System Landscapes (2007)

System Landscapes re-imagines the computer program as a landscape, presented as a website to be accessed and inhabited online. By layering early Google Earth satellite imagery with the aggressive, repetitive output of crashing Adobe Photoshop windows — the result of over-taxing the software — Cortright transforms digital limitations into a layered, surreal topography. The work utilizes the language of the “glitch” as a way to map the frustration, playfulness, and chaotic architecture of early web-making. In the context of WWW!, System Landscapes serves as a foundational inquiry into the screen as a terrain of its own, where satellite views provide the horizon, error windows form the weather, and the desktop functions as an environment one can traverse.

Petra Cortright is a Los Angeles–based artist whose practice interrogates the aesthetics of consumer and corporate software. Rising to prominence with her early webcam self-portrait videos uploaded to YouTube and captioned with spam text, she translates endlessly modifiable digital files into paintings on aluminum, linen, or paper at a “decisive moment.”