Petra Cortright

Who is Petra Cortright?

Petra Cortright is a Los Angeles, California based Internet artist. She studied at Parsons The New School for Design in New York and California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Her work has been shown at the New Museum in New York, Rhizome, the Venice Biennale., the 2010 01SJ Biennial in San Jose, California, and the 12ième Biennale d'art contemporain de Lyon. Petra Cortright makes, "pulverizingly effective works of Net art. Clear-eyed, dainty, and intuitive, they’re weird in a way that Net art has never been weird before".

vvebcam, one of her early works, relates to the activity of looking at a video online. Instead of being a simple consumer of YouTube, Cortright films herself while weaving into her video animations that both interrupt the experience of watching and question the entire physical process of sitting on front of a monitor. She refers to the physical nature of the computing experience in her blog piece, slecht-lands. Like Nam June Paik's TV Buddha, in vvebcam the viewer is both producer and subject. Cortright gazes at the webcam, on which she sees an image of herself punctuated by random computer generated objects.