Romhacking as art? [Archive] - Retrogaming Roundtable

Daria

05-16-2004, 07:58 PM

Since you said it won't be a round long, and nothing's more annoying then trying to reply to a thread about an article that no longer exists.

By SIMON HOUPT
Saturday, May 15, 2004 - Page R1

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NEW YORK -- If you want to glimpse the future of art, tag along one day with Cory Arcangel as he plows through the history of technology. Every few weeks Arcangel, a 25-year-old artist based in Brooklyn, spends a day trolling in Goodwill stores and junk shops for the sort of detritus that our society used to call high tech, like Nintendo NES videogame cartridges circa 1985. Then he takes them back to his studio for a little torture with a soldering iron.

When he's done, Super Mario isn't so super after all. Arcangel's artworks include Super Mario Clouds, a piece in the current Whitney Biennial that consists of a hacked Nintendo cartridge that projects only the blue sky and gently floating clouds that used to form the visual backdrop for the little Italian plumber's heroic antics. Another piece, called Naptime, shows Mario dreaming of psychedelic visions. Arcangel's I Shot Andy Warhol, currently on view at the Guggenheim, is the result of a hacked Hogan's Alley cartridge in which the Nintendo game's shooting gallery of snarling denizens has been replaced by Warhol, the Pope, the rap artist Flava Flav and the fried-chicken icon Colonel Sanders.

A continent away, holed up in his suburban Los Angeles house, Brian Burton is looking for his next project. Burton is a DJ who goes by the name Danger Mouse, and last winter he thought it would be cool to use Acid Pro, a $400 (U.S.) music-software package to mix The Black Album by the rapper Jay-Z with The White Album by the Beatles into a so-called mash-up. Working non-stop for two weeks, he produced The Grey Album, which quickly became one of the most sought after pieces of media on the Internet, with more than 100,000 copies downloaded on a single day in February.

Separated by thousands of miles and decades of technological advances, Arcangel and Burton are together at the forefront of a new kind of culture. Rather than creating something out of raw paints and canvas or chisels on untouched stone, or coaxing sounds from a musical instrument with their own hands, their preferred medium is premade art, prerecorded music, and other media that already exist.

"All culture is recombinant. All cultural works build themselves out of pieces of other works," says Siva Vaidhyanathan, director of the undergraduate program in communication studies at New York University. "This is what artists have been doing since we've had artists."

Shakespeare borrowed Danish and Scottish legends, Leonard Bernstein borrowed from Shakespeare, and Homer's story of Troy (which has now been made into a $175-million [U.S.] film without anyone in Hollywood cutting a cheque to Homer's descendants) was itself based on myth. Warhol and other pop artists appropriated commercial icons for their paintings. Musicians record cover versions of their favourite songs as tributes to their forebears.

The difference now is that artists -- professionals and amateurs alike -- are taking existing works and messing with their content and expression to create something new. If you want a name for the phenomenon, you could look at its insistence on the rights of the individual and call it democratic art, or focus on its wholesale limb-splicing and call it FrankenArt, in a nod to Mary Shelley's science-fiction horror story (which was, as it happens, based on the true story of a scientist living in Burg Frankenstein, but that may be neither here nor there).

Marcel Duchamp did something like this when he drew a mustache on a copy of the Mona Lisa. Last year, England's enfants terribles Jake and Dinos Chapman, to the horror of the art world, marked up Goya's Disasters of War prints with images of clown heads and puppy-dog heads. But most of the new art is being driven by the ability to reshape with technology.

"What we're seeing now is the expansion and extension of these habits through electronic means, and artists are making sure that the medium itself is part of the message," says Vaidhyanathan, whose new book The Anarchist in the Library grapples with how the Internet affects the struggle between oligarchy and anarchy.

The Internet, with its essential malleability, has energized much of the activity. Wikipedia is a so-called "open content" on-line encyclopedia where visitors can contribute content to the articles, albeit at the discretion of editors. Artist Mark Napier created Net.Flag, a web project that exhibited a prospective national flag for the Internet that visitors could alter.

And the Internet emboldens amateurs. In the summer of 2001, one rabid Star Wars fan took it upon himself to make a new cut of Episode I, removing 20 minutes from the original 133-minute running time, all but eliminating Jar Jar Binks and rendering the young Anakin more appropriately solemn than in the original.

Titled Episode 1.1 -- The Phantom Edit and distributed over the Web, the film inspired numerous other amateur edits.

Some artists are more interested in rearranging elements to deconstruct and challenge the products of pop culture. Jennifer and Kevin McCoy are represented along with Arcangel in Pop_Remix, a show that opened this week at the San Francisco gallery SF Camerawork. Their piece Every Shot, Every Episode is made up of CD-ROMs that contain the entire 88-episode run of Starsky & Hutch. The McCoys blew apart the show's linear narrative and grouped the scenes into themes.

Choose the CD labelled Every Sexy Outfit, and you'll see a montage of all the racy clothes that appeared on the show. Watching the CD Every Yellow Volkswagen could make a viewer wonder if someone on the show's crew drove a certain German car that happened to find its way into the street scenes.

SF Camerawork curator Marisa S. Olson believes the current spate of "remixing" film, television, and videogame images parallels the work of pop-art practitioners, who appropriated commercial icons and vernacular imagery for their raw material.

But some icons hold their power through the generations. Artist Paul Pfeiffer's entry in Pop_Remix uses a favourite of Warhol's, Marilyn Monroe -- or, to be more accurate, her absence. For his series of photographs entitled Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Pfeiffer took film publicity stills of Marilyn and painstakingly erased her from the image, leaving only an image of what looks like a hazy photographic backdrop.

Like many of the young artists involved in the wave of FrankenArt, Cory Arcangel believes his age is a major influence. "I'm 25 and I have no experience with anything except media, so it's like, I can't make anything," he said this week from San Francisco, where he was attending the opening of Pop_Remix. "The language I understand is media, so when I make something, as a raw material it's the only thing I'm comfortable with. It's not a conscious effort, being a hacker or making a political statement.

"I grew up playing videogames, it's something that I just understand intuitively," he added. "It doesn't make sense for me to make work out of anything else. It doesn't make sense for me to just draw stuff. I think with a lot of artists my age, it's all just mashing stuff together, and it's all about connotation and it's all about how things fit together, and it's all just about cultural references."

Arcangel intentionally spurned the powerful graphics and audio potential of the new technology that captivated other young artists, such as Flash or Shockwave, because he didn't like the idea of his work being limited by someone else's software code. "You can't even really program computers any more," he complains. "Flash is a program made by Macromedia, which runs on an operating system made by Microsoft or Apple, so as an artist I always think of my work being filtered through all these levels of censors."

As for the big company he implicitly took on, Arcangel hasn't heard from Nintendo, perhaps because those early Super Mario cartridges are no longer relevant to the company's bottom line. But other artists have felt the full force of the law, or at least those insisting they have the law behind them.

After word got around about Burton's Grey Album, lawyers from EMI, which claimed control over the rights to the Beatles' White Album, delivered a cease-and-desist letter to the DJ. EMI was hit with a worldwide protest that involved more than 300 websites posting copies of The Grey Album on Feb. 24, dubbed Grey Tuesday. The website BannedMusic.org, from which links to the album are still available, estimates that more than one million Burton-mixed tracks were downloaded within 24 hours. EMI backed off a little after Burton explained he had no intention of profiting from his creation.

Burton says he's a fan of both Jay-Z and the Beatles, and The Grey Album does seem respectful. The 12-track record is a wild ride that Beatles fans might embrace if they're open-minded and inclined to the same sort of cultural revolutions as their idols were. Jay-Z's Dirt on My Shoulders begins with John Lennon's gentle guitar and vocal coo from Julia before tripping into a skittery rap. What More Can I Say lets us taste the familiar guitar riff of While My Guitar Gently Weeps before undermining it with a funky bass-and-snare drum counterpoint. The final tune 99 Problems fuses the already jumbled Helter Skelter to angry rap.

Recorded mash-ups began with live remixing in dance clubs, first in Jamaica and then in the United States and Canada, with DJs spinning snippets of songs bumping up against each other. Eventually, someone took the discs home and recorded them. Nowadays, anyone with a Macintosh preloaded with the music-mixing software Pro Tools has the power to blend songs.

They're not all good, mind you. Some carry a whiff of arrogance and forced subjugation, as if the remixer is trying to humiliate the two original artists by inflicting a relationship where none should be. A mash-up of Michael Jackson's Bad married to the Osmonds' Crazy Horses is an endless clash that quickly wears out its kitschy welcome. A fusion of Celine Dion's I Drive All Night with 101 Strings, which sounds as if it was mixed by a deaf rhesus monkey alternating between intravenous drips of cocaine and Quaaludes, is even more enervating than Dion's original.

But some mash-ups are made out of respect, and they're like peanut butter dipped in chocolate: two great tastes that taste great together. One of the most famous is Stroke of Genius, in which Christina Aguilera's Genie in a Bottle and the Strokes' Hard to Explain complement each other so well you feel the two artists should tour together. Aguilera's camp tried to block distribution of the song when it appeared two years ago, but they've apparently since come around to the concept. Last month they reportedly hired the producer of the mash-up, a fellow who goes by the name Freelance Hellraiser, to mix Aguilera's next single.

And other artists, finally acknowledging the impossibility of putting the technology genie back in the bottle, are climbing aboard the mash-up train. David Bowie, noting that American art wouldn't have progressed if the pop artists hadn't had unrestricted access to the works of others, says mash-ups are fine by him, as long as they're good. He is backing a contest in which fans are asked to take the vocals from any song on his new album, Reality, which are available in one-minute samples from his website, and lay them over one of his classic cuts. The winner of the contest, which closes Monday, receives a new Audi (the corporate sponsor of Bowie's tour) and sees his or her mash-up released as an MP3.

This is the future, and it offers a vision of a global culture. NYU's Sivi Vaidhyanathan believes Danger Mouse's remix, for example, has deep significance. "The Grey Album itself carries a really important lesson for North American culture in general. There has been, for 400 years, a conversation between West African and Western European culture in North America, and The Grey Album makes that explicit," he says. "We've reached the point where we have to recognize that the cultural history of these three areas are permanently intertwined. This is what we live in, and live with, and let's just dance to it."

FrankenNuggets

Phantom Editors: During the summer and fall of 2001, rabid Star Wars fans recut Episode 1: The Phantom Menace into various shorter versions of the film, frequently rendering it more entertaining and intelligible than the original.

Wikipedia: On-line encyclopedia that is endlessly regenerating itself through new content posted by visitors.

Mash-ups: Professional and amateur DJs use off-the-shelf software that enables them to take elements of two songs -- like the vocal line from one and the backing tracks from another -- and fuse them into something new.

Hacked videogames: Using cast-off cartridges of classic games from the 1980s, artists create visual environments that re-mix familiar elements, evoking both alienation from and nostalgia for the recent past.

-- Simon Houpt

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