cory arcangel

Cory Arcangel (born 1978) is a digital artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. His work is concerned with the relationship between technology and culture, and with media appropriation.

Arcangel's best known works are his Nintendo game cartridge hacks and reworkings of obsolete computer systems of the 70's and 80's. ^[7]

Some examples of his work are Super Mario Clouds, a Mario cartridge from which everything but the clouds has been erased, Sans Simon, a video of Simon and Garfunkel where Arcangel films his hand blocking out the image of Paul Simon on screen, and I Shot Andy Warhol, which replaces targets in the shooting game "Hogan's Alley" with images of Pope John Paul II, Flavor Flav, and Andy Warhol.

Arcangel has worked in collaboration with the Paper Rad Art Collective to make Super Mario Movie, a 15 minute video made by replacing the Super Mario Bros. game code with a movie program written by Arcangel. All the graphics were left intact and were used by the movie engine, which tells the story of the game world becoming corrupted and Mario questioning his own existence.

In 2007, Film and Video Umbrella commissioned him to produce a new work, a couple thousand short films about Glenn Gould^[8], using tiny fragments of video, each containing a single note of various instruments (and some performing pets) to create an arrangement of Bach's Variation no. 1 (from the Goldberg Variations). To do this, he had to create his own video-editing software.^[9]

Arcangel's recent work such as Video Painting and Photoshop CS: 110 by 72 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient "Spectrum", mousedown y=1098 x=1749.9, mouse up y=0 x=4160 addresses the role of technology in determining the way that viewers appreciate art.

"Imagine me buying some video equipment off of eBay, turning it on, pressing some random buttons, and then calling whatever comes out my ‘work.’ This mind-set is the spirit of Adult Contemporary. In contrast to some of my older work, which exercised a somewhat subversive use of modern digital tools, the pieces in this show are inspired by the idea of using technology exactly as it was designed, although in a manner best described as ‘non-expert.’ What if the possibility of using a system poorly in an uneducated manner were celebrated? What if I, as an artist, attached my name to the aesthetics of different eras of technology without really bothering to do my homework or even reading the manual (so to speak)?” - Cory Arcangel