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Cory Arcangel
The Generation of
Technological Compromise
Written by Alissa Atkinson
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"This is boring." My fifteen year old brother James has beaten GTO: Vice City for the tenth time. He thinks the graphics are crappy compared to Halo, and the violence is too tame. Having sold his Playstation2 to buy the newer, better XBox, he has little driveway-shoveling money left over for new games. My mom sent me upstairs to get James away from "that damn machine" and join the party in the living room. I'm home for the day to celebrate my grammy's eightieth birthday: twenty members of my family are downstairs talking about the email my cousin Trisha sent with digital pictures of her engagement ring. My mom has a digital camera of her own, of course; it sits on the desk in the den, full of pictures neither she or my step-dad can figure out how to transfer to their computer.
"I couldn't see the photos," my grammy says. "I'll never understand that World Wide Interweb or whatever you call it." I alone, in this room full of aunts, uncles, and younger cousins, can accept and understand the complete integration of technology while still remembering what life was like before cellphones and superior 3D graphics.
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I'm in my twenties.
So is Cory Arcangel, "hacktivist," pop-culture
commentator, low-tech programmer, high-tech satirist, and foremost,
artist. Using defunct hardware and software, old Nintendo cartridges,
and the Internet, he makes art that's aesthetically interesting and
thematically representative of our generation. We are the first
enhabitors of Attention Defecit Disorder, the ones who distinctly
remember the first kids on our blocks who got Sega Genesis, PCs, and
access to chat rooms.
Arcangel took one particular object from his
youth, a Super Mario Bros game cartridge, to create one of his most
popular pieces: "Nintendo Clouds." This artwork is as straightforward as
its title, a moving image of videogame skies created by hacking into the
cartridge and erasing all but the simplistic background. He exaggerates
his view of the world, commenting on the lack of irony of his Nintendo
Clouds: "I had probably spent more time concentrating on video and
videogame skies rather than real ones, therefore the sky from Mario
brothers is just as beautiful to me as the real one." He argues, "this
is all we know," this generation "raised on cable."
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We may have been "raised on cable", but we are perhaps the most
cognizant of the changes in society during the technological boom of the
eighties and nineties. It was our childhood, our adolescence. It is a
part of us. Through all of his work, Arcangel portrays this dichotomy of
technology as an inhibitor in creativity and an element in defining past
and identity. He shows this through his innovation and sense of humor in
projects like "Pizza Party," part of the 2004 Whitney Biennial, in which
he found a way to order a pizza from Dominos at the command line. Also
included, this realm which has been referred to as "essentially, great
silly digital pranks" in the New York Times, are the new
www.Dooogle.com, a search engine which only sends information involving
Doogie Houser, M.D., "I Shot Andy Warhol," a shooting gallery game
displayed at the Guggenheim which featured pop icons Andy Warhol,
Colonel Sanders, Flava Flav, and the Pope, and "T.A.C. (Total Asshole
Compression)," a program that enlarges any file passed through it. Both
Dooogle and "T.A.C" were shown at Arcangel's recent exhibition, titled
Welcome to My Homepage Artshow, at Team Gallery in New York from
Janurary 12 to February 13, 2005. Also featured were new hacked
videogame cartridges, including a fully interactive Ipod programmed for
Nintendo and a frustratingly slowed down version of Tetris, as well as
some experiments in video art.
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With a culture of technology as his
medium, and the sarcasm with which he sometimes uses it, one might
wonder exactly what Arcangel's relationship with technology is. Based on
his participation in and enthusiasm for groups like Paper Rad and Beige,
which have been exerting both hatred and love for technology with
creative destruction, it is helpful to think of Arcangel as a grafitti
artist and technology as a wall. The wall, though oppressive in some
ways, standing between the artist and the world, becomes the art itself
when Arcangel tags it with his message.
Through his work, he tries to turn the dismal view of an era trapped by
technology into a positive one, showing others how to transform the
innovation that surrounds them into something of beauty that they can
create. He doesn't do this through just the pieces themselves, but also
his website, on which he includes detailed step-by-step instructions for
his methods. Teaching his process to his audience is of utmost
importance to Arcangel. Why? As fellow Beige members say, "if you don't learn to use and
understand your computer, then some big software company is going to
tell you how. And what kind of art is going to come from that?"
More Info [website]
Lecture [website]
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