Flow-Parody: Bots and Monkeyrunners
The MIT Press eBooks · 2025
with increasing aggressiveness, one of the artist's functions, I believe, is to specify how technology uses us."Century 21, Cory Arcangel's first big solo show in the US after he moved to Norway in 2015 took place at Greene Naftali in New York in 2021.While Arcangel's earlier shows such as Here Comes Everybody would joyfully play along with the unfettered creativity of the multitudes of social media, Century 21 is dominated by something different.2 The feel of the works is different, and the humor is less tangible.Rather than relying on subcultures, he uses the devices and affordances of the platform economy as artistic material.The online exhibition catalog states: "Cory Arcangel uses the systems and social mores of the Internet as artistic material, lending solidity to what he calls the virtual realm that 'both consumes us and fits so neatly in the palm of our hands.'"3 To sneak up on this material, it is as if the artist has withdrawn or is hiding behind bots.He hacks into the API of Android cell phones to simulate the flows of human-computer interaction, using social bots to click and game across platforms.Five such works will be analyzed.They are all by Arcangel and involve a series of different types of bots that are programmed with help from his 4 FLOW-PARODY Bots and Monkeyrunners