How Cory Arcangel Recovered a Late Artist’s Digital Legacy – The New Yorker
7 May 2025
In 2002, the thirty-five-year-old, Luxembourg-born painter Michel Majerus was on a short flight from Berlin, where he lived, to his native country, when the plane crashed, killing him and nineteen other passengers. With his death, a burgeoning artistic career was cut short. Majerus had been the subject of a solo museum exhibition in Switzerland, in 1996, and he’d created a major installation for the Venice Biennale, in 1999. There would be no more of his innovative œuvre, which included individual painted canvases in addition to room-scale installations smashing together the vocabulary of early digital culture—lo-fi video games, internet-y typefaces—with aggressive brushstrokes and flat planes of color borrowed from Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. Majerus’s souped-up Apple PowerBook G3 laptop, however, survived the wreck—at least, the hard drive did.
The computer remained with his estate for many years, a relic left untouched. During that time, Majerus’s paintings continued to be shown in galleries and museums, exerting a quiet but persistent influence on a generation of artists who were creating work using and responding to the internet. Then, in 2017, the artist Cory Arcangel, famous for his digital art works, became aware of Majerus’s hard drive and began a quest to access its contents. What prompted Arcangel’s interest was an untitled painting of Majerus’s, from 2000, that an assistant had shown him on Instagram. The background is covered in acid-pastel blocks of color, reminiscent of the Neo-Geo movement of the nineteen-eighties, but the foreground contains evocative phrases in text that looks pulled from Geocities or a “Matrix”-era rave poster: “Newcomer,” “burned out,” “fuck the intention of the artist.” Majerus had intuited that the internet would lead to a great collision of styles and reference points—everything from Super Mario to Jackson Pollock coexisting in pixels. The untitled painting inspired nostalgia for the dial-up millennial generation, but Arcangel, whose own work includes a hacked version of “Super Mario Bros.” with only its clouds remaining, was also struck by how contemporary it seemed. During a recent Google Meet call from an austere apartment that a gallery representing the Majerus Estate maintains in Berlin, Arcangel said, “It just came at me from a hundred different angles, and each one of these little things sent me off into a spiral of associations.”
Given Majerus’s incorporation of digital imagery, such as video-game sprites, and the fluency of his tech-culture references, Arcangel guessed that Majerus was as much a digital artist as an analog painter. Perhaps the laptop held the key to his process. Arcangel brought the hard drive to the attention of Dragan Espenschied, the preservation director at Rhizome, a New York institution that archives the history of art created in digital environments. There was a risk that the hardware might malfunction and the stored files would be lost forever. The Majerus Estate commissioned a data rescue company to create a digital copy of the drive. Then, Espenschied used an emulator—a piece of software that mimics the entire architecture of an older device—to boot up a facsimile of the laptop, including its early-two-thousands operating system and the pixellated file icons on Majerus’s cluttered desktop, which featured a background image from Ms. Pac-Man. This was his computer exactly as he had left it, down to his customized Photoshop shortcuts and the positions of the windows. “It’s like he just stepped out of the room,” Arcangel said.
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Image: Let’s Play Majerus G3, a project by Cory Arcangel, Michel Majerus Estate, April 27, 2024–March 15, 2025 © Michel Majerus Estate, 2024© Cory Arcangel, 2024. Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin
