Lecture Review #2 Cory Arcangel

I work nights and have school during the days, so due to my work schedule and my daughter I was only able to attend one live lecture.  So, I decided to view the youtube lecture by Cory Arcangel.

         Cory Arcangel is a digital programmer that deals with program code.  Most of his projects have been focused around the idea of “stealing” program codes and tweaking with them in a certain way to make an artwork that varies from the original program.  He says, “I don’t know anything else unless it’s attached to some culture or pop culture.”

After going to school for music, he realized that he did not want to become the starving musician and started to study programming.  While in school he began to take apart programs and put them back together to screw with people.  Arcangel made a mail program that when the other students would open their mail the computer would shut down and the cd rom would shoot open.  He enjoyed watching their reactions.  

Another of his projects was called “data diaries”.  He went through the ram from his computer for each day of a one month period.  He saved the ram of 16 different colors and then created a movie of the multiple colors.  It became 128 mb of random ram of colors, pixels, shapes and lines.

One of his projects that caught my eye was his Beach Boys v. Ghetto Boys project.  In it he did something similar to the InBflat series we worked with on youtube.  Arcangel took two songs by two opposite groups like the Beach Boys and the Ghetto Boys, worked with the timing and played them simultaneously next to each other.  Be wanted to do a match up without completely editing it.

Arcangel has worked in various programs to create almost a Duchamp like feel to his work in which he takes a found, already created, program and works with it to create something new.  He works with multiple programs to create the effect that he desires at that specific time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzHq7PzQWEE&feature=channel