Super Mario Clouds by Cory Arcangel is a piece that, as it’s title suggests, depicts the clouds from the NES game Super Mario Brothers. Arcangel created this piece by hacking into a cartridge for Super Mario Brothers and removing elements from the game until all that was left was the clouds. Released in 1985 Super Mario Brothers was and continues to be one of, if no the, most iconic video game, and instantly recognizable to many. Therefore Arcangel thought to experiment with its recognizability by removing pieces of it to see if people would still be able to identify that it was indeed Super Mario Brothers.

I felt like I should have been able to recognize that it was Super Mario Brothers, but when I first saw it on the museum it’s identity eluded me. I was able to tell that it had an aesthetic rooted in Super Mario Brothers or retro video games in general, but I didn’t realize that it was exactly the clouds from Super Mario Brothers. Rather I thought it was a piece simply trying to capture the aesthetic of classic video games, an aesthetic largely defined by Super Mario Brothers, but with certain degrees of separation.

Magnet TV by Nam June Paik is a piece that depicts the distortion of television signals. The piece consists of a tv, receiving a satellite signal to depict an image, with a magnet on top. The magnet will distort the signal to the tv, thereby contorting the image on the television. The shape of the contortion can be changed by moving the magnet. This piece was created as a subversion of two concepts when it was created in 1965. The first was that the television signal was all powerful and infallible. The second was that art was static. Allegedly, one could interact with the piece and move the magnet to change the image.

 

I first interpreted the piece as primarily featuring the body of the television itself as a sculpture akin to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. It was only until after I read the sign that I realized the focus of the artwork was on the image in the television. I wish I could have interacted with it like the sign suggested people once could.