The MIT Press, book, ISBN 978-0262552547, English, 274 pages, 2025, USA

Cory Arcangel is certainly an anomaly in media art. Embodying a pure hacker DIY spirit, he has, in just a few years, become a renowned contemporary artist. This particular trajectory, and how it materialised almost spontaneously, is at the core of The Cory Arcangel Hack, Eivind Røssaak’s thorough research, which blends theory and technique and is published Open Access. In his own words, understanding an Arcangel artwork means “exploring the technical operation that makes it possible”, as he is a “mechanologist”, using devices such as irony and failure to question digital media. Arcangel has a definitive hacker attitude and sensibility. This is also clear from the long introduction, which contains several biographical and historical notes. Røssaak approaches Arcangel through Deleuze and Guattari’s “generalized theory of flows”, discussed in the first chapter. In the second chapter, the “flow-break hack” reverse engineers Super Mario Clouds, the sophisticated hack that made him famous, inscribed in the tradition of videogame artists and still combining hardcore technical aspects with the pure poetry of the visual result. In the third chapter (the flow-remix hack), he discusses works characterised by remix strategies, with a similarly painstaking attitude, sometimes including specific bits of code, while the fourth chapter (the flow-parody hack) addresses bots acting on platforms. Alexander R. Galloway, in the preface, points to a key element: Arcangel’s work is fun. In fact, it disrupts and exposes the absurdity of digital logic, but does so in a way that generates pleasure, with his own dysfunctional machines.