in getting more comfortable talking about my work and being less precious about posting in general. 30 posts later, and I can say I’m a seasoned blogger—perhaps I was made for this, as someone who got my start on LiveJournal 20 years ago. I’m looking forward to continuing this practice in 2024, but for now I’m going to present you with the only content worth blogging in December: a list! A personal, year-end one at that. I’m in love with my portal! <3

THING +1 performance on thing.tube

GIRL CLUTTER

I started off the year interested in the rise of the messy aesthetic vs. the clean/that girl aesthetic that had been proliferating on our feeds through the height of the pandemic. I wrote about routines, maintenance, and the performance of them for the 2023 Are.na Annual. My ROOM MAKEOVER! *messy girl aesthetic inspired* girl clutter ♡ video was featured in a New York Times piece about this recent turn to showing one’s mess online. Earlier this month, I performed a collaborative clean-with-me where I invited viewers to help declutter my virtual bedroom over on the experimental artist-run streaming platform thing.tube. 

CHICK MAGNET

Over the course of the year, I slowly worked on an installation on the outside of my refrigerator, which eventually turned into the book Chick Magnet. It was published with Heavy Manners Library in Los Angeles. Will Allstetter wrote a very thoughtful article about it for i-D. This is the first project in an ongoing body of work that looks at vision boards and the various forms they can take.

Ultra Infinity screening at Cinema Village curated by NPCC

MORE MESS

For nearly five months of 2023, I dedicated my free time to meticulously creating a frame animation from a webcam video of me dancing to a viral TikTok song. Each frame was printed out, handled, and touched with my buffalo-sauce-smeared fingers before being scanned back into my computer and stitched together. This performance resulted in the piece Cupid, which screened alongside legends Mike Kelley and Cory Arcangel at Cinema Village in New York in November, curated by NPCC. I screened another new piece: Tomato Girl, where I go on TikTok live and dance for strangers while being pelted with virtual tomatoes.

DESKTOP DUMPS

I continued my yearslong practice of uploading the contents of my desktop to the Internet before cleaning it up via my Desktop Dump Archive. I’ve written about them in my Desktop Diary series and performed a collaborative Desktop Dump for Screen Walks, an initiative by the Photographers’ Gallery and Fotomuseum Winterthur that hosts live-streamed explorations of online spaces.

Some Tumblrs! panel at New Museum organized by Rhizome

SPEAKING & TEACHING

I had the pleasure of speaking at Brown for their Ivy Film Festival, with my big gulp of diet coke placed on the podium. Rhizome held a much-needed panel on Tumblr and its legacy at the New Museum as part of their recent Tumblr accessions to their ArtBase. It was thrilling to finally get to speak about a platform that meant so much to me in an institutional context. I’m thankful that my Tumblr is now a part of their growing archive of born-digital artworks. Please consider donating to their End of Year Campaign to support the invaluable work they do. I also continued to teach my class on live-streaming at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), as well as visit Faith Holland’s video art history class at SVA and Lucas Blalock’s photography class at Bard. 

MUSEUMS

My video works Inbox Full (2012), Me Singing Stay By Rihanna (2018), and Me And My Gurls (2018) were acquired by the Centre Pompidou for their permanent collection. I first made this announcement on Tumblr last month and someone commented, “Canonized <3.” In February, Me Singing Stay By Rihanna was part of the exhibition I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen at the Modern Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. This ambitious exhibition, curated by Alison Hearst, surveyed 50 years of screen culture by 50 artists. You can hear me speaking about Inbox Full, performing the self, and a selection of my work for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s podcast Portraits.

A final housekeeping note: I’m not sure I’ll continue doing very many paid subscriber-only posts next year. If you do choose to do a paid subscription, it is because you’d simply like to support what I do. No pressure! See you in 2024!