MIG 29 Soviet Fighter Plane and Clouds, 2005

Basel 2017
MIG 29 Soviet Fighter Plane and Clouds

Lisson Gallery, team (gallery, inc.)

Installation
2 hacked Nintendo Entertainment System game cartridges, 2 Nintendo Entertainment System game consoles, artist software
For the first time, Cory Arcangel’s MIG 29 Soviet Fighter Plane and Clouds is exhibited in the format the artist originally intended. He says: ‘This work is a hack of an early 90s video game in which you are a Soviet Fighter Jet asked to go on bombing missions in the Middle East. Usually in these games you are an American pilot; here it’s a role reversal. The game was produced by CAMERICA which was a bootleg Nintendo game-making company. This could very well be the reason the content is a bit unorthodox. For this hack, I singled out the plane from the intro screen of the game, and programmed a new cartridge with just that, and then stole the clouds from later in the game, and made another cartridge which just has those. I made this project to be an installation: meaning, it kinda has to be set up with a bunch of projectors to make any sense. All of my other hacks were made for my website and then retrofitted for gallery installation.’ Reconfiguring web design and hacking as artistic practice, Arcangel remains faithful to Open Source culture and makes his work and methods available online, thus superimposing a perpetual question mark as to the value of the art object.