A Couple Thousand Short Films About Glenn Gould

Mario's world is falling apart.

Filmed at Urbandale Plaza in the eastern suburbs of Buffalo N.Y., "Urbandale" is a study of America's suburban sprawl stripped to its barest essentials and void of unnecessary contemporary cultural influence. The film, rendered in text, focuses on the repetitive motion of foodstuffs being cooked in the lobby of a discount department store. Says Arcangel, "I composed Urbandale by creating my own software and using ASCII (text) as the only means of display [...] I have 'frozen' a certain time and aesthetic in computer culture [...] The soundtrack for Urbandale was also composed by myself and recorded with 12 electric guitars".

A screen capture of pre-set iMovie transition graphics.

This historic work by Cory Arcangel is an infinite loop where the famed figure, Super Mario, is stuck on a block in a sea of blue pixels. This rarely-seen artwork is a video generated by a Nintendo Entertainment System playing a Super Mario Bros. cartridge which has been hacked by Arcangel.

In Naptime, the visuals were made first, and then the music added at the end by Paul B. Davis.

A short film and video installation by Cory Arcangel

Video Ravingz is a hacked version of Mario 2 where the user wins the game simply by inserting the cartridge. With rave-style graphics and music, there's an air of celebration about this work because everyone's a winner.

Continuing his investigation into the intersection of culture and technology in the context of the handmade, here Arcangel explores the "mash-up," in which music fans digitally merge two songs to create unexpected hybrids. Arcangel's experiment pushes this practice into the realm of absurdity, pairing wildly different tracks based on the similarity of their bands' names.

A surf through subway.com and its associated social media accounts, a vast web-content empire including Jared’s Journey, videos with nutrition experts, testimonies from former Olympians, and tips for opening your own franchise.