Cory Arcangel hacks, manipulates and reuses various technological applications, including video games, web software, film and print media. In doing so he comments on digital media technologies and cultures while at the same time continuing to seek the possibilities that present themselves on the cutting edge of humor, theory and technological shortcomings. His interest in technology spans from the vernacular or non-expert to the conscious disrupting of digital techniques. Using techniques common to conceptual art and performance, Arcangel's work often comments on the relationship between these two.

The Netherlands Media Arts Institute is showing Arcangel's best known work, 'Super Mario Clouds' (2002-). The artist altered a version of the Nintendo game Super Mario Brothers in such a way that only an iconic, bright blue sky with clouds slowly drifting by remained. For the work 'Structural Film' (2007) Arcangel used the medium of film, which has been around a much longer time. In this work the iMovie filter that imitates dust and scratches from a time-worn film, called 'Aged Film', was applied to a blank image. Arcangel then transferred the resulting quicktime film to 16 mm film, so that the work becomes a contemporary pastiche of Nam June Paik's 'Zen for Film'.

Arcangel's video installation 'Sweet 16' (2006), which by now could almost be called a classic, will also be presented. In this work two intros to the Guns N' Roses video clip 'Sweet Child O' Mine' sometimes run synchronously, and are sometimes totally out of sync. That is because the two videos' lengths are off by one note. The artist's love of music also emerges in his latest work 'Drei Klavierstücke, op. 11' (2009). In this video Arcangel brings together short YouTube fragments of cats walking on pianos. The artist edited all the separate fragments one note at a time, so that the cats collectively play Schönberg's 'Op. 11', a pioneering work of 'atonal' music.
 

Cory Arcangel Permanent Vacation, 2007 It is not an unthinkable scenario: two silver Imacs whose users are absent, sending endless e-mails to each other with the message 'out of office' until their hard disks fill up and crash. But that filling up and crashing apparently will not happen for another 24 years, and before that time the mailserver will long since have become obsolete and certainly the computers will no longer function. With this Arcangel raises for our attention the timely, but also transient nature of phenomenon like e-mail, mailservers and the hardware associated with them.

 

Cory Arcangel Self–Playing Sony Playstation 1 Bowling, 2008 In this work Arcangel has modified a Playstation controller. The result is an endless bowling game throwing gutter balls time after time. Here the sometimes totally senseless aspect of technology is made inescapably clear. The artist fusses around for months programming something like this game, which ultimately can no longer do anything meaningful. In this and other game modifications Arcangel twists the narrative structure and changes the game into bizarre cinema. At the same time he displays an absurd situation; there is no longer a sense of any actual replay, but a software program that determines that a gutter ball will be bowled, anew, and endlessly.

 

Cory Arcangel I don’t want to spoil the party, 2007 It is February, 1964. The Beatles have just landed in America. The mass hysteria around the band is at its height. The video shows the legendary press conference that is now regarded as a cultural-historic landmark. In Arcangel's version an irritating, active red dot floats between Paul McCartney's eyes. Is it the laser pen of a professor of media/television studies, or is it something stranger? In any case, according to Arcangel it is nothing personal... The title 'I don't want to spoil the party' is a number by the Beatles, written by John Lennon. In the text somebody goes to a party and waits there for his girlfriend. When it becomes clear that she has stood him up, he leaves the party rather than spoil things for the others.

 

Cory Arcangel Untitled (Translation Exercise), 2006 In 'Untitled (Translation Exercise)' the artist dubbed the popular high school film 'Dazed and Confused' by the artist Richard Linklater, hiring a company in India to perform the labor-intensive process. He asked the staff at the Indian firm to read the original scenario. Each 'actor' had to record his sentences independently of the others, so that the post-synchronized dialogues fail to connect with one another, often quite comically. The work can be read as an allegory for the manner in which American's dependence on out-sourcing is destroying its social cohesion.

 

Cory Arcangel Sweet 16, 2006 In this work two introductions from the video clip 'Sweet Child O' Mine' by Guns N' Roses play together, sometimes synchronously, sometimes totally out of sync. The intro is comprised of a guitar loop by the guitarist Slash. The installation plays the two video images alongside each other, starting in perfect sync, but becoming more and more removed from each other in terms of image and sound, slowly creating fascinating visual and auditory contrasts. After seventeen minutes the image and sound come back around to running in sync again, and the process starts all over anew.

 

Cory Arcangel Structural Film, 2007 Arcangel here plays with the idea of old (and old-fashioned) media, and how new media seeks to copy old media, as well as tapping into our continuing fascination with and reassessment of abstract and experimental film. In 'Structural Film' Arcangel employs the filter from iMovie called 'Aged Film', which imitates the dust and scratches on a worn film, to an empty image. The artist then transferred the resulting QuickTime film to 16 mm stock, so that the work becomes a contemporary pastiche on Nam June Paik's 'Zen for Film'.

 

Cory Arcangel Personal Film, 2008 In 'Personal Film' Arcangel transfers degraded / hand drawn film material found online to 16mm stock so that it appears to be 'avant-garde'. As in several other works, here Arcangel makes use of existing material, a method that has been familiar and much used since Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades. In an absurdist manner the artist combines the use of existing material, which looks like avant-garde film, with the labor-intensive, expensive and complicated process of transferring from video to 16 mm film.

 

Cory Arcangel I Shot Andy Warhol, 2002 Arcangel added famous figures from the mass media into this handmade hack of the air pistol arcade game 'Hogan's Alley' (1984). The artist replaced the targets of the original game with the iconic characters Andy Warhol, Pope John Paul II, Flava Flav and Colonel Sanders. You only score points by gunning down Warhol, thus assuming the role Valerie Solanas, who did shoot him. In another part of the game you shoot at falling Campbell soup cans, with which Warhol is identified. In this work Arcangel connects the popularity of games with pop art works by Warhol, who became famous for something as banal and popular as Campbell's soup cans. With it, he creates an ode to the king of pop art.

 

Cory Arcangel Super Mario Clouds, 2002- Arcangel modified a version of the Nintendo game Super Mario by hand, in such a way that only the iconic, bright blue sky with its clouds slowly drifting by remained. Like 'Japanese Driving Game', this work refers to landscape art and minimalism. At the same time it is humorous, and totally unplayable. With its simplified, pixelated cloud forms and garish color the iconic blue sky refers to pop art. Arcangel uses the aesthetic of games in order to create a contemporary variant of pop art.

 

Cory Arcangel Japanese Driving Game, 2004 In the adapted 'Japanese Driving Game' a road runs down the middle, with landscapes rushing by to the right and left, as if you were in a race car. It is a horizontal rendering of space, unique to the video games of the 1980s. But conceptually this work also refers to other landscape art, or conceptual art. In this setting the clouds of the Mario game function as the sky that belongs with the road and horizon of 'Japanese Driving Game', as if it is a landscape painting comprised of several screens.

 

Cory Arcangel Space Invader, 2004 'Space Invader' is a hack of the classic 2004 Atari game 'Space Invaders'. This game can normally be played by everyone, but Arcangel reduced the game in such a way that playing it becomes uninteresting. All the invaders have been rubbed out, except for one, although this invader inherits the missiles from the others making the game impossible to play. What's left of the game is boring and difficult, and the frustrated gamer drops it for other things. In this and other games made unplayable by game modifications, Arcangel responds critically to the interactive strategies that have been popular in media art since the 1990s.

 

Cory Arcangel Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11, 2009 Arcangel's love of music emerges in his latest work, 'Drei Klavierstücke, op. 11'. In this work the artist brings together short YouTube fragments of cats walking on piano keys. In the work each video fragment is equivalent to one music note. The artist edited the images so that together the cats collectively play Schönberg's 'op. 11'. 'Op. 11' is an avant-garde atonal piece for three pianos. With this work Arcangel pushes editing techniques to the limit, and takes the MTV style of a rapid succession of images and restless camera handling to an extreme. Here the artist seeks to make an important piece of music, unknown to the vast majority of his audience, visible with the aid of the omnipresent, banal, almost slapstick YouTube fragments of cats-on-the-keyboard.

 

Cory Arcangel completed his Bachelor in 'Technology in Music and Related Arts' at The Oberlin Conservatory of Music, in Oberlin, Ohio, in 2000. Together with friends from the conservatory, in 1998 the artist set up the programmers' collective BEIGE. In addition to being an artist, Cory Arcangel is also a musician and performer. At the age of 26, Arcangel already had a solo exhibition in the Migros Museum in Zürich, Switzerland. Since then his work has been shown in group exhibitions in museums all over the world. Arcangel has had shows in commercial galleries in New York (USA), Paris (France), Salzburg (Austria), London (UK), Brussels (Belgium), Geneva (Switzerland), Stockholm (Sweden) and other.
 

 

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