This screening takes the form of a screen capture made specially for Kunstnernes Hus, in which Cory Arcangel guides the audience through his studio desktop, presenting a selection of his video works from the past two decades—from early incursions such as Data Diaries to a deep learning computer playing the RPG Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. Navigating between these videos, Arcangel treats his digital environment like an open studio, offering commentary on how screens, files, and viewing habits have shaped his practice over time. Arcangel will also be present at Kunstnernes Hus to provide live commentary.

Performance with single-channel video accompaniment
Dimensions variable
CA 2006-021
Courtesy of Cory Arcangel © Cory Arcangel

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 postconceptual 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—that pinpoint areas of both creativity and concern before and after platform capitalism.

Eivind Røssaak is an Associate Research Professor in film and new media at the National Library of Norway. He studied at the University of Oslo and New York University, taught at the Writer’s Academy in Bø, Norway, alongside Karl Ove Knausgård and others. Visiting Professor at University of Chicago, USC, Los Angels, and Taipei Tech. Learned filmmaking at Film-Makers’ Coop Workshop, East Village, and guitar at GIT, Los Angeles. His PhD was on art and the analogue regime; his current book is on art and the digital regime, focusing on Cory Arcangel. Some books: Sic: Fra litteraturens randsoner (2001), Selviakttakelse: En tendens i kunst og litteratur (2005), The Still/Moving Image: Cinema and the Arts (2010); The Archive in Motion (2010); Between Stillness and Motion (2011); Memory in Motion (2017); The Cory Arcangel Hack: Digital Culture and Aesthetic Practice (2025).

Cory Arcangel ( born 1978, Buffalo, NY ) is an artist and composer living and working in Stavanger, Norway. Arcangel explores the potential and failures of old and new technologies, highlighting their obsolescence, humor, aesthetic attributes and, at times, eerie influence in contemporary life. Applying a semi-archeological methodology, his practice explores, encodes, and hacks the structural language of video games, software, social media and machine learning, treating them as subject matter and medium.

Recent projects include “End User” at MGK Siegen, Siegen (upcoming); “Let’s Play Majerus G3” at Michel Majerus Estate, Berlin; “ALL I EAT IN A DAY” Curated by Cory Arcangel and Giovanni Carmine at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland; “ & ”, ART on THE MART, Chicago; “Worldbuilding: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age” at Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf, Germany and Centre Pompidou Metz, France. His work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Art on The Mart, Chicago; Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg; Whitney Museum, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Barbican Art Center, London; Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami and the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zürich.

Main image: Cory Arcangel, Data Diaries, 2003.