Cory Arcangel The Screen Age: Video's Past and Future

IN THE OPENING MOMENTS of The Possible Fog of Heaven, a 1993 computer-animated video by John Knecht, pixelated wishbones twirl and descend vertically over a black background. A cello drones on the soundtrack, while Elvis, of all people, speaks in voice-over—apparently delivering his first utterances from the afterlife. As the singer deadpans his experience of heaven—“There is a flyby waiting for everyone here, I mean to each his own, without, without forgiveness”—the wishbones turn to bodies, plummeting downward as if having leaped off a building. “Things have been falling in my videos for decades,” Knecht has said. “It was at first formal … [and] increasingly became an atmosphere, functioning both as a formal device and a metaphorical space.”