Cory Arcangel and Paper Rad

"The delicate process of hacking a Nintendo cartridge — not to mention the creation of the complicated animation program behind Super Mario Movie is a way of coming to terms with the codes of a machine-language that generates images evocative (for anyone of a certain youngish age) of an era when arcane Nintendo secrets dominated playground gossip. But Arcángel makes an important point when talking about his work's relationship to nostalgia: computer art of the '90s and of this decade has been hobbled by an accessibility problem. If audiences and critics don't understand the process (which Arcángel calls the "expressiveness") of how computer art is made, it's prone to misunderstanding or, worse, doomed to obsolescence.

Arcángel averts this problem by bending an immediately recognizable technological language whose characters, sounds and graphics are eternally lodged in pop culture's memory. But there are also utilitarian advantages to working with an 8-bit system like the original Nintendo. Its now-primitive digital architecture makes it a relatively easy hack job and feeds Arcangel's fetish for process. Changes to a game's structure are made manually, by soldering new chips in place of the originals. If a technology corporation's ideal is to sell upgrades to enhance functionality and speed (for handsome profits) Arcangel's work is its antithesis.

His interventions into preexisting techno-logical systems disrupt their seamlessness - the very quality that makes them prominent firstworld facilitators of unthinking leisure time. For instance, in Super Slow Tetris, Arcángel has slowed the game's pace to a crawl, destroying its functionality.

Similarly, many of his non-Nintendo works pervert technology to create worthless or anti-productive systems. Dooogle, the Web site Arcángel created at www.dooogle.com, mimics the graphics of the Google search engine, but only yields results that have to do with the early '90s television show "Doogie Howser, M.D." T.A.C, is a piece of software designed by Arcángel for Macintosh computers and programmed by the Radical Software Group. Its function — to considerably enlarge the size of any file passed through it — is the opposite of popular compression programs such as Stufflt. T.A.C., by the way, stands for "Total Asshole Compression." Computer art isn't exactly renowned for this brand of deadpan humor, and this, combined with his heavy reliance on the detritus of popular culture, is the major factor behind Arcangel's accessibility both inside and outside the art world."

I think these videos are cool to put it simply.