SITUATION #129: Alan Butler, Sturtevant/a_m_f_skidrow_01 Finite Infinite, 2018
part of Fotomuseum Winterthur SITUATIONS programme.
In Sturtevant/a_m_f_skidrow_01 Finite Infinite, a short video loop portraying a non-player character (NPC) from a computer game is projected on a rotating beamer in the installation space. The installation builds on Butler’s previous work, Down and Out in Los Santos. There, the artist embarked on a journey through the social landscape of the video game Grand Theft Auto V to document the lives of homeless NPCs in the virtual city of Los Santos. One of the characters he encountered is at the centrepiece of his new work: a homeless NPC that bears a striking resemblance to conceptual artist Sturtevant. The character is transformed into a hybrid, computational entity, half human-looking, yet resembling a dog running endlessly in circles. By directing our gaze to the characters that inhabit the uncanny borders of non/human, the artist challenges the viewer to rethink anthropomorphic representation and consider these digital entities and bots as autonomous creatures that do not subjugate to a human hierarchy.
Sturtevant/a_m_f_skidrow_01 Finite Infinite is accompanied by the online video essay Mondo Cane.
Down and Out in Los Santos is series of photographs that are created by exploiting a smartphone camera feature within the video game Grand Theft Auto V. Players of GTAV can put away the guns and knives, and instead take photos within the game environment. This operates in basically the same way as ‘real’ cameras do. I walk around a three-dimensional space, find a subject, point the camera, compose the shot, focus, and click the shutter. I have taken a photograph.
Adopting a photojournalistic approach, the series aims to engage in a sort of social-realism for the software-age, documenting poverty and the lives of the homeless within video game environment’s socio-economic hegemony. Through performative engagement with the uncanny simulations of society’s most vulnerable, Down and Out in Los Santos aims to unearth the viewer’s empathy and humanity through manipulative photographic tropes.
Embarking on daily photographic expeditions within this video game, I have already spent over a year capturing these homeless people, their surroundings, the infrastructure, and hopefully the symptoms and causes of their states of being. The initial result is thousands of quasi-photographic images, which depict moments of real intimacy between myself and these virtual people. There are a number of ways that this is achieved – such as waiting for eye-contact with the simulant, or using depth of field to draw focus to objects, poses, limbs and intimate moments between groups of people. These individuals do not provide the game with any functionality per se, as they never intersect with the narrative. Instead they exist as why I think of as an ‘ambient human presence’. I am not proud to say that they exist in a similar place of reality to the homeless people who sit on the doorsteps of my studio every day in Dublin’s city centre.
While the inhabitants of Los Santos possess only a superficial amount of artificial intelligence, it is possible to have real emotional experiences in their presence. This might sound sad and geeky, but it is true. The characters are aware of my presence as I photograph them, some ignore me, other times I am attacked and must defend myself. They chatter to each other, they share alcohol and cigarettes, they ask for money to buy drugs. Programmed to self-identify, they congregate with those in similar social situations to themselves.
Once I have taken the photographs, the images are then uploaded to a social network called the ‘Rockstar Social Club’. The feature called ‘Snapmatic’ is itself is a simulacra of modern photo-sharing apps, such as Instagram. A technical imposition of corporate pragmatism means the images are downsized and compressed, and their journey through these networks is scarred onto the pixelated, low-resolution corrupted surface of these digital photos.
This website is where the project will be initially rolled out, with software automatically posting images every day until some point in 2018. I have already posted hundreds of these images online on various networks. On Instagram, the project takes an interesting turn. Through the use of hashtags, I have been attempting to allow these images penetrate traditional photographic and photojournalism networks. The unexpected result here is that dozens of bots have been ‘liking’ these images. The bots in question have been installed by particular Instagram users to automatically ‘like’ every single post on particular hashtags. I have been calling these the “Sycophant Bots”, since the exist only to flatter users, with the hope that people like me will ‘follow’ their host-account. Perhaps it is poetic, but entirely appropriate that software is the first audience of these empathetic photographs of software people.
Vladimir Rizov: Virtual Photography, Immersion, and Boundaries in Grand Theft Auto V.
Photography is a visual practice that deals with the production of images. Images, be it digital or analogue, moving or still, are consistently framed in a particular material artefact. Furthermore, most perspectives tend to see the image as a singular, material final product that is deeply rooted in a teleological framework. However, such perspectives clearly omit the richness of the concept image, as this conference rightly raises the issues of materiality, multimodality, and mediality. In order to demonstrate the inherent multisensory aspect of an image, as well as its rootedness in a practice that is not necessarily teleological, I will explore instances of photographs taken in-game by Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V) players. The element of virtuality in the game will reveal several aspects of the image. First, the disembodied element of virtuality poses an interesting relationship between image, medium, and the body (Hansen, 2004). This relates heavily to issues of embodiment and agency, where the two practices of photography and gaming meet. While gaming is widely seen to be concerned with immersion, photography can be conceptualised as a practice of seeing. Second, because images exist dependent on a medium, the contrast between the moving images of the virtual game world of GTA V and the still photographs created will provide opportunity for reflection on the concept of image in its multiple forms. As Vivian Sobchack writes ‘electronic presence has neither a point of view nor a visual situation, such as we experience, respectively, with the photograph and the cinema’ (2000: 151). However, what happens when the third person experience of GTA V coincides with a POV use of a virtual camera? As Galloway points out, shooter games already have expanded the ‘definitional bounds of the subjective shot’ (2006: 63), but the POV use of a virtual camera seems to not only be expanding the experience of the virtual world, but simultaneously questioning it; both allowing for further immersion and potential detachment from the in-game world. This is particularly interesting, since games are widely considered ‘an active medium’ (Galloway, 2006: 83) that involves a player’s physical input and multisensory experience. However, while Galloway claims that ‘the primary phenomenological reality of games is that of action (rather than looking, as it is with cinema in what Jameson described as “rapt, mindless fascination”)’ (2006: 83), the case of virtual photography in-game problematizes this by converging action and seeing into a singular experience.
Grand Theft Auto has incorporated an in-game camera in its franchise since 2002, growingly giving importance and expanding the capabilities of photography in the gameplay and as a free photo tool independent from the game missions. Camera simulation in GTA is always a first person view, with the frame of the camera viewfinder. The player has the ability to zoom, but no other control (like focus, aperture…) is available. Alternative to the camera, there is also a smartphone with a camera app, in more recent GTA editions (GTA IV and V).
[…] The device was also available in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, albeit with more functionality, allowing Carl to use it freely. It can be used in San Fierro to collect snapshots, which is required to achieve 100% completion. The camera has a capacity of 36 pictures per film, and pictures taken can be saved. If the player recruits a gang member, the player can give the camera to him by walking up to him and pulling the left trigger. After that, the game is viewed through the perspective of the gang member and pictures of CJ can be taken. The player can also aim the camera at a girlfriend and CJ will say something related to photo-shooting and she will wave. If you aim the camera at a gang member, CJ will say something like he says to his girlfriend, but the gang member will not respond or wave unless the player has recruited him.
[…] [In Grand Theft Auto IV] The camera is used in certain missions where a picture is required. Outside of missions, snapshots can be taken, but there is no way of saving them.
[…]In Grand Theft Auto V, the camera is replaced by the Snapmatic app on smartphones. Snapmatic has the same function as regular cameras, but allows users to take selfies or use filters. In the mission Paparazzo, Franklin follows Miranda Cowan’sLimo so Beverly Felton can take pictures of the actress consuming drugs. Subsequent Paparazzo missions also feature the use of cameras. In the mission Casing the Jewel Store, Lester givesMichael a pair of glasses fitted with a camera, to study Vangelico’s vents and security systems, which can’t be used outside of missions.
Grand Theft Auto Vice City was the first GTA to feature a camera mode in its gameplay. In one mission the player had to take incriminating pictures of a politician.
In one mission in GTA IV called “Photo Shoot”, the player has to take pictures of gang members and send it to another character, to individuate the target for an assassination. The photo is taken with the character in-game camera phone, which allows zooming.
GTA V – “Paparazzo photo missions”
In GTA V, all of the three main character has a smartphone with camera capability, and the player has the ability to take pictures freely and indipendently from missions and gameplay objectives. Photography however is also integrated in missions related to the “Strangers and Freaks” side storyline. Here the player works with a Paparazzi to get pictures of specific targets.
A selection of videogames that attempt to incorporate photography (or better “photographing”) as game mechanics to a certain degree.
Polaroid Pete (Gekisha Boy Gekibo)
Gekibo: Gekisha Boy – screenshot of the 1992 PC game version
Gekibo: Gekisha Boy – screenshot from the 1992 PC game version
In this PC game from 1992 (ported to PS2 in 2002, and with a a sequel titled Gekisha Boy 2 released for PS2 in 2001), photography plays a big role in both story and game mechanics. This makingGekisha Boy one of the earliest examples of videogames to incorporate a camera and the act of taking pictures as core game mechanic. In each level the main character has to take snapshots of events happening around him, with points being assigned according to the player’s ability to catch the “decisive moment”.
Fatal Frame
In this series, the game takes inspiration from the Victorian born art of ‘Spirit Photography’. It lets the player capture images of spirits through a Camera Obscura, while exploring abandoned ruins and fend off hostile ghosts.
Dead Rising
the main character of Dead Rising is a photo journalist, Frank West, who has to survive a zombie-infested environment while documenting the events with his camera. Shots taken with the in-game camera are evaluated (genre of the photos is analysed, e.g. brutality, drama, …) and rewarded through a point system.
Spiderman 3
Spiderman 3 lets you play as Peter Parker, and in some missions you are required to get pictures for the Daily Bugle. A basic camera interface allows you to zoom and frame an image before taking the shot. Pictures are given points (photo score).
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
in an easter egg within Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, the player is transported to a white environment where it is possible to take pictures of the female character, posing as if in some sort of weird erotic photo shoot.
Grand Theft Auto V
in GTA V, there are a number of missions where you work with/for a paparazzi photographer and you have to take pictures with a DSLR or with your in-game smartphone camera.
Camera Sim 3D
Camera Sim 3D is a DSLR simulator, developed with the purpose of teaching the basics of photography and how to operate a DSLR camera. It is still in production at the time of writing, but a live demo is available online.
the original article included “Life Is Strange” as one of the games about photography, but it was not featured in our list because the mechanics for taking a picture in the game offer very little control or similarity with the act of photographing (no possibility of framing, zooming, focusing).
An article by Justin Page on Laughing Squid from January 2014 says some players have been playing GTA V Online in passive mode as war photoreporters, documenting street crime.
“ILLSNAPMATIX is a celebration of the people, places and things illuminated by the virtual light of Grand Theft Auto” created and curated by Karl Smith.
Modern games now are so beautiful. The lighting and staging really does lend itself to a culture of capturing, sharing and celebrating those images. It’s fun to see that become more interpretive; telling a story or conveying and emotion or sense of place, rather than just “look at this pretty screen grab” (but I’m not knocking that as it’s often an art form in its own right).
A documentary entirely shot with the in-game visuals of Grand Theft Auto V and narrated and edited in the traditional style of popular nature documentaries by YouTube user 8-Bit-Bastard. It’s interesting to note that although it appears to be intended as a parody, the video has received many comments complaining about the inaccurate details of the narration, forcing the YouTube user to comment about the issue:
Hi guys! Some people have been saying it’s not totally accurate – of course it isn’t. We’re not professional wildlife researchers, we’re idiots who play computer games. Enjoy!
The hyper realistic aspect of the in-game sea world and the detailed editing and voice-over create a totally believable documentary piece, challenging traditional notions of representation and simulation.
this video work by artist Fernando Pereira Gomes is a somewhat hypnotic portrait of a Grand Theft Auto V character under different lighting conditions over the course of an almost entire ‘game-day’ (a full day in GTA V takes about 48 minutes).
in-game photography 