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The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project
Colin Marshall

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30. Cory Arcangel's Clouds (2002)
[View Film]

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 shows you how to do on his site. So the "video art" here isnt so much what's embedded above as what you get when you put the home-soldered cart into the machine.

Even watched in the form of Ubuweb clip, Clouds (a.k.a. Super Mario Clouds, or whatever) is actually pretty hypnotic. I somehow never realized, in all my childhood hours of playing that game, that the clouds drifted to the left by themselves, even absent the player's scrolling the screen by walking ahead.