All the Parts from Simon and Garfunkel's 1984 Central Park Performance Where Garfunkel Sings With His Hands in His Pockets

Cory Arcangel

2004, 6:33, color, sound

Arcangel brings a willfully lo-fi aesthetic to bear in manipulating a consumer video document of a twenty-year-old Simon and Garfunkel concert; his concerns lie as much with the event's reproduction and dissemination as with any of its supposedly original qualities. Investigating the social production of celebrity and its representations, Arcangel touches on issues of bootlegging, amateurism, and a culture in which participation can border on obsession.

Insectiside

Cory Arcangel in collaboration with Jamie Arcangel 

1992-2003, 7:29 min, color, sound

With Insectiside, Arcangel brings his strategically amateur aesthetic, which celebrates the excesses of the accidental and contingent, to a new level, re-presenting a home video that he made as a teenager in 1992. The video, which features the artist and his sister parodically yet lovingly performing as a heavy metal band, takes on new meaning beside Arcangel's recent work with music videos and the codes of pop culture.

Interchill @ FACT Center

Cory Arcangel 

2004, 9:41 min, color, sound

Produced during Arcangel's residency at Liverpool's FACT Center, this carefully ramshackle production appears as if it might have emerged from a public access TV studio some time in the late 1980s. Bracketed by stroboscopic dance segments, the heart of the work is a seemingly casual conversation about pop music between the artist and a local teenager, in which audio and video tracks are slightly out of sync, and digital compression lends the image a softened quality that is somehow both anachronistic and of-the-moment.

Message my Brother Justin Left Me on my Cell from the Slayer Concert Last Week

Cory Arcangel 

2004, 2:27 min, b&w, sound

In this deadpan conceptual anecdote, Arcangel delivers exactly what his title promises. In doing so, he directs us to the ceaseless and apparently effortless movement of digital information; in this case, a translation of data from the private to the public, from audio to video, and from a transient, spontaneous communication to a replicable, distributable form.

Smoove

Cory Arcangel in collaboration with Jamie Arcangel 

1996-2003, 2:24 min, color, sound

In Smoove, Arcangel satirizes the music video form, in particular the use of women to sell the music product. Arcangel presents a hyper-kinetic teenage girl, whose stylized, flailing mimicry of the kinds of dancing that one might see in a music video, combined with her insistent, near-manic smile, threatens to overturn the carefully controlled conventions of the genre.

The Making of Super Mario Clouds

Cory Arcangel 

2004, 76:00 min, color, silent

In the first part of this work, Arcangel silently documents the real-time construction of his video game cartridge piece, Super Mario Clouds, in which he hacked a "Mario Brothers" cartridge, erasing everything but the clouds. While The Making of Super Mario Clouds poses as an instructional video, willfully amateur camerawork and the omission of any soundtrack indicate the artist's intentions: to give viewers, in his words, "a feel for the process, in its gloriously boring true detail." The second part is a 9-minute video re-scan of the clouds.