New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Eivind Røssaak, "The Cory Arcangel Hack: Digital Culture and Aesthetic Practice" (MIT Press, 2025)

Apr 4, 2026

Eivind Røssaak, research professor at the National Library of Norway who studies visual media and media history. He traces Cory Arcangel’s DIY hacks as technical pranks that critique platform capitalism. Short takes cover Arcangel’s flow-break, flow-remix, and flow-parody strategies, his lecture-performances, and how small code interventions reshape digital culture.

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INSIGHT

Hacks Make Digital Systems Politically Mutable

Cory Arcangel's hacks reveal digital systems as mutable social structures rather than fixed tools.
Eivind Røssaak traces this by treating technical devices as ecologies of operators, showing how small code changes reconfigure social relations.

ANECDOTE

The Pizza Party Live Hack That Ordered Pizza For The Crowd

Arcangel performed a live hack called The Pizza Party that commandeered Domino's ordering to feed an audience.
He nervously waited with the crowd for delivery, likening pressing the hack to pressing a nuclear button when the pizza arrived.

INSIGHT

Deleuzian Flows Make Hacks Politically Legible

Røssaak applies Deleuze and Guattari's concept of flows and the machinic phylum to digital media to make the hack intelligible politically.
Hacks intervene in electrical and informational flows by arresting, rerouting, or remixing code-based currents.

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The first in-depth exploration of the work of artist Cory Arcangel, a pioneer of DIY-new media art whose influential “hacks” subvert the confines of Big Tech.

Cory Arcangel (b. 1978)—perhaps best known for Super Mario Clouds, the most referenced artistic game hack in art history—became one of the first artists from a new generation of punk DIY–new media geeks to capture the attention of the art world.
Combining the hands-on skills from the 1990s net art scene and the 2010s post-internet art’s fondness for memes and the generic image, Arcangel demonstrated the way cultural expressions are intimately connected to media technologies and how these technologies can be pranked for cultural critique. In The Cory Arcangel Hack: Digital Culture and Aesthetic Practice (MIT Press, 2025), Eivind Røssaak shows how Arcangel’s body of work defines a particular strain of postconceptual art that is fundamental for understanding the digital world we live in.
Today, the question is not what comes first, humans or machines, but what the forces regulating expressive flows are. Arcangel’s aesthetic and micropolitical critique of mediation at the level of codes and chips enables us to think critically with computational articulations through specific aesthetic clashes and disjunctions, identified in the book as critical “flow-cut arrangements.” This book explores three dominant arrangements in Arcangel’s work—the flow-break hack, the flow-remix hack, and the flow-parody hack—that pinpoint areas of both creativity and concern before and after platform capitalism.

Matthis Frickhoeffer is a scholar of critical theory and French thought with a background in literature studies, linguistics and art theory. His work focuses on questions of form, semiotics, and intertextuality. He teaches at the University of Texas at Dallas.

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