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Now you can play Cory Arcangel’s readymade "Bomb Iraq" from your desk

The digital art archivists at Rhizome have excavated and extracted files from the computer that contains Cory Arcangel’s 2005 Bomb Iraq, so now you can experience a piece of art from the creator of Super Mario Clouds in your browser.  A sort of modern-day Duchamp’s Fountain, Bomb Iraq is a post-conceptual found-object that begs the question: “What the fuck, art?” Originally, Bomb Iraq was a terrible homemade computer game with terrible clipart graphics programmed by a kid who remains anonymous. Obviously, it’s about bombing Iraq.  When Arcangel found the game on an old Macintosh TV, Apple’s flopped computer/television hybrid, he was…

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Cory Arcangel mines digital Warhol art from old floppy disks

Working alongside Cory Archangel, the artist best known for removing everything but the clouds from Super Mario Bros., a team of archivists and forensic experts has extracted early digital artwork of Andy Warhol from some corrupt disks.  The art is what you’d expect to find Warhol doodling on his home computer in 1985: squiggly Campbell’s soup cans and pixelated self-portraiture. He had created the art on an Amiga 1000 in a program called Graphicraft and stored the images on magnetic floppies, but, as we know in hindsight, those die remarkably fast. Retrieving the 28 images of lost pop art required some skillful…

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Profile of Cory Arcangel reveals an artist who understands games as an instrument of failure

The New Yorker lifted the paywall on its marvellous profile of digital artist Cory Arcangel. You may know him best from his 2008 piece Super Mario Clouds (above) where he erased everything in Miyamoto’s classic except the — go on, guess — clouds. Below, Arcangel explains why frustration is at the center of one of his newer projects, Various Self Playing Bowling Games (aka Beat the Champ), that involved hacking several bowling games to only throw gutter balls. On one wall of the studio, Arcangel cued up the bowling projections, which Whitney visitors will see immediately after stepping off the elevator. The…