| Cory Arcangel | |
|---|---|
| Born | May 25, 1978 [1] Buffalo, New York |
| Nationality | American |
| Field | New media |
| Training | Oberlin Conservatory |
| Works | Various Self Playing Bowling Games, I Shot Andy Warhol, Sans Simon, Sweet 16, Colors, Super Mario Movie, Super Mario Clouds, F1 Racer, a couple thousand short films about Glenn Gould |
Cory Arcangel (born May 25, 1978) is a Brooklyn, New York artist who makes work in many different media, including drawing,[1] music,[1] video,[1] performance,[2], and video game modifications, for which he is perhaps best known.[1] Arcangel often uses the artistic strategy of appropriation, creatively re-using existing materials such as dancing stands,[3] Photoshop gradients,[1] and YouTube videos[1] to create new works of art. His work explores the relationship between technology and culture.
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Arcangel grew up in Buffalo, New York and attended the Nichols School, where he was a star[1] lacrosse goalie. He was exposed to experimental video artists such as Nam June Paik through the Squeaky Wheel Buffalo Media Arts Center. He was very interested in guitar, practicing eight hours a day by the time he turned seventeen. He studied classical guitar at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, but later switched to major in the technology of music. At Oberlin, Arcangel met Jacob Ciocci and Paul B. Davis. Arcangel and Davis formed the Beige Programming Ensemble in 2000, and released a record of 8-bit music entitled "The 8-Bit Construction Set".[1]
Arcangel credits Pauline Oliveros, with whom he took a composition class, for his "fascination with finding artistic inspiration in unlikely machines". He describes a piece in which she connected sine wave oscillators to loudspeakers and output the exact audio frequency as the resonance of the concert hall, creating an increasingly louder sound. This, he says, was what made it "click" for him.[1] Arcangel counts many among his influences, including Steve Reich, Tiger Woods, and Weekend at Bernie's.[1]
Arcangel's best known works are his Nintendo game cartridge hacks[1] and reworkings of obsolete computer systems of the 1970s and 80s.[4] One example is Super Mario Clouds (2002), a modified version of the Super Mario Bros. video game for Nintendo's NES game console in which all of the game's graphics have been removed, leaving only a blue background with white clouds scrolling slowly from right to left.
Pizza Party (2004) was a free, functional software package that could be used to order Domino's pizza through a command-line interface. The program allowed users to order pizza by typing in commands such as pizza_party -pmx 2 medium regular, which - according to the artist[5] - would order 2 medium crust pizzas with pepperoni, mushrooms and extra cheese. The piece was commissioned by Eyebeam Research and Development and implemented by Mike Frumin.[6]
In this 2004 single-channel video, Arcangel points the camera at a television screen that is playing a tape of the concert. Each time Paul Simon appears in the frame, Arcangel places his hand over Simon's image.[7] The work is one of several videos, performances and lectures by Arcangel based on Simon and Garfunkel's live concerts.
Punk Rock 101 (2006) is an example of Arcangel's work with the Web as an artistic medium. For this piece, he re-published Kurt Cobain's suicide letter alongside a series of Google Ads. The ads are tailored to the content of any given page, and the piece juxtaposed of Cobain's angst with ads selling social anxiety treatment and motivational speaking. Art critic Paddy Johnson wrote of the work, "This is quite possibly the most brilliant subversion of the medium I have seen."[8]
In 2007, Film and Video Umbrella commissioned Arcangel to produce a new work, a couple thousand short films about Glenn Gould,[9] using tiny fragments of video, each containing a single note produced by 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.[10]
Arcangel's 2007 LP is an intervention into Bruce Springsteen's 1975 album Born to Run. While the album's title track includes a glockenspiel part, many of the songs on the album do not. Arcangel created a glockenspiel part for each of these songs, releasing them on this vinyl record, which can be played in sync with Springsteen's original to add a 'missing' part to the original album.[11] In addition to the LP, Arcangel has also performed the piece live.[12]
Arcangel's series of Photoshop Gradient Demonstrations are large, colorful prints produced using the gradient tool built into the popular image-processing software Photoshop. The title of each of these works describes the process by which it was made. For example, one 2008 work is titled 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.[13] With these instructions, any Photoshop user can reproduce Arcangel's abstract images exactly on their own computer.
Arcangel created Various Self Playing Bowling Games (aka Beat the Champ (2011) by hacking various bowling video games (for game consoles from Atari 2600 to Nintendo GameCube) to throw only gutter balls. Arcangel says, "But throwing a gutter ball is just humiliating. That's what makes the piece so ridiculous, but also sad and even oppressive. The failure seems funny at first–then it flips."[1] Art critic Charles Darwent from The Independent described the work as "complex and funny and moving." Andrea K. Scott of The New Yorker compared the piece to Bruce Nauman's "Stamping in the Studio", where he stamped in an empty room for an hour, as "a ritual of isolation and futility".[1]
Arcangel's work has appeared in many museum exhibitions, including a solo exhibition at the Migros Museum in Zurich, Switzerland,[14], and exhibitions in the Barbican Centre in London, England[1] and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Illinois. His work has also been exhibited in many places in New York City, including the Museum of Modern Art's Color Chart,[15] the 2004 Whitney Museum,[1][16] and the New Museum.[17] His work is included in public collections in locations such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Miami Art Museum, Migros Museum, and Neue Nationalgalerie. Arcangel is represented by Team Gallery in New York, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris and Salzburg, Lisson Gallery in London, and Galerie Guy Bartschi in Geneva.
Arcangel is married to Hanne Mugaas, a Norwegian curator. Arcangel was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. His treatments gave him both concentration and memory issues, completely wiping out his short-term memory for a period of time. It also temporarily affected his work, leading him to create works that he described as "hyper-structuralist" or void of "real content". The cancer returned in 2009, and his lymph nodes were removed, freeing him of the disease.[1]