About Cory Arcangel: Cory Arcangel, born May 25, 1978, is a Brooklyn, New York post-conceptual artist who makes work in many different media, including drawing, music, video, performance art, and video game modifications, for which he is perhaps best known. Arcangel often uses the artistic strategy of appropriation, creatively re-using existing materials such as dancing stands, Photoshop gradients and YouTube videos to create new works of art. His work explores the relationship between digital technology and pop culture. His website can be found here.
Super Mario Clouds– Arcangel’s best known works are his Nintendo game cartridge hacks and reworkings of obsolete computer systems of the 1970s and 80s. One example is Super Mario Clouds (2002), a modified version of the Super Mario Bros. video game for Nintendo’s NES game console in which all of the game’s graphics have been removed, leaving only a blue background with white clouds scrolling slowly from right to left.
Bowling Series– Arcangel created Various Self Playing Bowling Games (aka Beat the Champ) (2011) by hacking various bowling video games (for game consoles from Atari 2600 to Nintendo GameCube) to throw only gutter balls. Arcangel says, “But throwing a gutter ball is just humiliating. That’s what makes the piece so ridiculous, but also sad and even oppressive. The failure seems funny at first–then it flips.
Super Mario Movie– In collaboration with Paper Rad, and extended off of Arcangel’s ===Totally Fucked=== (2003), ===Super Mario Movie=== (2005) is another modified NES Super Mario Brothers cartridge, programmed to be a 15-minute video and is available for download for an NES emulator. The video consists of a serious of original 8-bit tracks, original texts and “dialogue” boxes, and a complete rework of the background images and coding via 6502 binary.
