Harry Bayley discuss Bram Ruiter and Martin Gerrits’s seldom-seen homage to Phil Solomon, Infinite Skies (2011), which was screened at the 2024 Milan Machinima Festival. The screening inspired this thoughtful and poetic critique by our occasional contributor and machinimaker, Harry Bayley.
“Here may indeed be torment, but not death.”
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Volume 2: Purgatorio
Following the tradition of experimental and avant-garde filmmaking with/in Grand Theft Auto, Bram Ruiter's Infinite Skies explores an abandoned world, one left to ruin once its masters have left.
This isn't about world-building; it's about a world imploding.
Infinite Skies feels like a natural extension of Phil Solomon’s work within Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, though Ruiter approaches the same environment with a distinct vision. The streets are the very ones Solomon once traversed, yet Ruiter reinterprets them, offering a fresh perspective. By retracing Solomon’s path, Infinite Skies seems to deliberately evoke a return to those uncanny, purgatorial islands Solomon once explored.
The deja vu triggers cognitive dissonance, because the San Andreas of Infinite Skies contrasts sharply with its portrayal in Solomon's work. While Solomon presents the virtual world as controlled, isolated, empty, and almost painterly in its aesthetic, Infinite Skies renders San Andreas as violent, cluttered, and chaotic.
Re-watching Last Days in a Lonely Place and Rehearsals for Retirement there is a cyclical feel to the world a constant unbecoming and return, Infinite Skies stops that cycle seeming to ask what has happened to these virtual worlds now that we have left. There isn't a sense of return or unbecoming here but one of the infinite void, a constant unfolding heading deeper, deeper.
Infinite Skies is uniquely eerily, the way the camera floats through the barren landscape confronting us with occult images from deep within the game's code. The pixelated alchemy employed by Ruiter presses up against the limits of the game's code journeying up to and past the point of no return.
The game seems to be unraveling, dissolving into a maze of streets and mist. Tormented by NPC specters, the landscape is relentlessly battered by shifting weather, with thick fog and rain smothering the pixelated plains. A baseball player stands silhouetted in the moonlight, motionless, as another figure bleeds out on the pavement, while a revenant hovers above a car welded into the brick walls.
Something is definitely amiss here, and there is no way back.
Ultilising an in game mod which allows for rapid switching of weather cycles Ruiter creates disorienting dense landscape. The effect is a tool for brushing away the layers on the surface of the 32-bit plain. This act of subtraction revealing the torment beneath. Infinite Skies feels as though we have broken through the games inner barrier into whats hiding in the back room.
Venturing deep into the gamespace, being confronted with uncanny representations of our world, of the games world, a space harbourign a brooding dread just under the surface. The virtual world seems to be reacting to something human, listening to our resonance, creating some kind of new flesh beneath what we see - formulating dimensions of purgatory filled with ghosts from the player's past.
The world is grieving.
But how does a game grieve?
Self-presence refers to the degree to which an individual feels immersed in a media environment, engaging with it as though they are a part of it. The player character becomes an extension of oneself, merging real and virtual experiences into a unified perception.
But how does a virtual environment respond to self-presence?
What traces do we leave behind, do our trails get absorbed into the game, or expelled from the wound we cleave on our journeys through?
As we push against the boundaries of what is possible within the game and phase into the digital world, does the gamespace start to push back?
Infinite Skies explores this, what if the game can respond to our interaction with it and how we project ourselves into its world, how would a game react to how we feel.
Harry Bayley
Harry Bayley recently wrote about Aaron Berry's The Fourth Era. He recently screened Ruiter's works in London.
Work cited
Infinite Skies
Digital video, color, sound, 6' 29", 2011, The Netherlands
Bram Ruiter is an experimental filmmaker based in Zwolle, the Netherlands, who creates collage-like cinematic morphologies that examine themes of creation, contradictions, labor, and the unfinished or incomplete. Fascinated by marginal objects and obsolescent procedures, his work incorporates non-traditional materials and broken aesthetics. Ruiter’s films have screened internationally at festivals including the Viennale, Karlovy Vary, Pesaro Film Fest, Fantastic Fest Austin, A.Maze Berlin, and the Netherlands Film Festival. Ruiter also teaches filmmaking at ArtEZ University of the Arts, both at graduate and undergraduate level. His groundbreaking machinima Perpetual Spawning was awarded the Critics’ Choice Award at the 2019 Milan Machinima Festival and his remastered version of Endless Sea was featured in S04 of VRAL.
Read more about Infinite Skies
Read a recent interview with Bram Ruiter
Watch an excerpt from Endless Sea (2015)
Watch Perpetual Spawning (2018)
