From the browser to the gallery: Petra Cortright's 'post-internet' art

The artist is exhibiting gifs of wiggling strippers found online - and people are collecting her work. So what happens when the technology becomes obsoloete?

Strippers are raining from the rafters at Depart Foundation on Los Angeles's Sunset Strip. It's not an adolescent fantasy; instead, it's post-internet artist Petra Cortright's Niki, Lucy, Lola, Viola, a series of massive screens seemingly infected with VirtuaGirl, a seedy computer programme that sends a cadre of strippers dancing across your laptop, peeking from behind emails, or sidling up to your toolbar.

Cortright found VirtuaGirl in 2009, returning again and again to the website to add new dancers to her collection. She first began using it in a 2013 work, Vicky Deep in Spring Valley, featuring a pole dancer and a unicorn in idyllic forest landscapes culled from screensavers. So who usually looks at the VirtuaGirl site? "There's a Star Wars outfit," she says about the strippers. "The outfits might tell you who the audience is."