How Cory Arcangel Recovered a Late Artist's Digital Legacy Michel Majerus died in a plane crash, but the contents of his laptop are providing a window into his process two decades later.

By Kyle Chayka

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.