The first in-depth exploration of the work of artist Cory Arcangel, a pioneer of DIY-new media art whose influential “hacks” subvert the confines of Big Tech.
Cory Arcangel (b. 1978), perhaps best known for Super Mario Clouds, the most referenced artistic game hack in art history, became one of the first artists from a new generation of punk DIY-new media geeks to capture the attention of the art world.
Combining the hands-on skills from the 1990s net art scene and the 2010s post-internet art’s fondness for memes and the generic image, Arcangel demonstrated the way cultural expressions are intimately connected to media technologies and how these technologies can be pranked for cultural critique. In The Cory Arcangel Hack, Eivind Røssaak shows how Arcangel’s body of work defines a particular strain of post-conceptual art that is fundamental for understanding the digital world we live in.
Today, the question is not what comes first, humans or machines, but what the forces regulating expressive flows are. Arcangel’s aesthetic and micropolitical critique of mediation at the level of codes and chips enables us to think critically with computational articulations through specific aesthetic clashes and disjunctions, identified in the book as critical “flow-cut arrangements.” This book explores three dominant arrangements in Arcangel’s work—the flow-break hack, the flow-remix hack, and the flow-parody hack—which pinpoint areas of both creativity and concern before and after platform capitalism.
ENDORSEMENTS
“Arcangel’s trajectory as an artist maps the palette of computing over the past decades. From beige to candy-colored and rainbow-hued to toxic orange and dollar blues, Eivind Røssaak captures this faithfully and in telling detail.” —Matthew Fuller, Goldsmiths, University of London
“Like Duchamp, Arcangel is a sly prankster. His media hacks are serious, challenging, and deeply funny. Røssaak shows why these aspects must be thought together to understand Arcangel’s conception of a contemporary art practice. Weaving together the technical and social mechanics through which we are threaded, Røssaak’s infrastructural analysis reveals Arcangel’s jokes as a window into the unconscious of our 21st-century media culture.” —Andrew V. Uroskie, Associate Professor, Stony Brook University
“Any one of Cory Arcangel’s artworks could hardly have been produced a day earlier, because he conjures ideas and materials from the cultural and technological ferment of the now. Røssaak studies a quarter century’s worth of Arcangel's groundbreaking work in order to shed light on where we've been, how we were got here, and how one might resist the flow.” —Seth Price, artist
Eivind Røssaak is Research Professor at the National Library of Norway’s Department of Research, Visual Media Section. A former Visiting Scholar at Cinema and Media Studies at University of Chicago, Cinematic Arts at USC, and Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, he has published and edited several books and articles in English and Norwegian.
The first in-depth exploration of the work of artist Cory Arcangel, a pioneer of DIY-new media art whose influential “hacks” subvert the confines of Big Tech.
Cory Arcangel (b. 1978), perhaps best known for Super Mario Clouds, the most referenced artistic game hack in art history, became one of the first artists from a new generation of punk DIY-new media geeks to capture the attention of the art world.
Combining the hands-on skills from the 1990s net art scene and the 2010s post-internet art’s fondness for memes and the generic image, Arcangel demonstrated the way cultural expressions are intimately connected to media technologies and how these technologies can be pranked for cultural critique. In The Cory Arcangel Hack, Eivind Røssaak shows how Arcangel’s body of work defines a particular strain of post-conceptual art that is fundamental for understanding the digital world we live in.
Today, the question is not what comes first, humans or machines, but what the forces regulating expressive flows are. Arcangel’s aesthetic and micropolitical critique of mediation at the level of codes and chips enables us to think critically with computational articulations through specific aesthetic clashes and disjunctions, identified in the book as critical “flow-cut arrangements.” This book explores three dominant arrangements in Arcangel’s work—the flow-break hack, the flow-remix hack, and the flow-parody hack—which pinpoint areas of both creativity and concern before and after platform capitalism.
Reviews
ENDORSEMENTS
“Arcangel’s trajectory as an artist maps the palette of computing over the past decades. From beige to candy-colored and rainbow-hued to toxic orange and dollar blues, Eivind Røssaak captures this faithfully and in telling detail.” —Matthew Fuller, Goldsmiths, University of London
“Like Duchamp, Arcangel is a sly prankster. His media hacks are serious, challenging, and deeply funny. Røssaak shows why these aspects must be thought together to understand Arcangel’s conception of a contemporary art practice. Weaving together the technical and social mechanics through which we are threaded, Røssaak’s infrastructural analysis reveals Arcangel’s jokes as a window into the unconscious of our 21st-century media culture.” —Andrew V. Uroskie, Associate Professor, Stony Brook University
“Any one of Cory Arcangel’s artworks could hardly have been produced a day earlier, because he conjures ideas and materials from the cultural and technological ferment of the now. Røssaak studies a quarter century’s worth of Arcangel's groundbreaking work in order to shed light on where we've been, how we were got here, and how one might resist the flow.” —Seth Price, artist
Author
Eivind Røssaak is Research Professor at the National Library of Norway’s Department of Research, Visual Media Section. A former Visiting Scholar at Cinema and Media Studies at University of Chicago, Cinematic Arts at USC, and Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, he has published and edited several books and articles in English and Norwegian.
