Errors and Omissions is Cory Arcangel’s second show in Shanghai, following his 2019 solo presentation, Topline, at CC Foundation.
Constructed as a focused take on a survey show, this exhibition features an array of the artist’s multimedia projects, including video games, single-channel video, inkjets, and industrially-coated aluminum ‘paintings’, utilizing techniques such as AI, machine learning and machine code. The show is anchored by two video game works created nearly 20 years apart — Super Slow Tetris (2004), and /rodeo/ Let’s Play: HOLLYWOOD (2021). Super Slow Tetris, an original copy of the Nintendo Entertainment System game Tetris has been hacked and slowed radically so that it now takes almost a whole day for a group of blocks to fall to the bottom of the screen (while crucially still playable). /rodeo/ (pronounced ‘Rodeo’) is another approach to extended game play, but here a bespoke Deep-Q machine-learning supercomputing system plays a casual, free-to-play, Android game called ‘Kim
Kardashian: Hollywood,’ where players aim to increase their reputation by gaining fans and A-List celebrity stardom. /rodeo?/ Let’s Play: HOLLYWOOD (2021) presented in the Shanghai gallery is a 3-hour-long single-channel screen capture video of /rodeo/ playing ‘Kim Kardashian: Hollywood,’ recorded on 14th December 2021.
Connecting these works are not only /rodeo/’s ambient system sounds by musician Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never), but a new series, entitled Things I Made, in which various webpages from coryarcangel.com become prints on paper ripped from an HP Deskjet 2710e manual. The prints track the progress of Arcangel’s work over the last two decades and include Photoshop Gradient and Smudge Tool Demonstration (2007) and his Self-Playing Nintendo 64 NBA Courtside 2 (2011).
The show concludes with a ready-made floor installation and a new series of Alus, aluminum paintings featuring abstract shapes and signatures cut by a robotic CNC fibre laser cutting machine with finishes that are reminiscent of Apple’s product lines for both casual and professional users. The lines, curves, and letters have been rendered from vectorized photographs of tracksuits, motifs which have been a long-standing interest of Arcangel’s. Industrially painted in hot pink, each work and its markings are unique. Diamond Plate (2023) utilizes a non-skid, safety surface used for stairs, catwalks, work platforms, walkways and ramps as the backdrop for the exhibition. Notably, the diamond plate pattern was a popular website background in the early days of the internet and was the background for the artist’s first website (circa 1996). From the ’90s until 2023, Arcangel has weaved and swerved through a career centering contemporary art around ideas of power, digital technology and humor. Errors and Omissions serves as a teaser to Arcangel’s continuing journey.
Cory Arcangel, Errors and Omissions, 3rd November 2023 – 31st January 2024
Lisson Gallery, Shanghai
About the artist
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, humor, aesthetic attributes and, at times, eerie influence in contemporary life. Applying a semi-archaeological methodology, his practice explores, encodes, and hacks the structural language of video games, software, social media and machine learning — treating them as subject matter and medium. Notable works include Totally Fucked (2003), a hacked Mario Bros game cartridge where Mario is stuck on a cube forever; Permanent Vacation (2008), where two computers are locked in an out of office email loop; Drei Klavierstücke op.11 (2009), in which Arnold Schoenberg’s homonymous 1909 score is plated by editing together YouTube clips of cats playing pianos; Working on my Novel (2009), a compendium of Twitter search results for ‘working on my novel’; Various Self Playing Bowling Games (2011), video games modified to throw gutter balls; Flatware (2018-), a series of abstract ‘paintings’ mounted on Ikea tabletops sourced from a diverse range of leisurewear and, /rodeo/ Let’s Play: HOLLYWOOD (2017-2021), a custom built high-performance machine learning computer which plays, as it learns, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, a free-to-play role-playing Android game. Recent and ongoing projects include ‘Worldbuilding: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age’ at Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf, Germany and Centre Pompidou Metz, France; ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen’, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, US; ‘Rainbow’ at MUDEC, Milan, Italy and ‘Game Society’ at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea.
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: ‘Midnight Moment – Another Romp Through the IP’, Times Square, New York, USA (2022), ‘Flying Foxes’, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany (2022), ‘Topline’, CC Foundation, Shanghai, China (2019), ‘BACK OFF’, Firstsite, Colchester, Essex, UK (2019), ‘Be the first of your friends’, Espace Louis Vuitton München, Munich, Germany (2015), ‘This is all so crazy, everybody seems so famous’, Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, Italy (2015), ‘All The Small Things’, Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland (2015), ‘Masters’, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA (2012–13), ‘Beat the Champ’, Barbican, London, UK (2011), ‘Here Comes Everybody’, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany (2010–11) and Nerdzone Version 1, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich, Switzerland (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). In 2014, he launched Arcangel Surfware, a merchandise and publishing imprint. Its flagship store opened in Stavanger, Norway in 2018.
