GAMESCENES

Game Art: Joseph Delappe's Elegy: GTA USA Gun Homicides (2018)

Joseph Delappe's new project - developed in collaboration with Albert Elwin (coding) and James Wood (consultant), Elegy: GTA USA Gun Homicides, is a self-playing version of Grand Theft Auto V that - starting each midnight CST (Central Standard Time) - reenacts/recounts/represents the entire body count to date from January 1st 2018 in-game. 

 

In other words, the project visualizes real life gun-related homicides in the United States of America though the filter of a video game. (As NRA fanatics love to say, "Guns don't kill people, video games do.")

Each daily update represents - in a graphic, literal way - the body count reported by a gun violence website. The next day, the program scrapes the new data and starts again, in a perverse Groundhog Day-sort of way, while "God Bless America" - both the original version by Irving Berlin (1918) as well as Kate Smith's iteration (1938) - plays in the background. 2018 marks the 100th anniversary of the composing of this song.

 

"From the mountains

To the prairies
To the oceans
White with foam
God bless America
My home sweet home"

 

As the camera slowly recedes - a peculiar "kill cam" - all is left on the screen is trail of blood and agonizing avatars. Launched on July 4, 2018, Delappe's intention is to run Elegy 24/7 until July 4, 2019.

 

The message is clear: in the US, everyday is The Purge.

 

 

Delappe is live streaming Elegy on his Twitch channel.

There's a dash of Hugo Arcier's 11 Executions and a bit of Brent Watanabe's San Andreas Deer Cam.

 

Joseph DeLappe is Professor of Games and Tactical Media in the Division of Games and Art (School of Design and Informatics) at Abertay University in  Dundee, Scotland. He's also a bold, daring, and uncompromising American artist. 

LINK: Joseph Delappe

Event: Ian Cheng's Emissary Forks At Perfection (May 24 - November 25, Venice Italy)

Ian Cheng

Emissary Forks At Perfection

May 24 - November 25

Espace Louis Vuitton

Venezia Calle del Ridotto 1353

Opening hours: Monday to Saturday from 10 am to 8.00 pm and on Sunday from 10.30 am to 8.00 pm. Open on public holidays. Free entrance

For its third exhibition produced in the framework the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s “Hors-les-murs” program, the Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia is pleased to present American artist Ian Cheng’s Emissary Forks At Perfection. The Fondation Louis Vuitton’s “Hors-les-murs” program showcases previously unseen holdings of the Collection at the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Munich, Venice and Beijing, thus carrying out the Fondation’s intent to realize international projects and make them accessible to a broader public.

The video installation Emissary Forks At Perfection (2015-2016) is the second chapter of the Emissaries trilogy created by Cheng between 2015 and 2017. These three episodes, located in the same space but addressing different eras, trace the evolution of ensembles of beings and the way they adapt to their environment. Each features an “emissary”, a “narrative agent”, whose actions will modify the course of events. With Emissary Forks At Perfection, Cheng leads us to question the human mind’s adaptive capacities and human evolution in the face of otherness, randomness and the unpredictability of an ever-changing world.

LINK: Ian Cheng

LINK: Espace Louis Vitton

Brent Watanabe's San Andreas Community Cam (2017)

Brent Watanabe's follow up to San Andreas Streaming Deer Cam (2016) is titled San Andreas Community Cam, a live video stream from a computer running a modded version of Grand Theft Auto V, hosted on Twitch.tv. It's painful to watch (lots of crying involved) and yet uncannily compelling. It was made for post-human viewers in mind. The side comments are obviously an inherent part of the artwork and, like the activities of the AI controlled characters, are unscripted. Fascinating.

As the artist writes:

The mod follows the citizens of San Andreas, a fictional state in GTA V based on California. The citizens are programmed to control themselves and make their own decisions, with no one actually playing the game. The citizens are 'playing themselves', with all activity unscripted.  The piece is presented as a live stream on sanandreascommunitycams.com. 

LINK: Brent Watanabe