In 2018 and 2019, you could stop by the artist shop Arcangel Surfware Flagship, which was located in Storhaug. It was an art project created by Cory Arcangel, where he himself ran the shop. Now, for the first time, it is being shown as an installation in the new exhibition Family Office at Stavanger Art Museum, which opens on November 14. We invite you to a conversation between Cory Arcangel and Eivind Røssaak based on the book The Cory Arcangel Hack: Digital Culture and Aesthetic Practice (MIT Press, 2025).
The book is the first in-depth exploration of the work of artist Cory Arcangel, who is often described as a pioneer of internet art and new media. In The Cory Arcangel Hack, Eivind Røssaak shows how Arcangel's body of work defines a particular direction within post-conceptual art that is fundamental to understanding the digital world we live in. Today, the question is not what comes first, humans or machines, but rather which forces regulate the expressive flows.
Arcangel's aesthetic and micro-political critique of mediation at the code and chip level makes it possible for us to think critically through computational possibilities, disruptions, and mockeries, identified in the book as critical "flow-cut arrangements." This book explores three dominant such arrangements in Arcangel's work: "flow-break hack," "flow-remix hack," and "flow-parody hack," which point to areas of both creativity and concern before and after platform capitalism.
The exhibition Family Office is Cory Arcangel's first solo exhibition in Norway. It presents the last ten years of his artistic practice, a period during which he has been active in and from Stavanger. Cory Arcangel is one of the most internationally prominent artists working with digital technologies and internet art. Ever since he hacked a Super Mario game cartridge in 2002 and turned it into video art, he has helped bring the technologies of the internet age into the art world. He is known for hacking technological systems to comment on the absurd and humorous aspects of digital cultures and media phenomena, and how these shape our patterns of behavior.
Cory Arcangel (born 1978, Buffalo, New York) is an artist, composer, curator, and entrepreneur. He has a background in classical guitar and studied music technology at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio. In 2011, he became the youngest artist to receive a full-floor solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Eivind Røssaak (born 1964, Oslo) is a researcher in film and new media at the National Library of Norway. He studied at the University of Oslo and New York University and has taught at the Creative Writing Program in Bø alongside Karl Ove Knausgård and others. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, USC Los Angeles, and Taipei Tech. He learned filmmaking at the Film-Makers' Coop Workshop in East Village and guitar at GIT in Los Angeles.
