Cory Arcangel

In a sly homage to the Chicago-based band Earth, Wind & Fire, Cory Arcangel's '🌊, 💨 & 🔥' draws on footage of water, wind, and fire shot in Chicago, Illinois and Stavanger, Norway for his first major show in Chicago in nearly fifteen years.

Using Cookery, a custom-built, open-source software Arcangel developed in collaboration with designer Henry Van Dusen, Arcangel repeatedly manipulates his collected video footage, resulting in a degraded, digitally-abstracted landscape painting. The project is paired with a soundscape that pays tribute to Chicago house music through the use of one of its founding instruments — the Roland TB-303 — developed specifically for this project by experimental musician Hampus Lindwall. With '🌊, 💨 & 🔥,' Cory presents a multimedia experience that presents the artist's approach to new terrain while staying true to his explorations of our digital and physical environment through technologies old and new. 

Read up on how to use Cookery and learn more about Cory and project in our interview with the artist.

Cory Arcangel (born 1978, Buffalo, NY), is an artist, composer, curator, and entrepreneur living and working in Stavanger, Norway. Arcangel explores the potential and failures of old and new digital 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. Notable works include Totally Fucked (2003), a hacked Mario Bros game cartridge where Mario is stuck on a cube forever; Permanent Vacation (2008), where two computers are locked in an out of office email loop; Drei Klavierstücke op.11 (2009), in which Arnold Schoenberg’s homonymous 1909 score is plated by editing together YouTube clips of cats playing pianos; Working on my Novel (2009), a compendium of Twitter search results for “working on my novel”; Various Self Playing Bowling Games (2011), video games modified to throw gutter balls; Flatware (2018-), a series of abstract “paintings” mounted on Ikea tabletops sourced from a diverse range of leisurewear and, /roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ Let's Play: HOLLYWOOD (2017-2021), a custom built high performance machine learning computer which plays, as it learns, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, a free-to-play role-playing Android game. Recent and ongoing projects include “🌊💨&🔥,” ART on THE MART, Chicago; “Let’s Play Majerus G3,” Michel Majerus Estate, Berlin; and “Worldbuilding: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age” at Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf, Germany and Centre Pompidou Metz, France.

Arcangel is the youngest artist since Bruce Nauman to have been given a full floor solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2011). Other exhibitions comprise: “Let’s Play Majerus G3,” Michel Majerus Estate, Berlin, Germany (2024), “Midnight Moment - Another Romp Through the IP (Times Square edit)”, Times Square (2022),“Topline”, at CC Foundation, Shanghai (2019), “BACK OFF”, at Firstsite, Colchester, Essex, UK (2019), “Be the first of your friends” at Espace Louis Vuitton München, Munich, Germany (2015), “This is all so crazy, everybody seems so famous” at Galleria d‘Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo (2015), “All The Small Things” at the Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik (2015), “Masters” at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2012–13), “Beat the Champ” at the Barbican, London (2011), and “Here Comes Everybody” at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2010–11) and Nerdzone Version 1 at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich (2005). Arcangel received the Kino der Kunst Award in 2015 and was shortlisted for the Nam June Paik Award in 2014. His work was included in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Liverpool Biennial (both 2004). In 2014, he launched Arcangel Surfware, a merchandise and publishing imprint. Its flagship store opened in Stavanger, Norway in 2018.

Image by Tim Barber

Born (1976) in Stockholm, Hampus Lindwall grew up playing the electric guitar in various rock, metal & jazz fusion bands. He started playing keyboards in his late teens and studied the organ at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm with Torvald Torén and Anders Bondeman. Under the influence of Rolande Falcinelli he moved to Paris in 2002 and studied at the Conservatoire de Saint-Maur-des-Fossés and the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Lyon, with Éric Lebrun, Pierre Pincemaille and Loïc Mallié. He won the 1st prizes in the International improvisation competitions “Orgel ohne Grenzen, Air Art 2003″ in Saarbrücken, Germany, and the “Prix Boëllmann-Gigout”, 2004 in Strasbourg, France.He is the last disciple of Rolande Falcinelli and the Titular Organist in Saint-Esprit, Paris, since 2005, a position made famous by Jeanne Demessieux who occupied it between 1933 and 1962.Hampus Lindwall has pererformed all around the world and has released albums with Ligia Digital, Clean Feed Records, Firework Editions, Matière-Mémoire and SUPERPANG.As described by Boomkat, in 2021 Lindwall “drop(d) acid” with a “mind-spanking array of virtuosic acid solos” played on a TB-303 on his recent release, Lost & Found, for the record label Matière-Mémoire.

Image by Martin Argyroglo

Henry Van Dusen is a computer programmer and artist living in NYC. He is a developer for Dusen Dusen, a textile and housewares brand that develops seasonal collections inspired by fine art, commercial and naïve design, as well as the brain's reaction to color, movement, and contrast. His recent projects include a companion website to a Laura Owens exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery and endorphinport.com v2, a chat application in which users can chat with a virtual/real character named Jeremy. Henry and Cory Arcangel have collaborated before, recently on a project at the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, Denmark. Henry adapted musicandthemindoftheworld.com, which loops 200 hours of music recorded by Tony Conrad published for the first time by Cory, to function as a kiosk installation. Henry collaborated with Cory to build Cookery, the open-source software whose video effects debuted with '🌊, 💨 & 🔥.'

Image via Henry Van Dusen