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

Apr 4, 2026

Eivind Røssaak, research professor in visual media and author of The Cory Arcangel Hack, maps how Arcangel’s DIY hacks reorder digital culture. He traces hacker-art collisions, presents a taxonomy of flow-break, flow-remix, and flow-parody hacks, and situates Arcangel within contemporary digital art. The conversation also looks ahead to AI ecologies and how media technologies shape expressive flows.

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ANECDOTE

A Fifteen Year Research Arc

Røssaak first met Arcangel while researching analog film regimes but kept revisiting his work across 10–15 years before writing the book.
Early interviews in NYU's milieu (with Alexander Galloway present) seeded the long research trajectory.

INSIGHT

Dual-Level Hack As Artistic Strategy

Cory Arcangel's hacks operate on two levels: technical manipulation and conceptual intervention in social structures.
Arcangel simultaneously hacks game/software internals and the art world's expectations by performing as a hacker and using conceptual art strategies.

ANECDOTE

The Pizza Party Lecture Performance

Arcangel invented the lecture performance to perform hacks live while explaining them, mixing demonstration and discourse.
In The Pizza Party he hacked an online ordering system live and nervously awaited the actual pizza delivery, which eventually arrived to audience astonishment.

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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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