Podcast Summary:

New Books Network – Eivind Røssaak, "The Cory Arcangel Hack: Digital Culture and Aesthetic Practice" (MIT Press, 2025)
Aired: April 4, 2026.
Host: Matthias Rickoffer
Guest: Ivan Russok, Research Professor, National Library of Norway

Episode Overview

This episode discusses Eivind Røssaak’s new book, The Cory Arcangel Hack: Digital Culture and Aesthetic Practice, exploring the intersection of art, digital technology, and critical theory through the lens of the artist Cory Arcangel’s work. Russok details his long-term research into how Arcangel’s practice both embodies and critiques the “digital regime” via hacking—conceptually and technically—while grounding this analysis in Deleuze, Guattari, and broader media theory. The conversation traces the evolution of Arcangel’s oeuvre, categorized as “flow break”, “flow remix”, and “flow parody” hacks, and reflects on their significance for contemporary digital culture and the wider art world.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Genesis of the Project & Research Trajectory

• Analog to Digital Transition: Russok describes his background in analog media studies, highlighting his curiosity about the shift to the digital regime and how new pressures shape society and subjectivity (02:45–04:23).
  • Russok: “I wanted to understand sort of the digital world as a kind of a new type of pressure... transforming, shaping subjects in very subliminal, unconscious ways, like machines.” (04:23)
• Early Encounter with Cory Arcangel: Initial interactions with Arcangel and his circle led to long-term observation before delving deeply into his work a decade later (02:45–05:53).

2. Cory Arcangel & the “Hack” as Artistic and Conceptual Strategy

• Double-Site Hacking: Archangel’s art is understood as intervening simultaneously on the level of software/code and concept/context (11:12–12:06).
  • Archangel leverages his “posture”—“playing a hacker in the art world… using conceptual strategies from the art world to interfere into hacker operations.” (11:40)
• Lecture-Performance as an Artistic Mode: To clarify misunderstood works, Archangel adopted the “lecture performance” format, where explanation and performance co-occur (12:06).
  • Memorable Example: Pizza Party—A live audience witnesses Archangel hack Domino’s Pizza’s ordering system and nervously await delivery together (12:06–14:57).
    • Russok (paraphrasing Archangel): “When I pressed my hack on the computer, it was a little bit like pressing the nuclear button... It’s amazing what that tiny hack can do; just messing with the command line... changes the rhythms or patterns of the world.” (13:30)

3. Theoretical Foundations: Flow, Machine, and Assemblage

• Deleuze & Guattari as Framework: The “material ontology of flows”—involving commodities, affects, codes—is repurposed to analyze digital ecologies (15:51–17:50).
• Flow in Digital Culture: Digital systems make “flow” literal and material, as code organizes electrical currents and social/technical flows (17:50).

4. Typology of Arcangel’s “Hack” Artworks

• Flow Break Hacks
  • Examples: Early ROM hacks (e.g., Super Mario Clouds), which disrupt game mechanics to create contemplative video art (19:57–22:30).
    • Russok: “It was not meant to play the game in any better or more efficient way. It was rather to destroy the game and take it apart and extract certain singularities from the game and put them into another context...” (21:10)
• Flow Remix Hacks
  • Remixing user-generated content (Twitter, YouTube) via custom editing tools; example: transforming countless YouTube cat videos to render Schoenberg's piano pieces (24:26–27:30).
  • Notable Work: Working on My Novel—A book comprised entirely of tweets from would-be novelists who tweet about writing instead of actually writing.
    • Russok: “It’s beautiful to read the book… an allegory on the new networked human being... addicted to social media or TV series... never able to fulfill... writing a novel.” (28:38)
    • Rickoffer: “The act of tweeting becomes the writing of the novel. And Archangel is giving them like a sort of collective agency again.” (29:17)
• Flow Parody Hacks
  • Automated bots simulate hyper-obedient social media users, parodying platform logic by compulsively “liking” everything—critiquing digital obedience (29:45–35:57).
  • Russok: “I call these works... subversive affirmation... a record of a user being just stupid, just clicking like on every post. But... when you understand automated gesture behind these works, you start... they are too hyper obedient... too compliant to be human.” (31:30)
  • Referencing Soviet/East European art’s “subversive affirmation”—parodying by over-identifying with the system (32:35).

5. Art World Context and Critique

• Contemporary Art’s “Lost Opportunity”
  • Rickoffer quotes Russok: “An exploration of contemporary art’s lost opportunity, exemplifying what contemporary art could be if it did not deny the fact that technology is an integral part of the contemporary environment.” (36:59)
  • Russok: There remains a division between “digital art” and “contemporary art,” echoing scholars like Claire Bishop and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev on the art world’s repression of digital discourse (38:28–41:50).
  • Russok: “Cory Arcangel... is both a digital artist and a contemporary artist. He succeeds at hacking contemporary art strategies... while at the same time being a highly skilled programmer and can sort of live in these two worlds.”

6. Future Directions

• New Research: Russok is now engaged in the “AI Ecologies” project, investigating the assemblages of AI and deploying Deleuzian theory on machinic lineages (42:57–43:50).

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the impact of hacking as minor intervention:

  • Russok (paraphrasing Archangel):
    • “When I pressed my hack on the computer, it was a little bit like pressing the nuclear button in an operating lab... it’s amazing what that tiny hack can do...” (13:30)

• On the paradox of digital art and contemporary art:

  • Russok: “It seems to me that this dialogue between digital art and contemporary art... never seems to be a complete integration between... the digital art and contemporary art.” (38:28)

• On “Working on My Novel” and the remix hack:

  • Russok: “It’s a really sad piece of literature about the new condition of the digital regime. In a way, it’s actually a fantastic novel.” (28:38)

• On the subversive potential of the hack:

  • Russok: “No, no, no, no, no. The computer, the software, the program, the game, whatever you have in front of you, it’s programmable. You can change it, you can alter it... By changing a piece of software, you implicitly change social relations...” (29:45)

Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• 01:12 – Guest intro and book background
• 02:45 – Russok on analog versus digital regimes
• 06:41 – Theoretical context: hacking, Deleuze, and digital critique
• 08:49 – What is “the hack” in Arcangel’s practice?
• 12:06 – “Lecture performance” and “Pizza Party” story
• 15:51 – Flow theory and Deleuze/Guattari applied
• 19:57 – Breakdown of Arcangel’s “flow break hacks”
• 24:26 – “Flow remix hacks” and user-generated content
• 29:45 – “Flow parody hacks”, social media bots, and subversive affirmation
• 36:59 – Art world critique: integration of digital and contemporary art
• 42:57 – Russok’s next project: AI Ecologies

Concluding Thoughts

Russok provides an in-depth, theoretically rich exploration of Cory Arcangel’s oeuvre as a model for engaging critically and creatively with the “digital regime.” By mapping Arcangel’s evolving hack strategies onto social, technical, and artistic flows, Russok demonstrates the unique position of artists who operate simultaneously within and against digital norms. The episode provides both a practical introduction to Arcangel’s work and a robust theoretical framing for understanding digital aesthetics more broadly—highlighting ongoing challenges in art world discourse and hinting at new directions at the AI frontier.