This is Rhizome Today for Tuesday, February 3, 2014. This post will be taken offline on February 4.
Last night, while preparing my remarks for tonight's benefit, I spent some time perusing the disorganized files of Petra Cortright's hard drive. That is, I re-read most of her ebook HELL_TREE, which collects a series of disorganized files and writings from her computer. That is, I procrastinated. (Cortright is the joint honoree of tonight's benefit, along with the ebook's publishers Paul Chan/Badlands Unlimited).
In her Rhizome Artist Profile in 2011, Cortright defined the "hell tree" as a disorganized directory on her computer, containing files that she names by "smashing randomly on the keyboard."
...it makes me miserable thoes files become evil sources of misery and then the hell tree folder rises again. the key is to put things in a file folder with a correctly labeled name. then files within that folder can be named whatever because i know the general idea of whats going on :) uhh my process for working is maybe how a painter would work. i dont really work on big "projects" for the most part. i haven't figured out how to work like that without becoming overwhelmed. i think im more successful if i do something everyday, if im drawing/paintign in photoshop everyday and then taking some time to keep the sketches organized in documents folder. then later i can look back and select thigns that are working those are the pieces. making videos is a mystery and it happens randomly.
This might seem to be unlikely source material for a book, but the haphazard collection of files that are captured in HELL_TREE seem to only get more interesting with time. The ebook can be thought of as a self-portrait of the artist, but it's just as much about her social circle/collaborators and the technological context in which they circulated. It marries a Proustian attention to the minutiae of daily existence with a literary structure seemingly determined by her computer's operating system. It also is a pretty good example of what art historian Josephine Bosma means when she says, "Standardization as the technological basis for the postindustrial network neither predefines every gesture made in or by it, nor does it have one specific dominant aesthetic."
Here's a screen capture of a sample page:
The book mostly consists of screenshots like this, most of them in the applications "Tex-Edit Plus" or "TextEdit" running on a Mac. On the left, a window shows what seems to be a more structured set of data, formatted for human reading although containing descriptions that seem most useful to machines. The window on the right is a lot messier, although still possible to read. Overlaid on top of this are additional windows, some of them displaying poetry fragments, to-do lists, or rants against other internet users.
Here are a few other things I screen capped along the way:
A cameo by artist and fellow member of the Nasty Nets "surf club" (group blog), Guthrie Lonergan.
A cameo by artist and maker of one of tonight's benefit editions, Joel Holmberg aka @dotkalm, followed by one of many to do lists in the ebook.
Yes! Yes I do!
Wrestling with big issues.
And life events intervene--an apartment fire, followed by a departure from school.
The intimacy and messiness of Hell_Tree makes me think of Jesse Darling's argument that
The artist vassal who reaps the fruit of user-serfs' affective labor typically has a Facebook profile so impeccably impersonal as to look like LinkedIn—or else groomed to perfection, rehearsed in the press, and archived as performance.
Cortright's practice was never only about being groomed or about reaping the fruit of the user-serf, but about performing this labor herself, working with the computer and the internet as daily practice. Through this kind of practice, a lot of misery may accumulate in the hell tree folder, but its contents have much to say about our practices and our lives.