Does that make sense?
An interview with the American post-conceptual artist Cory Arcangel, who has been residing in Stavanger, Norway, for the past eight years.
"I’m not trying to communicate something concrete; I’m trying to communicate a feeling. I know the feeling, and I recognize it when the salt and pepper in the work are just right. But it’s a lot of trial and error, and much of the work is really just experiments," Cory Arcangel explains his approach. He often employs the artistic strategy of appropriation, “creatively repurposing existing materials such as dancing stands, Photoshop gradients, and YouTube videos to create new works of art”.
One of his most well-known pieces, Super Mario Clouds (2002), is a modified version of the video game Super Mario Bros. for Nintendo's 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. It was exhibited at the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and the endlessly drifting clouds were projected onto the walls of the room. This work evolved into the next step - Totally Fucked (2003), which was also created by modifying Super Mario Bros. Here, the artist crafted a world where the main character of the game, the tireless Mario, begins his journey on a single block-cube, situated in the centre of a blue void.
An important point here is that this game (as well as the world of Nintendo and Atari consoles in general) already became completely obsolete by the first half of the 2000s. "Arcangel finds an abject beauty in the way that modern technology is doomed to obsolescence,” wrote Andrea K. Scott, New Yorker reviewer in 2011. “I love the kind of obviously invisible things or the trash or the discarded, and forgotten. And those things that have no interest at all,” Cory Arcangel tells me in Düsseldorf in 2024. We converse with him at the library of Julia Stoschek Foundation, at this world-known new media Mecca. Until February 4th there was an extensive exhibition WORLDBUILDING: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age — curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Arcangel’s "historical" work was also exhibited there – in 2004 he came up with the idea of revealing the code of Space Invaders, a game created by Atari in the late 1970s. The essence of the game was to fight space invaders attacking you; Arcangel removed all the invaders except one — the one that inherited the entire arsenal and all the abilities of its fallen comrades. It became impossible to defeat him. A game in which winning is impossible loses its meaning, and the player sooner or later "lays down their arms".
As a part of WORLDBUILDING public programme in Düsseldorf, at St. Antonius Kirche, a concert took place where the renowned composer and musical experimenter Hampus Lindwall performed on the organ music written by Cory Arcangel and inspired by techno culture. It was an astonishing sensation – the classical power of the organ vibrating in such a contemporary manner. Cory has a serious musical education in the past, so this field is very close and interesting to him. He also held his artist talk in Düsseldorf, where he showcased, for example, one of his works with bots - on a large screen, an Instagram account of Amazon was projected, and the bot's cursor methodically scrolled from post to post, liking each one: all these incredible offers, holiday greetings, and happy faces of owners and consumers of various kinds of goods… It was funny, sad, and somehow solemn.
Humor is an important component of many of the artist's works, but it is by no means an end in itself. In one of his interviews, he spoke quite critically about irony as something that "sucks the air out of things." Yet he has a somewhat Dadaist approach, one of his works – Sans Simon, which he toured few art festivals with – is a performance where he stands on a stool behind the audience's backs and during the DVD showing of Simon and Garfunkel's concert, he constantly blocks with his hand the part of the projection where Paul Simon should appear. As simple as that. At the same time, he has very complex, self-learning works using AI. But recently, he has been engaged in sculpture and contemplating painting.
Why so – we discussed this in Düsseldorf, and during the conversation, Cory often asked me again after some thought was spoken: "Does that make sense?" It seemed to me that this phrase is kind of the key to him. It is not only about respect for the interlocutor and his opinion and understanding but also about his approach in general – taking certain things from our world, examining them from all sides, as if testing them for meaning and strength with the same question – Does that make sense?
Cory Arcangel. Another Romp Thru the IP (Times Square edit), 2009/2022. Single-channel video. (Installation view: Midnight Moment, Times Square Arts, New York, USA, March, 2022 - March, 2022) Photo: Michael Hull. Courtesy: Michael Hull for Times Square Arts. 
Shall we start with Space Invader? It's 2004. You hacked the code of the game created by Atari and altered it. Did you engage in gaming a lot before, during your childhood, or teenage years?
No, I wasn't much of a gamer. We did have an Atari console, but gaming wasn't a significant part of my childhood.
But I've read that during that time, you often observed your friends playing.
Right. Because we didn't have a Nintendo, but my friend had one. And I would go and watch. And I enjoyed it a lot. That's how I got a sense of video games when I was a kid – by watching people play. I was like 10 years old or 9. And I didn't like playing myself – I found it too frustrating and stressful. But I would just sit on my friend's bed and observe. When I was an adult, I started doing video game stuff. And then, of course, I drew on those kinds of memories and experiences.
So, perhaps, it's not the game itself that interests you, but rather what it evokes in people?
Well, actually, back then, around 25 years ago when I created my first video game works, my fascination lay in television art and experimental television of the '80s and '90s. The television set held immense power as a portal into homes. There was nothing else, there was no internet. There were newspapers and stuff, but the TV had such power to bring things to you. And an aura! That's what I wanted to access. For me to be able to make things appear on my TV was so special. So games were almost beside the point. But games were something that could also come through a TV. It seems so crazy now — people don't watch TV any more!
TV has become akin to a tape recorder nowadays.
Indeed. I've always been drawn to structures, and the traditional TV structure no longer exists.
You "restructured" Space Invaders in such a way that the player cannot win.
Precisely.
Cory Arcangel, Space Invader, 2004, video game, infinite duration, color, sound, hacked Space Invader Cartridge, Atari 2600 video game system, artist software (coded by Alexander Galloway), dimension variable. Installation view, WORLDBUILDING, JSF Düsseldorf. Photo: Simon Vogel, Cologne
Your enemy, the invader, became so powerful that the game lost its appeal. Was it your deliberate intention to render it meaningless?
It began as a joke, really. I pondered what would happen if all the invaders were removed from Space Invaders. I shared the idea with my friend Alex Galloway, a computer programmer. To my surprise, he emailed me the next day, having made it a reality. If you removed all the invaders, the remaining one would inherit their firepower. It was entirely coincidental. Modifying the game didn't require extensive alterations; a simple chip replacement sufficed.
Cory Arcangel. Space Invader, 2004. Handmade hacked Space Invader cartridge and Atari 2600 video game system, artist software (coded by Alex Galloway)
You've also delved considerably into browser art, which emerged roughly 20 years ago. It feels like another era...
Actually, Jodi.org t made their first browser piece in 1995. So it’s nearly 30 years ago. We still think it's new, but it's really old. Isn't that crazy? My first browser pieces were made it the late 90s.
How do you perceive them now?
They look really old. It's very funny, right? Many browser pieces from that era don't work anymore due to changes in browser technology and screen resolutions. The resolution is so different. So they look really small. But I think it's helpful to think of every browser work as a performance. Browser work is something which happens through a browser. It's a network, it's a bunch of different machines working together. It's the power grid, the electricity, the server, the wires, your own browser… It's helpful to think of them like I would think of concerts that I saw 30 years ago. Does that make sense? They're not sculptures. They're not these things which just exist. They're things which are fleeting and temporary.
For that, you sometimes refer to them as "performances."
Because that kind of works happens when you see it. This is happening. There's electricity in here, machines are making these things appear. These aren't stable objects. So any electronic device or the screen is a real-time situation, or performance. Does that make sense?
Sure. But how was your interest in these digital things developing after the era of browser art and classical net-art? What was next for you?
Then I became interested in big data because Google had happened. All of a sudden, really great search capabilities and social media had happened. So there were people publishing stuff online, on Twitter, on Blogspot. So that was my source material – big searches in big data. I have a good example; I had a novel that I published called “Working on my novel”. I had just searched Twitter for people who would use the phrase “Working on my novel”. I did that for many years, and I created an archive of all the results of that search, and I curated it down to a really good selection. And then I published a book with the best of those. So that was my interest for a couple of years – fishing for data in these giant data sets.
Cory Arcangel. Working on My Novel, 2009. Twitter search results for "working on my novel". Courtesy: Cory Arcangel
But you are fishing for some kind of absurdity in it?
In that particular project, I wanted to find out – what was the essence of Twitter? How can I communicate this new form of communication? Of course, to compare it against the novel was the most perfect way to tell people that this was something new. But then it came out as a novel, I published a real book. And I got permission from all the people to be in the book. So it was a real proper publisher – Penguin, nonetheless.
I did many years a lot of projects like that because all that stuff was new, and it was possible all of a sudden.
But you also made these bots for Twitter, which were putting “likes”…
That came a little bit later. So all these big social networks happened, and I was searching in them and finding things. And then people learned how to do bots. And then I thought, “Well, why don't I make some bots”? I did a lot of works with bots, and some of the bots are driven by machine learning and stuff like that.
I like your idea that people spoke a lot about Darknet, and that kind of mysterious hidden places in the internet but actually, the biggest part of the global net consists of “places” where nobody comes, nobody is interested about them, so that’s actually something which you can call “Darknet”…
I love the kind of obviously invisible things or the trash or the discarded, and forgotten. And those things that have no interest at all. No media interest, no philosophical interest, just invisible items, you know.
And you have to remember – when I was working on the Atari 20 years ago, that was an item which had no interest at all. It was not yet retro; it was not cool. The Ataris and Nintendos were just discarded forgotten items that you could get for a few dollars at a thrift store. So I like to look in places that people aren't looking in, stupid places. The dumber, the better. (Both laugh)
Internet as a system is full of that kind of “places”…
Oh my god, most of it. 99.5% of it. The internet is made for bots. The internet is made for those things.
But what is your image of the internet? How do you see it metaphorically?
Just think of some cloud warehouse in a mountain in Scandinavia, with all these servers and water coming through to keep them cool. But nobody's looking at any of it. You know, it's just videos on YouTube of birthday parties and all of our personal photographs.
How many photos do you have on your phone?
A few thousand.
And that's just you. Right? And how many times do you really look at them? Hardly ever, probably. Or you might scroll once in a while. That's my feeling about every server farm… I picture it physically as a rack with some lights blinking and I just I think it's crazy. I think it's madness.
Installation view: Flying Foxes, Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany, November, 2022 - February, 2023. Photo: Fred Dott. Courtesy: Kunstverein in Hamburg
But this bot which automatically put “likes” under every post is also kind of a caricature. Because when you are supporting some publication, giving it a positive response, it’s also your personality in a way. And here it's so automatic…
The one bot I made is going through Amazon.com's Instagram feed. I thought, who's looking at Amazon.com's Instagram feed? And there is the performance which is the liking. But also, there is the capturing of this feed. This is also kind of structural film. It's horizontal, and we see it in a cinema setting.
The problem I found putting them on a screen on the wall – people were unable to understand that they were art. Because it was just Instagram to them. And I had real trouble. Like, there was no distance between what's in their hand and the work. So I started showing them Bruce Nauman style, like big projections. And then sideways. And it helped a little bit.
It's easier to get the impression.
It's too close to people when it's just… But it's a compliment in a way, if people don't understand that it's art. You know, because it means you're really doing something.
Sometimes it's a very fragile border...
I did sculptures once. I dressed up these “pool noodles” what you put in a pool in the summertime and they float. And I dressed them like people, I put headphones on them. But people would just go and touch them and hold them. And I was like, “Wait, it's a sculpture, why are they doing this?” But people couldn't understand that they were sculptures. Because for some reason, it's a short circuit. And that's when I realized, that's really the best situation if you can make work that for whatever reason, people can't comprehend as artwork, even though it's in a gallery or a museum. It's good. And I mean, eventually, they will comprehend.
Cory Arcangel. Raw Youth, 2014. Foam pool noodles, wristband, tailored Bravado Justin Bieber Vertical Hoodie, Skullcandy headphones, Apple iPod classic and charger, Apple iPhone 5 case, Skrillex “Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites” MPEG-1 Audio Layer III file. (Installation view: All The Small Things, Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Herning, Denmark, March, 2014 - September, 2014) Photo: Sacha Maric
When you're changing your interests, what is this impulse for further change? “I just want to try it”. Or you feel that there is a burst of energy in this particular field of human activities?
Yeah, it's energy-driven. And it's intuitive. And I'm not in charge of it. And I get dragged along. So I'm not driving. My critical mind is not able to affect it at all. I see door handles like this now (shows at the door). And all the door handles in Europe are so beautiful. Look at that. Have you ever been to New York? In New York you turn any door handle and half of them are about to fall off. Right? But here in Europe it’s different. So every time I touch a door handle, I think to myself about it. And eventually, I started working with aluminium because I wanted to find out how these beautiful objects — mostly aluminium — work. So I go just around, and I notice things. I see people with Adidas stripes all the time. Beautiful! (whispers). I want to see if I can translate that to an artwork? I'm just driven by life. Many times I think I got to stop making the stripe works, it's just too much, and then I'll see somebody and I think: “Wow...”
I don't have total agency over what I'm doing. I'm just following. Unfortunately, that’s how it works. It doesn't mean I'm always right. Or that it's interesting. Or that I am able to communicate these feelings to people.
Cory Arcangel. ~3.2023.003~2x1.2~E6, 2023. Gold anodized aluminium plate (BWB-Bausilber 2 E6). Photo: Stefan Altenburger. Courtesy: Cory Arcangel.
But I was also really fascinated by the story with Simon and Garfunkel DVD, this dadaist gesture… When you were projecting the video with their concert and just put your hand in front of the projector so that half of the screen, where Paul Simon was, became invisible, in the shadow.
Yeah, exactly, the talented one. I mean, they're both talented. But he was really the songwriter there.
But now my interest now is aluminum, and taking that further: sculptures. I want to finally make like a real sculpture. Like, the one that stands in the middle of a room, that you can walk around.
So you are kind of moving from digital things to more material?
Yes. I think there's a trajectory over the last 25 years. I’m getting more and more conservative!
Conservative? Now it’s not so easy to say what is conservative…
Yeah, it's true. More and more traditional, let's say because I started off with all the computer stuff, but then I became very interested in contemporary art as an adult, so I'm slowly getting to all the different areas – painting, sculpture, I want to eventually try it all.
Cory Arcangel. /roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ Let's Play: HOLLYWOOD 2021-06-08T22:58:00+02:00 11082, 2021. Single-channel screen capture video of /roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ Let's Play: HOLLYWOOD recorded on June 8, 2021. System sounds by Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never). (Installation view: Game Society, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea, May, 2023 - September, 2023) Photo: Hong Cheolki. Courtesy: Courtesy of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA)
But you were also practicing as a musician, as a composer, and there was a beautiful concert yesterday.
My piece was based on this thing called chord memory, which was a function on a lot of early synthesizers, where you could voice a chord and then it would put that whole chord onto one note. So you could hit one key and it would be like (hums a 2-second melody). And then what happened in a lot of early techno music is that people would just press random keys, but there would be a whole chord that was being transposed. It's a beautiful sound. Because it's outside of classical western music theory, it just becomes almost random. And I love that sound more than anything. And so my piece last night was based on that, although in the end, my piece became less like techno but and more like modernist organ music.
But I'm trained as a composer. That was my education ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Did it structure your imagination, your creativity – this composer background?
Yeah, definitely. So I think in scores still. Code running is the same as a musician playing a score. It's like, there's instructions and they are to be executed. It's very similar.
But you are changing not only different art fields, but also territory. You moved from States to Stavanger in Norway. You decided to live there. May I ask why?
Well, my wife is from there. She works there. And we have a daughter. And I could work actually anywhere. And I was like, “Okay, let's go”. And I've been there for eight years now. But it was random. I mean, we just kind of ended up there, we didn't put so much thought into it.
How do you feel there?
I like it. And although it's Europe on paper… I don't think Norway is really European in culture. It’s something completely different. I think Sweden or Denmark are more European. But Norway is something else. Finland also and Iceland are also something else entirely. In any case, I like it.
Cory Arcangel. Photo: Tim Barber
Are you an active participant in the art scene in Norway?
Not so much. I'm active locally in Stavanger, but Stavanger is not the capital, the capital is Oslo. And Stavanger is like a nine-hour train ride to Oslo. It’s really “out there”. It's a night train you get on at 10, you get off at 7.
So I'm not really on the radar in Oslo or in the mainstream Norwegian art scene, but certainly in Stavanger, everybody knows me because it's a small town.
So how could you compare it to New York were you were living before this move?
It’s totally the opposite from New York. And, of course, having lived so long in New York, I was very much like most New Yorkers – I just thought it was the whole world. Every New Yorker thinks that New York is the world. And to leave New York and to realize that outside of New York not many people think about New York was a lot of fun.
America is so big, right? America is huge. But there is a kind of shared culture. But when you go to southwest Norway, you realize – there are things that are so different from America, even basic things that I never considered. Like, they eat four meals a day, for example. Or very simple things… like how they talk to each other, how they relate to each other. In the winter, the sun will just come up a little bit. And three, three and a half hours later go down. Like it won't go across the sky! Stuff that I never considered in my life that they could be different. But I love it. I think it was really a blessing that I moved there.
Stavanger is also an oil capital. So I learned things about petroleum and gas and how modern life is powered – by these guys flying these helicopters to these oil platforms every two weeks. And it was just a shock to me – I had no idea. Most people don't think about it.
I think Norway is really mystical country… You know, in the town I live, there was one restaurant in 1976. They discovered oil in 1967. And it all happened so quickly in Norway. So you have this tiny little country, kind of isolated, that just became so wealthy. There's a really bizarre mix of ancient and modern and money.
But it's interesting that Norwegians also have this time perspective, this responsibility for the future generations. So there is a state foundation, which is taking money from selling petroleum and investing it, but all profit is accumulating for the next generations, for the times when oil will go out of fashion, probably.
Yes, they own like 4% of the world. Because they invest all the time. I think it's because they were so isolated. And their culture is very much about surviving. And also helping each other. Survival culture. In America, it's the opposite. It's like “Get off my lawn”. “Trespassers will be shot”. That's a very American. So Norway for me is a fascinating place.
Installation view: Errors and Omissions, Lisson Gallery Shanghai, Shanghai, China, November 2023 – January 2024. Courtesy: Lisson Gallery
But as an artist, you are not so much interested in things like crypto and NFTs.
Well, I'm interested in it. But I don't like to do things when they're hot. I didn't get interested in crypto initially in the 2010’s because I thought nobody understood it. And I wasn't interested in working with technology that could not be communicated to a large audience. And then now most people understand it, or at least know what it is. But then it was just too hot! And the same is with AI right now. It's just too hot. I like to wait until things are kind of not cool. Does that make sense?
But I certainly am interested in crypto; it is an interesting and clever system. So I think maybe at some point, I’ll sit down and look into it.
After sculptures?
Yeah, after sculptures. (Laughs).
………………….
The next big project, featuring Cory Arcangel's participation, will open on April 25th at the Michel Majerus Estate in Berlin. “An initiative led by artist Cory Arcangel, Let’s Play Majerus G3 takes as its point of departure the laptop that Michel Majerus (1967 – 2002) used in his late career, now reactivated following a restoration undertaken in cooperation with digital-art organization Rhizome”. Michel Majerus was a Luxembourgish artist who combined painting with digital media in his work. He lived and worked in Berlin until his untimely death in a plane crash in November 2002. “The exhibition at the Michel Majerus Estate features works by Arcangel that span nearly two decades, including new commissions displayed alongside selected works by Majerus in a juxtaposition that suggests a continuity in non-concurrent, albeit conceptually linked, bodies of work”.
Title image: Flying Foxes, Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany, November, 2022 - February, 2023. Installation view. Photo: Fred Dott
