Month: October 2013
Cropping Exercise
For these two exercises, I thought specifically about Barbara Kruger’s work. I decided to compose sections of the original photos in a narrative manner. For my first photo collage, I focused on the hands and feet of the two characters at odds to create what I think is an interesting composition.
The second tells a narrative, possibly of these men planning something sinister.
CORY ARCANGEL
As the combination of technology and fine art has become more prevalent, few contemporary artists have been able to manipulate technology quite as poignantly as Cory Arcangel. Having had a great deal of exposure in the past decade, he is know for the depth of his relationship with technology:
“He comments on digital media technologies and cultures while at the same time continuing to seek the possibilities that present themselves on the cutting edge of humor, theory and technological shortcomings. His interest in technology spans from the vernacular or non-expert to the conscious disrupting of digital techniques.”(EAI)
Arcangel’s early works revolve around game cartridge manipulation. Spanning from 2002-2005, Arcangel’s work experiments with “hacking” and the cultural significance of his technological medium.
The hacking process includes removing the plastic exterior of the game cartridge and cuts wires and solders areas to remove information from the chip. Arcangel then inserts his own chip with his own coding to add information into the game.
Super Mario Clouds(2002) is a modified cartridge of the game Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo Entertainment System that was released in 1985, and possibly Cory Arcangel’s most well-known piece. The NES game cartridge is manipulated to only display the sky and clouds from the original, iconic gameplay. The blue sky and 8-bit pixelated clouds scroll left on the screen. Arcangel does not seem to have a concrete reason for his choices:
“I knew that the clouds would be simple enough for people to latch on to, and I knew that in order to make art that dealt with technology, you had to, in a way, have the art not directly be about specific technologies. I mean, we think everyone played Nintendo, but really, hardly anybody played Nintendo. Now looking back on it all – it’s about… what do these pixelated clouds represent? It represents the whole progression of humans, communication and technology. But I couldn’t write that down. And it became a meme slowly.”(Stuart)
Arcangel recognizes the clouds as an icon, but it does not necessarily talk about the medium or technology.
In the same year, Arcangel created I Shot Andy Warhol. This cartridge manipulation dealt specifically with the nature of the content of the manipulated game, in this case Hogan’s Alley(1984). Hogan’s Alley is not nearly as iconic as Super Mario Bros, but it uses the “light gun” expansion device released for the NES; This device allowed players to “shoot” objects on their television screen. The original game called for the player to shoot cardboard cut-outs of “gangsters” and to not shoot “innocents”. I Shot Andy Warhol replaces the “gangsters” with images of Andy Warhol, while the “innocents” are replaced by pop culture characters like Colonel Sanders, Flavor Flav, and the Pope. Not only does this refer to the infamous shooting of Andy Warhol, but the 1996 film of the same name. The piece mirrors the pop culture Warhol himself used in “a perfect example of a Warholian appropriation of pop culture. But instead of just watching, we get to participate in the process of the modern world eating itself”. The game allows Arcangel to kill his idol or “missing [the] target and keeping Warhol alive for eternity in our gaming consoles”.(Campbell)
2004 led to three game modifications that Arcangel has described as “totally maddening”(Arcangel). The first, Super Slow Tetris is, as title imples, is a modification of the NES game Tetris, but it has been slowed to the extent that it takes eight hours for one block to drop; However, the game is entirely playable. Space Invader, on the other hand, is a manipulation of the iconic Atari game Space Invaders which is adapted to have only one invader, making the game very difficult. Arcangel appears to have an interest in creating straining or tedious processes for the person interacting with his pieces. Continuing his experimentation with other kinds of games, F1 Racer was a modification of Japanese Famicon cartridge. Similarly to Super Mario Clouds, the racing game modification subtracted the car and all information other than the road and scenery that the player was intended to drive in.
The piece that seemed to conclude this era of Cory Arcangel’s work is Super Mario Movie. This almost 15-minute-long “movie” can be viewed by inserting the modified cartridge into the NES. The film creates a narrative about Mario as a character stranded in his own game. The movie includes the title screen of the original game Super Mario Bros. Text then appears as if it is apart of the game play that reads “AS A VIDEO GAME GROWS OLD ITS CONTENT AND INTERNAL LOGIC DETERIORATES”. This statement seems to sum up much of Arcangel’s work. The shot then depicts a parts from an early work entitled Totally Fucked, which just shows mario standing on a very small block of land, stranded for several minutes. The rest of the film shows Mario falling and interacting in a manipulated and digitally corrupt version of the game. The text begins to be corrupted and unintelligible and Mario is able to walk through areas without any ground beneath him. He appears alone in a broken and sad world, until he appears in the ending screen of the game, a bright grassy area.
Cory Arcangel’s work not only uses a technology in an interesting way, but it also sheds light onto the progression of technology and how we interact with it.
Video games in themselves have only been around for less than forty years. However, by 2002, Arcangel was able to use these cartridges that were 17 years old that were completely obsolete. Just as video games appear to still be emerging, they are still constantly progressing. The idea that the cartridges themselves and the mundane experience of playing a video game is what he has made into his art is the key element of his work. Cory Arcangel pushes the boundary of what can be a medium in art making and how to talk about technology today.
Arcangel, Cory. CoryArcangel. Familiar, 2002. Web. 16 Oct 2013. www.coryarcangel.com/things-i-made
Campbell, Marc. Dangerous Minds. 6 Aug 2012. Web. 16 Oct 2013. http://dangerousminds.net/comments/i_shot_andy_warhol_the_video_game
Electronic Arts Intermix. EAI, 1997. Web 16 Oct 2013. http://www.eai.org/artistBio.htm?id=7480
Stuart, Keith. “The Game of Art: a Profile of Digital Artist Cory Arcangel”. The Guardian, 4 Dec 2009. Web. 16 Oct 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2009/dec/04/games-art
autumn james 