Cory Arcangel: 🤗
Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art
Saturday 22nd April - Sunday 9th July 2023
🤗 is from a series of artworks called ‘Runners’ by American artist Cory Arcangel. Arcangel’s work explores the potential and failures of old and new digital technologies, highlighting their obsolescence, humour, aesthetics and, at times, eerie influence on contemporary life.
🤗 is a single-channel screen recording of a live bot performance on Instagram. Screen captured via a smartphone on 8 December 2019 the recording scrolls through a year’s worth of Amazon’s Instagram feed with a live bot programmed by the artist liking each post in turn. The screen has been turned horizontally to give the viewer the impression of watching a film tracking from left to right as opposed to the conventional scrolling down motion of Instagram. The artist’s intention is to highlight the pervasiveness of advertising that encourages capitalist consumerism.
Social media platforms are progressively being used to covertly extract meta data on personal interests for commercial gain. The use of pop-up advertisements extend the browsing time of users for this purpose and Arcangel exposes the often mundane and surreptitious methods they use to seduce users into buying ‘things’ they do not often need.
Cory Arcangel (born 1978, Buffalo, New York) is an artist, composer, curator and entrepreneur living and working in Stavanger, Norway. His work is included in many public collections, including the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, MoMA in New York, the Tate, London and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington D.C. Arcangel is the youngest artist since Bruce Nauman to have been given a full floor solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2011). Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art presented a solo exhibition of Arcangel’s work in 2007.
Produced in collaboration with Georgia Smithson, NPIF/ AHRC funded PhD researcher, the University of Sunderland. Supported by The AHRC Northumbria- Sunderland Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT).
Photos: Colin Davison