 OK, so I see that Cori is already here. I don't know where to look. So I'm going to introduce you, Cori, before your lecture performance. Cori Archangel is an artist, composer, curator, and entrepreneur living and working in Stavanger in Norway. Cori Archangel explores the potential and failures of old and new technologies, highlighting their obsolescence, humor, aesthetic attributes, and at times, eerie influence in contemporary art life. Applying a semi-archaeological methodology, his practice explores, encodes, and hacks the structural language of video games, software, social media, and machine learning, treating them as subject matter and medium. His work has been exhibited in many solo exhibitions, notably at the Whitney Museum in New York, at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, at the Barbican Art Center in London, or at the Hamburger Bandhof in Berlin, among others. Hey, Cori, you can start. Can you hear me? Yes. Great. All right. Thank you. Thank you for the introduction. And thanks for having me. Thanks to Madame and to the estate. Very excited to be here. I guess, be here as in quotations. And I'm excited that this is the inauguration of my streaming setup. So what I'm going to do today is something called Burned Out. And it is a kind of parallel presentation to the essay I wrote for the Michelle Mageris catalog, which is called Michelle Mageris, published by DCV in Berlin. I don't know if it's out yet. Maybe it's already out. So that's a kind of polished New Yorker style long read. And this is going to be covering some of the same ideas, but be, well, I'm here. So it'll be kind of in my own words and a bit more rambling and unorganized. And so I hope that the two things together could be a nice pair. And yeah, I think we said lecture performance because we didn't really know what this was going to be. It's not really exactly a lecture. It's not really exactly a performance. So OK, and the other important thing that I want to say is that this lecture is or performance or whatever it is has an arena accompaniment. Oh, I've lived in Norway for so long. I'm losing my English. It is accompanied by an arena channel. So for those of you who don't know, arena is a kind of artist founded and run social network for organizing thoughts, videos, ideas. It's kind of like a ambient Pinterest or a friendly whatever social network you use. It's a friendly version. And I'm a power user. And so what I've done is I've put together an arena channel here for those who want to look at some of this material afterwards. And let me just share my screen now. And you could see it is there. OK. So the channel is organized backwards. So the actual lecture starts at the bottom of the channel. And now I'll work my way up. And these are just links to things that I had seen around the web that I want to talk about. So each of these links to a kind of broader resource. OK, so I'm going to try to do this in like 25 minutes-ish. So just bear with me. It's going to be pretty quick. And here we go. So I wanted to start with, well, you know what? I hated Majerys' work when I first saw it. I mean, I really, really, really hated his work. I first saw his work in 2002 in a show that he did at Friedrich Penzel Gallery in New York. I would have been 24 years old at the time. And I will tell you how I remember it. And then later in this thing, I will kind of tell you probably what actually happened. Because after doing a lot of research about this show, I realized I was remembering it totally wrong. But what I remember was walking into the gallery, which at that time was on 22nd Street in Chelsea. And I remember walking in. And I remembered almost immediately, if those of you who remember Penzel Gallery at the time, it was a kind of long hallway. And there was a front desk on the left side. And I remember just almost immediately after a front desk seeing a giant black painting with space invaders on it, probably something, probably this or another one. And I just remember seeing it. I remember getting so angry. And I just remember turning right around and just leaving the gallery. Didn't remember the name of the artist. Didn't just absolutely just got so annoyed. And I just left. Some background is probably in order. I was 24. I had just graduated from music conservatory two years earlier with a degree in kind of electronic music, kind of avant-garde music. I studied as a composer. And I didn't have any contemporary art knowledge or experience. Yet I had though started to kind of creep around galleries. And I think I could explain there's probably three reasons or three main reasons why I got so annoyed. One thing is to note is that in the early 2000s, New York City had an amazing net art scene. And Rhizome defines net art as art that acts on the network or is acted upon. And I think that's like a really lovely definition. Although I think even the scene at New York was even a little bit beyond that. It was kind of a net art, digital art. There was a couple organizations around then that were around. So thing, Wolfgang Stala's, the thing was a kind of at the time I knew it as an email list where people discussed contemporary art. It was also an internet service provider. And Wolfgang Stala who founded it is also an artist. And I'll talk about one of his works a little later. There was this actually Rhizome has reconstructed some of the early thing, Boltonport Systems messages. So for those interested at home who want to do more research that's there, there was Rhizome.org, which started as a kind of platform also for communication about digital art. And there was also the upgrade. I don't know if people remember this. It was Yael Canarex kind of get these kind of monthly meetings where digital artists would talk about their work. So digital artists didn't have a lot of exhibition opportunities at the time. So often there were these structures where people could come together and talk about their work. Now, the reason I talk about all this is because of this kind of amazing scene, I was almost on a monthly basis had the opportunity to see these amazing, amazing masterpiece artworks. And so I was seeing all these digital artworks at the time. So let me give you three quick examples. One would be I saw this work every shot every episode in 2001 by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy. This is Jennifer and Kevin had taken the show Starsky and Hutch and kind of ran it all the scenes through a database and re-edited it into all these different videos. So for example, one video would be every mirror from the whole television show. Another scene would be every cough. Or another video would be every cough or every boss. And so what you had is this kind of incredible installation where you had all these video discs. You could pull one out and you could put it in a player and you could see these kind of edits. So this is an amazing work. I saw Wolfgang Stala's untitled. So I would actually talk about the whole series that Wolfgang Stala did of webcam works where he would train a webcam on a certain location and project those webcams in gallery spaces. And these webcams would update every like three to five seconds. And they really kind of, they read as like monumental. They read as paintings and also I would say like kind of Warholian. He, this particular show which I saw was the front room was the lower Manhattan as videotaped from Brooklyn. And then in the back of the gallery was the Comberg Monastery in Germany as videoed or as recorded by a webcam. So these were, I should say that these were live. So you'd go into the gallery and you'd see these spaces live. And of course, this particular one untitled was up during the 9-11 attack. And so this artwork also happened to record the whole attack. And I saw it at the end of the show. And so at the time there was, you could still see the smoke from the fires that were burning. And there's a third work that I want to talk about which I couldn't find any record of, but it's by Mark Napier. I don't know the title, but he had made a webpage and it just showed blank white. And when you clicked on it, it made ripples as if a pond. And if anyone anywhere else in the world saw that webpage, they would see those ripples. And if they clicked, they would make ripples and they would combine. So it was this amazing, distributed, very simple, very beautiful web performance. So I mentioned these three works or series of works because I just had no time in 2002 for painting. I could not understand why anyone would be painting then when all of this other stuff was happening. The second thing is that galleries had in New York City started to move from Soho. And I'm gonna click here on a really great book called Soho So Long by the Art Club 2000 who were mentioned a little bit earlier. This is a really great kind of book of interviews with gallerists and other people adjacent to the art industry about why the galleries moved from Soho to Chelsea. And in that move, the kind of modern gallery was born, the modern gallery being a kind of big industrial space. And also it was already mentioned earlier how big galleries have gotten. This had started in the mid-90s. And so when I saw a pencil gallery in 2002, one of these galleries is what I walked into, small by today's standards, but then still it just seemed enormous, smooth, concrete floor. And having no experience with the art industry, I was like, these spaces just radiate money, power, market, inaccessibility, you don't really feel that even like you're welcome in spaces like that. So that was also kind of weighing in on me. And then the third thing which annoyed me was I was making digital work at the time. I was making work using video game systems. And this work was just seen as kind of second rate. It wasn't considered real artwork or it was, well, the best example I have of that was there were spaces to show media work in the early 2000s, but often they were, well, here's an example. This would be the New Museum's Zenith Media Lounge, which I should admit, I was very happy to show in, but it was in the basement and under the stairs. And many institutions had these kinds of spaces and they were always like literally under stairs in the basement around the corner. They were secondary spaces as digital work just wasn't considered a real valid kind of pursuit in the kind of larger art industry at the time. And so when I went into Majoris' show and saw this painting of space invaders, and I just thought, well, why should the painter get these beautiful spaces? Why can't digital artists get these beautiful spaces? I want these beautiful spaces. So all these things were kind of mixed up and I was also 24, so anyway. So as I mentioned, I didn't bother to even find the name of the artist who made the space invader painting. So what I wanna talk about now is how Majoris came back into my life kind of quote unquote as an adult. And he came back in my life in 2004. And before I get to how, I just wanna talk about some of the real basic things that had changed. So first we could talk about what changed for me is, I kept hanging around galleries and I kept, I mean, being annoyed by galleries, but I kept going because in that annoyance there was something that it really meant that I wanted these things. And so, slowly I learned about photography. So I learned how to make photographs. I learned the language of sculpture. And so I had spent kind of 10 years like slowly teaching myself the basic language of contemporary art. And this, in some years this was difficult. So, Mike Smith who is learning who Mike Smith was for many years, I put him as an example here. There was the place where I worked, had a picture of him in a video on a horse with a cowboy hat. And for many years I could not get Mike Smith and Richard Prince straight because I thought, oh right, the guy on the horse, the guy with the horse is that is Mike Smith. But anyway, over many, many years I eventually figured out Mike Smith, Roberta Smith, Mike Kelly. And then the other thing that happens is of course the world changes. So, Google happens. And in fact, Google I would say became mainstream because Google I think started in the late 90s. Google was first introduced to me by a computer science friend in college, I think 99s. But Google becomes mainstream, Facebook happens, if you could believe it. YouTube happens. And of course, Instagram happens. So, these are all the things that are happening in the background. So in 2000, oh, and actually just a real quick side note, also in 2014, Kevin McCoy does a presentation where he, this is Kevin McCoy from the earlier masterpiece I showed you. He does a presentation where he kind of proposes the technology of NFTs. So, and it was, he called it monograph. So that's a kind of side note, which is interesting. So, 2014, I'm on Instagram and I see this, this image, in fact, I literally see this and it's my same, I have my same phone here. This is New Waste, who was actually Gil Gentili who was a production assistant of mine at the time. And I wanna talk a little bit about Gil. Gil was my production assistant and this isn't just any post on Instagram, Gil had great visual taste. I liked Gil's visual taste so much that I asked him to design my book, which is called The Source here, you could see it here. And you could see Gil's amazing cover that, so this is a book of source code and yet Gil presented this cover to me and this shows you, so Gil has a really great visual sense, visual taste. And so I'm paying attention to Gil's Instagram because I know he kind of knows what he's looking at. So he posts this and I don't know who it is. There's no name, there's no artist, there's nothing and I immediately get very tense because I'm presented with something that I almost immediately know as a masterpiece yet I don't know anything about it. So immediately my Rolodex in my head starts flipping and I try to figure out, oh God, who is that? What artist is this? And quickly I wanna take you through some of the people that I thought it could be. So I thought maybe at first it could be Jeff Elrod. So this is Jeff Elrod, an amazing painter. This is a show Jeff Elrod did in New York in 2002 with Leo Koenig, which actually I was hanging around Leo Koenig during these years because I worked around the corner and I saw this show being installed and I saw Jeff actually pull the tape off of these black paintings. But it didn't quite seem to be a Jeff Elrod but it was close. So then I thought, well, maybe it could be a Wendy White. Here are some Wendy White paintings from those years. She's another super, super, super painter. But it didn't quite line up. It's, there was something more harsh about the Mejeris. So then I thought, well, maybe it could be a Francis Reuter and the palette, you could see here the palette I thought lined up with Francis Reuter but the imagery didn't quite line up with Francis. And then my last guess was it could be a Laura Owens painting maybe. And during those years, people had started whispering about this Laura Owens series of paintings. I hadn't seen them yet, but people were whispering. She's got this new series of paintings. They're very cool. They're kind of Tumblr style. They're massive. So I thought maybe it could be Laura Owens but similar to some of the other artists, this painting by Mejeris, this untitled painting was just too, here's the post. And then here it is on the Matthew Marx website. The Mejeris painting is just too dystopic. So eventually what I thought is I thought, oh, this is probably some young Berlin artists. That was kind of where I landed on this. Some young kind of post internet artist who I was worried about because I thought this was the most amazing painting. So let me briefly talk about this painting. And then I wanna just kind of come back to why I like these space invader paintings now. But quickly like, so when I see this painting, what do I think of? For me, there's just so many elements in the painting we could talk about. I could just zoom in on one thing which would be maybe the phrase newcomer. And for me, what that reminds me of is here, let me get these tabs. I'm just the generation after. So I remember like life before the internet and I think that it's already been discussed a few times in this symposium that it's important to remember that the internet really hadn't happened yet. It existed, but it hadn't become mainstream yet. And so I kind of remember this life before the internet. And so when I see these kind of techno fonts, I immediately kind of zoom back into, for me, it was this source sonic groove. This was the store I used to hang out in on Bleecker Street. This was the techno store run by Adam X and Heather Hart. I have a link to Heather Hart on my arena if anyone wants to see. So it's Heather Hart, 1999 who you could see often working in sonic groove. And I just remember being in these aisles and being dazzled by these record covers in these strange language and these strange colors. And I have a couple examples here from this project here called the AUD MCR's Underground Dance Music Collection of Recorded Sound. This is a collection of trance records I bought from a retired trance DJ. I bought his entire collection and cataloged it as is without even changing the order of the records. And I think it's a really good, or it has been for me a really good resource when researching Mejeris because you can kind of see actually what trance records looked like at the time. And so there are a couple in here that seemed to me like very Mejeris-y. So for me, just that one phrase burned out just all of a sudden sends me down this spiral of all these different connections. And for me, the thing with Mejeris is there's like 40 of those things in one painting. And so here's some other kind of really great record covers that I find have a kind of feeling of Mejeris. Although I think something that is interesting if someone were to go in a little bit farther, if you actually look at what all of trance records look like, they don't all look like what we think trance records would look like. In fact, a lot of them don't. So here's like an example of this record label called Renaissance record. So it's interesting that Mejeris, we associate him with this kind of look of the time, but actually it is a selective look. It's a look of the time of what is only new in the time. So this is a great kind of interesting other type of trance record look. So now what I wanna do is, so I find out at Mejeris, I think it's some young artist, I eventually corner Gil and Gil's like, oh no, no, no, no, that's an artist named Michelle Mejeris. Yeah, I forgot this part of the story. This is from 14 years ago. And I completely was blown away and started then kind of creeping around the estate and trying, I kind of sought out the estate and I just said, I have to learn as much as I can about this artist. I don't, there's so much energy coming on here. And then on one of those trips to the estate, paging through the catalog, I saw the Space Invader or one of the Space Invader paintings again and was really, really surprised and remembered my initial encounter with Mejeris and was kind of blown away. And actually what had happened is there were two Space Invader paintings in the show. I had remembered them as one. And also when I was paging through the catalog at the estate, I realized I did actually see the rest of the show because I had seen the corn head painting. When I saw an image of that, I remembered, oh yeah, I did see that. And I do remember looking around the corner in the show, seeing that giant installation and just being like, whoa. So what I wanna talk about now in kind of conclusion is to think, well, why do I like Mejeris now? Love Mejeris or you know what I mean? Why is he in a kind of eternal inspiration to me now? And why did I dislike it so much then? And so a couple of things like, first is like in the meantime, I came to a kind of understanding of painting and my understanding of painting came to me through the world of heavy metal. So my brother works in the heavy metal industry and that's an industry that I have a lot of respect for and kind of grew up with my whole life with my brother kind of teaching, he might use my older brother teaching me the kind of ins and outs. In heavy metals, I think a great way to think about painting. It is an industry and it's an industry unto itself. It is an industry which has its own history and its own timeline and it operates completely without any interference from other music industries. It is totally insular and it just keeps plugging away and young metal bands are expected to have a kind of knowledge of the whole history. So if you're a young metal band and you don't know all the history going back to the beginning, it's actually kind of very strange. So most bands have this kind of reverence for the history of metal and even though of course they might wanna just be trying to move it forward or destroy it or whatever. And so I think it's a lot, for me it helped to understand painting, that painting is this kind of, painting is its own thing. And it just goes forward. It can be mainstream but it can also, but actually its own dialogue is kind of outside of the other art dialogues. And it just kind of does its own thing and painters have a knowledge of painting going back hundreds of years and they're all just trying to chip away and just make some contribution. And so on my arena here, I won't punish you with, but I have a kind of like a timeline between Black Sabbath to pentagram to sleep, to earth so you could hear this kind of, this is just one thread of heavy metal where you could hear Black Sabbath and all these bands that came after. So painting, I kind of came to an understanding of painting and that painting is kind of amazing. The second thing is I came to understand the art world as how it relates to power. And there was somebody had mentioned earlier the art world became hyper about the market and power. And so then thinking back on why I didn't like Chelsea Galleries at the time is I didn't understand that that gross feeling of these kind of blue chip galleries. And what I didn't understand, especially with Mejeres is that Mejeres is working with that energy. And so when you see these Mejeres paintings and they're installed in these spaces, Mejeres knows about blue chip painters, money, auctions. You could see it in his diaries. He's completely aware and he's trying to insert himself in there and use that kind of tension to the artwork's advantage. And so that's something that completely I had no concept of when I saw that show. And then the third thing is what I thought I was seeing with these, sorry, I'm like, I forgot to, here's corn head. I forgot to click. What I thought I was seeing with I saw these space invaders paintings. I thought I was, what I interpreted as is like some German painter was trying to be cool to buy painting space invaders. But what it really is, I think, is Mejeres painting space invaders in the style of Warhol, or silk screening I should say, silk screening as painting of course, in the style of Warhol. And then not to be like a painting by Mejeres or not to be a painting by an artist, but it is then to be quote unquote a painting by Mejeres. So it is totally aware that this is a painting to be installed in Petzl, to be a painting by Mejeres, which is using the style of another artist and to use that kind of tension of these blue chip spaces and the whole history of contemporary painting and auctions to use it all as an advantage. And so in that way, Mejeres isn't making paintings, he's more making these kind of like performances or things which are to perform as painting by Mejeres. And so this stuff all flew over my head when I was 24, but this is kind of how I see the work. And now it's the kind of, he's a kind of meta artist in a way. And I also link to these as I would say that perhaps these could be, you know, Stella's in pastels, you could imagine him writing in his diaries. So he's always trying to do these combinations and using other artists as his material. And so then I just want to talk like, just to leave you, like I think it was also important that I saw this untitled painting on Instagram. And I think it's important that I, meaning like I saw it today. And meaning like it's how it came through Instagram to me and it's what it's next to on Instagram. And you know, on Instagram, it's next to, you know, oil companies, heads of states, disinformation bots. And so I think his work has a particular resonance now because this kind of internet utopia had kind of completely fallen apart and has turned into a kind of dystopia. And I read his work as like totally absolutely dystopic and harsh. And here are some, I've posted some just kind of some current examples of dystopic images. And these are from the really great open arena channel, Yuppie Dystopia. So it's an arena for people to, it's an arena channel for people to post things which are about the current dystopia that we live in. And so, yeah, I think that's kind of how, oh yeah. And then of course, if you wanna watch this Facebook metaverse video, this is exactly, this is exactly the dystopia that I'm thinking of. So I think his work works especially well now as the world kind of heats up and declines, yeah, I don't know how to say, but we're on a verge of climate collapse. So I mean, I think his work is so harsh and so dystopic that it has a way of meaning more now. And so I did wanna just leave with the phrases in that painting, which is, you know, these phrases burned out, newcomer, plant, explosive device, the means of deception, zero, fuck the intention of the artist. And so I think these are really great. You know, these are not positive phrases. These are really tense and difficult things. And I think for me, that's really what the work, why the work resonates for me right now. Okay, I think that's it. Thank you. Thank you, Cori. I think it was also very interesting to have this way of showing your influences on this platform arena, which also reminded of maybe of Majerys' way of working in collecting visual material. So it's also a nice nod to Majerys' way of working. Also, I like the heavy metal reference, and I think Tophik, our IT technician, probably loved it because he's really into it. But I actually wanted to ask you a very simple question. How this rediscovery of Majerys' work actually influenced your reflections and your work in the end? Yeah, oh, it's a great question. Wow, that's such a wild question. I mean, well, actually I have a great answer. I mean, on Friday, I'm opening a show at the Kunstverein in Hamburg, and it's literally below the Majerys' show, which also opens on the same day. And in putting together that show, I was like, oh my God, I have to compete against, like it was so, competing with Majerys, or at least pulling myself up to the same level was the almost impossible goal of putting together that show. And so that's a kind of like very recent example, just, you know, and it affected the works that I was choosing, it affected how I installed it, it affected how I talked about it. You know, it's a really, really, really high bar. And as people had mentioned, he had this kind of like, he was so on and he hadn't even really peaked yet. And it seemed almost magical how he was doing it, right? And I, of course, I'm like, I'm living and I'm middle age. I mean, to even try to get close to that zone that he was in was really daunting. And I mean, you could even see in my studio here, I mean, these are like, can you see these pink things? These are like, I'm trying, so these are like really, these are powder coating on aluminum. And clearly I'm thinking about Majerys when I'm making these. And so I'm just trying to, yeah, so it changed everything, you know? And yeah, of course aluminum, even literally aluminum is a Majerys medium, you know? So a lot of different ways. And then also to have to have been around the estate and have to work with the estate to, that also has been amazing to see, you know, how gentle and how cared for the works are. And it's been inspiring in a whole different way, you know? Thanks. Anyone in the audience would like to ask a question or make a comment? Nope. So we're running a bit late, so maybe we end it here for now and we will see you again, Corey, at the panel discussion. Thank you so much. It was great.