Most artist websites eventually become tasteful grids: white background, giant thumbnails, biography, exhibitions, contact. Petra Cortright’s old personal site goes in the opposite direction. It looks like somebody handed early web culture a glitter cannon and told it to organize a serious art archive.
Visit Petra Cortright’s hello.html.
The page is a dense index of work organized by year and medium, but calling it an index makes it sound calmer than it is. The navigation is full of arrows, asterisks, misspellings, aggressive capitalization and titles such as SICKWOOF, 666 SMIELYZ, TROLLY XPLOSION, CATS SPIRT SPSIT SPIT and SSSSSSSSSSSSWWWWRRRRRLLLLLL.
Underneath the visual noise is a surprisingly useful chronology. Video pieces run through 2007–2011. Still-image work reaches back to pixel paintings and selected LiveJournal entries from 2004. There are ASCII drawings from 2006, GIF pieces, collaborations, landscapes, drawings, web video and later links to catalogs and studio contact information.
Cortright is important to Internet art partly because the materials of ordinary online life are not hidden behind a gallery-neutral presentation. Webcam video, cheap effects, compression, browser behavior, animated GIFs and amateur-looking graphics are allowed to remain visibly digital.
The famous 2007 work VVEBCAM, for example, came from the period when webcams, YouTube aesthetics and desktop effects were becoming ordinary cultural material rather than specialized computer tricks. Elsewhere the site preserves ASCII drawings, pixel paintings and animated pieces without pretending those forms need to be translated into something more respectable first.
That makes the website itself part of the record. A clean redesign could preserve the files while destroying some of the context: the feeling that web pages were spaces artists could manipulate directly instead of neutral frames supplied by a platform.
There is an old-web confidence to it. Links do not apologize for being links. File names and page names remain visible. Navigation can be eccentric. The website assumes the visitor can poke around and figure things out.
This matters because net art is unusually vulnerable to preservation problems. Browsers change. Plugins disappear. Embedded services die. Video formats become awkward. Domains lapse. Even when individual works survive in museum collections, the original personal site can retain relationships between pieces that institutional descriptions smooth away.
Explore Petra Cortright’s web-art index. It is both portfolio and artifact: evidence from a period when making art for the Internet could still mean making the Internet itself look stranger.