Big, chunky pixels: New lo-fi animation
Cory Arcangel
While Bell-Smith struggles within the confines of a software application, artist Cory Arcangel has his hands on the physical computer chip itself. Arcangel, a New York-based artist, is adept at subverting electronic media to both hilarious and sublime effect. In one groundbreaking bit of animation called “Super Mario Clouds” (2002), he isolated the clouds from a Super Mario Brothers Nintendo cartridge, leaving a deep blue sky and passing clouds to loop infinitely. It is a hazy, beautiful piece of art, as though his entire video game generation had collectively dreamt it. More recently, he collaborated with Paper Rad on “Mario Movie” (2005), a more ambitious retooling of the game that turns it into an animated narrative of Mario’s world gone awry. This time, all of the graphic elements are re-jiggered to dramatic effect, or as Arcangel wrote: “Picture title screens, messed up fantasy worlds, castles floating on rainbow colored 8bit clouds, waterfalls, underwater dungeon nightmare rave-scapes, dance parties, floating/mushrooms level scenes, Mario alone on a cloud crying...”
Figure 7: Still from “Mario Movie,” 2005, Cory Arcangel and Paper Rad.
Arcangel achieves this by literally altering the matrix of the game. In order to manipulate the game’s elements, Arcangel built his own animation program to handle the graphics, burnt it onto a chip, and installed that chip in the original Nintendo game cartridge, mechanically re-configuring the Mario universe. The beauty of this project is that Arcangel and Paper Rad don’t violate the Mario universe. They work within the preestablished Mario system to create their own animated narrative. Mario does nothing uncharacteristic, and Arcangel’s animation program behaves just as the original does, it just happens to answer to a different master. This is animation entering the realm of appropriation and the physical, and, in the case of Arcangel’s chip manipulation and use of the original cartridge construction, even the sculptural. Like Bell-Smith and Wyld File, Arcangel enjoys working with limitations and subverting notions of progress and technological potential. The impression he wants to create, he says, “is that the cartridge might just be a little dusty and working funny.” And again like Bell-Smith, Arcangel leaves evidence of his artistic hand in his work, in this case by virtue of his alteration of an actual object to achieve digital effects. Viewing both the scrappy Nintendo cartridge and the film within reminds us that there are human beings behind the screens and exposes the potential for hand-crafted art in a medium in which, as Bell-Smith has noted, the hand often seems absent.
Of course, the personal, hand-crafted and deliberate aesthetics that these artists are working towards is not an isolated phenomenon: it has direct corollaries to the current movement of hand-made graphics and the return to more personal, craft-oriented books springing up around North America. As notions of progress move artists and designers ever closer to an impersonal ideal, artists are going to subvert it and work to restore the humanity to their beloved mediums. Embracing limitations, undermining programs, and asserting the presence of their own hands in the process is both an aesthetic and personal choice: it’s about living and creating in a way that makes sense to the artist. For creators like Wyld File, Michael Bell-Smith and Cory Arcangel, wherever progress takes them, they’ll have one eye on what’s possible and one eye on what’s necessary. For these artists, doing it wrong and making it difficult is just all right.
Where to go from here
For more information about the artists mentioned in this article, check out their websites:
- Wyld File: www.wyldfile.org/
- Michael Bell-Smith at Foxy Production: www.foxyproduction.com/artist/view/5
- Cory Arcangel: www.beigerecords.com/cory/
