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Cory Arcangel Recovered a Late Artist's Digital Legacy
Michel Majerus died in a plane crash, but the contents of his laptop are providing a window into his process two decades later. Arcangel says, “It’s like he just stepped out of the room.”
The background is covered in acid-pastel blocks of color, reminiscent of the Neo-Geo movement of the nineteen-eighties, but the foreground contains evocative phrases in text that looks pulled from Geocities or a “Matrix”-era rave poster: “Newcomer,” “burned out,” “fuck the intention of the artist.” Majerus had intuited that the internet would lead to a great collision of styles and reference points—everything from Super Mario to Jackson Pollock coexisting in pixels. Then, Espenschied used an emulator—a piece of software that mimics the entire architecture of an older device—to boot up a facsimile of the laptop, including its early-two-thousands operating system and the pixellated file icons on Majerus’s cluttered desktop, which featured a background image from Ms. Pac-Man. Majerus’s laptop, and Arcangel’s archival work and performances, represent an effort to insert the visual legacy of our era into the longer arc of art history, to immortalize the ephemeral modus vivendi of a particular technological moment.
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