CORY ARCANGEL: Another one I made is called… where is it? Oh, “Super Mario Movie.” So this is a collaboration I did with an art group out of, well, Boston, Rhode Island, Pittsburgh, different places, called Paper Rad. For those of you who don’t know Paper Rad, it looks like this. This is kind of their style. Similar to the Mario clouds, this is a reprogrammed “Mario Brothers” cartridge, and this particular cartridge was reprogrammed to play a movie, a kind of like 15-minute, semi-narrative—semi-narrative meaning it’s not like watching a movie but narrative in the sense that you are meant to watch it from beginning to end—a kind of composition that moves.
So let me show it to you first. Here it is here. This is the first time I’ve ever done an artist presentation after putting some of the stuff on my website. It’s kind of funny just to be surfing through my website. Okay, so this is the beginning. So, I’ll probably fast-forward through it.
So, to make it, I had programmed an animation engine and a music engine for the Nintendo, and then I kind of taught the members of Paper Rad how to use it, and then we collaborated on a script, and we went back and forth over a couple months, kind of building these scenes in a kind of homemade animation program.
This goes on for a while, this first scene.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Did you change the music?
CA: Yeah, well, yes. The music is entirely through-composed, meaning once the video was done—it’s hard to say it’s a video because it’s not really a video—once this animation was done, made about 15 minutes, and then Jacob from Paper Rad went and composed the music like a film composer would. It sounds like, you know, because Nintendo has a built-in audio chip, so it sounds like Nintendo music, but actually all of the notes, they’re all different notes from the original game. But you could hear the motif from the original game that he brings in and out of this, so he’s taking bits and pieces of the original composition and playing with them. In fact, you’ll see at the end, he brings everything back together. So, you know, he goes on this kind of journey.
So we’re going to just fast-forward through some of the... it’s this kind of thing. Anyways, these are just all of the graphics that are on the cartridge basically. This is what comes with it when you take apart the cartridge. That’s just the graphics that come with it. So I’ll fast-forward to the end. This is a good place.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Would this be projected as a loop in a gallery or exhibition space?
CA: Yeah, the way that we have showed it is as a loop in a gallery space, which, it was when we wrote the script and when we were making the movie, we knew it was going to be a loop, so we built into the narrative the fact that you could walk in and out at any time. Although we would prefer you watch it from beginning to end, we’re not against—that’s one of the things when you make moving images for galleries now, you have to deal with this idea of gallery time, which is this completely warped notion of what time is. Because with cinema it’s pretty clear: you sit down and you watch from beginning to end. But to take a kind of constructive cinema and bring it into a gallery, you start working on all these wishy-washy areas. But yeah, a loop in a gallery was actually part of our notion that it could be watched not from the beginning. I’ll show you installation pictures in a second.
So this is familiar to anyone who ever played the Nintendo. This is what it would do when it crashed, but it’s fake. The end is supposed to be a “Star Wars” kind of thing. It’s a prequel to the actual game, so the last scene of the movie is the first scene of the “Mario Brothers” game.
For the one who asked, this is what one installation looked like. The movie is projected here. We kind of made these blocks and projected it on these blocks. The cartridge itself has secret scenes on it, and the secret scenes are what go on these blocks. The first time we did it, with the way it was designed to be shown, it was about two stories high.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: And multiple projections, too, right?
CA: Well, the movie, the main movie is one projection, and then this kind of installation element was multiple projections. It has, and willingly with our permission, shown only the movie version, so we’re pretty lax about it. But if we had an opportunity, we have done it a couple of ways with these cubes. But since we knew it was going to be two stories high, that’s like all these abstract graphics and stuff were designed to be shown two stories high. It makes you a little dizzy actually, but that was part of the point.
Again, here’s the source code. This source code is really treacherous and incredibly long, and so no one has ever emailed me about it. I doubt anyone has ever looked at it, but I’ll show you. So it’s the source code, and it’s not organized, so I haven’t organized it yet, and so there’s all the junk. It’s like a working folder. So this is all the, just junk. There’s just like scraps and bits of script, and just weird. I don’t even know what any of this is. I think this is just music? But I don’t even know what any of this is. One of these days… well, it’s actually one of the things that I’m working on, is to go back and organize all this. It will compile it. It’s not all cleaned up like this.
