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?
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
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