Super Mario Movie Cory Arcangel (Nintendo cartridge hack; media installation, 2005, 15 minutes. Source code and ROM downloadable from the artist's Web site.)




A collaborative project with the collective Paper Rad, Super Mario Movie is a hacked 8-bit Super Mario Brothers 1 cartridge. Immersive, hyperactive, and ecstatic, the 15-minute Super Mario Movie is a hallucinatory spectacle. Arcangel describes the piece on his Web site: "This is similar to my cloud cartridge, but 40 times as awesome. …Like mad max, but in 8bits. Picture title screens, messed- up fantasy worlds, castles floating on rainbow colored 8-bit clouds, waterfalls, underwater dungeon nightmare rave scapes, dance parties, floating / mushrooms level scenes, Mario alone on a cloud crying, fireball flicker patterns, and video synth knitted 60 frames per second seizure vidz. …. & All being generated by this one 32k 1984 cartridge!!!!!!!!!!! basically it is mario brothers totally rearranged into this amazing impossible 8bit world....”

As with Super Mario Clouds, Super Mario Movie exists in several iterations: It has been exhibited in galleries as a projected installation environment; it has been shown as single-channel work in screening venues; and the source code and ROM are available on the Internet. Arcangel explains: “Certain works work in the gallery and not the Internet, or on the Internet and not in the gallery. This gets into the whole thing of where a piece works best. …Let's take the Super Mario Movie as an example: OK, it works well in a gallery, works pretty well at Deitch Projects, everybody was happy, but also it works just as well on the Internet, because people downloaded it and watched that movie all the time. And it also works in film festivals.”

http://deitch.com/projects/sub.php?projId=153


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