Lecture Review: Cory Arcangel

Cory Arcangel is a computer artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. While studying music in school, he realized that making money as a musician would be hard and instead changed his focus to computer programming. In his free time he began to hack into other peoples programs to mess with them. He describes on such program that he altered to shut down peoples computers and simultaneously open their CD drive when they opened an email. What began as fun and games for Arcangel turned into his career.

Most of his current projects are now based around hacking program codes to make art out of the altered result. In his “Data Diaries” piece, he saved pieces of the memory on his computer every day for a month. He then converted these bits of code into colors created a movie of the 16bit color scheme that randomly displayed oscillating shapes of brightly colored pixels.

Arcangels “Beach Boys/Geto Boys” piece caught my eye because of its similarity with the YouTube remix project that we did in class. I really liked this piece because it was so simple to create, yet the creative vision that went into was anything but simple. With so many popular mix CD’s of artist mashups, this was the first I’ve seen on video and with more implication than just sounding cool. I think he really has a deeper meaning on the direction of American pop culture and its change over time with his piece as well. After all, he did say that "Nothing in my mind has any significance unless it is attached to some kind of culture."

If I was present at the lecture I would have liked to ask Arcangel if he has ever gotten into any trouble as a result of his hacking. I would also like to know where's he stands on the concept of intellectual property since he mentions that his work basically "steals" aesthetics and similar concepts from other people.