The Cory Arcangel Hack

Eivind Røssaak's 'The Cory Arcangel Hack' examines the oeuvre of artist Cory Arcangel and situates his ROM hacks, social-media remixes, and bot works within a broader theory of flows and machinic assemblages.

The book identifies three dominant flow arrangements—flow-break, flow-remix, and flow-parody hacks—and uses them to explore how Arcangel intervenes in the technical and social ecologies of games, platforms, and code.

Røssaak draws on Deleuzian concepts (flows, machinic assemblages) and software studies to argue that Arcangel's work performs micropolitical critiques of mediation at the level of chips and code.

He also traces Arcangel's movement from early net-art hacker contexts into the contemporary art world, arguing the work exemplifies a post-conceptual digital aesthetic.

The monograph positions Arcangel as exemplary of how art can critically engage with digital technologies and platform capitalism.