Cory Arcangel

Early life

Arcangel grew up in Buffalo, New York and attended the Nichols School, where he was a star 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, graduating in 2000. 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".

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. Arcangel counts many among his influences, including Steve Reich, Tiger Woods, and Weekend at Bernie's.

Super Mario Clouds

Arcangel's best known works are his Nintendo game cartridge hacks and reworkings of obsolete computer systems of the 1970s and 80s. 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.

Exhibited at Liste Art Fair, Basel, Switzerland
Migros Museum, Zurich, Switzerland
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
NiMK, Amsterdam, Netherlands
MoCA, North Miami
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
DHC/ART Foundation, Montreal, Quebec

I Shot Andy Warhol

Modified NES Hogans Alley game. I Shot Andy Warhol (2002) is similar to the original NES game, except that the gangsters from the original have been replaced by Andy Warhol, and the "innocents" have been replaced by the Pope, Flavor Flav, and Col Sanders. Both the graphics and the programs were modified, a complete binary hack, but the game is downloadable for at home play.

Exhibitions at LISTE Art Fair, Basel, Switzerland
Migros Museum, Zurich, Switzerland
NiMK, Amsterdam, Netherlands
MoCA, North Miami
DHC/ART Foundation, Montreal, Quebec

Totally Fucked

In a modified NES Super Mario Brothers game, Arcangel creates a world where Mario starts on a single block-cube (2003) centered in blue nothingness. Nothing else, just Mario and a cube.
Yep, that's it.

Exhibited at LISTE Art Fair, Basel, Switzerland
MoCA, North Miami

Super slow Tetris 2004

This was originally called "Tetris Screwed". It takes about 8 hours for the blocks to fall in one complete game. At the same time, it is still possible to move them left and right, it just takes minutes for them to drop one pixel down on the screen.

Pizza Party

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 - would order 2 medium crust pizzas with pepperoni, mushrooms and extra cheese. The piece was commissioned by Eyebeam and implemented by Mike Frumin.

Sans Simon

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. The work is one of several videos, performances and lectures by Arcangel based on Simon and Garfunkel's live concerts.

Tetris Screwed

NES Tetris game that has been modified to play at a mind-numbingly slow speed, it takes about 8 hours for the blocks to fall in one complete game. The blocks can still be moved from left to right, but takes minutes for the blocks to fall pixel by pixel.
Tetris Screwed (2004) is a binary hack, where the constant delay loop was written by hand in 6502 binary.

Exhibited by LISTE Art Fair, Basel, Switzerland
Migros Museum, Zurich, Switzerland

Super Mario Movie

In collaboration with Paper Rad, and extended off of Arcangel's ===Totally Fucked=== (2003), ===Super Mario Movie=== (2005) is another modified NES Super Mario Brothers cartridge, programmed to be a 15-minute video and is available for download for an NES emulator. The video consists of a series of original 8-bit tracks, original texts and "dialogue" boxes, and a complete rework of the background images and coding via 6502 binary.

Exhibited at Deitch Projects, New York
Migros Museum, Zurich, Switzerland

Punk Rock 101

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 alleged suicide letter alongside a series of Google Ads. The ads are tailored to the content of any given page, and the piece juxtaposed 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."

A couple thousand short films about Glenn Gould

In 2007, Film and Video Umbrella commissioned Arcangel to produce a new work, a couple of thousand short films about Glenn Gould, 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.

The Bruce Springsteen Born to Run Glockenspiel Addendum

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. In addition to the LP, Arcangel has also performed the piece live.

Photoshop CS series

Arcangel's Photoshop CS series are large c-print gradient digital paintings created solely in the eponymous popular image editing program. They appear to be a pop art version of abstract expressionism or color field painting.

Lake Series

In 2013 and 2014 Arcangel exhibited a series of 1920X1080 H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 looped digital file from lossless Quicktime Animation master. The pieces are displayed on 70" flat screens using a media player. Pop culture images have had the outdated Java applet "lake" applied, creating the series of film images

Exhibited at
Herning Museum of Contemporary Art
Tl;dr Team Gallery, New York

Photoshop Gradient Demonstrations

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. With these instructions, any Photoshop user can reproduce Arcangel's abstract images exactly on their own computer.

Various Self Playing Bowling Games (aka Beat the Champ)

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." 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".

Commissioned by The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (6 screens)�
and The Barbican, London (14 screens)

The AUDMCRS Underground Dance Music Collection of Recorded Sound

Arcangel, with the help of specialists, assembled a collection of 839 trance LPs and corresponding catalogue in Machine Readable Cataloging standard (2012). The vinyl was originally purchased from retired trance and underground dance music disk jockey Joshua Ryan and cataloged over 2011 and 2012 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn by the Cory Arcangel fine arts studio. A key point to remember considering this work is that these records were only ever intended to be used whist DJing and not listened to in a stand-alone format. Because of this, this work preserves this music by making it so far removed from its original context and purpose. The vinyl list and images are available on http://audmcrs.coryarcangel.com/

Asymmetrical Response

In military parlance, the terms asymmetrical and symmetrical are employed to refer to political provocations and diplomatic démarches, escalation and tension, and power dynamics of the highest order. Not specific to war, these terms also refer more generally to a set of relations that define our connections to power.
On the eve of Y2K, Russian-born Olia Lialina—who is among the best-known participants in the 1990s net.art scene—first met American artist Cory Arcangel. Ever since, the artists have been deep in dialogue about the social and cultural impact of the Internet’s historical shift from a tool for military communication to an “information superhighway” promising open and equal exchange, and, finally, the increasingly asymmetric “content delivery system” we experience today. In this first collaboration, Arcangel and Lialina present complex bodies of work that arose through their continuing conversation. Curated by Caitlin Jones for Western Front, Vancouver; organized by Tim Griffin and Lumi Tan for The Kitchen.

Exhibitions

Arcangel's work has appeared in many museum exhibitions, including a solo exhibition at the Migros Museum in Zurich, Switzerland, and exhibitions in the Barbican Centre in London, England 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, the Whitney Museum, and the New Museum. 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.

At 33, Arcangel was the youngest artist ever to receive an entire floor for new work with Pro Tools, his 2011 solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Other notable solo shows since have been "Power Points" (2013) and "Masters" (2012). Many of his shows include a variety of old and new work from Arcangel.

Arcangel was an Eyebeam resident from 2002-2006.

Personal life

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.