Cory Arcangel

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

Cory Arcangel (born May 25, 1978) is an American post-conceptual artist who makes work in many different media, including drawing, music, video, performance art, and video game modifications, for which he is best known.

Arcangel often uses the artistic strategy of appropriation, creatively reusing existing materials such as dancing stands, Photoshop gradients and YouTube videos to create new works of art.

His work explores the relationship between digital technology and pop culture.

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" by the age of 19.

The 8-bit Construction Set was a record that was made on one side by the Commodore 64 and the other side by the Atari 800.

A total of 4 people (Joe Beuckman, Joe Bonn, Paul B. Davis, and Cory Arcangel) were working on the project and took about 2 years to complete.

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.

One example is Super Mario Clouds (2002), a modified version of the video game Super Mario Bros. for Nintendo's NES game console in which all of the game's graphics have been removed, leaving a blue background with white clouds scrolling slowly from right to left.

I Shot Andy Warhol (2002) is a modified version of the video game Hogans Alley.

It is similar to the original NES game, except that the gangsters from the original have been replaced by Andy Warhol, and the "innocents" have been replaced by the Pope, Flavor Flav, and Colonel Sanders.

Both the graphics and the programs were modified, a complete binary hack, but the game is downloadable for at home play.

Totally Fucked (2003) was created by modifying Super Mario Bros..

Arcangel created a world where Mario starts on a single block-cube centered in blue nothingness.

In collaboration with the art collective Paper Rad, and extended off of Arcangel's Totally Fucked (2003), Super Mario Movie (2005) is another modified NES Super Mario Bros. 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.

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 two medium crust pizzas with pepperoni, mushrooms and extra cheese.

The piece was commissioned by Eyebeam and implemented by Mike Frumin.

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 (2004) is based upon Tetris; modified to play at a very slow speed, where 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 is a binary hack, where the constant delay loop was written by hand in 6502 binary.

He is a recipient of a 2006 Creative Capital Emerging Fields Award and the 2015 Kino der Kunst Award for Filmic Oeuvre.

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.

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."

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.