“I’m definitely like a computer person.” An American in Norway. A computer person taking cold plunges in the fjords. Artist Cory Arcangel has used digital technologies and humour to explore the world around him since starting as an artist in the early 00s.
“It’s just trying to think, I’ve got all these tools, how could I hook them together and create something interesting. Or in my case, often, how could I do the stupidest possible thing?” Cory Arcangel explains from his studio in Stavanger, Norway. “It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I realised that that stuff could be art.” Back in 2002, while still living in New York, Arcangel created the piece Super Mario Clouds, which would become an immediate hit in the art world. By reprogramming the iconic video game, the viewer is left with only the clouds floating slowly across the screen. No Mario, no coins to be collected, no game. “The idea was: What if I made landscape art, or what would pop art look like if it were made in this structure?”
A couple of years ago, the artist and his wife settled in Stavanger, Norway, where his wife got a job. Skyscrapers and the fast-paced life of New York were exchanged for fjords and a new way of life. The shift affected Arcangel and his art: “I realised that art has almost no relationship to the normal world,” he says and explains: “In fact, the whole – or a whole – point of a certain type of art, and especially the art that I make, is that it has no use, that it has no clear meaning, that it can’t be pinned down.”
“A lot of my work has shifted around this idea of power and energy.” Stavanger is known for being the “oil capital” of Norway. Being in Stavanger, surrounded by such power has impacted Arcangel’s art: “I think what previously was kind of, I thought it was this virtual nothingness, is actually all power and it’s turbines spinning.” Aluminium became present in many of his works: “I started working with aluminium. And aluminium in particular, because it requires an enormous amount of energy to make.”
When asked about the post-internet movement in art, Cory Arcangel responded: “When I started to even use a computer was considered like… It was like persona non grata.” In the early 00s, curators would not know what to do with artists like Arcangel: “As soon as you mentioned a computer, their face would go white and they’d be like ‘I gotta go, sorry’.” How the world looks at digital art has changed immensely: “I was like ‘Thank God’. Because I just can’t take another year of this. I’m going to lose my mind because I really crossed over quite early, and that was part of my project.”
Cory Arcangel (born 1978, Buffalo, NY) is an artist, composer, curator, and entrepreneur living and working in Stavanger, Norway. Arcangel explores the potential and failures of old and new digital technologies, highlighting their obsolescence, humour, aesthetic attributes and, at times, eerie influence in contemporary life. Arcangel is the youngest artist since Bruce Nauman to have been given a full-floor solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2011). Other exhibitions comprise: “Let’s Play Majerus G3,” Michel Majerus Estate, Berlin, Germany (2024), “Midnight Moment – Another Romp Through the IP (Times Square edit)”, Times Square (2022),“Topline”, at CC Foundation, Shanghai (2019), “BACK OFF”, at Firstsite, Colchester, Essex, UK (2019), “Be the first of your friends” at Espace Louis Vuitton München, Munich, Germany (2015), “All The Small Things” at the Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik (2015), “Masters” at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2012–13), “Beat the Champ” at the Barbican, London (2011), and “Here Comes Everybody” at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2010–11) and Nerdzone Version 1 at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich (2005). Arcangel received the Kino der Kunst Award in 2015 and was shortlisted for the Nam June Paik Award in 2014. His work was included in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Liverpool Biennial (both 2004).
Cory Arcangel was interviewed by Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen at his studio in Stavanger, Norway, in January 2025.
Camera: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan
Edited and produced by Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2025
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