Cory Arcangel, Super Mario Clouds, 2002

Cory Arcangel: My name is Cory Arcangel. I am a computer programmer and web designer based in Brooklyn, New York.

In 2002 I made a work called Super Mario Clouds and it is a moving image which is generated in real time off of a modified Super Mario Brothers Nintendo entertainment system cartridge. When the cartridge is inserted into the video game system, the only thing that you see is a blue sky and clouds from the game Super Mario Brothers, and it is a non-interactive work that just scrolls the clouds by very, very, very slowly.

The great thing is that a ton of people have started using computers and when a ton of people start using computers they start making a ton of stuff, you know what I mean? And so you have, especially on the Internet, all of these wonderful vernacular forms of expression, which have emerged out of amateur computer culture. And so that is a never-ending inspiration.

I think that museums and galleries are great because they force a kind of longer perspective on the work. Like, what will this look like in a 100 years? What will this look like in 200 years? And ultimately, even though I'm working with a lot of cultural artifacts that are relatively current, it is my goal that they would have relevance to greater human culture in the future. And that is kind of the game, or one of the games that you could play in museums and galleries.