by Stephen Hirsch
The future fabricating machine in performance will invent images as patterned after cliché vision as those of the camera, and its results will suffer a similar claim to “realism,” IBM being no more God nor even a “Thinking machine” than the camera eye all-seeing or capable of creative selectivity…Yet increased human intervention and control renders any process more capable of a balance between sub-and-objective expression, and between those two concepts, somewhere, soul…
- Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision
I think when we play Mr. Italiano, it’s training our minds for something.
- Paper Rad, "Welcome to M B"
Access to computers – and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works – should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!...All information should be free…Mistrust Authority, Promote Decentralization…You can create art and beauty on a computer…Computers can change your life for the better.
- Steven Levy’s “hacker ethics”
In 2005, computer artist Cory Arcangel collaborated with Paper Rad – a three-person art collective specializing in comics, animation, music, and installations – on a project entitled Super Mario Movie. They created this Mario Movie by hacking a standard Super Mario Bros. (1985) Nintendo Entertainment System videogame. The Movie, which tells the story of a decaying game world in which Mario is suffering a kind of existential crisis, runs off of the hacked cartridge played on a standard Nintendo Entertainment System. This project suggests a new relationship between the spectator and the work of art in the digital age, a relationship in which the spectator actually takes control of the work and utilizes it for something new. In many ways, Walter Benjamin provides this transformation’s theoretical background in his classic 1935 essay on technologies of mechanical reproduction. Benjamin’s relevance to the computer technology involved in the Mario Movie is complicated by the essential differences between the technology of Benjamin’s historical period and the technology of the digital age. While a common vision of technological utopianism emerges, the Mario Movie illustrates the way in which digital technology offers revolutionary possibilities beyond the limitations and reservations evident in Benjamin’s essay. Ultimately, a continuum emerges in which Benjamin provides the foundational description of a process of technological transformation of the world (primarily through decay of the aura) and the Mario Movie – within the context of digital utopianism – begins to outline some form of that process’s fulfillment. The appropriation and reorientation of a mass-produced work or object that characterizes the Mario Movie ultimately asserts the transformative, revolutionary possibilities of the innovative user.
In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin writes that because of the increasing extension of the printing press an increasing number of readers became writers:
And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other…Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer.
He then states: “All this can easily be applied to the film, where transitions that in literature took centuries have come about in a decade.”[1] Benjamin here argues that an increasing availability or accessibility of media technologies as tools, as well as an increasing availability or accessibility of the knowledge required to use those tools, leads to a situation in which the only difference between a reader and a writer is which function the individual person – potentially both reader and writer – happens to be fulfilling at the moment. With the increasing accessibility of reproduction technologies, every reader is always potentially a writer, every spectator is potentially an actor.
This observation of Benjamin’s certainly seems prophetically accurate with regard to media technologies like blogs and video cameras and YouTube, which facilitate to an extreme degree the widespread availability of the active roles of author or filmmaker. The passive spectator can easily become the active creator.
But in my view Cory Arcangel and Paper Rad’s Super Mario Movie presents something different in relation to Benjamin’s observations. While it does illustrate the shift in which the passive, receptive spectator takes on an active and creative role, it does more than that. It illustrates a profound transformation in the spectator’s relationship to the work of art (art defined broadly here to include the Super Mario Brothers video game). In Benjamin’s description above, the nature of being a spectator does not really change. What does change is the availability or accessibility of the creator role. The reader becomes a writer when he publishes an article of his own; the film spectator becomes an actor when he appears as an extra or playing himself in a film. But when reading a novel or the articles of others, the writer again becomes a reader. Basically, the spectator can sometimes be a creator and the creator can sometimes be a spectator; a certain mobility between roles is created by the situation described by Benjamin, but the roles themselves are not necessarily altered.
The Super Mario Movie presents something different, a further and more profound transformation in the relationship between a work of art and the individual who encounters it. The spectator becomes a critical and innovative user. The difference here is essentially this: the spectator who becomes a creator sees a film and says something like, “I can do that too,” whereas the spectator who becomes a user-innovator sees a film (or in this case a video game) and says, “I can do something else with this.”
I should note that I don’t see this as any kind of refutation or finding fault with Benjamin’s argument, but instead as an elaboration. Obviously there is an overlap between the spectator who becomes a creator and the spectator who becomes a critical user-innovator, for example Godard and the French New Wave critics-turned-filmmakers who use all kinds of classical
Benjamin’s concept of the aura and its disappearance through mechanical reproduction suggests one way we might go about theorizing the transformation of the spectator into a user-innovator with respect to the Super Mario Movie. In particular, the spatial metaphor Benjamin uses to explain the aura of a work of art provides a foundation for identifying how a viewer begins to understand a work as something that he or she can use and change as desired. Benjamin’s use of the term “aura” essentially refers to a work of art’s unique existence, its authenticity, its status as a singular object with a fixed place in historical tradition as well as a history of its own. Mechanical reproduction destroys this singularity and history. As Benjamin puts it: “…the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.”[2] By thus eroding an object’s uniqueness and tradition, mass-reproduction deprives the work of much of its distance from and power over the spectator.
Benjamin’s use of the spatial metaphor to explain the disappearance of the aura proves particularly insightful with regard to explaining the transformed relationship with a work of art that makes the Super Mario Movie possible. Benjamin writes:
We define the aura as the unique appearance of a distance, however close it may be…This image makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura…Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly…[3]
Due to its uniqueness, its origin and existence in its own particular time and place, the object with an aura stands at a distance from the spectator. It is a foreign, autonomous object, occupying a position of power and authority in its relationship with any particular spectator. Those who want to view the object with an aura must go to it, because it will not come to them. One cannot adjust such an object to suit one’s demands, but instead one must adjust oneself to the object’s unique existence as it is. One can approach such a work but not touch it; one may observe it but not change it. The destruction of the aura through mass-reproduction of the object destroys this distance between the spectator and the work. This closeness with the object, this tactile intimacy, characterizes the relationship of the innovative user with the work of art.
With the Super Mario Movie the distance between the viewer and the work has been so completely annihilated that the viewer becomes a user with the power to reach right into the guts of the work – what it’s made of, it’s material elements. To create the Super Mario Movie, Cory Arcangel – who did all of the actual programming work on this collaboration – took apart a Super Mario Bros. game cartridge and altered its insides. Briefly, this entails opening up the cartridge, removing the program chip from the circuit board (while leaving the original graphics chip intact), soldering in a socket for a new chip, placing the new chip into the socket, and then screwing the cartridge back together. The new chip itself is programmed on a normal personal computer. Arcangel wrote all of the code for the Movie on his computer and used a chip-burning USB device called an EEPROM Burner to transfer the code onto a blank Nintendo cartridge chip.[4] This whole process is characterized by Arcangel’s tactile intimacy, his closeness, with the Mario game. At one point in his essay, Benjamin compares the cameraman to a surgeon, who diminishes the distance between himself and the patient to such a degree that he penetrates the patient’s body and works with his internal parts and organs.[5] Arcangel hacking the Mario game cartridge offers an even more striking correspondence to the surgeon’s invasive proximity and internal alteration of the patient. The distance created by the aura is non-existent here as Arcangel actually gets inside of the work and changes it. The relationship between object and spectator governed by the aura is inverted. The work itself is subordinated to the demands of the spectator, who now becomes a user with the ability not only to put hands on the work, but in it as well. In this way Arcangel and Paper Rad rework the existing work, changing and manipulating it to fulfill their own goals and demands.
The fact that Benjamin’s analogy with surgery seems more apt in relation to the digital work of hacking the game cartridge than it does in relation to the film work of cinematography points towards the question of why Benjamin’s theory appears so relevant to computer artwork such as the Mario Movie. Benjamin writes his essay in 1935, responding to technologies of mechanical mass-reproduction – at the pinnacle of which stands cinematic technology – and their effects on the realm of art. As detailed above, the primary effect Benjamin identifies is the decay of the aura possessed by the traditional work of art. With the Mario Movie we are dealing with a different kind of technology. Digital images found in video games are not mass-reproductions of some original image or work, as is the case with prints of a painting, recordings of a musical performance, or images on a film strip of a profilmic event. Instead, digital images are mass-produced. Instead of capturing and propagating some original, the digital image of an NES video game is painted or drawn on a television directly from the code embedded in its mass-produced, factory-soldered microchips.
Thus, whereas Benjamin writes in a historical period in which he can perceive the decay of the aura through technologies of reproduction, in the computer age of mass-produced images no aura exists to begin with. Benjamin witnesses the decay of the aura, not its annihilation. Technologies of mechanical reproduction copy, preserve, and disseminate some original image or work, thus allowing some vestige of the original’s aura to remain in their content. Furthermore, analog reproduction technologies – the only kind available in Benjamin’s day – are plagued by a noticeable degree of generation loss, and thus a well-preserved original print of a film, for instance, possesses qualities such as superior clarity and fidelity that can lend it an aura of its own. The digital image is not subject to these effects that maintain or create an aura; it does not reproduce anything original that had an aura to begin with, and all copies should be exactly the same. In fact, by referring to games as “copies,” one implies that each individual cartridge is an exact copy of every other cartridge rather than a copy of some original. Thus, with regard to digital images, the aura has not decayed, but instead has been completely annihilated. In this way it becomes evident that much of Benjamin’s essay might become even more relevant with regard to this technology of an entirely different nature. After all, the consequences implied by the disappearance of the aura could only fully manifest themselves in an age when the aura has truly disappeared.
The relevance of Benjamin’s essay to the Super Mario Movie becomes even less surprising, and more clearly defined, when one places the two within a broader context of utopian responses to technological developments. As described above, Benjamin views the extension of technologies of mechanical reproduction and their aura-destroying effects as progressive, full of revolutionary, utopian possibility. For one thing, such technologies allow the masses more and more to adopt creative roles, becoming authors and actors instead of mere passive spectators. Furthermore, the decay of the aura jeopardizes the authority of the work. This has numerous liberating effects: the spectator can adopt a critical position in relation to the object or work, a criticism denied by the cult value associated with the aura[6]; the spectator can bring the work close “spatially and humanly,” entering into a more hands-on, personal relationship with the work[7]; the spectator can perceive the work in a state of distraction rather than attentive, receptive contemplation, absorbing the work rather than being absorbed by it, receiving it through a filter of more pressing, personal concerns.[8] It is all of these concepts and effects that Benjamin refers to in his preface as full of utopian promise: “…they are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.”[9] This revolutionary irreverence for the aura-less work, this close, distracted, critical relationship with it, certainly underlies the Super Mario Movie and its treatment of the original game.
Importantly, the Mario Movie takes Benjamin’s utopian vision of the possibilities offered by technology and its relation to art farther than Benjamin does. Benjamin’s view is marked by some significant reservations. In his epilogue he writes: “Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property.”[10] This reservation is an extension of my comments above on Benjamin’s observation that every reader can at any time become a writer, every working-class spectator can become an actor. I wrote that this does not significantly transform the structure of the individual human being’s relationship to the work of art, since although one may freely switch between the roles of spectator and creator, these roles themselves remain unchanged. The structure or system remains the same. Benjamin qualifies the utopian aspect of his essay with the same observation: the availability of the creative role, of “expression,” is nothing without a more fundamental change in the system of property relations governing objects and works. Even the Soviet practice of using regular, non-actor workers to portray themselves in films[11] becomes a false revolutionary act, an illusion of empowerment and participation, when not accompanied by a shift in property relations all along the line. In other words, the true utopian shift would allow for widespread appropriation and use of the work, including the knowledge and tools behind it, by the masses. It would be something more like Arcangel and Paper Rad hacking Mario Bros, utilizing it and the tools that made it to fulfill their own objectives. The limit that Benjamin’s hopeful vision of technology ultimately runs up against is that of accessibility. The masses simply don’t have the tools required to hack the film.
The Super Mario Movie goes beyond this historical limitation Benjamin recognizes in his vision of technology, fitting into the context of the later technological utopianism of the digital age. In his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner details the emergence of this digital utopianism through a kind of dialectical synthesis that occurred primarily during the 1970s between the technological advances of military-industrial-academic research in the science of computers and the countercultural ideals of the “New Communalists” striving to pioneer alternative, utopian ways of living. Turner identifies Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth Catalog as the nexus for this synthesis: “With the Whole Earth Catalog, Brand offered a generation of computer engineers and programmers an alternative vision of technology as a tool for individual and collective transformation.”[12] A continuum of technological utopianism emerges here. Benjamin points toward technology’s ability to undermine and destroy established structures and hierarchies, whereas Brand points toward technology’s ability to be harnessed by individuals for personal fulfillment and the creation of new worlds in place of the undermined established structures.
In fact, the accessibility of technological tools – limited and limiting in Benjamin’s case, while underlying the Mario Movie – becomes the main focus of digital utopianism. Besides the title, date, and price, the cover of the first Whole Earth Catalog simply shows the earth viewed from space and, above it, reads, “access to tools.” In a passage that underlines the significance of digital art such as the Mario Movie, Turner writes of the Whole Earth Catalog: “…readers could glimpse the possibility of an entirely new world system, one in which American industry supplied tools that could be appropriated for purposes of transformation. The tools would be deployed first by an elite and later by the whole population.”[13] Arcangel and Paper Rad, as digital artists, act as members of this “elite,” appropriating the technological tools and products of industry and deploying them in a personally fulfilling and transformative way. In the process Arcangel encourages the “whole population” to do likewise through his hobbyist approach, posting all of his code as well as detailed instructions on hacking game cartridges on his website. The Super Mario Movie is an artistic testament to “access to tools,” with all of its essential elements appropriated from industry: the images (the original factory-soldered graphics chip is left intact), the material base (the cartridge, the program chip), the exhibition mechanism (a standard Nintendo Entertainment System).[14] In this way, the Mario Movie stands as a representation and some form of fulfillment of a long history of technological utopianism. Arcangel and Paper Rad appropriate an aura-less digital work, hack and utilize it as a tool – a means to some kind of personal, artistic ends – with no regard for the game’s prescribed uses or programmed objectives.
This replacement of a game’s intended use and objectives with something new – an idiosyncratic use or vision – has an effect analogous to photogénie in cinema. Early French cinema critics of the late nineteen-teens such as Jean Epstein, Louis Delluc, and Louis Aragon saw a certain revelatory power in the cinematic image that they termed photogénie. This concept, which echoes Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky’s idea of defamiliarization, refers to cinema’s ability to focus one’s attention on everyday objects or gestures – a typewriter, a banknote, a person lighting a cigarette – in such a way that they take on new aspects, new significance, a poetic beauty.
Poets without being artists, children sometimes fix their attention on an object to the point where their concentration makes it grow larger, grow so much it completely occupies their visual field, assumes a mysterious aspect and loses all relation to its purpose…Likewise on the screen objects that were a few moments ago sticks of furniture or books of cloakroom tickets are transformed to the point where they take on menacing or enigmatic meanings.[15]
Photogénie involves taking an object rendered invisible or unnoticed by the habits of everyday life and viewing it with such magnified attention – with the new eyes of a not-yet habituated child – that its prescribed purpose falls away, replaced by some newfound significance. A machinima work such as the Mario Movie has the same effect on the objects and gestures of the game world. The Mario Bros. game is so goal-oriented, presenting the player with objective after objective, that incidental details of animation, character design, or background objects go unnoticed, taken for granted, rendered invisible by force of game-play habits. One is too busy making Mario jump onto a cloud to notice how he jumps or the details of the cloud. When an artist removes the game’s programmed objectives, it magnifies the attention paid to such incidental details. The beginning of the Mario Movie illustrates this. For the first few minutes of the movie Mario simply stands on top of a box with a question mark on it (the kind that, in the actual game, one is constantly bopping with Mario’s head to get coins), wondering whether he should jump off or not. He fidgets back and forth on the box, magnifying the abrupt way that Mario moves, as well as the eight-bit intricacies of his character design and that of the question-box. Another Arcangel project, Super Mario Clouds (2003), provides an even more extreme example of machinima photogénie. On this hacked cartridge, everything in the game is removed except for the clouds scrolling by. This magnification of attention on the clouds provides an utterly defamiliarized vision of the Mario Bros. game world, while at the same time completely subverting the game’s programmed objectives.
Undermining a game’s intended use and objectives in this way – replacing them with something personal and transformative, some artistic or poetic vision – certainly has a political dimension. To refer back to Benjamin, it is one concrete, localized way in which “the masses” can exercise the right to transform property relations. Arcangel and Paper Rad’s act of hacking the cartridge states that, despite the fact that Mario Bros. is a mass-produced object of the entertainment industry, it is not solely the property of Nintendo; this corporation does not have exclusive power in prescribing how one uses Mario. In our digital age, with its utopian ideal of unlimited access to tools, personal appropriation and utilization of a mass-produced object or image, or work of art, is absolutely possible. In this way, the Mario Movie serves as a digital version of the Situationist practice of detournement, which involves taking some existing work or object – originally the city itself – and utilizing it in a new, transformative way that subverts established meanings and uses. The Mario Movie’s disregard for and subversion of the uses and objectives of the original game refers back to Alex Galloway’s comment, cited in note two above, that with this project Arcangel and Paper Rad display their understanding that “all media is dead media.” They do not recognize the Mario game as having any kind of life, power, or autonomy of its own. It only comes alive only when they use it, when they make it come alive to fulfill their own idiosyncratic artistic desires. As Retort writes:
Commodities can embody human purposes, and are capable of inflecting and developing such purposes, only if they are constantly subject to reorientation – change of function, change of valuation, recall to their mere instrumentality – in a world of meanings vastly exceeding those that any things can conjure up.[16]
Arcangel and Paper Rad do precisely this with the Mario Movie, subjecting the mass-produced digital image object to a radical reorientation. Thus, for all of its under-the-radar quirkiness, its light-heartedness and its fun, the Mario Movie actually stands as a refreshingly reasonable artistic act in its assertion of the primacy of human concerns in a society flooded more and more by images and objects erroneously claiming to possess some kind of power or magic – some kind of aura. Of course one must note the locality and the small, hobbyist scale of this project – after all, they merely hacked a twenty-year-old videogame, showing it at some galleries and museums and distributing it for free on the internet. This small scale serves as a reminder of the amount of power that remains in its established place. If a project such as the Mario Movie were to become truly threatening on any large political (or financial) scale, it is this established power that has the option to either take legal action (the music industry v. peer-to-peer file sharing) or to take recuperative action (George Lucas’ control of the Star Wars fan-film culture). On the other hand, one also cannot forget the Mario Movie as a concrete example of a transformative artistic act facilitated by new, digital media – an act that asserts the possibilities, as well as the rights, of the innovative user.
[1] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Film Theory and Criticism eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen , 6th edition (
[2] Benjamin, 794. It is worth noting here that this point of Benjamin’s offers one possible explanation for why these artists chose Super Mario Brothers (1985) as opposed to a more contemporary game. This explanation goes beyond mere nostalgia. If objects are detached from the domain of historical tradition by being mass-reproduced, then questions of an object’s contemporaneousness are beside the point. Thus, with respect to history (and the degrees of relevance it can imply), there is no significant difference between Mario and the latest Grand Theft Auto. The artists’ choice of Mario serves to emphasize this tradition-less coexistence of old and new objects. Alex Galloway offers a similar explanation in his essay on the Super Mario Movie: “Super Mario Bros might be nostalgia to you. But it's not to them. All media is dead media, that's what Paper Rad and Cory understand” (“Cory Arcangel (Beige) & Paper Rad’s The Mario Movie,” available at: http://www.deitch.com/projects/press_text.php?pressId=29).
[3] Benjamin, 795.
[4] All of this information on hacking Nintendo cartridges is available at Cory Arcangel’s website: http://www.beigerecords.com/cory/Things_I_Made_in_2003/.
[5] Benjamin, 804.
[6] Benjamin, 800.
[7] Benjamin, 795.
[8] Benjamin, 809.
[9] Benjamin, 792.
[10] Benjamin, 809-10.
[11] Benjamin, 803.
[12] Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (
[13] Turner, 97.
[14] It should be noted that while the example I have chosen appropriates an entertainment product, the appropriation of the tools of industry (power) by digital artists can have a much more explicitly political dimension. The Radical Software Group, with which Arcangel is affiliated, has a project called “Carnivore,” which takes the very same digital wiretapping/surveillance system used by the FBI and, by way of a number of “clients” designed by digital artists (including Arcangel), interprets the collected data as dynamic visual or aural works of art. More info – and the program itself – available at: http://r-s-g.org/carnivore/.
[15] Louis Aragorn, “On Décor,” French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907-1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 1988), 166.
[16] Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (
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