Philip Solomon

MMF MMXXIV: BRAM RUITER

We are delighted to showcase the remastered, previously unreleased Infinite Skies by Bram Ruiter at the upcoming Milan Machinima Festival.

Infinite Skies, a machinima created by Bram Ruiter and Martin Gerrits during their film school years, explores themes of grief and purgatory. Crafted in the attic of Gerrits’s parents’ home in 2011, this project represents an early, bold foray into complex subjects by the creators, then just 22 years old. Initially viewed by Ruiter as overly edgy, he has since come to recognize its nuanced depth upon revisitation. Echoing the thematic and aesthetic qualities of Ruiter’s later work, Endless Sea, this predecessor inadvertently suggested a trilogy that remained incomplete with the unrealized Unending Earth. This video work marks an early milestone in Ruiter's journey into digital storytelling, setting its narrative against the expansive, generative landscapes of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and drawing inspiration from Philip Solomon’s game video art. Infinite Skies encapsulates a period of raw experimentation and unbridled creativity in Ruiter’s career. Revisited and remastered in 2024, Ruiter’s early work is now being presented for the first time, showcasing his evolving appreciation for the intricate exploration of complex themes.

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 the 7th edition of the Milan Machinima Festival

EVENT: FROM EXPANDED CINEMA TO MACHINIMA (FEBRUARY 3 2024, MILAN)

MEMORIES OF THE SCREEN #3

FROM EXPANDED CINEMA TO MACHINIMA

Saturday February 3 2024, 09:30 - 13:30 FREE ENTRY

Accademia di Belle Arti, Brera

Sede di San Carpoforo, Via Formentini 12, Milan, Italy

Curated by Simonetta Fadda e Matteo Bittanti

Special Guest: GianFilippo Pedote: Artavazd Pelešjan and Godfrey Reggio’s special affinities

In the latest acclaimed lecture series organized by artist Dimitri Kozaris, Simonetta Fadda and Matteo Bittanti unravel the interwoven lineages from analog video art provocateurs to today’s game-based machinima practitioners. As digital media intensify our reliance on simulated realities, artists like the late Phil Solomon and Harun Farocki strategically repurposed gaming assets to unveil the affective and ideological functions of these persuasive worlds. Contemporary figures like Dutch filmmaker Bram Ruiter advance this tradition of appropriation-as-critique, harnessing the medium’s own tools to reveal otherwise hidden currents of awe and unease within emergent virtual topographies.

Yet as Bittanti’s historical contextualization underscores, contemporary artists build directly upon tactics predating the digital revolution — from the Situationists’ mischievous image hijacking to Peggy Ahwesh’s decontextualization of gaming imagery. While machinima constitutes a 21st century iteration, the deeper creative impulse persists: to remake perception by tearing open and radically recombining the fabric of the present.

This drive resonates with earlier aspirations like Gene Youngblood’s influential Expanded Cinema concept in the radical 1970s, which called for imploding and transcending the standard frame itself. From celluloid and analog signals to CGI, the desire endures to expose and transform the unseen dimensions, glitches, and bugs lurking within everyday media architectures. By spotlighting today’s vanguard remixers through their seminal precursors across eras, Fadda and Bittanti’s shared inquiry reveals the drive of the avant-garde tradition pulsating within creative digital disruptions past, present and future.

ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT BRAM RUITER’S ENDLESS SEA

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…

(continues)

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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ARTICLE: HAUNTOLOGICAL OBSESSIONS: ON BRAM RUITER’S PERPETUAL SPAWNING

Bram Ruiter, Perpetual Spawning, digital video, color, sound, 5' 41", The Netherlands, Sound design and mix by Tom ‘Silkersoft’ Schley, made with Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar Games, 2013)

“Shot in Grand Theft Auto IV, Perpetual Spawning is an hallucinogenic, delirious take on repetition and reiteration. An obsessive hauntological quality pervades this eerie montage of glitches, while Tom ‘Silkersoft’ Schley’s ominous beats lead the viewer in a downward spiral into modern catacombs”. 

As the 2019 Critics’ Choice Award from the Milan Machinima Festival suggests, Ruiter’s film lingers with viewers through its hypnotic sense of unease.

As the Dutch filmmaker explained in a recent interview, Perpetual Spawning emerged organically from his ongoing fascination with Philip Solomon. Specifically, Ruiter was intrigued by how the late American avant-garde filmmaker utilized Grand Theft Auto’s open game architecture to explore the empty yet visually vibrant textures of violence within. Inspired by Solomon’s experimental approach, Ruiter began his own boundary-pushing interventions using available mods to alter GTA IV’s environment and camera positioning. Detaching the first-person camera view to float freely, Ruiter entered one of Liberty City’s subway stations and discovered the game glitching in compelling, unexpected ways. As random non-player character models began perpetually spawning in and out of frame, Ruiter leaned into the surreal effect and structured his footage around the rhythmic arrival of subway trains.

Through this appropriative process aligned with avant-garde figures like Stan Brakhage and the aforementioned Solomon, Ruiter’s machinima interrogation joins a lineage of experimental works utilizing emerging technologies to expose and reshape restrictive media formats. Perpetual Spawning was constructed through Ruiter’s distinctive intuitive approach during a period of confinement and constraint. First introduced in 2018 while temporarily living with parents due to financial limitations, the machinima parallels thematic sensations of entrapment and liminal stasis with its formally inventive passages through a glitched, destabilized gamespace. Though leveraging GTA IV rather than San Andreas – the setting for Ruiter’s 2015 work Endless Sea –, both poetic non-narrative pieces emerge from the artist’s urge to discover beauty and cathartic release through “screwing around” with commercial game assets in abnormal ways.

So, what does Ruiter’s tinkering achieve?

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Matteo Bittanti

Works cited 

Bram Ruiter, Perpetual Spawning, digital video, color, sound, 5’ 41”, The Netherlands, Sound design and mix by Tom “Silkersoft” Schley, made with Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar Games, 2013)

Bram Ruiter, Endless Sea, digital video, color, sound, 6’ 59”, 2015 (2023), The Netherlands, made with Grand Theft Auto San Andreas (Rockstar Games, 2004)

Perpetual Spawning is officially distributed by Collectif Jeune Cinema

This content is exclusive to Patreon subscribers. To gain full access, consider joining our vibrant community.