Cory Arcangel: ‘If I was 24, I’d be in some NFT collective’
Arcangel's biggest ever installation lit up Chicago last month. He talks about developing the project, living in Norway, and digital culture since the dot‑com era. Save to My Ocula
OG digital native Cory Arcangel looks backwards and forwards at how he's been turning technology into art since the world came online.
With a new commission showing at Art on the Mart in Chicago this summer, an exhibition on view at the Michel Majerus Estate in Berlin through March 2025, and a curatorial project at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen opening this September, Arcangel notes that his latest protect reflects a significant shift—but only in some ways.
The Art on the Mart video installation, 🌊, 💨 & 🔥 (2024), a reference to the Chicago-based band, Earth, Wind & Fire, is an animated, digitally-abstracted 'landscape painting' that resembles a pixelated heat map.
The projection covers the two-and-a-half-acre façade of the Merchandise Mart—the iconic Art Deco building built on the banks of the Chicago River in 1930—the world's largest digital art platform.
To develop the work, Arcangel collaborated with designer and programmer Henry Van Dusen on custom-built software dubbed 'Cookery', which processed footage of nature that Arcangel filmed in Chicago and in Stavanger, Norway, where he has been based since 2015.
The accompanying witty, minimalist score of melodious digital blips and bleeps, created by experimental musician Hampus Lindwall, reflects Arcangel's background as a composer of electronic music.
His repertoire includes a 2009 edit of YouTube clips showing cats playing piano to recreate Arnold Schoenberg's 1909 composition, 'Drei Klavierstücke Op.11', and the 2013 LP 24 Dances for the Electric Piano, published on his label Arcangel Surfware.
Arcangel was part of a wave of artists working with digital and internet culture at the cusp of the new millennium. He even participated in dot-com millionaire Josh Harris' iconic project, Quiet: We Live in Public, where 100 people lived in a subterranean space under New York City with webcams monitoring everyone, everywhere, at all times—an event captured by Ondi Timoner in the 2009 documentary.
Coming of age within this moment, at the cusp of the digital age, shaped Arcangel's engagement with art and pop cultural history—an engagement which has been described as semi-archeological. The artist treats video games, software, social media, and machine learning as subject matter, material, and art historical medium.
Take Totally Fucked (2003), a hacked Super Mario Brothers game cartridge showing Mario stuck on a cube, bringing to mind the Romantic trope of the lone figure in a vast landscape, this time located in the digital sphere.
Other projects reveal a sharp formalism. The Photoshop series (2007–ongoing) comprises prints created from the software's gradient templates and tool demonstrations functioning as readymades and contemporary hard-edge colour-field abstractions, while Working on my Novel (2009), a compendium of Twitter search results for 'working on my novel', recalls the seriality of conceptual art.
Then there was Arcangel's 2016 exhibition with Lisson Gallery, currentmood, for which he produced online ads as 'promoted content', turning the internet into an exhibition space and site of transmission in a gesture that brings to mind the television event The Medium is the Medium (1969), when Boston's public station WGBH-TV broadcast works by artists including Allan Kaprow and Nam June Paik.
More recently, Arcangel's mini-survey with Lisson Gallery in Shanghai, Errors and Omissions (2023–2024), covered 20 years of practice. The show was bookended by two video works: Super Slow Tetris (2004), a playable cartridge of the Nintendo game hacked so that the blocks take forever to fall, and /roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ Let's Play: HOLLYWOOD (2021), where a custom-built Deep Q-learning supercomputing system plays the mobile role-playing game 'Kim Kardashian: Hollywood'.
With these earlier projects in mind, 🌊, 💨 & 🔥 reveals a shift that has taken place in Arcangel's decades-long interrogation of the digital following his move to Norway—a transition the artist reflects on candidly in this discussion.
SB: Your Art on the Mart commission is monumental in terms of scale and technology. Is this the biggest project you've ever worked on?
CA:
Absolutely. I've never come close to this scale in anything I've done and most likely ever will do, given how big the building is. There are very few artworks that are of this size, with the exception maybe of something like Michael Heizer's city that he built out in the desert recently, or some Land works.
In terms of interacting with the technology, that was more standard for me and on par with almost all of my other projects, although Cookery is a one-of-a-kind system.
‘It's public, which meant I couldn't get away with doing some kind of edgelord minimalism. I had to make it fun.’
When an image flies around on cloud servers, typical processes like compression, resizing, sharpness, and brightness slowly degrade the file. The software I developed with Henry Van Dusen allows you to script those degradations and amplify and play with them. This project was a good excuse to finish that software and get it to work on video.
It's a wild work. I've been doing this for 25 years, but this project had so many unknowns and things that I hadn't really done before—to make real software and then release it for people, and obviously the scale of the building. It's public, which meant I couldn't get away with doing some kind of edgelord minimalism. I had to make it fun. There are subways riding by! There were so many factors to consider, and in the end it was really rewarding because I was taken out of my comfort zone.
As the deadline for delivering the file approached—and of course like with all deadlines, that's when you're really confronted with making hard decisions—I was thinking hard about scale. At some point I counted the windows in the building and realised that the file would likely look better the smaller it was—a smaller width and height of the file would mean bigger colour blocks. So I dropped the resolution of the final video down significantly to only 240 pixels wide.
SB: It really feels like you mapped every brick.
CA: Exactly. Your perception is exactly the process that I just described. In the end it became a giant physical presentation of an absolutely tiny, tiny video file.
SB: You used your own video footage to create the work. Was this material from your archive, previous works, or new footage?
CA: It was all video taken specifically for this work, of water, sky, and fire, in-between Norway, where I live, and Chicago. I filmed all kinds of things in these categories—fjords, mountains, birds.
As the deadline approached, I realised the footage should be life-size, so that what you saw on the building would not be so far from how these things would appear. It's a bit of a trick—the image of the fjord is not presented at the scale or size of that fjord, but it's blown up to the size it would look in reality if one is standing and seeing it from across the Chicago river.
‘I'm a psycho for what you would call formalism. I am almost OCD about structures and systems, it's my Achilles heel.’
When I'm standing in front of the fjord with my phone, I'm seeing a huge visual—a vista—which is a massive part of my visual field. One of the closest things that we have to that experience is cinema, where you're sitting in front of a screen, and that ratio of distance to screen can also be a vista. In the case of Art on the Mart, the screen is something like 14 storeys high.
So I was thinking about scale and phones: the scale of videotaping the fjord on the phone, the scale of where I was standing in front of the fjord with my cellphone filming it, and the scale of it projected on the building.
SB: I love this idea of stretching out the pixels because you're opening up the digital image to the energetic experience of space. It's about amplifying the static in the space of the pixel—each pixel—to create that feeling of being in the world through the image, or abstraction, created.
CA: Amplifying the static—that's exactly how you could describe this software that me and Henry Van Dusen wrote for this.
I think what happened is that I was confronted with so many new variables with this project and I got quite stressed because for one, it's public. Then I looked back on the last 25 years of my practice and I was like, 'Let's do landscapes.' Landscapes are kinda like my safe space.
That happened in parallel with my living in Norway for the last eight years, so those two things kind of combined. I live on the fjord and look out on it all day long, so I decided to start with that. Classic Norwegian painting is of course all about the fjord.
SB: The idea of the landscape is interesting in terms of your move to Norway. As a Xennial—which describes those born between the analogue and digital ages, at the cusp of Gen X and Millennial—how has living on the edge of nature and the city informed your practice in recent years, given your focus on the digital landscape?
CA: Shortly after I first moved to Norway, I had to take all social media off of my phone because it is so quiet where I live and it was too jarring, too intense, to go back and forth from what I saw outside to looking at all the violence on my phone. Whereas when I was living in New York, the energy in the phone and out in the city were about the same. That was the first time I realised something weird was happening, that this move was a whole different thing.
The other thing which is wild is that I live in Stavanger, the oil capital of Norway. So while it is beautiful, there's this oil industry that builds platforms out in the North Sea to extract the oil. It's beautiful as a physical, natural place, but it's also a site of manufacturing for the thing that powers all of our lives today, which is oil and gas. It's an amazing duality.
So I think of everything now in terms of energy and nature. I think where I live in Norway is an incredible place to understand the modern world because it is both: you can see energy, which is what builds our modern world, and you can also see what was before all that. That has affected my worldview completely.
SB: Your recent exhibition at Lisson Gallery in Shanghai, Errors and Omissions, covered 20 years of your practice. Looking back, how has your approach to the digital evolved? Has there been a big shift from Super Slow Tetris (2004), for example, to 🌊, 💨, & 🔥?
CA: I think that my work is a kinda locomotive. It has its own inertia and it goes in its own direction. What's really changed is everything around it. The shifts that I have lived through as an adult, as a working artist, include the first dot-com boom, which was Yahoo, and then the crash. Then the birth of Web 2.0—Twitter, blogs, whatever. Then social networks came, and YouTube, and then of course crypto and AI. And that's just the digital world!
‘Sometimes I feel like I'm an experimental artist doing wild things, but really I could be a finance bro. I love spreadsheets. I love structure. I love numbers.’
I actually think that in its essence my work has been quite stable. There isn't much difference between what I did with Super Slow Tetris and getting a team together to programme a machine-learning AI computer to play the Kim Kardashian cellphone game. Both are defined by a kinda existential stupidity.
SB: That sense of automation, of being caught in the loop of digital architecture, brings to mind how algorithms and search engine optimisation is shaping the production of content in the art industry. How are you observing that phenomenon?
CA: I think paintings are so popular now because these social media algorithms understand a painting as an artwork, and Instagram has been pushing them because of that. I think partly what you see in the art market right now is related to the Instagram algorithm. For all the poor conceptual artists whose work doesn't photograph well, it's a visibility disaster.
SB: One thing you've mentioned a few times is the deadline and how it catalyses the finalisation of your projects. When you work in the digital sphere, you're working in a context that is never still, so the deadline creates a grid: a space of pressure to work within.
CA: Exactly. Because you can have multiple versions, you could theoretically never be done with anything.
SB: This relates to your work in music, because as a composer, a composition is a framework with a start and end: a grid. Could you talk about your relationship with formalism? Do you feel like a formalist?
CA: I'm a psycho for what you would call formalism. I am almost OCD about structures and systems, it's my Achilles heel. Sometimes I feel like I'm an experimental artist doing wild things, but really I could be a finance bro. I love spreadsheets. I love structure. I love numbers.
SB: There's something so structural to what you do.
CA: Definitely. Speaking about structuralism, structural film kind of led to experimental video, which is a type of structural film but in a different medium. My Art on the Mart project is 100 percent an experimental video. The code Henry and I wrote is like a digital synthesiser for imagery, and the result looks a lot like a video from the eighties that would've been done with analogue synthesisers.
I think structure—form, narrative, flow, timing, entertainment, or whatever you call it when you experience an artwork—is about trying to keep people's attention. Music is about attention. So you have to be aware of it.
SB: That awareness is also about making the digital legible—to make it tangible as matter.
CA: Definitely. From the perspective of my generation, the huge issue or opportunity to solve in the early 2000s was how to make digital work that was legible to people who were not digital natives. A big part of my project at that time was to figure out how to make work that could be read as art to people who were not interested in digital art.
SB: This relates to your upcoming Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen show, which you are curating and also producing a work for. Could you talk about that?
CA: The St. Gallen show is centred on art history. I'm co-curating it with Giovanni Carmine who is the director of the Kunsthalle. We're looking at mediums which are on the edge of being considered seriously as mediums for contemporary art, like NFTs and sneaker collaborations. The work I'm developing for that show is a Pablo Picasso immersive installation.
SB: Is that a parody of the Van Gogh immersive experience?
CA: Not a parody, but a pastiche. A parody is making fun of something, whereas a pastiche is done more lovingly.
SB: Coming back to what you were saying about making digital art legible in the early 2000s, could you talk about your experience with We Live in Public?
CA: Oh, wow. There were two of those live streaming houses in the late 1990s and early 2000s and I did performances in both. One house was a little earlier than We Live in Public in Ohio, where I went to school, which was called Here and Now. There were cameras in every room for that project as well. At some point I did a one-off live-stream performance there, then again a few years later in New York, I did a musical improvisation with another artist, Yael Kanarek, for We Live in Public.
For We Live in Public, I was part of a group of artists who were invited there. If I remember correctly, it was organised by Yael, who was asked by Josh Harris, I think. It's hard to explain now, but there was no way for electronic artists to show their work then—it wasn't even clear how!
‘A big part of my project at that time was to figure out how to make work that could be read as art to people who were not interested in digital art.’
There were different groups and communities of net artists then, centred around things like rhizome.org, thing.net, and The Upgrade (which Yael later did). Everyone kind of knew each other in New York—the real hackers, DNS hackers, net artists, and people like Josh Harris. It was a small and motley collection of people, I would say.
Josh Harris' company, pseudo.com, was huge. It crashed when I moved to New York. I remember going to a party once in their office. I think they had already gone bankrupt. I had never seen so many Aeron chairs!
SB: Is there still a sense of community in this early digital scene now? Do you keep in touch?
CA: We definitely keep in touch. When I opened my recent show at Michel Majerus Estate, a lot of artists from that era came out. It was like a class reunion. They all live in Berlin since New York was not so friendly to the avantgarde artists of that era—it's so expensive, for one. But also new communities have emerged. I'm sure that if I was 24 today, I'd be in some NFT collective. There are whole other worlds now. —[O]
Cory Arcangel: 🌊, 💨 & 🔥 is on view at Art on the Mart in Chicago until 11 September 2024. Let's Play Majerus G3 is on view at the Michel Majerus Estate in Berlin until 15 March 2025.
Main image: Cory Arcangel (2015). © Cory Arcangel. Courtesy Lisson Gallery. Photo: Tim Barber.
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