As with Super Mario Clouds, Japanese Driving Game began as a hacked video game cartridge. In both pieces, Arcangel removed the elements that make them "games," leaving only images inscribed with a kind of sublime minimalism—in Super Mario Clouds, the passing clouds and blue sky, in Japanese Driving Game, the empty road stretching to a vanishing point on the horizon. Japanese Driving Game has also been exhibited as a large-scale single-channel projection in galleries and museums, and Arcangel has made the source code and ROM available for download on the Internet. In addition, the image of road and landscape has been made into a poster that Arcangel sells on his Web site. Says Arcangel, “It's like Pop art. Pop art in motion. …As a poster, it immediately becomes recognizable.

Arcangel describes the piece on his Web site: “This is a simple mod I did of the old Japanese famicom driving game F1 Racer. Basically I just took out the game, cars, etc, and left the road. ...I have written a small perl compile script 4 u also, I use mac osx and this all works fine, for other operating systems, I would warn u might need to tinker a bit...”

http://www.beigerecords.com/cory/Things_I_Made_in_2004/f1racer_2004.html

Return to Cory Arcangel Case Study