VIDEO: Cory Arcangel-✎╓✈ – dreamideamachine ART VIEW

A pioneer of technology-based art, Cory Arcangel works in a wide variety of media, including music composition, video, modified video games, performance and the internet. The ease with which he uses software, hardware and internet resources as raw artistic material, placing them in new contexts, reveals a new kind of style. Arcangel’s unique artistic approach is based on his training in classical guitar and his studies in music technology at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio in the late 1990s, which coincided with the beginning of the digital revolution and inspired him to become an artist, composer, programmer and entrepreneur. For “✎╓✈” his first solo exhibition in Korea, Cory Arcangel assembles a group of works that reflects the breadth of his practice. Presenting video, performance, wallpaper and wall-mounted pieces, he explores his enduring interest in technological development, the digital realm and the global circulation of information and commodities. In 2020, Arcangel programmed a bot using machine-learning technology to scrape clickbait gossip websites, establishing a series of key terms related to the material. Passing these through Google Images, the bot generated slideshows accompanied by an automated voice reading nonsensical texts composed of information from the same websites. From 2020 until late 2021, these videos were uploaded to YouTube without the artist’s intervention. Assembling all 800+ YouTube videos into a two-week-long, single-channel video archive, “Related to Your Interests” (2020) presents a bizarre blend of visual and aural material comprised of celebrity gossip, pop-cultural trends and tabloid headlines, acting as a commentary on the ‘amalgamations of people and algorithms’ observed by the artist in recent technological developments Moving from New York to Stavanger in 2015, Arcangel found himself living in the onshore epicentre of Norway’s booming oil and gas industry, which is also a site of the energy-intensive production of aluminium. What Arcangel describes as the ‘all-pervasive and all-encompassing’ nature of these industries, informed his decision to start making works using local materials and fabrication methods, resulting in the laser-cut “Alus”. Inspired by the artist’s unexpected encounter with a mega-yacht in the port of Stavanger, “LIØNHEART” (2023) reproduces a life-size section of the titular vessel as a wallpaper. The image stretches across the gallery wall to confront viewers with the overwhelming scale of the boat, eching Arcangel’s experience in his hometown.