Eivind Røssaak, "The Cory Arcangel Hack: Digital Culture and Aesthetic Practice" (MIT Press, 2025)

Summary

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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

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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.

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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).

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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)

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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

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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.

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Transcript

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[Matthias Rickoffer]

Welcome to the New Books Network welcome to New Books Network. My name is Matthias Rickoffer and today I'm going to talk to Ivan Russok about his new monograph, the Corrie Archangel. Hac Arvin Russel is a Research professor at the National Library of Norway's Department of Research and Visual Media. A former Visiting Scholar in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago in Cinematic Arts at USC and at the Tisch School of the Arts at nyu. He has published and edited several books and articles in English and Norwegian. The Corrie Archangel Hack, Digital Culture and Aesthetic Practice came out in late 2025 and is published by MIT Press. One of the great accomplishments of this book is that Eyvind is able to provide a use, case, application and progression of Deleuze and Guattari's theoretical concepts like flow machining, film Sheer's image and line of flight, which are often criticized for being too abstract, developing those into a critical, applicable practice and therefore proving why both volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia are such relevant works and how to actually work with them. Welcome to New Books Network. I'm really happy to talk about your new book today and I guess to lead into this discussion, really, how did this research started? What were your initial questions?

[Ivan Russok]

Yeah, in my PhD and in several books after that, I was concerned with the analog regimes, analog media, especially film and the film world, the world of Walter Benjamin, Jean Lucas, Ken Jacobs, the avant garde of the 60s. And I, I became very curious about the sort of the next regime, the digital regime. And already early in the 2000s, I studied at NYU and got in contact with Alexander Galloway and his circle of friends. And out there was Cory Archangel also. He was sort of the talk of the town at the time, but I was working on the analog regime, so I wasn't interested in Archangel's work at the time. But I visited him and I did my first interview with him and I saw something was going on there which was really interesting, but I couldn't solve it at that time. But 10 years later I started solving some of the issues at Thailand, seeing the relevance of his work for the. The contemporary media situation, the contemporary digital life, or media life, if you will.

[Matthias Rickoffer]

So it sounds like this has been like a research project of like 15 years, something like that.

[Ivan Russok]

Concretely, I worked on a book for four or five years, but it's been in the back of my mind because I wanted to understand sort of the digital world as a kind of a new type of. Of pressure which is exerted on the social, on people, on communities, on individuals and subjects, transforming, shaping subjects in very subliminal, unconscious ways, like machines. But to understand it, as I come from the field of aesthetics, I usually like to analyze these pressures or phenomena through an artistic intelligence of some sort and see how it operates through his or her work. So that's why I followed maybe Corey Archangel for 10, 15 years before I started working intensely on trying to understand how it all functioned and operated. And I, and I did a lot of interviews with him and his network and critics from the time he started in 2001 in New York, sort of. What was this all about? So that's what I tried to talk about in the book.

[Matthias Rickoffer]

But I think it makes a lot of sense when you're describing coming from analog regimes and how Jace generally likes the time shifted towards like, more this discussion of digital and the more opaque or digital structures, then to look into net art and make a little bit of post Internet, where we have this intersection basically. Like there's something, I would say very tangible and intersectional at the work of Corey Archangel. When we talk about machines, where they are analog and they are digital, and it really combines both of these worlds. Did your question shift or changes like your research question when you basically started looking at these discussions and then if you now look at the final book?

[Ivan Russok]

Yeah, it's. I discovered sort of a. In. In the early 2000s, around 2001, a series of books came out that started questioning what is the digital all about? You know, we had Lemon beach, you have Grusin, and then you have the books of Matthew Fuller and Alexander Galloway, who was a friend and also a colleague in the hacker collective with Corey Archangel, actually. So there was a lot of things going on. So I was sort of very inspired by this momentum of thinking. And I saw Archangel as a very interesting artist because he epitomized this idea of the hack. He was sort of the hacker artist in the early 2000s, I think, especially because of his now famous work, Super Mario Clouds, which is his famous ROM hack, creating basically an unplayable game. And it foregrounds the hack itself in a way. So he sort of epitomized the hacker. And I was very interested in, you know, there was this whole discussion Even in the 80s and the 90s about how can you intervene, how can you be a critique of the digital regime? And I remember in the last interview that Gilles Deleuze did, he was asked the same question, how can we oppose the new digital regime? And Deleuze said something, you have to launch a virus, you have to sort of become a hacker. That was sort of his last comment on the digital regime before he passed, in a way. So I even went back to. To that moment and brought it into the book.

[Matthias Rickoffer]

Yeah, but let's zoom in on that a little bit. Like, how does the hack specifically in Archangel's work oppose this regime or subverts it?

[Ivan Russok]

Yeah, that is a main aspect of my book, is trying to understand this art form as. As a critical art form in a way. And it goes back to. Many of my sources are in software studies and assemblage theory, looking at how technical devices are never simply technical tools, but they're always part of a much larger ecology of operators or systems or platforms and sort of lines of material and technical practices. And so a work of art in this digital matrix, if I can call it that, is a sort of an intervention in this line of technical and material practices. He intervenes, so to speak, in a larger ecology. So even though Archangel's work may at first look very simple, some even called it like gimmicks or media one liners or even jokes. And they can be literally just jokes. You know, he's just messing up. He's extracting a little something from social media or from a game and sort of looping it in in a different machine. But we always have to keep in mind the ecology of machines that he is messing with in this specific work. So that's been sort of what I've been attempting to do, to see how each of his works in connection to this larger ecology and how it intervenes in this larger ecology. Then that's when you can start thinking critically and politically about his. His artworks.

[Matthias Rickoffer]

So if I'm understanding correctly, and correct me if I'm wrong, that there are, like, two sites, basically, to the hack, you have the. The immediate hack, which is the production of the artwork. If it's like hacking a ROM to create a video piece or something like that, and then embedded in that is like a second hack, which is more like a conceptual hack of the SoThere structure or the environment where it's happening.

[Ivan Russok]

Absolutely, yeah. That's a very nice reading of how I approach it and how I read the hack on two levels. And that is also the way Archangel always operates in two worlds. He uses his posture. He's a. He's playing a hacker in the art

[Matthias Rickoffer]

world,

[Ivan Russok]

but at the same time, he's using conceptual strategies from the art world to interfere into hacker operations. So that's why I talk about some. Because in the beginning, Archangel was sort of in between the hacker world and art world. And paradoxically, the hackers didn't understand what he was doing and art world didn't understand what he was doing. So he had. Because he was sort of. He was hacking both worlds, so to speak. So that's very interesting. So that's why he. Archangel told me that that's why he invented. Took up the tradition, which goes back at least to John Cage, because nobody understood what John Cage was doing. So he invented the lecture performance. That's where you perform your work while you explain it to the audience at the same time through a sort of discourse. So Archangel also invented the lecture performance, where he performs a hack in front of an audience. Like the. There is a piece called the Pizza Party, which is a hack he performed in front of a live audience at the Kitchen in New York, which was basically. He was hacking Domino's Pizzas ordering system and ordering a pizza for the entire crowd at the Kitchen. The audience in the kitchen. And after the hack, he was nervously waiting with the audience if the delivery man would come with the pizza or not. And I think some 20 minutes later, the delivery man came and he was blasting the audience. And he said. And Corey said it was one of the most amazing performances he ever did, because he felt like he felt supreme in a way, because he showed his audience that a simple hack of the computer could sort of totally change the order of the world in a way. He said it was. So when I pressed my hack on the computer, it was a little bit like pressing the nuclear button in an operating lab. Is that so? It's amazing what that tiny hack can do, you know, just messing with the command line or something. And it changes the rhythms or patterns of the world.

[Matthias Rickoffer]

So it's a great work and I think a good example, especially for what in your preface, Galloway is like alluding to that Archangel was doing sort of post Internet art in the time of NetArc, that there's like this basically before was a time really that it already alludes to that. I think that's also connected to this idea of the deckers are not really understanding the art aspect of it. And there's this problem from the art world to understand the hack aspect. All this idea of the hack is, especially in your research, connected to the idea of flow, because you need something to be hacked, basically, and you're going into different ideas of flow and categories. Can you elaborate a little bit more on the flow theoretical aspect of that?

[Ivan Russok]

Yeah, I try to sort of create a new critical aesthetic to understand this kind of artworks. And again, it's inspired by. By Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Their two works on Anti Oedipus and Mil Plateau, or A Thousand Plateaus, where they set up a kind of a materialistic psychiatry of some sort, where they look at society as made up of a series of. Of flows on all kinds of levels. You know, flows of dirt, earth, money, but also merchandise, labor, but also desires, beliefs, affects, trauma and so on. They're all sort of. And as human beings, we live in these force fields and we sort of create our worlds by mapping or finding trajectories in between and with, against and opposing certain flows. So they create a sort of a general ontology around this notion of flow, which I find really interesting. And then in A thousand plateaus, they develop a notion called the machinic phylum, which is another very interesting notion, because the machinic phelim has to do with flows of techniques, tools, gestures, standards, and know how that evolve and mutate across context. But they don't connect this to the computer in this book. But when you look at the digital regime, the notion of flow becomes even more material, even more in your face, even more tangible. And a series of sociologists started writing about the network society as a society, which is all about flows in a very material manner and even in a very electrical manner, because codes are ultimately ways of stopping and breaking and organizing electrical currents. So the flow is so material when it comes to understanding the digital regime. And even more so, it makes a lot of sense in connection with the hack, because a hack is basically making sort of flowing with certain flows and arresting or intervening in other flows, stopping them or changing them, or altering the code. So it's basically it's intervening in flows to create other flow arrangements, as I call it. So an artwork. In this book, they're all flow arrangements of various sorts. You can say that any social media, any game is this specific flow arrangement of many, many, many flows, including surveillance flows and all kinds of operational flows. So when you create the artwork using a social media or a game or a video game as your material, you extract flows singularities from flows and rearrange them into another flow arrangement. So that's how it operates. I also talk about just to make a trajectory through all of Archangel's work, I divided them into three separate types of flow arrangements. I call them the Flow Break hacks and the Flow Remix hacks and the Flow Parody hacks. So I sort of separate all these works into these three different hack types. Basically, many of his early works were all about breaking the flow of a video game to create another type of flow which resonates with contemporary video art. It's a very typical strategy in Archangel's work. So, you know, the game hackers and the game hacker communities, they didn't really understand what Archangel's hacks were all about, because game hackers, they usually hack a game to make a game more playable or to win more awards or points. But Archangel's hack was the opposite. 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 as just, you know, Super Mario Cloud was this floating clouds on a blue horizon, you know, and it was. You could hardly see it was a game at all anymore. But it started resonating with contemporary video art. It resonated with Namjoon Paik's San Buddhist meditations in relation to television. But Archangel's art was not in relation to television, but in relation to video games, to another regime of technology, the digital. So that's the flow break hacks, which they totally break the flow of its original ecology. You can no longer play most of these games.

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[Ivan Russok]

And then in what I call his second period, he embarks on what I call the Flow remix hack, which is where he mines social media like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and he uses this enormous flow of user generated content as artistic material and he just remixes it in a, in a both in a homage to all the creative surfers out there. And he sort of, he says in an interview, he said that the art world is lagging behind. Dartworld is so conservative in terms of aesthetics and creativity compared to this watershed of user generated content on the Internet. He says the art world has to do something to be updated according to the avant garde on the Internet, so to speak. So in this period he had a certain admiration for this user generated content. So he was playing along with it. So he created a series of super cuts. He did this wonderful video of cats playing the piano, but he reorganized them beautifully into playing exactly a piano sonata by Arnold Schoenberg, you know, the three piano pieces. And he did this by creating a super sensitive editing tool he called Gold Pro from the piano player Glenn Gold, who was a virtuoso interpreter of Bach and also Schoenberg. So he could cut fragments from hundreds, Even thousands of YouTube videos and make his own editing tool, sort of select the correct notes according to the music score he fed into his program. So you see here that the Flow Remix hack is based on a different type of hack than in the Flow Break hacks. The Flow Breaks hacks were usually hacks messing up the ROM or the memory of the game engines, while the Flow Remix hack is based on homemade editing tools. And he even created a work of literature in the remix period, which is called Working on My Novel, which is basically, he is remixing tweets from wannabe writers who. Who are tweeting about themselves working on their novel. But they are. But they end up tweeting about working on their novel instead of writing the novel. That's sort of the irony of that, that whole book. But it's. It's beautiful to read the book because it's about all these wannabe writers who are actually doing anything else but writing the book, right? And. And they're. They're watching tv, they're playing a game, they are surfing Instagram or Twitter, or they're working on a TW blog or something, or just drinking coffee or just doing anything but writing, working on their novel. So it's a beautiful. And I think it speaks to. It's sort of an allegory on the new networked human being. I think it's. On one level, it's a really funny novel, but at the same time, it's a really sad piece of literature too, because it talks about all these people addicted to social media or TV series, and they are sort of never able to fulfill their life with doing this ultimate expression, which is according to themselves, writing a novel. So 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. It was really well reviewed when it came out in 2014. Most reviewed work ever.

[Matthias Rickoffer]

Yeah, I really like it because I've always interpreted in the sense that these people are not really writing the novel, they're tweeting about it. But then with assembling all these tweets into an actual novel, it. The act of tweeting becomes the writing of the novel. And Archangel is giving them like a sort of collective Agency again, re centering basically the texts, which is. That's exactly interesting.

[Ivan Russok]

My point in the reading, he's getting all these sad and frustrated tweeters. A gift. You're in a novel now. You're in a novel. So it's a beautiful piece also that kind of. And that is also symbolic to what the hack is all about for Corey, because it's digital media platforms, computers, they're sold to us as unalterable, as finished, as something we cannot mess with. Even the software is copyrighted and protected or black boxed in a way. So core work is all about. 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. And saying this, if you look at a software study says a software is basically a systematization of social relations and labor. They don't want you to mess with it, but you can change it. That's what every hacker shows us. You can change it. And by changing a piece of software, you implicitly change social relations, labor in a way. So that's always a part of the hacker ethos in Cora's mind and in the way I quote McKenzie Work saying that it's the hackers that produce new things in the world nowadays. They are able to. And they can remind us that things are changeable. And I didn't go into the third regime. I talk about the flow parody. Maybe I should complete that part because it speaks to if the, if the second flow flow remix hack is, is. Is a homage to what's, what's happening and the joy of user generated content. Working on my novel introduces a bit of darkness. And in the third period, which I call the flow parody hacks, they are apocalyptic in a way because. And these works were all exhibited at the Century 21 exhibition in 2021 in New York. And all of the works, or almost all of them were made up of bots recording or simulating users on social media. And they were compliant users. They were hyper obedient users. In some of the works. These bots, all they do, they tour across a series of profiles from super mega companies or celebrities and all they do is click likes. It's just, it's the most obedient gesture you can do, I guess, just click like on everything and it's a very machine like movement and it's, it's. I call, I call these works, they are examples of subversive affirmation because you think that you think this is just a record of a user being just stupid, just clicking like on every. Every post. But it's exactly this. This when you. When you understand automated gesture behind these, these works, you start. It's sort of. They are too hyper obedient, they are too compliant, they are too playing along with the system to be. To be human beings in a way. So here, here comes this transformation of these works where they become subversive to what the platform. And you know, this notion of subversive affirmation actually comes from the Inke Arns who talked about art during. In East Europe and in Russia during. In Soviet Union, during totalitarian period, all the artists could do was sort of simulate obedience. And they developed this notion of subversive affirmation that did what was expected of them, but they did it in a too enthusiastic manner. So the audience understood that this was subversion, but the authorities didn't understand it. So in a way, when social media becomes authoritarian or totalitarian, as there perhaps are at this moment, it's interesting how Archangel changes his strategy and mimics the strategies of the artists of the two titan periods in Eastern Europe and Soviet. And how he does it. And there are of course, many variations to his pieces here. He is also being very subversive in some of the pieces, which is. One of them is a homage to Marseille Duchamp, where he basically plays Duchamp's endgame in chess across celebrity profiles. And they all think they're hacked, but it's basically instructions on how to move the chess pieces according to Marcel Duchamp. So this is still. He has this very conceptual hacket layer going on at the same time also.

[Matthias Rickoffer]

But where is there like the element of parody? Where is it coming in in these flow arrangements when it is so apocalyptic and so dark, basically. Version.

[Ivan Russok]

Yeah, Parody is walking along. Parody, it means being right next to a work and looking at it or playing along with it. So somehow. So it is. It is basically this whole way of being affirmative to how you're supposed to use the social media, but your affirmation is subversive in a way. So that. That what makes it a parody in a way, I think when you. A parody is a way of copying a certain style or praxis, but doing it in a subversive manner in a way. So that's why it becomes a parody in a way, I think. Yeah.

[Matthias Rickoffer]

Thank you for that clarification. I think that especially the focus on the more recent art really leads into one of the quotes in the book. Well, it's a quote by you. So One of the passages in the book, which I really liked, where you're talking about Archangel's art and writing a code, I believe 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. So you're talking about the role basically of Archangel and Archangel's work within this broader art theoretical discourse, and that there are these. Not just these issues of placing him in a realm or in a genre or in a discussion, but just that there is something very specific about his work. And I wouldn't say it's a counter position rarely, but it's what you're calling this. It's like the lost opportunity. It's very speculative to a degree. I would like, if you could elaborate a little bit on that, to think about what this means, what Corey Archangel's work means for the art world, and also where this is maybe going, because we talked a lot about, like, early 2000s art, and now we're in the contemporary moment, basically.

[Ivan Russok]

Yeah. So in a way, you can say that Cory Archangel was a digital artist who succeeded and became a contemporary artist and became appreciated as simply a contemporary artist. But at the same time, that's not the whole story, because it seems to me that this dialogue between digital art and contemporary art, it tends to take place now and now and then, but there never seems to be a complete integration between, let's say, the digital art and contemporary art. There. Somehow it goes back to, you know, I quote Gilbert Simondau, who in the 1950s said that culture has a tendency to deny the relevance of technology as something determining any aspect of culture, as if culture is totally independent from technology and media and so on. And of course, that's not true. And Gilbert Simondau tries to show that in his whole philosophy. And then later in 2012, Claire Bishop says contemporary art has repressed its relationship to the digital. And she actually says it in the middle of the post Internet hype. But I think the post Internet art was simply a hype. It was big for two or three years, and then it disappeared. And then contemporary art could continue as if nothing happened. And I read Only recently, in January 2026, Art Forum published an interview with a great Documenta curator, Carolyn Kristoff Bakargiev. And she says the conversation between digital art and what's called contemporary or traditional art never happened. We're still awaiting that to happen. So it's quite. This makes Cory Archangel interesting in many ways, because he's perhaps that exception, who is both a digital artist and a contemporary artist. He succeeds at hacking contemporary art strategies, conceptual art. He's a post conceptual artist, I would say, while at the same time being proficient and highly skilled programmer and can sort of live in these two worlds at the same time. And of course, he's not alone. You have Trevor Paglen. You have Hito style. There are more and more artists who have become really global names and helping to create these extremely important dialogue today, you know, even taking it into the challenges of AI and what's awaiting us there. So luckily there are some extremely interesting artists who are able to have this conversation and to show a critical path for us.

[Matthias Rickoffer]

Yeah, I think especially with the Whitney Vienna going on right now, there are like some moves of starting these conversations again, looking at like, especially like post Internet art in like 2000 and tens basically, and trying to figure out what was going on at that time and where are these positions now. But yeah, we still miss this, really, the dialogue about that. It's true.

[Ivan Russok]

And Whitney has been a prominent museum for this particular dialogue, thanks to Christian Cole, who is one of their curators.

[Matthias Rickoffer]

Basically coming to a close here. I wanted to ask you what you're working on right now or what's coming next for you in terms of research, maybe in continuing this, talking about flow arrangements or just something else.

[Ivan Russok]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm part of a research project now called AI Ecologies. So we are looking into the regimes of AI in a more elaborate way, looking at the assemblages of AI from automated intelligence, but also to the extraction regimes, going all the way deep down into metallurgy. And I'm deploying again the Leuzian notion of the machinic fulum to understand how AI represents a new lineage in the machinic fulum.

[Matthias Rickoffer]

Sounds like an interesting and important work and I'm looking forward to reading about it. Well, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for writing this book. It was great. Reid and I had a good time talking to you. Thank you.

[Ivan Russok]

Thanks so much for having me.

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