The Cory Arcangel Hack

The Cory Arcangel Hack

Digital Culture and Aesthetic Practice

About the Book

The first in-depth exploration of the work of artist Cory Arcangel, a pioneer of DIY-new media art whose influential “hacks” subvert pop culture and the digital vernacular.

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 post-conceptual 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—which pinpoint areas of both creativity and concern before and after platform capitalism.
Read more
Close

Leonardo Series

The Cory Arcangel Hack
Proxistant Vision
Social Media Archeology and Poetics
Ecologies of Artistic Practice
Heartbeat Art
Voicetracks
Virtual Menageries
Control
Living Surfaces
The Future Is Present
View more

About the Author

Eivind Rossaak
Decorative Carat

About the Author

Alexander R. Galloway
Decorative Carat

By clicking submit, I acknowledge that I have read and agree to Penguin Random House's Privacy Policy and Terms of Use and understand that Penguin Random House collects certain categories of personal information for the purposes listed in that policy, discloses, sells, or shares certain personal information and retains personal information in accordance with the policy. You can opt-out of the sale or sharing of personal information anytime.

Random House Publishing Group