Cory Arcangel at MMCA Seoul:

Cory Arcangel at MMCA Seoul:
Super Mario Movie

An artist, composer, curator, and entrepreneur, Cory Arcangel explores the potential and failures of old and new digital technologies, highlighting their obsolescence, humor, aesthetic attributes and, at times, eerie influence in contemporary life. Applying a semi-archeological methodology, his practice explores, encodes, and hacks the structural language of video games, software, social media and machine learning — treating them as subject matter and medium.

In Super Mario Movie (2005), created in collaboration with artist collective Paper Rad, our protagonist is thrown into a world neither he nor we can comprehend. The rules of the game universe are turned upside down, colours shift, Mario floats on air. The game’s text becomes nonsense and the screen is at times overtaken by vaguely familiar symbols and abstract patterns. Through this all, Mario wanders. A nostalgic throwback, an existentialist exercise or a good internet joke? The viewer is left to pick their own interpretation.

From Cory Arcangel's website on Super Mario Movie:

ps: ​First check out the ROM below. You can load this up in a NES emulator to watch this movie. It’s better then the youtube, trust me! Also it’s legit. Also, check the related code section for a full blast of the entire working archive of the code for this project. Also buried in the code and its versions are bits of script (which we had been working on sporadically for a few years) and other loose ends. For the NES heads out there, the code also might be of interest because it contains a very simple built from scratch music sequencer, a rudimentary animation engine, and an RLE scheme to compress backgrounds.

Read more about 'Game Society' at MMCA Seoul here.