Cory Arcangel at Conversations At The Edge Spring 2009
Best known for his Nintendo game cartridge hacks, multi-media trickster Cory Arcangel uses new and vintage computers, sound, performance, and the web to recontextualize popular figures (Super Mario Brothers, Bruce Springsteen, Simon & Garfunkel) and aesthetic systems (the instructional video, adult contemporary music, the “artist talk”) in subversively comedic ways. This evening, he’ll provide an overview of his practice, possibly including his Super Mario movies, the epic and aptly titled performance piece Bruce Springsteen Born to Run Glockenspiel Addendum, and an archetypal “experimental film,” complete with digital scratches and Final Cut Pro countdown. Co-presented by SAIC’s Parlor Room. 1998–2008, Cory Arcangel, USA, multiple formats, ca. 60 min.
Cory Arcangel is a computer artist, performer, and curator who lives and works in Brooklyn. His work centers on his love of personal computers and the internet. He co-founded the Beige Programming Ensemble. Recent exhibitions include the Whitney Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Space1026, Philadelphia; the Migros Museum, Zurich; Team Gallery, New York; and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Paris. His online portfolio and web portal is located at: beigerecords.com/cory/
Conversations at the Edge (CATE) is a weekly series of screenings, artist talks, and performances by some of the most compelling media artists of yesterday and today.
CATE is organized by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Department of Film, Video, and New Media in collaboration with the Gene Siskel Film Center and the Video Data Bank.
Programs take place Thursdays at 6pm at the Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N. State / Chicago, IL / 312-846-2600), unless otherwise noted.
This edition carries the two covers above and leads with the feature: "IN CONVERSATION: DARA BIRNBAUM AND CORY ARCANGEL" which is an interview/discussion between (Video) artist Dara Birnbaum and (New Media) artist Cory Arcangel. The cover images ARTFORUM chose are from Dara Birnbaum's 1978/1979 video "Technology Transformation: Wonder Woman" and Cory Arcangel's "Super Mario Clouds" project from 2002.
The pairing of Birnbaum and Arcangel creates a dynamic resonance for considering certain Media Art Historical connections, tensions and/or dislocations between the histories of experimental Media Art through Video Art and New Media Art. Birnbaum's Wonder Woman is well known and historically recognized Video Art, i.e. as included on the Video Data Bank's seminal anthology "Surveying the First Decade: Video Art and Alternative Media in the U.S." Similarly, Arcangel's Super Mario Clouds has been quickly cannonized into recent New Media Art Histories as an emblematic work, i.e. in Mark Tribe and Reena Jana's "Art in the Age of Digital Distribution".
It's refreshingly intriguing to read Birnbaum and Arcangel "in conversation" and perhaps encouraging to see Artforum taking up a position that criticalartware put forward when such positions were not as always already/often recognized in (to quote Birnbaum) "the frameworks of institutional art spaces" or even New Media Art discourses...
(Film, Video and New Media department at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago; New Media Art Histories; Art Games + Independent Gaming Cultures; Open Source, Artware + early Video Art; Computer Witchcraft + Majikal Media Art)