EVENT: PATRICK LEMIEUX (JANUARY 30—FEBRUARY 12 2026)
Everything but the Clouds
single-channel digital video essay, color, sound, 19’ 44”, 2017, United States.
created by Patrick LeMieux
January 30–February 12 2026
Everything but the Clouds is a video essay that forensically examines Cory Arcangel’s canonical work Super Mario Clouds (2002), the cartridge modification the artist has described as “an old Mario Brothers cartridge which I modified to erase everything but the clouds.” Taking Arcangel’s tutorial and source code as operational instructions, LeMieux reconstructs the workflow from ROM images, hardware documentation, and a step-by-step replay of the published procedure. Executed as written, the method yields not Super Mario Clouds but Coin Heaven (2013), a different hack isolating Sprite 0, an infrastructural sprite depicted as a coin whose hit flag enables the NES to synchronize horizontal scrolling in Super Mario Bros. Rather than a simple act of erasure, Super Mario Clouds appears as a carefully rebuilt homebrew program that recreates Mario’s drifting clouds on a custom ROM image shaped by the constraints of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Everything but the Clouds operates as both art history and platform forensics, reframing Super Mario Clouds as materially grounded cartridge practice rooted in the collaborative ROM-hacking methods of the BEIGE Programming Ensemble. The video situates game-based art within the aftermarket communities of speedrunners, ROM hackers, and hardware reproducers who treat consoles as open platforms for critical making. By taking Arcangel’s “erase everything but the clouds” narrative literally, LeMieux turns art-historical critique into experimental practice, foregrounding the economic and technical infrastructures that the fantasy of an autonomous cloudscape tends to obscure.
Patrick LeMieux is an artist, media scholar, and game designer whose work combines media archaeology, critical code studies, and experimental hardware practice. He investigates videogame platforms as sites of historical, economic, and computational struggle, often through forensic reconstruction, ROM hacking, and forms of play. His projects translate platform-specific operations – speedrunning, tool-assisted runs, cartridge modification – into installations, videos, and performances that make the labour, infrastructure, and temporality underpinning digital culture visible. LeMieux is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Digital Media at the University of California, Davis, where he co-directs the Alt Ctrl Lab and is a member of ModLab. He teaches courses in game studies, media art histories, and critical game-making. He holds a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences from Duke University (2015), an M.F.A. in Digital Media Art from the University of Florida (2010), and a B.E.D. in Visualization Science from Texas A&M University (2007). His dissertation, Aftermarket: A Game Design Philosophy, traces experimental communities of speedrunners, ROM hackers, and hardware reproducers who transform commercial videogames from protected products into open platforms. With Stephanie Boluk, LeMieux co-authored Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), a widely cited contribution to game studies that argues metagames are “where and when games happen," across hardware, communities, strategies, and stories. Their essays appear in journals such as Critical Inquiry, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Electronic Book Review, and Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, addressing topics from Oulipian game poetics and anamorphic subjectivity to seriality, speedrunning, and the nonhuman play of networked consoles. LeMieux’s artworks have been exhibited at institutions including the Centre Pompidou and Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (DC), Centro Cultural General San Martín (Bueno Aires), Etopia Centre for Arts & Technology (Zaragoza), 4th Independent Animation Biennale (Shenzhen), Babycastles (New York), and in festivals and exhibitions associated with SIGGRAPH, alt.ctrl.GDC, IndieCade, Now Play This, Game On, Out of Index, and Playtopia. Solo exhibitions include Platform Games (Babycastles, 2015), tilt/SHIFT (Cannon Gallery of Art, University of Western Oregon, 2014), and Art Games (J. Wayne Reitz Union, University of Florida, 2009). His installations and videos –including Brothers (2013), Coin Heaven (2013), 4:57 (2013), How to Lose “Super Mario Bros.” (2013), Everything but the Clouds (2017), and The Octopad (2018) –reverse engineer both games and game-based artworks to expose the technical, economic, and ideological narratives that usually remain behind the screen.