Since graduating from Oberlin College in the spring of 2000, Cory Arcangel has been producing artworks that playfully investigate digital-media technologies and cultures, asking his audiences to think about the ways in which they engage technology, and ways that, perhaps more importantly, technology engages them. When he does teaching demonstrations and public performances to expose the ways which particular technologies work, this dialectic of engagement is particularly apparent. It is also readily discernible when the technological object no longer appears as a black box (that which one merely inputs or outputs without knowledge of what goes on inside), but rather, when it’s presented as something with crude inner workings, which anyone could manipulate should he or she become interested. For Arcangel, the key to revealing these inner workings is a subtle alchemy of education and entertainment.

While Arcangel’s work has consistently tarried with art-world problems and dynamics—for instance, I Shot Andy Warhol (2002), his hack of Nintendo’s Hogan’s Alley video game, in which the renowned Pop artist appears in the shooting gallery among other cultural icons—his most recent solo show at Team Gallery, “Adult Contemporary,” foregrounded art-world-specific problems more than ever before, particularly the spatial and temporal logistics of the gallery experience. At the show, one first confronted Video Painting (2008), a video comprised of improvisation with video software, which is too long to be watched in any one sitting. The experience of the piece involves not only enduring the real time of the improvisation, but also understanding the time limitations of the context of the gallery-bound video installation. Finding roots in the problems of Structuralist Cinema, a film movement that had origins in Arcangel’s hometown of Buffalo through the efforts of Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits, and others in the University at Buffalo’s Department of Media Study, Arcangel transposes the problems of cinematic duration and structure upon the gallery space via video.

Downstairs in the gallery was Self Playing Sony Play Station 1 Bowling (2008), a Sega Play Station bowling video game that Arcangel programmed to continually bowl gutter balls. In the installation space, time was completely determined by the virtual throw of a bowling ball down an alley. The feeling of chronological time being at a standstill was compounded by the fact that one watched the bowling game while sitting on a pleather sofa, resting one’s feet on wall-to-wall carpets, suggesting the paraphernalia of a typical suburban home-entertainment unit. In a room beside this video installation was Permanent Vacation (2008), an installation of two Apple computers that send “out of office” e-mails to each other until the e-mail software eventually crashes the computers.

The other works in “Adult Contemporary” reflect Arcangel’s ongoing concern for property and tactical appropriation. In one work, for instance, Photoshop CS: 110 by 72 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, Square pixels, default gradient “Spectrum”, mousedown y)1098 x=1749.9, mouseup 7)0 4160, x)0 (2008), the title describes the specifications for producing the work in Adobe Photoshop. Though the gesture of naming an artwork after the method of its construction has roots in conceptual artists like Sol LeWitt, who provided museums with instructions for making his drawings rather than producing the works himself, and Lawrence Weiner, who equated linguistic facts with manifested art works, the recent availability of digital imaging software such as Adobe Photoshop has made the lines between production and consumption, high and low, creation and distribution seem less stable than ever. Arcangel’s confusion of “instruction” and “object” is compounded by his use of code, which often involves following the instructions of a prior programmer or software designer, if only to be at cross-purposes with a software’s (or hardware’s) intended application.

Thom Donovan: Though you’ve downplayed an activist or interventionist quality about your work in previous interviews, I have a vivid memory of your junior show at Oberlin in which you taught your audience how to hack LISA, an antiquated Apple sequencing software. This gesture seemed radical at the time—that you could demonstrate the disobedience of the hack so simply and elegantly. Though the critical reception of your work has highlighted its pranksterism and translations between the tech and art worlds, do you also acknowledge an activist streak in your work that prioritizes knowing about the technologies that we use and in turn use us?

Cory Arcangel: Can you define activism for me? Let’s pivot this question around a definition because an activist stance can mean many different things. Of course, in my work, literal politics doesn’t really play much of a role.

TD: When I saw the LISA hack, it seemed disruptive in a certain way and as a gesture, extremely powerful. And I see there being other moves that you make in your work that may not have an explicitly political aspect but intervene in a certain way. I see part of your visual art practice as a kind of teaching practice. How do performance and demonstration position you as a teacher?

CA: That performance came at the tail end of a lot of research that I was doing about the underground cracker scene, and all of that research was based off one thing that I had seen. I think maybe it was 1997 or 1998, and I had downloaded a crack of ProTools or some cracked software. Basically, these people were modifying the intro screens to the program, so instead of the intro screen of whichever Adobe program, it was now just a picture of a cartoon snowman with this big black bar over his eyes. And that was the mark of this secret computer cracker. That’s how I got into it—I saw that, and I said, well, you know, I’m from the suburbs, and I always grew up watching graffiti on TV, I grew up saying that I wanted to be a graffiti artist, but, of course, I had no access to that, and graffiti culture was already long gone by then. But, when I saw this software graffiti, it reignited that passion—I was like, I want to be one of these guys. But then, of course I never really did that because I was never really willing to put the stuff back online. I was willing to show people how to do it in a way. This was all very early stuff, so my politics were not really worked out yet then. But I was thinking: this is so easy, these systems that are given to us are so easy to manipulate, intervene with, and leapfrog over. And that interest has stayed with me. That was one of the things that eventually came out into teaching, making tutorials, and writing essays about how things work. Basically the core reason I like to do that is to show people how this stuff is pretty accessible and because as the Internet and computers grow up more and more, walls are built, and these walls don’t necessarily have to be there. I’m glad that you remember that performance. That was the first time I had done one of those lecture demonstrations and tried to make it entertaining and fun for an audience. And I still do that. It’s ten years later, and I did one last week at the New Museum.

TD: I was thinking about that quality of your work again when I saw you do something for The Believer Magazine about three years ago at PS1. You committed Internet suicide, that is, you decommissioned your Friendster account before a live audience.

CA: Kind of similar, less radical.

TD: But I saw the same performance qualities at PS1 as at the work in your senior recital at Oberlin. The audience was very involved in what you were saying, and I don’t think that many artists are able to do that very easily—to have an audience be so attentive.

CA: I’ve found that it’s pretty similar to comedy. But I’ve done comedy in clubs, and comedy’s much harder. I’ve found that people in art audiences are much more willing to ride along with you. It’s really a safety net for me because I’ve seriously bombed in comedy clubs before.

TD: Are you doing a lot of comedy still?

CA: Every couple of weeks, I might sneak into an open mic night.

TD: It sounds like a guilty pleasure.

CA: It’s like a pre-midlife maybe-I-want-to-do-something-else crisis.

TD: One of the most popular forms in the art world of the past decade or so has been the reenactment.

CA: Oh yeah, the reenactment or referentialism. That’s what people say the new thing is—referentialism, which I feel like I probably participate in. I don’t know if I’ve done too many reenactments, but in this show, I feel like I’m trying to skate around that topic of appropriating whole eras of art that were somehow related to or based around technology, and so, yeah, I am referencing it. Video Painting is basically two hours of graphics that I remember from mid 90s videos. And in order to get a certain look, you basically have to use those technologies. But, yeah, looking at YouTube, I think that the reenactment is a part of a larger shift. Everything on YouTube is a reenactment.

TD: Why do you think it’s become the thing to do?

CA: I know why. I used to do it when I was a kid. As soon as you got a video camera, you wanted to make your own. You wanted to dress like—well, for me, I wanted to dress like Guns N’ Roses and make a Guns N’ Roses video. I don’t know what that impulse is. What do you think it is?

TD: I think that part of the reason for reenactment is that there’s nostalgia for lost objects. I also think that it has to do with a larger cultural trauma, or just a want to build community out of these things.

CA: A lot of it is like wearing a t-shirt. This is one of my theories about how media culture will work in the future when all media is available all the time to everybody (which of course is coming pretty quickly). Your mix tapes or your links lists or your curating become what your t-shirt was like when you were growing up, advertising your likes and dislikes.

TD: A lifestyle.

CA: A lifestyle, yeah.

TD: Is that referentialism?

CA: I mean referentialism as I recently read about it described in a really narrow context—about a young conceptual artist who was literally referencing the work of x 60s conceptual artist, y 70s conceptual artist, and z philosopher. These artworks are literally built on top of direct references. So, this is not exactly what’s happening with lifestyle, but it’s similar. If you’re a young conceptual artist and you’re referencing this thing from this other conceptual artist in the 60s, it’s not so different from me making a YouTube playlist and saying, “I’m cool, I’m into this.” I guess you could argue that on YouTube, I’m not making anything, but I think in the future, making something will be almost beside the point. It will be like, this is what I’m interested in, here’s the bizarre mix.

TD: So, consuming as producing.

CA: Consuming as producing. And then maybe we can think of this new spirit of re-creations as being basically one step down from that.

TD: In a pretty recent interview with Paul Pieroni for Art World, you said that you’ve been trying to wrap your head around YouTube and MP3 technologies. Have you made any advances in figuring that out or bringing that problem into your work?

CA: Well, yeah, I think that this show is a result of one minor advance I’d made, one potential answer to the question of how I can be an artist in this world where YouTube is available and I basically now have access to an unlimited audience. I mean, this is kind of the dream of video art. It’s finally here, and all of a sudden, it’s like a paralysis instead. It’s not like the champagne just corked and I’m having a party, but it’s actually turned out to be kind of the opposite.

TD: People don’t know what to do.

CA: Yeah, I don’t know what to do.

TD: The director of Team Gallery was just saying to us that she was seeking out a second projector in case the projector that is playing one of your films on a loop upstairs breaks down, and you said that it would actually interest you if it broke down. I’m wondering how failure relates to your work. Like a more tech-savvy Jean Tinguely, you seem to revel in technological breakdown, the entropy of the technological fact. From what does this impulse stem?

CA: This is going to be hard to answer, or to put into words because I’ve only realized this lately because I’ve gone through a period of reevaluating what I’m doing and trying to think about. I’ve found that there is this certain core element of my interest. For example, what we’re hearing right now in the background is this self-playing bowling game that I spent a lot of time and energy working with an engineer on, learning how to program it so that it plays itself over and over again.

TD: But then it loses.

CA: Yeah, the end result is that it just throws gutter balls over and over again. And so I can explain why I think gutter balls are interesting and why the work is interesting, because it’s bending cinema narrative and taking games and turning them into this bizarre cinema/gallery narrative time. But there’s still a core, this slightly absurd situation, and I can never put my finger on why that core is there, but it’s always been an interest of mine—things just not quite working right.

TD: I think about Buffalo as a very failed place. You grew up south of Buffalo, and I spent about five years in Buffalo for graduate school, and there are a lot of failures there. The movie Buffalo 66 is very truthful about the city.

CA: I liked that movie. I saw that—I think it was the premier week—at the theater near UB.

TD: The North.

CA: Yeah, the North. There was a standing ovation. And all those inside jokes about Buffalo in the movie, like when he pisses on St. Joe’s. Yeah, Buffalo is very strange, yet oddly inspiring in a weird way. I think that there’s something in that situation that’s really beautiful. Do you know the bowling alley Voelker’s? I spent a whole summer there. Every day after work, my brother and I would go to Voelker’s, and we tried to learn bowling all summer. There’s something about Volker’s that’s kind of oddly preserved, kind of 70s.

TD: The golden age of bowling.

CA: Yeah. I’m sure that there are things about bowling preserved in many cities, but for Buffalo, in particular, bowling is some kind of cultural pet, or at least from what I learned growing up. So this self-playing bowling game is without a doubt inspired by the bowling culture of Buffalo.

TD: When I was sitting there watching the game play itself and bowl gutter balls continuously, it was pretty hellish in the darkness of the installation space, that black pleather sofa. There was something icky about the room itself where the video game was playing on repeat.

CA: It’s a slightly more comfortable cinema. It’s like a cinema, except homier. And it’s really unpleasurable to sit there and watch the bowling. Also, a lot of things in the show are very involved with gallery time—how people perceive time in the gallery and how the moving image and the time associated with the moving image are totally warped by the gallery—and completely ignored.

TD: I was thinking about a dynamic in your work, or even a dialectic. You have the Nintendo cartridge, and it’s carved into, and there’s something really bold about that. But it’s like you’re seeing into this black box, seeing into the thing itself.

CA: I don’t know if you can see this since it’s hard to see, but the PlayStation bowling is done in a similarly thematic way, which means that it has the controller, and there’s this thing glued onto it, this circuit board with my name on it. Or the Photoshop print upstairs—the name of the Photoshop print is basically an instruction telling you how to make the object itself. Anybody could make it—that’s the whole point. And that anyone could make it is of course a conceptual-art thing. It’s been around for a long time, but in dealing with technology, it’s slightly different because you can now make digital duplicates, which makes things a little bit more confusing.

TD: Like a reenactment of 60s art only through a technology that everyone uses now. What about groups like the Yes Men, ®™k, and Negativeland? Do you see yourself as being in dialogue with them at all?

CA: Tiny bits. I should say that all of those groups are important to me, but Yes Men is a whole thing unto itself, and for me to say that I am somehow similar to them would make no sense because they’re very specific, although I like what they do very much. As for Negativeland, I’m very glad you bring them up. I mean, tape-splice culture is something I really like.

TD: Their most famous work was a straight-up appropriation of U2’s first album.

CA: Yeah, the Casey Kasem thing. I obviously identify with that kind of thing, and I think that we should actually give them and groups like that much more credit. Those guys predicted everything that’s happening now. So, I think it’s not so much that I’m influenced by Negativeland but by the culture that Negativeland predicted because I’m coming from the Internet thing where that’s common—cutting/pasting, cutting/pasting. It’s all coming back in a weird way, which is to their credit. Bruce Conner and all those people really saw the future. What kind of future I see, I have no clue.