Rhythm Zero Los Santos
digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 112’ , 2019, Germany
created by Jonas Blume
What happens when an artist surrenders all agency in a game space designed for violence? In Rhythm Zero Los Santos (2019), Jonas Blume stages a durational performance inside Grand Theft Auto Online, transforming the volatile, multiplayer landscape of San Andreas into a theatre of procedural harm. The work draws on Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 (1974), in which the artist remained passive as gallery visitors were invited to use seventy-two objects on her body, including a loaded gun. It also echoes Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964), where vulnerability was staged through stillness and surrender. In both cases, the artist ceded control to the audience. In Blume’s version, bodily vulnerability is displaced onto a digital avatar, and the ethical stakes shift accordingly: the spectators are anonymous, the weapons are virtual, but the aggression remains disturbingly real. Across 112 uninterrupted minutes, Blume’s avatar — nearly nude, tattooed, inert — stands passively in various locales of Los Santos. Other players, unaware they are participants in an artwork, encounter him and react. Some attack, some posture, some ignore.
Jonas Blume is a multimedia artist working across video, sculpture, and immersive installation. His work interrogates how digital systems shape identity, agency, and perception. He holds a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MA in Visual and Media Anthropology from Freie Universität Berlin. His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Centre Pompidou, Museum für Gestaltung, and NRW-Forum. He currently lives and works between Berlin and Marseille.
05/23/2025
EVENT: OLEKSANDR HOISAN (MAY 23—JUNE 5 2025, ONLINE)
The Analogy of Space
digital video, color, sound, 12’, 2022, Ukraine
created by Oleksandr Hoisan
May 23-June 5 2025
The Analogy of Space (2022) is a 12-minute machinima made with/in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Rockstar Games, 2004), utilizing the CamHunt plugin to enable articulate, fluid cinematography more reminiscent of steadicam or dolly work than in-game animations. Originating as a student project at the Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts, in Ukraine, this work marks Oleksandr Hoisan’s inaugural foray into machinima, positioning itself at the intersection of procedural aesthetics and ethnographic drift. Composed as a non-linear sequence of ambient vignettes, the film methodically tracks the repetitive, robotic behaviors of NPCs across the algorithmically generated topographies of San Fierro, Los Santos, Las Venturas, and the interstitial rural zones of San Andreas. It forgoes voiceover, soundtrack, or narrative causality, instead operating within the sonic ecology of the gameworld itself, a compositional strategy that reframes the sandbox environment as a site of ambient documentary practice. The outcome can be described as ambient phenomenology: a durational encounter with systemic inertia, where violence, routine, and glitch are not dramatic events but structural conditions. Through protracted tracking shots and continual camera motion – an approach the filmmaker calls in-game space animadoc –The Analogy of Space accentuates the uncanny banality of simulated life, which unfolds not through intention, but through looped code and ambient indifference. The machinima resists closure; its motion is not teleological but contingent, offering temporary kinesthetic relief from street-level opacity. In Hoisan’s hands, the camera becomes both observer and drifter, traversing a dynamic world that resists intelligibility.
Oleksandr Hoisan is a Ukrainian filmmaker and visual artist whose work engages with digital environments, contemporary cinema, and machinima. He holds both a bachelor’s (2022) and master’s degree (2024) in film and television directing from the Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts. His early student films have been selected for over 100 national and international film festivals, including Oberhausen, FIDMarseille, Sarajevo Film Festival, BRNO16, and Molodist, earning multiple awards. A member of Contemporary Ukrainian Cinema, the Ukrainian Guild of Directors, and the National Filmmakers Association of Ukraine, Hoisan is also the founder and program director of the Ivano-Frankivsk International Short Film Festival 4:3. His recent work explores non-narrative forms, virtual cities, and the documentary potential of video games.
04/01/2025
EVENT: 2GIRLS1COMP’S I AM IN YOUR GAME (APRIL 2 2025, LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA)
2girls1comp | Workshop | 2 Apr 2025 16.30–19:00
𝘐 𝘈𝘔 𝘐𝘕 𝘠𝘖𝘜𝘙 𝘎𝘈𝘔𝘌 – 𝘙𝘦𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘎𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘚𝘱𝘢𝘤𝘦𝘴 𝘛𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘛𝘦𝘹𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘙𝘦𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana Department of Video, Animation and New Media
Tobačna 5; 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
Textures in video games are what creates the visual identity of virtual environments, providing more than mere decoration for 3D models. They represent and shape the spaces players inhabit, embedding social and political meanings within the game.
In this workshop, participants will learn how to modify and personalize the game world of Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar, 2013) by altering its visual textures. We will explore techniques for manipulating existing textures and incorporating personal images into the virtual landscape. Through these interventions, participants will challenge and reinterpret the narratives and aesthetics defined by the original developers and game studios.
The workshop will introduce the emerging field of texture archeology and the networked community investigating the history of images such as cobble_stone.jpg. The event will explore issues of labour that lie behind computer games, as well as the hidden infrastructures beyond the game software.
Takeaways:
- gain an insight in modding as a practice for artistic appropriation
- gain a basic understanding of working with textures for 3D models in games
- have the chance to creatively and critically engage with video game culture by creating their own projects
Duration: 2,5h
Materials and knowledge required: Images you want to insert into the game (optional)
Laptop (ideally with Adobe Photoshop installed)
Free of charge
2girls1comp is a modding duo founded in 2023 by Italian artist and curator Marco De Mutiis and Swiss artist Alexandra Pfammatter. Their work redefines the logic of video games as an act of creative counter-play, revealing the social and economic fabric in which they are immersed: from reclaiming global digital infrastructures to commenting on free labor within the capitalist ideologies of the gaming industry, to showcasing the way play can influence its subjects through its mechanics. Their projects are distributed within the gaming and modding community, as well as cultural and artistic contexts.
03/06/2025
EVENT: MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL MMXXV (MARCH 17-23 2025, LOS ANGELES AND ONLINE)
MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL MMXXV
REBOOT/RESTART/RESET
MARCH 17—23 2025
Los Angeles, California and online
The Milan Machinima Festival MMXXV presents a curated selection of 31 machinima and game videos by 35 artists from 17 countries, including Belarus, Canada, China, Colombia, France, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the USA. Spanning nine programs, the festival unfolds online (March 17–23, 2025) and onsite in Los Angeles, California (March 20–21, 2025), showcasing works that challenge storytelling conventions, repurpose game engines as cinematic tools, and interrogate the aesthetics and politics of virtual worlds.
02/23/2025
EVENT: JUST PLAYIN’ AROUND (JANUARY 21 - APRIL 26 2025, PORTLAND, OREGON)
Matthew Earl Williams, Twentysix Gasoline Stations In Grand Theft Auto V, 2014-24, digital prints, Each 16 x 20 inches framed, © m. earl Williams, Courtesy of the artist.
Just Playin' Around
curated by Nancy Downes-Le Guin and Theo Downes-Le GuinJanuary 21 - April 26 2025
Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art
PSU1855 SW Broadway
Portland, OR 97201
press release
Once our basic needs are met, we humans have always turned to play and art. Children learn how to navigate the world by playing. Adults depend on play to bring joy and connection to others. The United Nations recognizes play as a universal right of children, and mental health specialists increasingly recommend play for its therapeutic benefit at all ages.
Artists often talk about their work as a form of play involving materials, ideas, and imagination. Play can be part of the process of making art, but can also be its subject matter. Artists create meaning from childhood memories, toys, games, and sport, reframing the past, interpreting the present, or imagining the future. Play is also a way for artists to seek release from meaning, to resist others’ need to interpret or instrumentalize their work, as seen in absurdist art-historical movements such as Dada.
Industrialized societies often treat play as childlike or trivial, an obstacle to productivity. Our cultural institutions define which artworks and artists are worthy of attention, often presenting art in distinctly unplayful settings, equating seriousness with cultural value. This belies the ways in which playfulness, surprise, silliness, and humor in art are able to engage charged emotional, social, and political issues.
Not all art needs to be playful, but in the end, play and art may not be so different. In both, we seek freedom, release, and community. Sometimes we create and receive meaning through our games and our art, and sometimes we just want to have fun. Just Playin’ Around is a peephole into some of the many ways in which art is play, play is art, and both are in all of us.Just Playin’ Around is curated by Nancy Downes-Le Guin and Theo Downes-Le Guin. This exhibition is supported by The Ford Family Foundation, The Reser Family Foundation, the Jackson Foundation, Elements Roofing, the Richard and Helen Phillips Charitable Fund, and the JSMA Exhibition Circle.
LINK: Just Playin' Around
01/03/2025
EVENT: ONE TETHERED BIRD (JANUARY 17 - FEBRUARY 21 2025, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON STATE)
11/08/2024
EVENT: LUKE CASPAR PEARSON (NOVEMBER 8 - 21 2024, ONLINE)
Reyner Banham Loves Los Santos
digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 5’ 15”, 2016, United Kingdom
created by Luke Caspar Pearson
Reyner Banham Loves Los Santos reimagines Banham’s original exploration of Los Angeles through the virtual lens of Grand Theft Auto V. In this adaptation sui generis of a 1972 BBC documentary, Banham’s vision of a city defined by mobility over monumentality is amplified within the sprawling, simulated metropolis of Los Santos. Just as Banham embraced the freeways and fluidity of LA’s urban fabric, Los Santos takes this mobility to an extreme, where the ability to instantly commandeer any vehicle represents a new kind of urban experience, rooted in speed, freedom, and fluid motion. Luke Caspar Pearson’s machinima reflects Banham’s fascination with the paradoxes of the city – its chaotic structure and capacity for personal liberation. The narrative juxtaposes Banham’s celebration of LA’s automotive culture with the lawless nature of Los Santos, transforming Banham’s intellectual engagement with LA into a playful yet critical examination of the intersections between urbanism, architecture, and video game spaces.
Luke Caspar Pearson is a London-based architect, academic, and co-founder of the design research practice You+Pea, where he explores the intersection of video game technologies and architectural design. As an Associate Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, he founded and co-directs the new Cinematic and Videogame Architecture MArch programme, emerging from his work with the innovative Videogame Urbanism studio. His research focuses on how digital tools can engage new audiences with architectural design. Luke is the co-author of Videogame Atlas: Mapping Interactive Worlds (Thames & Hudson, 2022) and his work has been widely published in journals such as eflux Architecture, Design Studies and Architectural Research Quarterly. His design projects have been featured in exhibitions at venues like the Royal Institute of British Architects, Somerset House.
10/17/2024
RESOURCE: HARRY BAYLEY ON BRAM RUITER’S INFINITE SKIES (2011)
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)
10/11/2024
EVENT: COLL.EO (OCTOBER 11 – 24, 2024, ONLINE)
REASONABLE TOO
digital video (3840 x 1632), color, sound, 10’ 03”, 2018 (2024), United States/Italy
created by COLL.EO
October 11 - 24 2024
vral.org
The second in a series of machinima by COLL.EO examining social and racial tensions in the United States produced between 2018 and 2020, Reasonable Too depicts a fatal encounter between a young man and law enforcement, set against a stark urban backdrop. Utilizing the digital environment of Grand Theft Auto V, the piece juxtaposes the overwhelming force of authority with the vulnerability of the victim, culminating in an execution. The progression of events – from the initial pursuit to the officer’s use of force – offers a pointed critique of systemic violence and power imbalances. By presenting this narrative within the context of a video game, Reasonable Too heightens the sense of helplessness and alienation often tied to real-world tragedies, underscoring the complex relationship between virtual worlds and lived experiences.
COLL.EO (est. 2012) is the dynamic duo of Colleen Flaherty and Matteo Bittanti, whose artistic practice can best be described as a tiresome exercise in recycling other people’s ideas. Known for their breathtaking lack of innovation, COLL.EO specializes in taking the work of others, throwing on a thin veneer of irony, and calling it subversion. After spending an extended period shuttling between San Francisco and Milan, they’ve managed to carve out a niche in Los Angeles, where the air is thick with their smug displays of so-called “appropriation” and “intervention.” Like an art world cover band, they rehash the past with neither flair nor purpose, but somehow they persist.
09/13/2024
EVENT: ALAN BUTLER (SEPTEMBER 13 - 26 2024, ONLINE)
26 GASOLINE STATIONS
digital video (1920 x 1080), colour, sound, 4’ 23”, 2016, Ireland
created by Alan Butler
September 13 - 26 2024
Introduced by Matteo Bittanti
vral.org
26 GASOLINE STATIONS is a digital homage to Ed Ruscha’s iconic 1963 photobook, 26 Gasoline Stations. Ruscha’s work famously documented the mundane yet intriguing petrol stations along his route from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City. In contrast, Butler’s reinterpretation situates this journey within the virtual world of Grand Theft Auto V’s San Andreas, transforming the act of driving across America into a navigational exploration and documentation of digital spaces. Executed as both machinima and an ebook, the project captures each station from the confines of Butler’s studio in Ireland, emphasising the shift from physical to virtual mobility. This transformation not only pays tribute to Ruscha’s artistic exploration but also probes deeper into the evolving relationship between real and simulated environments, highlighting how digital media can extend and challenge traditional notions of landscape, place, and documentation in the age of video games.
Alan Butler is an artist who employs both traditional and new media to probe themes surrounding digital culture and its influence on shaping realities. His creative approach incorporates various materials and techniques from the annals of image–making, scrutinising the ideological and political implications of technologies like 3D graphics, video games, and cloud computing. His recent solo exhibitions include We are Now in the Mountains and They Are in Us at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2023); The Need To Argue In The Master’s Language at Visual Carlow, Ireland (2018); and Down and Out in Los Santos at the Malmö Fotobiennal, Sweden (2017). He has also participated in notable group shows such as Open World: Video Games and Contemporary Art at The Akron Art Museum (2019) and Digital Citizen: The Precarious Subject at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, UK (2019). A key moment in his career was representing Ireland at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021 as part of the collective ANNEX. His works are held in several collections including the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Office of Public Works, Ireland, The Arts Council of Ireland, and Trinity College Dublin.