Overview

Los Santos Plays Itself begins with a simple claim: the most obsessively filmed city in contemporary art may be a fake Los Angeles built by Rockstar Games. Taking its cue from Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself, the book asks what happens when video art and post-photographic practices run on a commercial game engine. If Andersen traced how cinema framed a city, this study follows how simulation generates its own urban logic. Across more than seventy works made between 2013 and 2025, the book tracks artists who treat Grand Theft Auto V as software rather than a narrative. Their work exposes Los Santos as executable code: an apparatus in which ideology is encoded into traffic models, weather systems, and police routines. Machinima becomes a post-cinematic practice that scripts resistance into this procedural logic through ambient observation, modding, and infrastructural critique.

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Matteo Bittanti is a media theorist, curator, writer, and artist whose work centres on video games and contemporary art. He directs the Milan Machinima Festival and curates the online platform VRAL. As a scholar, he has published widely on games, game-based art, and visual culture. He is associate professor of media studies at IULM University, dividing his time between Los Angeles and Milan. Jordy Veenstra is a video editor, experimental filmmaker, machinima artist, and front-end developer based in Amsterdam. His work links video games and narrative through machinima, guided by a self-devised 'practice of distortion': applying cinematic conventions such as 24 fps, widescreen ratios, motion blur, grain, colour grading to treat game footage as cinema. Altering the perceptual grammar of in-game image and sound, he unsettles assumptions about medium specificity.

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