Cory Arcangel

Cory Arcangel is one of the most highly profiled international artists within digital technologies and Internet art. Ever since he hacked a Super Mario game cassette back in 2002 and made video art from it, he has contributed to lifting the technologies of the Internet age into the art world. He is known for hacking technological systems in order to comment on absurd and humorous aspects of digital cultures and media phenomena and on how these shape our patterns of behavior.

With an education in music and a background from hacker milieus at the very beginning of the Internet age, Cory Arcangel creates works that span from performance, music, and video to painting, drawing, and graphic print-making. He applies strategies from the historical avant-garde in his treatment of digital material and, in accordance with Internet’s amalgamation of cultural expressions, mixes elements from so-called high culture with popular culture phenomena. Artistic collaboration is an integrated part of his practice, on a par with self-publication, open access, and genre transgression.

Family Office

The exhibition Family Office is Cory Arcangel’s first solo exhibition in Norway. It is a presentation of the ten most recent years of his career as an artist, a period in which he has been working in and from Stavanger. The exhibition title refers to the artist’s combination of family and working life during this period, while also opening up to reflections on global phenomena related to technology, power, branding, and economic capital. 

Family Office includes several new works and shows the breadth of Arcangel’s productivity as an artist as he moves with relaxed integrity among the various expressions and genres of popular culture. Examples of his collaboration with the fashion designer Phoebe Philo and the music producer Oneohtrix Point Never are shown side by side with works that challenge the aesthetic potential of digital image-processing programs, as well as the circulation of pictures, phenomena, and aesthetic ideals on the web.

In 2014, he founded Arcangel Surfware, a “non-aspirational lifestyle brand,” which sells clothes and other retail products for surfing the web. The following year, Cory Arcangel moved to Stavanger. Since then, he has incorporated local aspects in his work, both when it comes to the production of artworks and regarding his choice of materials, artistic collaboration and thematics.

Arcangel Surfware Flagship

Central to the exhibition is a reconstruction of an artist’s store which Cory Arcangel ran in the period 2018–2019 in the Stavanger borough of Storhaug. The Arcangel Surfware Flagship was an art project: an experimental studio, a showroom for art, and a shop for his commercial brand Arcangel Surfware. The project played with ideas about center and periphery and challenged the accessibility of Internet shopping by having the artist himself as the shopkeeper during the limited opening hours. With support from the Inge Steensland Foundation, the shop was acquired in 2024 by Stavanger Art Museum as part of their collection and is now being exhibited for the first time as an installation.

Digital archeology

Making use of strategies such as appropriation, reverse engineering, post-production, and re-contextualization, Cory Arcangel shows how we can be active agents at a time characterized by increased technologization and constraint. Like a digital archeologist, he examines the structures – hacking the imagery as well as the functions – of software, video games, social media, and machine learning. Internet phenomena are like fresh produce, and the interest in outdated technology and aesthetics gives some of the works a nostalgic quality. Arcangel is also driven by an archival impulse and has contributed to the collection, organization, and publication of works by other artists, such as for instance Tony Conrad (1940–2016) and Michel Majerus (1967–2002).

The exhibition will also be showcasing several of the artist’s performative works, extending into the city itself. The work entitled Hail Mary – a composition made for carillon – will be presented in the newly restored Stavanger Cathedral, whose carillon from 1925 is not only the oldest in the Nordic countries but also Norway’s largest with its 49 bells covering four octaves. Cory Arcangel’s collaboration with the singer and composer Stine Janvin about traditional knitting patterns in the work called Identity Pitches is also included in the exhibition’s abundant side program.

Cory Arcangel

Cory Arcangel (born 1978 in Buffalo, New York) is an artist, composer, curator, and entrepreneur. He has a background in classical guitar and studied musical technology at Oberlin College and Conservatory in Ohio. Arcangel has had a considerable international career and has earlier had solo exhibitions at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst (2005), Hamburger Bahnhof (2010), The Barbican (2011), Reykjavik Art Museum (2015), and HEART Herning Museum of Contemporary Art (2014). In 2011, he became the youngest artist ever to have a full floor solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Last fall saw the publication of the book The Cory Arcangel Hack: Digital Culture and Aesthetic Practice, written by the Norwegian media researcher Eivind Røssaak and published by MIT Press.

Publication

The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated publication with texts written by Cory Arcangel, Caroline Busta, and Lil Internet/New Models, Eivind Røssaak, and Helga Nyman. The publication is designed by Studio Bergini, edited by Hanne Beate Ueland and Helga Nyman, and published by Walther König.

Feature Image: Installation view: Grand opening!, Arcangel Surfware Flagship & Flagship AS, Stavanger, Norway, May, 2018 - July, 2018 (Works pictured:  Arcangel Surfware Flagship, 2018-2019. Flagship store and sometimes art gallery. .  Mig 29 Soviet Fighter Plane, Clouds, and OS X, 2016. Mig 29 Soviet Fighter Plane and Clouds (2005) Nintendo Entertainment System .nes Roms, Macmini running OS X, Nintendo emulator (Open Emu), variable multi-channel presentation.  Fuck Negativity White Sweatpants, 2016. Sweats.  Arcangel Surfware White Slides, 2016. Slides.  Fuck Negativity Slides, 2015. iSlideUsa Slides.  Arcangel Surfware Retail Display, 2018. 3 Philips LED screens, 3 bright signs, 1 ethernet switcher, and 3 channel video. Untitled TRUMPF 6000 , 2018. Punched and laser cut Alu Diamond.  Untitled TRUMPF 6000 , 2018. Punched and laser cut Alu Diamond.  Untitled TRUMPF 6000 , 2018. Punched and laser cut SS 316 steel.  The Source Issue #5: Space Invader, 2015. Zine. 12 pages.) Photo: Jan Inge Haga. Courtesy: Arcangel Surfware.

Thumbnail Image: Cory Arcangel. Photoshop CS: 84 by 192 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient "Spectrum", mousedown y=12100, x=0, mouseup y=12100, x=57537; tool "Wand", select y= 12100,  x=16324, tolerance=138, contiguous=on; default gradient "Spectrum", mousedown y=24300, x=26379, mouseup y=12100, x=9806, 2019. Chromogenic print. Gjengitt med tillatelse fra kunstneren og Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.

Translation by Ingrid Haug.