Brooklyn, NY-based
Cory Arcangel and his accomplices -- who call themselves the
BEIGE programming ensemble -- "crack" Nintendo game chips and
alter their contents.
By traveling backward to the nascent technology of "interactive" video,
Arcangel and company (Joe Beuckman, Joseph Bonn and Paul B. Davis) rewrite science in reverse, chucking "advancement" out the window.
In
I Shot Andy Warhol (2002), for instance, they reprogrammed a 1980s Nintendo videogame,
Hogan's Alley, and populated the game with mass-culture icons (chosen because they are recognizable even at the extremely small pixel size in which they are rendered). Players gain points by shooting Andy Warhol, but lose points if they accidentally shoot Colonel Sanders, the Pope or Flavor Flav.
Another work,
Super Mario Clouds (2003), a large wall projection of wondrous blue with white digital clouds, is simply a Super Mario Bros. game chip with all of the
human figures removed.
Arcangel's
Data Diaries is a series of Quicktime video renderings of the
raw memory lurking in his computer; the collective's
8-Bit Construction Set (2001) -- a conceptual
DJ battle record with one Atari and one Commodore side -- has been called "a testament to nerdiness" by
The New York Times, and "genius" by
XLR8R magazine.
BEIGE and
Radical Software Group recently collaborated on a DVD entitled
Low Level All-Stars, a reseach project about early computer video grafitti, for the exhibition
Kingdom of Piracy. The project showcases the best "cracker" tags selected from over 1000 games available for the Commodore 64 computer. ("Crackers," the feareless geeks who remove a game's copy protection through brute force, often leave behind modified start-up screens as evidence of their trade.)
Cory Arcangel/BEIGE's work will be featured as part of the 2004 Biennial at
The Whitney Museum of American Art, March 11-May 30.
They will also show pieces in
Team Gallery's booth at the upcoming
Armory Show 2004, March 11-15.
# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/23/2004 01:38:00 PM
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