Cory Arcangel

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Cory Arcangel bigraphy, stories - Music

Cory Arcangel : biography

25 May 1978 –

Cory Arcangel (born May 25, 1978) is a Brooklyn, New York artist who makes work in many different media, including drawing, music, video, performance, and video game modifications, for which he is perhaps best known. Arcangel often uses the artistic strategy of appropriation, creatively re-using existing materials such as dancing stands,Whitney Museum. "The Whitney to Present Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools" (Press Release). April 11, 2011. Photoshop gradients, and YouTube videos to create new works of art. His work explores the relationship between technology and culture.

Works

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.

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 Research and Development 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.

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 of 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 of 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 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)