Lippard, Arkbro, Lindwall

How Do I Know If My Cat Likes Me?

Cory Arcangel is an American post-conceptual artist, composer, curator, writer and educator. He works in a variety of media and is a pioneer of technology based art. We spoke to Cory about visually representing 'How Do I Know If My Cat Likes Me?' the collaboration between Hanne Lippard, Ellen Arkbro, and Hampus Lindwal, that satirises the stultifying aesthetics of alienated life, from hold music to online banking, through the deployment of sonic and lyrical repetition.

Hello. Please tell us about the brief and commission.   Cory: Hampus, Ellen, and Hanne are three of my favourite musicians. To me, this band is a supergroup. In addition to being a fan, I know all three of them personally through my involvement in the scene. More specifically, Hampus and I collaborated on the organ series, Hidden Noise, which features both Hanne and Ellen. I wasn't supplied a specific creative brief for this project, just a general vibe, but I had the pleasure of listening to an early draft of the album.

How did the music inspire the creative process?
Cory: As mentioned before, these are three of my favourite musicians, so this record feels completely and totally uncanny to me. I’m going to date myself here, but it has the same energy as The Power Station or The Travelling Wilburys. Hardcore! An absolute dream. I’m the kind of person who listens to the same music on repeat for weeks, and this album was, for real, on repeat.

The digital artwork was created exclusively for this release using Cookery, a software tool I co-authored with Henry Van Dusen and published in 2024 through Arcangel Surfware, my publishing company. Cookery is a free command-line utility for concocting and cooking deep-frying 'recipes' for images and videos, mimicking the over-processed style of deep-fried memes. Hampus was involved in the creative process from the offset, encouraging me with the challenge: “You should do this with Cookery, and don’t over think it!” It was exactly the push I needed.

What did you research when developing ideas for artwork?Cory: One thing that worked in our favour was the tight timeframe... I think I had one week, start to finish, to create the cover artwork. That kind of deadline can be helpful for me, since I have the tendency to put things off forever. I had one drafting session where I generated a couple hundred images. That might sound dramatic, but with Cookery, it's easy to algorithmically produce visuals at this scale. I sent a handful to Lippard, Arkbro, Lindwall that I thought were chill (pictured above), but this was the one that everyone responded to most positively. It just felt right. It’s really striking, contemporary and now that all is said and done, it seems inevitable. 

Please share an insight into the design development.