MGKWalls
Cory Arcangel

Cory Arcangel (born in Buffalo, NY (US) in 1978, lives and works in Stavanger (NO)) has developed a series of new works for the fifth edition of “MGKWalls”. As an annual presentation, this site-specific exhibition series focuses on two prominent walls of the museum: the entrance wall in the foyer and the large LED screen on the façade. Programmatically, the latter opens the museum building to the city and has been a striking architectural feature since its opening.

Cory Arcangel is an artist, composer, curator, and entrepreneur. Since the late 1990s, he has been exploring the possibilities of art based on digital technologies. His work incorporates net art, internet and pop culture, experimental music and the entertainment industry. Arcangel has gained a reputation through his unique artistic approach to old and new digital technologies. The respective media are always thematic as well as the subject matter. Using a quasi-archaeological approach, he examines their structures and “hacks” the visual language of software, video games, social media, and machine learning.

The exhibition “End User” comprises two parts. Inside the museum, a triptych of large LED lightboxes illuminates the foyer. They form part of the ongoing series “Lysbokser” (Lightboxes) and present square-shaped screenshots: digital images with an original side length of 400 pixels have been scaled up to measure two x two metres. These are image-text combinations that the artist saves while casually surfing the internet and collects on his Are.na channel “Paintings”  (https://www.are.na/cory-arcangel/paintings-xcozqmk4tio). The image titles reveal the moment, date, and time when they were captured. The content ranges from user interface graphics to daily news and celebrity gossip, as well as art historical quotations and other pictorial elements. Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907) meets three-stripes symbols or a close-up of American singer Madison Beer at a Vanity Fair Oscar party. Taken as a whole, the lightboxes make subtle reference to the history of painting over a leap in time spanning around 100 years; they also provide a bleak picture of developments in today’s online information landscape.

A digitally altered video is being shown simultaneously on the LED screen on the museum façade. It shows water reflections from Norwegian fjords, which the artist recorded not far away from his studio. To process them further, Arcangel used the tool “Cookery”, which is a command line interface he developed together with Henry Van Dusen. It is available free of charge at https://cookery.cooking/ and can be used to compile recipes for “frying” images and videos. This software processes images by employing common techniques such as compression, resizing and modulation. We become aware of how manipulating and transforming the original source material with “Cookery” generates new visual possibilities at the interface between figuration, abstraction and misinformation.

Thus, the exhibition “Cory Archangel. End User” creates an interface between interior and exterior space, static and dynamic LED screens, media and spatial experience, as well as art-historical and commercial image production. It reflects the conditions and impacts of contemporary image production. As the title suggests, the presentation focuses on the source material’s end user and resultant artistic translations.

Curated by Thomas Thiel

Press conference
Cory Arcangel
FRI. 19.9. 12 am

Opening
Cory Arcangel
FRI. 19.9. 7 pm

• Press release, Cory Arcangel (.pdf)

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