VRAL is currently showing Bram Ruiter’s hallucinatory machinima Endless Sea. To provide further contextualization about his 2015 visionary work, we are discussing influences and intentions.
Through dissident appropriation of blockbuster gaming architecture, Dutch filmmaker Bram Ruiter’s hallucinatory 2015 machinima Endless Sea investigates the psychological turbulence latent within video games. Leveraging modifications enabling atmospheric manipulation, the work’s oneiric flow of disembodied mobility seems to infinitely drift through a vividly glitched coastal metropolis stuck in permanent sunset. Yet an inescapable, ominous sense of surveillance, pursuit and confinement pervades. By exposing the invisible boundaries encoded within commercial gaming’s promised freedoms, Ruiter’s haunted odyssey crystallizes the felt experience of liberation yielding to estrangement according to capital’s logic. Formally and philosophically, Endless Sea continues Ruiter’s fascination with creating “collage-like morphologies” from mainstream media debris.
Building upon the cut-up techniques of avant-garde figures like Stan Brakhage, this 6-minute experimental non-narrative excavates aberrant beauty from the perceptual gaps within Rockstar Games’ smoothly rendered open world. Yet unlike predecessors like Brakhage himself working directly with celluloid, Ruiter’s digital practice intersects with video artist traditions like Phil Solomon’s glitch remixes of iconic films and video games. This generative interbreeding of experimental film grammar with new media source material in turn profoundly impacts Ruiter’s creative process. Generated by appropriating and exploiting Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’s expanded weather simulation capacities, the seductive stream of bleeding hues, roiling clouds and refracted neon constructs an oneiric texture devoid of…
Matteo Bittanti
Works cited
Bram Ruiter, Endless Sea, digital video, color, sound, 6’ 59”, 2015 (2023), The Netherlands, made with Grand Theft Auto San Andreas (Rockstar Games, 2004).
Endless Sea is officially distributed by Collective Jeune Cinema.
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