F2 (or F1 Racer Mod or Japanese Driving Game). 2:46 min., color, silent, 2005. By Cory Arcangel. Ubuweb's description:
This is a simple mod Cory did of the old Japanese Famicom driving game F1 Racer. Basically the cars, etc., were removed from the game and all that was left was the road.
Procedurally, this is a close cousin to Clouds, the older game modification where Arcangel hacked everything but the clouds out of Super Mario Bros.
Now all we've got left from this driving game is the scenery and the
scrolling road. Getting what I've come to think of as the Standard Cory
Arcangel Ubuwebified Work Disclaimer, this (probably) really isn't
meant to be viewed as a clip but as a continuously running cartridge in
a gin-u-wine NES console. Or in this specific case, I suppose, a
Famicom console, which is the NES' Japanese equivalent. Or an NES with
some sort of converter, though I remember from my heavy NES-collecting
days that those were tricky to come by. (But you know what? Given the
ingenuity I've seen from Arcangel thus far, I wouldn't be surprised if
he somehow just willed one into existence.)I may well be of the last sub-generation to get nostalgic for driving games like the one Arcangel has here stripped of its cars. These were the games from before moving cameras, before infinite draw distances, before real-time 3D rendering. It was all scaled sprites and alternating strips of color to make sure you knew the road was supposed to be passing. This particular game just uses a stream of center lines to evoke that, but the result is basically the same. (This stuff is close to my heart; OutRun was my first-ever computer game, and boy, did I play the hell out of it, never well.) And now that I think about it, I'm not sure "nostalgia" is the right term; do I simply long for the days of these prepolygonal racers, or do I genuinely prefer the games themselves? I can't speak for the 25-year-olds buying Bob-omb shirts from Urban Outfitters, but I think my enthusiasm comes from a place of honest, "objective" enjoyment. I liked games made before 1995-ish even in 1996, and I like them now.
Visually, Video Ravingz
looks a lot like the glitchy patterns you get trying to play old, dirty
NES cartridges. The canonical technique to address this situation has
always, I suppose, been to blow vigorously on the contacts and hope for
the best, and I admit to having done that myself in my dissolute youth.
But I now understand that move isn't advisable. Sure, you might get the
game to work in the short term, but your spittle (or whatever) corrodes
it in the long term, causing even worse contact issues. These days, I'm
a Q-Tip-and-Windex man. Works every time.
Though Arcangel apparently made this out of what was once Super Mario Bros. 2
— my childhood favorite of the series, though one that's earned only
the legacy of a lukewarmly-regarded oddity — you'd be hard-pressed to
identify it from what remains. Of his vintage-game transformations that
I've seen so far, this is the most complete, though I can't imagine
what I'd do with an installation of it.
Like Arcangel's 
Easier to describe, I daresay, than to hazard a guess as to how he did it. The easiest explanation is that he played Super Mario Bros.
in an emulator, recorded it, and then visually erased everything
onscreen but the clouds and the blue background. But no! He actually
hacked the physical NES cartridge, which he 
First,
these dates are all over the place. Ubuweb's page title says 1968-1978,
its description says 1970, the video itself says 1971, and I'm sure,
with patience, I could turn up yet more signals of chronological
inconsistency. But the liquid-y gray Portapak visuals that open the
video date it more evocatively than any number could. As the description
above suggests, this is a dog's breakfast of material, some quite
interesting, some less so. If nothing else, it makes me wish I could
have put in a stretch as a scrappy early-seventies art team. (Are there
"art teams" any more? Sure, Blue Man Group, I guess, but they're the
polar opposite of scrappy.)
There's
some footage of a dude in eating a burger (which, despite its wobbly
lo-fi look, feels somehow modern, at least nineties-modern),
girls discussing Warhol and a "Top-Less Talk Show from Topanga",
in increasing order of the gulf between how interesting they sound and
how interesting they are. This all precedes Inflatables Illustrated,
a long middle segment on what appears to have been Ant Farmer Curtis
Schreier's prime avocation at the time: ironing together scraps of
plastic to make gigantic balloon-ish constructions.
Here's
another of the videos on Ubuweb where the operative artwork isn't so
much the video itself but the thing out there in the world that it
documents. But if you'll never make it out to Amarillo and experience
this array of midcentury luxury cars half-buried at pyramidal angles
for yourself, this is potentially valuable viewing. You'll certainly
never be able to witness it in life as it exists in this video, since
the whole shebang was quietly moved a bit, to 35°11′14″N 101°59′13.4″W,
in 1997. Plus it's always getting re-painted, re-graffiti'd,
re-painted, re-graffiti'd, etc.
The
video's second half is news broadcast from 1994, one of those brief
local-wackiness segments covering the Ranch's 20th anniversary. This is
the sort of thing I would expect Ant Farm to include, what with their
evident give-and-take relationship with the non-artistic media. In
fact, I sort of wish that all artists' videos about their own
concrete works or the concrete works of others' included excerpts from
the reaction of the mainstream. Though I'm as sick as you are of
hearing talking heads ask, "But is it art?", there's oftentimes an
interesting clash of perspectives to be explored.
Nobody had much to say about this one in
the critique, though there were some mumbles: "It was... artistic?" One
set complained that it was "confusing," with a certain member
mystifyingly objecting that he "didn't understand the red line." ("Yeah,
but that guy's an idiot," Madelaine later assured me.) The
teacher seemed to really enjoy it, though, and given my surprisingly
shabby academic history, that's not nothing.
But surely
you realize that the thought process behind this debut installment
wasn't unnecessarily complicated. You see and experience your
neighborhood on a daily basis. No matter how unusual it is, you
necessarily fall into a sort of sensory complacency about it. Since you can't just decide to
"visit" your neighborhood like an out-of-town friend might,
decontextualization via altered media seems like the next best thing.
These are the sounds and sights of a journey through my own
neighborhood, yes, but not with the usual colors nor the usual
continuity nor the usual audiovisual correspondence nor the usual speed.
