One day when our children’s children are trying to make sense of when humanity first transitioned from the classical era into the digital age in the early 2000s, one body of work that deserves to come up: the catalogue of the post-internet conceptual artist Cory Arcangel.
Since his 2002 breakthrough Super Mario Clouds — a hacked Nintendo cartridge that left nothing but drifting clouds on the screen — he’s transformed the familiar into works that carry humor, nostalgia, and weight. What once felt trivial becomes a melancholy memory.
Arcangel’s early online experiments set the stage for a proper blue chip art career, with work exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, the Barbican, and other international institutions. He continues to release new work through his Arcangel Surfware label (very much in the Metalabel spirit) that explores art and code at their edges.
Over the past year alongside our curator Molly Soda, we’ve been exploring with Cory how we might collaborate. Today the right project has arrived.
MY_PHOTO
For his debut release on Metalabel, Arcangel presents MY_PHOTO. Made with a Sony FD Mavica MVC-FD75 camera — a clunky digital relic that saves JPEGs onto 3.5" floppy disks — the project echoes past explorations of obsolete media and unusual landscapes.
The result is a digital artwork containing a series of images created by the artist in a limited edition of 64, with each edition containing a file folder that replicates the original floppy disk on which the photos were taken.
To better understand the context of the piece, we reached out to Arcangel in Norway to learn more about the work.
Q&A with Cory Arcangel
METALABEL: What are the origins of this project?
ARCANGEL: The origin of this project was acquiring a Sony FD Mavica MVC-FD75 during my Ebay binging years in the 00’s. The Mavica MVC-FD75 is a digital camera that saves photos by writing JPEGs directly onto a 3.5" floppy disk.
It continued when I moved to the southwest coast of Norway ten years ago, and being so surprised the skyscapes change every three minutes because of the wind.
Out of this ever-changing sky and my quest to figure out what to do with the Mavica, this project emerged as a kind of game: whenever I spotted a skyscape worth capturing, I would drop whatever I was doing, find the camera (sometimes by running home), and take a picture from my terrace.
METALABEL: Can you tell us more about the files themselves?
ARCANGEL: The download is an ISO image of the floppy — a virtual version of the disk. The disk contains 36 JPEG cloudscape pics I took. 36 is all that fit on the floppy, FYI ;-)
The project was fun. I’ve always loved floppy disks as sites for artwork(s). The JPEGs themselves feel quite loose. Last but not least, I think some of the pics are quite stunning (especially as I got better at it over the months and learned how the lens and Mavica compression algo “worked” together).
METALABEL: How are you thinking about technology and making new media art in 2025?
ARCANGEL: When I started doing this kinda work it was quite obscure. While that's changed to some degree, what really has changed to an unrecognisable degree is that the medium itself — code — now literally runs the world!
METALABEL: Why publish through Arcangel Surfware?
ARCANGEL: Arcangel Surfware runs parallel to my more trad "studio" work and functions like an R&D lab. It's a place to test ideas, and just kinda have fun.
HOLY SHIT
Nice. Excited to see he's still focused on "clouds," even if it's real ones.