CORY ARCANGEL: Another project I made around the same time is one called “I Shot Andy Warhol,” which is another modification of an old Nintendo game, and this is a modification of a game called “Hogan’s Alley.” “Hogan’s Alley” was a shoot-’em-up game. This is a modification where I took the bad guys and changed them to Andy Warhol, and the good guys changed to the Pope, Flavor Flav, and Colonel Sanders. It’s a playable video game, and this is what it looks like. You get the idea.

Actually, there’s a couple of – there's a city section, and then at the end, there’s a soup can section, which, the thing I always like to tell people is that the soup can was actually in the original game, so I didn’t actually have to modify anything, it was part of the game. It was part of the reason I decided to make it. And then again you can download the Nintendo ROM if you want to play it in a Nintendo emulator on your computer. Here’s some pictures of people playing it – kids. Kids like this.

CORY ARCANGEL: You're only hearing one side of the video, and this is little bits of video that I downloaded from YouTube, and then it's been reedited into "Goldberg Variation #1" by Johann Sebastian Bach. So we're just hearing this side now. So, that—huh?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Did you isolate every note and then recompose it with a visual note?

CA: I wrote my own video editing software and, yes, went through every clip and isolated every note with my ear and put it into a database and then my program took that database and ran it through the Bach and then spit out the video. So how is that I had to write my own thing to do it because it's a little bit too fast. Final Cut Pro can't quite edit that fast, and so I had to do my own thing. It was a pain in the ass. It's called "A Couple Thousand Short Films About Glenn Gould."

I am working on a new one right now on my desktop, which is going to be, hopefully, cats playing Schoenberg. That I am trying to get working right now, so I have—

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Can we see it?

CA: No, we don't have anything to see. What I can show you, which is possibly even more interesting, is these are the cats that I found so far on YouTube.

I ran into this weird problem on YouTube. This is like 100 and something, like, let's see. This is 157 cats I found, and I'd like about 500. YouTube has 500 cats, but YouTube has a real weird search thing where they only show you, like, up to result 600, and I can't find how to access more. I don't know. Something weird about YouTube that I can't figure out right now. Like I think there's so much stuff on YouTube, YouTube can't even give it to you all. Anyway, so that's something I'm working on.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Why Schoenberg?

CA: Okay, well. Why Schoenberg? Well, Schoenberg, of course, was like a turning point in music history, like he basically blew up Western—I mean, Bach is—why Bach? Bach is this weird—well, first Bach codified Western harmony, and he's like the most complex music you can get, and still people who don't understand music can get into it. I mean, it's Bach. Everybody kind of likes Bach, and for that reason people always turn to him to demonstrate new technology, like "Switched-On Bach." Bach is always seen as this weird, futuristic entity, right?

So that's why I originally chose Bach, and then with that video I saw that people reacted really strongly to the cats in it, you know? Like, I think the cats in that video is what saved it, you know? Because then it became funny and silly and not serious, you know? So I said, “Okay I have something here with these cats. This is powerful. This is like working with dynamite,” and so I thought this might be the opportunity to finally, like, take Schoenberg and make it accessible. Like, if I could, can I make that video? Or when I put it on YouTube, people are like, “Oh, it's so cute!” You know what I mean? “I love this video!” But within that, they don't know that they're basically passing around like totally radical music.

Because that's my thing with Schoenberg, I mean I think it's amazing, and I think it's interesting how music and art, to a certain extent just completely veered from public consciousness, you know what I mean? YouTube is this weird middle ground right now, where you have access to such large audiences, and so the goal is to—I don't think it's possible, but I hope that if I made a video that was cute enough that I could sneak Schoenberg on people. That's my goal. I'm working on it; that's all I can say. You know what I mean?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: 500 cats!

CA: Well, cats usually run across the keyboard, and so I figured if I have 500, right? That's like 10 notes per cat. That's 5,000 notes in my database. I think with 5,000 potential notes I could come up with something close to like a ten-minute Schoenberg, the notes of a Schoenberg. It won't be exact. It's cats, so it's not going to be every note exact, so that's what I think I need. But, again, this is all, you know, hypothetical at the moment.