Arno Coenen was born in 1972 in Deventer, The Netherlands and currently lives and works in Amsterdam. He graduated from Minerva, Groningen, in 1997 and obtained an MFA in computer graphics from Media-GN, Groningen in 1998. He has had a number of solo shows in the Netherlands and his work has been shown in group exhibitions and screenings in Russia, Korea, the USA and throughout Europe. He has given workshops in various venues including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and has received commissions to create several works. Coenen uses digital animation set to electronic music to make works whose style mimics computer games. The videos show fragmented narratives in fast-moving fantasy landscapes, and are often violent and sexually explicit. Using text, vaguely autobiographical elements, and recognizable icons from consumer culture, Coenen sets up a tension between the artificial, self-contained world of the 'video game' and elements from the actual context of its production.

Leaders for news programmes, advertisements, video clips and games all make use of the same visuals to style and animate their messages. While we zap from one TV station to another, the globes, cartoon characters, logos and three-dimensional letters tumble across the screen to accentuate the information they represent. Arno Coenen has moulded his Baghdad Disco into precisely this form of smooth and shiny icons that do not seem to be bothered by gravity. It starts with giant headlines such as ‘Breaking news’, that make room for an upbeat story in which golden Uzis, the Berlin bear, dancing Lego figures in veils and arabicized electro pop play a major role. The way in which these icons – or actually the things they refer to – relate to each other in real life is strained, to say the least. But despite the announcement of an ‘explosive situation’ when one of the Lego men blows himself up, they seem to get along quite well in the chaos of the Baghdad Disco.

The Remixxx is a variation of the black box version of Time to Bone: in the kind of one-man cabins that you find in porn-film theatres, you can insert a coin and then make a choice from a film menu of which all the ingredients are aimed at one thing only: to help you masturbate. There is something for everyone: Ass and Titties, Make Love Not War (with an Arab taking a Jew from behind), SM cellars, Japanese bondage, etc. For single-channel display, Coenen made a continuous performance out of a series of videos that look as if a web surfer could have found them on the internet (including 'click here' advertising banners). To the accompaniment of matching sounds and music, we see how the mouse glides over the mouse mat and then clicks. What the man in the video is obviously amazed to find 'splashes off the screen', his excitement mounting visibly.