Cory Arcangel
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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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.
In 2007, Film and Video Umbrella presented a touring exhibition of Arcangel's piece A Couple Thousand Short Films About Glenn Gould. For this work, Arcangel edited together single notes taken from online amateur music clips to create a rendition of Bach's Goldberg Variations.
Arcangel's best known projects probably are his Nintendo game cartridge hacks and his subversive reworking of obsolete computer systems of the 1970s and 80s.
Arcangel frequently talks about his early collaborations with Paul B. Davis as being very important to the development of his own work. In 1998 they founded BEIGE, a programming ensemble with other friends from Oberlin Conservatory.
Some examples of his work are a Mario cartridge from which everything but the clouds has been erased, a version of Tetris that has been drastically slowed down, 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. The movie debuted at Deitch Projects in New York in 2005.
He is also an electronic musician working with 8-bit music formats on early Atari and Commodore International computers.
Cory's work was featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and has also been exhibited in the Guggenheim and MoMA. His work is in public collections including MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Miami Art Museum.
