New Books in Popular Culture Eivind Røssaak, "The Cory Arcangel Hack: Digital Culture and Aesthetic Practice" (MIT Press, 2025)
Apr 4, 2026
Eivind Røssaak, a research professor at the National Library of Norway specializing in visual media and cinema studies, discusses Cory Arcangel’s hacker-based digital art. He traces Arcangel’s ROM hacks like Super Mario Clouds, his remix era using social platforms, and later parody works that mimic platform behaviors. The conversation maps hacking as aesthetic practice and a critique of digital regimes.
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Digital Regimes Reshape Human Subjectivity
- Digital regimes reshape subjects by exerting subliminal pressures through media and machines.
- Eivind Røssaak traced this by shifting from analog film studies to analyzing how Cory Arcangel's art maps those machine-driven pressures into aesthetic critique.
The Pizza Party Live Hack Demonstrated Power Of Small Commands
- Cory Arcangel performed a live hack called The Pizza Party that ordered pizza for an audience by manipulating Domino's system.
- The nervous wait for delivery dramatized how a tiny command can reorder everyday life, like pressing a 'nuclear button.'
Hacks Work By Rearranging Technical Flows
- Deleuze and Guattari's notion of flows helps explain hacks as interventions that stop, redirect, or rearrange technical and social flows.
- Røssaak adapts the machinic phylum to show hacks alter electrical/code-level flows, producing new social-material arrangements.
