Super Mario Clouds is a work of art, created by Cory Arcangel that depicted the clouds from Super Mario Brothers scrolling across the screen. As Cory Arcangel claimed, these clouds have been unaltered and merely isolated from all the other sprites through hacking into a cartridge of Super Mario Brothers. However, this claim has been disputed by Patrick leMieux, who argues that the clouds in Super Mario Clouds are not authentically from the video game.

 

With the evidence he presents, he makes a pretty pressing case against the authenticity in Super Mario Clouds. It’s immediately apparent from the differing shapes in the clouds, but reinforced when taking apart the data behind the renders. If so, I believe that it undermines the value of Archangels work. As he intended, the point he makes to accentuate the iconicness of these clouds should still stand, as it is their general form that is required to make the point as he wished to. However, when I saw this, it wasn’t that point that made it memorable to me. I wasn’t able to identify the clouds as specifically coming from Super Mario Brothers, so it didn’t seem like a very strong point to me. Rather it was he fact that they were elicited from a NES cartridge that piqued my interest. There was a certain Pop Art appeal to it, as leMieux identified. However, unlike cans of soup or cracker boxes, Super Mario Clouds have been recreated and remixed over and over again, so without the authenticity, nothing really separates this art from sprite sheets on google images.

I find the reproduction leMieux made to be quite interesting. He’s able to subvert the meaning in Super Mario Clouds to create a work that demonstrates the immovable presence of certain elements such as money in our ideals.