Cory Arcangel in Conversation with Raphael Gygax

For his first major presentation in Chicago in almost 15 years, ‘🌊, 💨 & 🔥,’ Cory Arcangel paid homage to the city’s landscape and cultural touchstones. Our curator, Raphael Gygax, sat down with the upbeat artist — who was buzzing coming into his second interview of the day — to discuss his practice, his process, and the inspiration behind his piece for us.

Cory Arcangel’s ‘🌊, 💨 & 🔥’ airs alongside Yinka Ilori’s Omi Okun, every night at 9pm, through September 11.

Image: Cory Arcangel. Let's Play Majerus G3 📽, 2024. YouTube(r) video series. Photo: Jens Ziehe. Courtesy: Cory Arcangel and Michel Majerus Estate, 2024.

Raphael Gygax
Your exhibition career encompasses more than 20 years. How would you describe your artistic practice? Very often you get labeled as a 'post-internet' artist. How do you relate to that brand or label?

Cory Arcangel
I describe myself now as an ‘experimental media artist,’ which is a very old-fashioned phrase, I use it both seriously and un-seriously. It's a term that I would've tried to avoid for a long time. But, now I use it both because it's out of vogue, and also because I think it accurately expresses what I am — in the sense that I am not so far from the artists in the seventies and eighties and nineties who were experimenting with machines and gadgets.

Although, because I'm an 'X-ennial,' a lot of this has to do with computer code, and that would perhaps distinguish me from the earlier generation, which was more analog. In terms of my work, sometimes I'm discussed as part of this ‘post-internet’ generation, and sometimes I'm not.

But I think I'm really a generation earlier than that, you know, and I'm a kind of lost generation. I'm the generation that started making work in the early 2000s, right after the ‘dot com’ crash. That's actually the generation I belong to. And that would place me with artists like Eva and Franco Mattes and Brody Condon, if you wanted to be quite accurate. But I'm never quite part of things. And I'm always on the edge of everything. Which is probably also why I tend to get lumped into all different types of things all the time.

Raphael
So what developments were then important for you, over the course of those years?

Cory
I had a pretty good education, even from high school, in media art and experimental video art. And then of course when I went to the Oberlin Conservatory, I had an education in avant-garde composition — we're talking, you know, Pauline Oliveros and everybody after. But when I got to New York, I didn't really even know what galleries were. So that was the first big huge leap, that I started going to galleries and learning about the world of contemporary art, and fell in love with it.

And then of course, the internet opened up and became mainstream. 'Web 2.0' happened, blogs happened, social networks started happening. And there were a bunch of great artists who 'came online' during that era. And then after that, I think, is what you were referring to with the 'post-internet' generation. So every four to five years, there was a kind of new discovery for me. And that's true, I guess, up until this day.

Raphael
What's the most recent discovery?

Cory
For me, the most recent discovery was the world of bots. Bots, like bot farms, click farms, you know, and obviously, which isn't a surprise, artificial intelligence, and that computers could be automated in nefarious and interesting ways.

Raphael
Yeah, although you did that quite early.

Cory
Yeah, it's true. I have been doing bots for 20 years. But, I think the difference now is they became part of mainstream culture, which is exciting. Practically speaking, I don’t have to explain them to people anymore, everyone knows what a computer bot is!

Raphael
Let's speak about the Chicago piece — I'll start with the question of the aging process of technologies. In the earlier works, like the Nintendo works, the question of 'aging' plays a major role, but also in your new work, right?

Cory
So this new work is fun because it ties together a lot of different threads from all different eras of my work, and of course aging is one. And for this work, it's about how images age as they travel through the various cloud servers. So as an image today goes online, it might get copied, it might get pasted, it might get re-formatted, it might get resized, it might become blurry. So as these images travel around in the kind of 'tumbler' of today's 'cloud computing' life, they degrade. And then if you accelerate the degradation, it's a technique people often refer to as ‘deep frying.’

For this commission, I worked with Henry Van Dusen, a longtime collaborator, to write a very advanced aging software for images called Cookery. And this commission for ART on THE MART is the first big test of this software.

Raphael
Can you tell us a bit more about the film sequences you used for that?

Cory
So the input footage was taken here in Stavanger and in Chicago, and it's of landscapes. So we have the fjord and the clouds in Stavanger, and then the river and the sky in Chicago. And also there's fire, which I took from Stavanger. A lot of the footage, with the exception of the fire, is life-size. And so that was one of the things that I was trying to think about — I have this huge canvas, what if what's projected on the canvas is the size that it would be in life?

Raphael
You mention THE MART as a sort of canvas for you. Would you describe yourself, maybe, as a 'digital painter?' because then you also encounter painting history, with landscape painting, and abstraction of landscape, and so on.

Cory
Absolutely. I mean, landscapes were my transition into becoming a professional artist. And Raphael, when we did our show in 2005, we did a huge landscape, with roads, and clouds, and it's been fun to come back to it. And it surprised me. All of a sudden I'm like, filming clouds in Stavanger and I was like, oh, wait a minute, I know about this. I've done this before!

Raphael
We can read your work through very different access points — one we've mentioned is painting history, but the other one could be film history. We could read it through the tradition of “absolute film” from Germany in the early 1920s, but also structuralist film from the 1960s in the U.S. So to what extent are those movements important to you? Is this something you're interested in?

Cory
I mean, maybe not so much ‘filmmaking,’ but experimental video was my first real education in avant-garde art. When I was a teenager, I had two experimental video classes in high school, where we were seeing like, Bill Viola and Nam June Paik. Some of my earliest thoughts of being an artist were really just wanting to have something on television. In Buffalo they had a show called Axlegrease, which was an experimental television show on public access, done by a nonprofit called Squeaky Wheel. And it was my dream to have something that one day they would screen on Axlegrease.

I started modifying video games in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s not because I wanted to make art installations, but because I was thinking, oh, a video game system is a synthesizer that can be programmed. It's a video synthesizer which can make colors and make your TV make colors. My interest in those early video games was as experimental video, so this interest is fundamental to me.

Raphael
You’re also a trained musician, you also started composition at some point. So let's talk about the sound of the ART on THE MART piece. You worked with Hampus Lindwall for this, tell us more.

Cory
Pretty early on I realized that the commission was kind of overwhelming. My thought was like, oh my God, it's gonna take all of my energy just to make this 10 minutes. And then I thought, okay, I need somebody to help me with the sound. And of course I thought of Hampus, who is a composer, an art collector, and an improvising musician. We have been collaborating for years and years in all different capacities. He ended up doing the score on the Roland TB-303. He had just released a record on the 303 like a year or two ago, and we thought it was great because it's an instrument that Chicago made very famous in the 1980s. That instrument had its second life in Chicago. And so that's what we ended up with, him improvising to each different scene in the video on his 303. It's great.

Raphael
My last question about the Chicago piece is, what was the biggest challenge for you in the work process?

Cory
I know the answer to this! The challenge was the context and the scale, right? It’s a very specific commission. This video cannot be transported. It is not for any projector, it is for this building. And so there is this issue of scale, because THE MART is just enormous.

And then there's the issue of context. People are outside, it's not a museum. Usually, I like showing trash in very fancy museums. That's my dynamic. And that relies a lot on the institutional vibe of the museum to play off the ‘trashiness’ of the work. But I can't do that here, because it's not a space where people are assuming they will see art.

And that of course was the fun part in the end, because I had to get out of my comfort zone and really think quite a lot — what am I doing here, and what do I want? How can I make myself happy, and a random person standing there happy, at the same time?

Image: POV: You're peeking over Cory's shoulder as he builds his commission for ART on THE MART. 

Raphael
I like that approach! So we come to the fun questions. Which artists are important references for you?

Cory
I could name probably 200, but let's see…

Raphael
Maybe then, who, at the moment, is an important figure you’re looking at?

Cory
You know, I saw that Isa Genzken show in Berlin at the Neue Nationalgalerie and that was really kind of mind-melting. It was 75 sculptures over her whole career. So that's an artist me and probably a lot of people are thinking about. And as for musicians, Ellen Arkbro is one whose last three or four records have been just really, really incredible for me.

I mean look, I could give like 500 artists, but lately I've been thinking a lot about sculpture — Anthony Caro, Nate Boyce, and as mentioned, Isa Genzken, all these sculptors!

Raphael
What was your first impression of Chicago?

Cory
Ah, cold.

Raphael
How would you describe your studio practice? What does a normal day at the studio look like for you?

Cory
First I go swimming, and then I go to the sauna at the public pool here in Stavanger. And then I come to my studio at 9:30 in the morning. Then I eat breakfast for ten minutes, and then I do a focus task until 12 or 12:30. So, no checking my texts or emails or anything, then I eat lunch. And then after lunch it's just chaos — admin emails, phone calls, getting very distracted. So it's two opposite days, always. And then, at 4 or 4:30pm I usually have to run to make dinner for my 8-year-old and my wife.

Raphael
Last question: what have you been reading or watching recently?

Cory
Oh wow, great question. I've been reading Ann Patchett, a fiction author. I also always randomly pick up books at the airport. The last book I read at the airport was called Chip War, about the birth of the semiconductor industry. Was that the question? What was I reading?

Raphael
Yeah.

Cory
That's what I'm reading.

Raphael
Sometimes people say like, 'I don't read at the moment,' so then...

Cory
Oh, then I would say Substack. 'cause I get all of my media through Substack. I'm reading a ton of different Substacks and my current favorite is Chart Book by Adam Tooze, which is global financial news.


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Cory's project, ‘🌊, 💨, & 🔥,’ airs alongside Yinka Ilori’s commission at 9pm, every night through September 11.