Creative Capital

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Cory Arcangel describes himself an appropriation artist, in the Dadaist tradition of Hannah Höch’s newspaper collages and Marcel Duchamp’s readymade urinal fountain. “The difference is that my content is delivered digitally,” Arcangel says, describing a computer-based art practice that often involves tweaking everyday commercial products like video-game cartridges and turning them into art.

Arcangel’s Creative Capital project, D.I.Y.W.I.K.I., is a work of conceptual Internet art. D.I.Y.W.I.K.I. is an open-source website detailing the artist’s methods of media intervention and hacking. Arcangel is creating a virtual user’s manual that details the process by which he has built previous works, including the manipulation of video games. The title explains both the piece’s function and the artist’s means of production: D.I.Y.W.I.K.I. is a do-it-yourself wiki, a collaborative website where users write, post, and edit text. The core idea of the project is to create a user-generated site “where all information is available,” Arcangel says. It’s intended as the ultimate repository on any subject, person, place, idea, process—all composed and monitored by the public. But it’s not to be confused with Wikipedia, the popular (and controversial) user-generated and user-edited encyclopedia launched in 2001. Arcangel’s experiment is more focused on the programming and code associated with creating his own work. With an intentionally playful tone, Arcangel’s site is less regulated, and more experimental than Wikipedia. By allowing internet users to alter the source code to his own artwork, D.I.Y.W.I.K.I. blurs the line between artist, artwork, and public.

“_D.I.Y.W.I.K.I._ is what I would have wanted to find years ago surfing the Internet. It would’ve been a dream come true for someone who wants to share information,” says Arcangel. He himself is a part of a thriving subculture of self-taught programmers who create artworks and performative musical pieces, using obsolete consumer machines and related paraphernalia, such as game consoles and dot matrix printers from the 1980s.

About six years ago, Arcangel wanted to make available, in an organized way, detailed how-to instructions on his own hacker projects. So he published source code for his hacking projects online. Emblazoned with the title “Cory’s Web LOG” and featuring no splashy graphics or fonts, his site (www.beigerecords.com/cory/) has the feel of a hip tinkerer’s home page, characterized by casual, conversational phrases peppered with extra exclamation points. D.I.Y.W.I.K.I. will be available in 2007 via a link on “Cory’s Web LOG.”

The entire site is infused with a DIY spirit. Arcangel posts complete instructions on how to replicate his best-known work, Super Mario Clouds (2002). In this piece, he took an old Nintendo entertainment system cartridge for the “Super Mario Bros.” game, then replaced the computer chip with a new one that he’d programmed to erase all imagery except the cartoony background clouds.

The open-source nature of his “Web LOG” is a fitting precedent for Arcangel’s new project. D.I.Y.W.I.K.I. features the same blunt yet humorous, guidebook-like tone of his general site, which includes such observations as “The first time I took a class in ‘computer science’ was at a summer school when I was 8 or 9 years old and I remember crying and switching to the ‘storytelling’ class.” There’s nothing expressionistic or artistic about D.I.Y.W.I.K.I., though, and the graphics and fonts are straightforward and plain. The first entry on video games was posted by Arcangel himself. What characterizes the project as an artwork, however, is what he calls the site’s “funny, performative voice,” a tone shared by most of the texts posted. As part of the conceptual strategy of the work, which Arcangel describes as an “organic” and intentionally unstructured project, D.I.Y.W.I.K.I. will not be promoted aggressively. Instead, he “hopes people will just stumble upon it,” he says, “via random Google searches.”

Arcangel is planning to present the project at colleges and other venues such as galleries and museums, in the style of technical workshops. His presentations are a hybrid of instructional session and performance art, while the participatory aspect of D.I.Y.W.I.K.I. evokes the active audience participation in Allan Kaprow’s art-performance Happenings of the 1960s. But since D.I.Y.W.I.K.I. is intended as a perpetual work-in-progress, its development will, at least in theory, continue ad infinitum.

Download the Weekend Workshop Agenda (.pdf)