CORY ARCANGEL: APPROPRIATION UNLIMITED
Published: Oyster #86, April/May 2010.
From hacking archaic video games to auto-tuning classic folk songs, the diffuse work of New York digital artist, composer and computer programmer Cory Arcangel offers a hilarious re-imagining of aging technology and culture, writes Dan Rule.
Cory Arcangel isn’t one for stretching or meditation. Pilates is, most definitely, not part of the routine. The New York artist achieves his inner peace via rather unconventional means.
“Oh man,” he sighs, almost wistfully, “I just love to computer program.”
For the 31-year-old, chatting over the phone from his studio in New York, the hard drive is his temple. “There’s nothing I love better than to sit down at night and write some code.”
“It’s kind of like yoga to me, like this strange way to activate your brain,” he pauses, mulling the thought. “It’s about everything and nothing, you know, all at once.”
Arcangel is an anomaly in a contemporary art world obsessed with the cult of the new. In a career that has stretched the best part of a decade, he has garnered one of art’s most singular reputations for a practice that ostensibly takes the form of a kind of recycling – the relics of digital culture his pixelated muse.
Working across video, music, animation and software manipulation, the classically trained composer and self-taught computer programmer has crafted original artworks out of some of the most iconic recent cultural ephemera. Pieces like his famed 2002 Nintendo cartridge hacks Mario Brothers Clouds and I Shot Andy Warhol, not to mention 2006 composition The Bruce Springsteen Born to Run Glockenspiel Addendum, have helped make Arcangel one of the most revered pop-cultural appropriators going around.
“I guess I like to experiment with the different ways that the work can disperse both inside and outside of general culture,” he offers. “Sometimes, people might not even know that something I’ve done is an art project. It’s essentially just some software that I’ve made that people use.”
Indeed, for Archangel, who grew up in the industrial city of Buffalo in western New York State, the joy is less about what he can create than its potential points of re-engagement with a variety of audiences.
“With my cat video (Arcangel’s 2009 video reinterpretation of late Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg’s legendary Drei Klavierstücke op. 11 made entirely from found video clips of cats walking across piano keys), I anticipated that it would circulate within an art context and be shown in museums and whatever. But also at the same time I knew that when I put it online it would circulate as a trashy, LOLcats kind of thing,” he laughs. “In that way it kind of also becomes a part of the culture it’s appropriating.”
“That video, for example, was put on cuteoverload.com, one of the top websites worldwide for cute animals,” he laughs again. “I just thought that it was funny that they’d even mentioned Schoenberg on that site.”
Somewhat unsurprisingly, Arcangel came to art via curious channels. Having grown up making “strange and wonderful” videos as a hobby after seeing experimental videos on cable access, he enrolled to study classical guitar at Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio following high school, soon shifting focus to contemporary composition and electronic music. Computer programming, her recalls, was a way to ensure he could pay the bills. “I guess I was always a bit of a computer nerd,” he says. “But the reason I learned to program was that with my music, I knew I was never going to be able to get a job.”
“So while I was studying I also taught myself how to computer program solely in order that when I graduated I knew I would be employable. But at the same time I found out that I really, really liked to computer program.”
It wasn’t until he moved to New York City following college that he began to join the dots. “I mean, I didn’t realise that there were galleries that showed video art,” he says. “So when I moved to New York it was just like, ‘I’ve been doing this for a long while, I should get on this’. I didn’t realise that what I was doing as this hobby could be considered art.”
“In college I learned about modern composition and low and behold, modern composition was in dialogue with modern, contemporary art. There was minimalist art just as there were minimalist composers.”
His fascination for hacking arose after learning about the European ‘software cracking’ scene, in which crackers would deface particular screens and features of victim software. “I remember the one I was most impressed with had a picture of a snowman with a black bar over his eyes, and that was the logo of this one cracker,” he urges. “It was just like graffiti, you know? It was like a graffiti tag that was digitally dispersed around the world and whoever that snowman guy might have been is kind of famous.”
“I thought that was the coolest kind of thing in the world,” he laughs. “I was never quite rebellious enough to jump on trains and be graffiti guy, do this was kind of perfect.”
While recent works have included the performance of auto-tuned folk songs, massively scaled Photoshop colour gradient prints, video paintings and even a foray into kinetic sculpture, Arcangel’s latest project sees him make a hilarious return to the gaming console.
“I have this new series of works that are self-playing games, so I’ve modified the controller so they basically play the same game over and over again into the system,” explains, stifling a giggle. “So I have this bowling game that just bowls gutter-balls one after another, forever, as long as the system is on. It’s so hilarious and definitely a series that I’m pretty proud about.”
Indeed, when technology is your muse, art never gets old. “The fun thing is that doing my kind of art, as time goes on, I’m presented with more and more things that I could use,” he says. “So now, for these bowling games, I’m using all these Playstation 1 games, which are like early 3D graphics and it just looks so funny now. But 10 years ago it might not yet have looked funny.”
“People forget that even the early Nintendo stuff, which we kind of remember as cute, is pretty harsh,” he laughs. “Like those little clouds move really slowly and are kind jagged and it’s really not pleasant.”
Cory Archangel’s new show The Sharper Images runs at MOCA North Miami until May 9th.
mocanomi.org
coreyarcangel.com
