Trisha Low's screenshot poetics
Click here for an enlarged version of the above screenshot.
When I think of Tumblr, and of Trisha Low, I think of sitting on the Caltrain on vacation with my family in the summer of 2015, scrolling through Tumblr on my phone and seeing the last essay in Low’s “On Being-Hated” series for SFMOMA’s Open Space magazine. I remember reading it and reading around it: first a block quote on my dashboard, posted by my then-boyfriend, then a series of posts on Low’s own Tumblr, and finally the essay itself, which I downed greedily, looking for answers about what I was then just beginning to learn about the fraught racial politics of the avant-garde.
Editorial note: Readers can view larger versions of each of the images below by clicking them; they will open in another window.
When you think of Tumblr, it’s not just, like, your Tumblr dashboard, but it’s like a memory of a screenshot of your Tumblr dashboard that’s on your Tumblr dashboard.
— Trisha Low, “Hunting Season”
Edited byAl Filreis J. Gordon Faylor