Cory Arcangel
Directing
Biography
Cory Arcangel (b. 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 is a recipient of a 2006 Creative Capital Emerging Fields Award and the 2015 Kino der Kunst Award for Filmic Oeuvre.
Known For
Mario's world is falling apart.
Super Mario Movie
A surf through subway.com and its associated social media accounts, a vast web-content empire including Jared’s Journey, videos with nutrition experts, testimonies from former Olympians, and tips for opening your own franchise.
Freshbuzz (subway.com)
From The Year of the Troll Tour
Smells Like Burnt Speaker
A screen capture of pre-set iMovie transition graphics.
Transitions
In February 2005, YouTube was launched and forever changed our relationship to moving images, both as viewers and producers. But even well before then, the web had made a large variety of new materials accessible to see and to download, as well as upload. “From the Cloud” is a video program that looks at found footage “films” in the Internet Age. The proliferation of archived photographs, digital images, and videos made available to everyone online as well as an exponential increase in production has changed the way artists interact with pre-existing material. The artists in this program both pull material from the cloud and implicitly comment on the cloud by doing so.
From the Cloud
Drei Klavierstuke is a recreation of Arnold Schoenberg’s 1909 op. 11 Drei Klavierstücke (aka Three Piano Pieces) made by editing together videos of cats playing pianos downloaded from Youtube.
Arnold Schoenberg, op. 11 - I - Cute Kittens
Continuing his investigation into the intersection of culture and technology in the context of the handmade, here Arcangel explores the "mash-up," in which music fans digitally merge two songs to create unexpected hybrids. Arcangel's experiment pushes this practice into the realm of absurdity, pairing wildly different tracks based on the similarity of their bands' names.
Beach Boys / Geto Boys
Video Ravingz is a hacked version of Mario 2 where the user wins the game simply by inserting the cartridge. With rave-style graphics and music, there's an air of celebration about this work because everyone's a winner.
Video Ravingz
Walking through Buffalo, New York's suburban Walden Galleria Mall. 1997, 5:26 min, color, sound.
Mall Walking
Filmed at Urbandale Plaza in the eastern suburbs of Buffalo N.Y., "Urbandale" is a study of America's suburban sprawl stripped to its barest essentials and void of unnecessary contemporary cultural influence. The film, rendered in text, focuses on the repetitive motion of foodstuffs being cooked in the lobby of a discount department store. Says Arcangel, "I composed Urbandale by creating my own software and using ASCII (text) as the only means of display [...] I have 'frozen' a certain time and aesthetic in computer culture [...] The soundtrack for Urbandale was also composed by myself and recorded with 12 electric guitars".
Urbandale
A short film and video installation by Cory Arcangel
Self Playing Nintendo 64 NBA Courtside 2
Goldberg Variation #1 re-constructed with instrumental instructional videos downloaded from YouTube.
A Couple Thousand Short Films About Glenn Gould
This historic work by Cory Arcangel is an infinite loop where the famed figure, Super Mario, is stuck on a block in a sea of blue pixels. This rarely-seen artwork is a video generated by a Nintendo Entertainment System playing a Super Mario Bros. cartridge which has been hacked by Arcangel.
Totally Fucked
In Naptime, the visuals were made first, and then the music added at the end by Paul B. Davis.