Cheatimerism
Digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 14’ 55’’, 2020, Italy
Created by Luca Miranda
By reconfiguring the spaces of Grand Theft Auto V, Cheatimerism investigates the political and economic implications of consumption and its side effects, including concrete waste, virtual surrogacy, and planned obsolescence. This machinima shows various sculptural forms made of identical vehicles, the Rapid GT, a sports car, and a waste collection truck, the Trashmaster. Capitalism, the artist seems to suggest, is the ultimate cheat mode.
Luca Miranda’s practice focuses on the relationship between reality and simulation. He is especially interested in the aesthetic potential of the avatar. In his work, Miranda critically investigates game mechanics and concepts such as immersion, identification, and interpassivity. Miranda received a B.A. in Media and Art from the University of Bologna and in 2019 received a M.A. in TV, Cinema and New Media at IULM University. In 2018, he co-founded Eremo, an artistic collective based in Milan. He is currently working on a book about walking simulators.
Matteo Bittanti: Can you describe the process behind the creation of Cheatimerism? Did you use any mods or – as the title seems to suggest – only cheat modes? If so, why?
Luca Miranda: My original goal was to investigate how video games represent the tropes of consumption and the consequences of the “free market”: I wanted to act within such an environment and then modify it. From the get go, I chose Grand Theft Auto V because this game exemplifies, despite its sandbox nature, the paradoxical relationship between simulation, representation, and consumption. First, I looked at modding for my intervention. The original plant was to “break” the game by removing all the 3D models in the scenario, leaving only the terrain and the avatar used by the player. My point reference was Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds (2002). However, rather than performing a similar gesture of subtraction, I was more interested in keeping the main avatar visible on the screen and exploring a landscape shaped by the free market: a space so saturated with goods as to become paradoxically invisible, like a map emptied of relevant signifiers. But then I temporarily paused the project, not for technical issues – there are thousands of tutorials on the web about hacking GTA V through mods and the game has one of the biggest communities of modders – but rather conceptual. Instead of removing stuff, I started thinking about adding more. I wanted to critically explore the notions of clutter and accretion rather than minimalism and elimination. It was only when I started walking in Los Santos without a clear purpose or sense of direction that an idea finally struck me: I thought about applying a cheat mode to achieve my objective. There are plenty of cheat modes in the Grand Theft Auto series that allow players to gain advantage within the game, including having complete access to all the available weapons or recovering precious life points. The cheat that interested me the most was the car spawn cheat. I was initially unaware that the same vehicle could be respawned several times: I thought that a new model would immediately replace the existing one, which would in turn disappear. Instead, cars simply piled up in the scene. At that point, I experienced an epiphany: I had found the perfect way to represent the sheer consumerist tendencies intrinsic to the game, using the most coveted item in any capitalist society, the car. By activating the cheat mode, I was able to introduce a change while keeping the system in place instead of disrupting it through modding. Let me clarify this point. Cheats and modding not only have specific genealogies, but also distinct characteristics and attributes (note 1). In fact, whereas modding operates against the system, cheats are somehow inscribed – and thus legitimate – in the system and by the system. Modding is what Byung Chul Han calls “the other negative”, a sort of bacterial infection that contrasts the immunological mechanism of the political and social bodies, while cheats are the byproduct of Han’s “performance society”. Cheat modes are mostly about augmenting fun and expanding consumption – at any cost – directly providing the player with the tools to achieve such goals. The respawn exemplifies the saturation and obsolescence of purpose. You can see a similar mechanism at play in games where cheats proliferate. For instance, by typing the word “rosebud” in The Sims 2, a player can instantly acquire an infinite amount of “money”. Such mechanism does not break or ruin the game, as you might think, but it engenders another kind of process related to the generation and circulation of capital within transactional spaces.
Matteo Bittanti: Cheatimerism is both a machinima and a game photography project. What is your relationship to post-photography and game-based digital videos? In the case of Cheatimerism, which came first?
Luca Miranda: I’m fascinated by the relationship between post-photography, the imaginary, and video games. Post-photography questions the most widely accepted assumptions about photography, how it should relate to the world, what is photographic and what is not. Obviously, a photograph is not a copy of the real but its symbolic representation, and the same applies to simulation. To photograph something is an act of exclusion that, in any case, manipulates the acquisition of the world. The prefix post- in post-photography challenges the photographic idol – in the etymological sense –, that is, the assumption that the real is the default condition. Post-photography is symptomatic of what Jean Baudrillard said about the relationship between Disneyland and the rest of the country in America (1986): the theme park is hyperreal because it is more convincing and realistic (in this specific sense) than America itself, which is a theme park masquerading as a “real” country. Video games and playful media are not distinct from our own reality, where the practices, gestures, and activities that we perform in the so called tangible world become pure entertainment. Players “take pictures” of their games for different reasons and goals, often through their avatars, using “digital” cameras within the game, as in the case of Grand Theft Auto V. Such an activity can be motivated by curiosity, fun, or amazement. But photographing game spaces could also be pursued for research purposes: in short, a game photographer could be a photographer, an artist, a professional, a scholar or a player. Or perhaps a combination of all these identities. Nowadays, more and more video games feature a variety of photographic tools. Photography in games can be both a narrative and a metanarrative device. In Sega’s Judgement (2018), a video game set in a fictional district of Tokyo, non-player characters react to the camera of the protagonist in various ways. Some are ashamed, some pose, others go on with their daily lives, ignoring the prompt. Photography has become a narrative tool in video games. There are so many interesting works from a critical point of view that illuminate the relationship between photography, video games, and mods. Consider, for example, InstaDoom created by the modder Linguica. This modification of Doom replaces the main character’s weapon with a selfie stick, so that the player can take a photograph of himself in truly terrifying places. But there are many more examples that I could mention. This topic deserves more critical attention. As far as my practice is concerned, game photography and machinima often go hand in hand and they tend to influence each other. In the case of Cheatimerism, the project was originally conceived as eminently photographic. But as I began the process, I became very interested in machinima as a documentation tool. The recording of the mise en scene, with the positioning of the vehicles, now feels a bit like the making-of featurette of a movie. It represents the incessant repetition of the following actions: moving the avatar, opening the cheat insertion strip, writing the cheat, inserting the car into the environment, and then starting over. I spent tens of hours repeating the same process in order to spawn a few thousand cars. It became almost hypnotic. All things considered, such a recursive loop is not that different from the “buy now!” routine of ecommerce platforms or the impulsive/compulsive purchase in supermarkets. In a way, I felt like I was performing something that was literally damaging my body and numbing my senses. During the making of Cheatimerism I discovered something interesting about the cars’ behavior. After several spawns, the vehicles began to intersect with each other which often caused an explosion. Such an occurrence produced a domino effect: the proximity of the vehicles often led to chain explosions. Apparently, there are many different ways and means of experiencing the pain of a performance.
Matteo Bittanti: The staggering and unrelentless production of waste is, by far, the key concern of the Twenty First century. After all, waste is the most significant outcome of capitalism. Today waste is proliferating. Not only recycling is a scam, but corporations do absolutely nothing to curb the production of plastics: if anything, Big Oil is investing more and more into this business and Coca Cola, among others, has demonstrate complete indifference to environmental concerns: in the corporate world, “greenwash” is the mantra and “sustainability” is a word devoid of any meaning. If anything, the last fifty years have demonstrated that capitalism and the environment are mutually exclusive. How are video games contributing to material destruction of the planet? And how can artists address this issue?
Luce Miranda: One of the main issues related to pollution and the proliferation of waste is not only the literal destruction of the environment, but also the accompanying ideological imprint. We are caught up in a consensual relationship between the culture of waste and the rejection of culture. A difficult issue to pinpoint is the widespread tendency to confuse civic culture with what I like to call civic fashion. What I mean is that the risk is to promote the discourse of civic behavior because it is trendy. If the issue of the day is the overwhelming amount of pets’ excrements on beaches, then you must confront the proliferation of used masks – which reminds me of Ramin Bahrani’s Plastic Bag – and after that you must address the unholy communion of shit, cigarette butts, and used masks scattered everywhere. And so on. The corporations and countries that promise to curb the production of plastic and improve the recycling of electronic waste are the same ones that are responsible for the mountains of trash depicted in Jiuliang Wang’s 2016 documentary Plastic China and the electronic waste graveyards photographed by Kai Löffelbein. This paradox reminds me of a scene in Sophie Fiennes’s Perverse Guide to Ideology (2012) in which the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek – drinking from a can of Coca Cola in the desert – declares that if you “enjoy it” when it’s warm, the drink loses all its magical potential, becoming practically indistinguishable from urine. In short, once you have experienced the hallucinatory magic effect, pollution and consumption enter our routines, charged with ideology. As I was thinking about a possible answer to your question, I was looking at my laptop which I have been using nonstop for hours. I could not but notice various plastic bottles sitting on the desk and Amazon boxes scattered on the floor. I do agree that capitalism and environmental concerns are mutually exclusive. You can reach the same conclusion just by looking at video games, and I am not referring to their narratives. These days I am investigating the survival genre, and especially those titles that have a crafting component. In many survival games, players appropriate the resources available from natural or wild contexts for their productive purposes, whether they are expropriated for survival purposes or for constructing lavish structures, like giant buildings or fully fledged palaces. The same dynamics can be found in the production and distribution processes of global corporations like Amazon. Compulsive purchasing logic and relentless waste inform many commercial video games. In some cases, we could even talk about the phenomenon of “fast (skin) fashion”. Questioning the role of games in contributing toward planetary destruction may sound excessive, but there are several issues that demand our attention. In addition to the aforementioned ideological substrates, the video game industry and eSports not only promote a specific kind of imaginary, but, as consumer industries, have a tangible impact on our ecosystem. Their footprint is huge. We are not only talking about electronic waste or waste produced by discarded entertainment products – gaming itself consumes the equivalent of five million cars per year – but also about the pollution caused by downloading software and products. Artists can play a crucial role and it is important that through their work they can engage with a space and the communities that inhabit it. Spaces can also be virtual and communities are made of consumers and gamers and not only citizens. Art, as a catalyst for change, as McLuhan said, is situated between trauma and civic sense. In other words, art must awaken users from their torpor by first traumatizing and then civilizing them. This tension can be seen in several game-based artworks, from Tekken Torture Tournament (1999-2000) by Eddo Stern and Mark Allen to indie games like Mutation (2019) by Die Gute Fabrik. The term “culture” comes from the Latin cŏlĕre, which refers to the act of cultivating, and this is precisely what artists must do: cultivate culture and foster critical thinking.
Matteo Bittanti: Through video games, players can vicariously experience the “good life”, i.e. an existence of abundance, endless consumption, and excess that is impossible for most in the so-called “real life” but is, nonetheless, presented as the ultimate goal in life. Players acquire goods otherwise inaccessible and unaffordable which they use to construct and circulate their branded identities on social media. In this sense, commercial video games recontextualize conspicuous consumption practices, bringing it into the surrogacy of the virtual: all (i.e. made of atoms and bits) cars are basically the same, but customization – in most cases, a simple “paint job” or a minor design detail – makes them appear “unique” and idiosyncratic, exclusive and elusive, thus highly desirable. Customization makes distinction and demarcation possible, even if the entire process is entirely virtual. Are video games the new opium of the people?
Luca: Whereas the flâneur was a wandering subject free of commitments, purposes, and duties, today’s wandering in video games is tantamount to keeping active as many obligations and duties as possible. Video games can normalize and incentivize specific behavioral patterns (consider, for instance the popularity of slang terms that first emerged in video game cultures) and, successful games can even introduce brand new habits, new ways of playing and being in the world. Virtual worlds like Second Life and massively multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft have been crucial for the development of virtual economies: they redefined the meaning of wealth, rewards, and the “good life”. In Second Life I can buy houses and hairstyles that in the real world I could never have. With Call of Duty: Warzone I can build an incredible arsenal of custom weapons. Thanks to Fortnite I now have a digital closet full of expensive clothes. Video games are sources of endless possibilities – the video game way of life – that make up for the shortcomings of the real world. The developers of the long-awaited Cyberpunk 2077 have reported that the level of customization of the avatar will be such that you will be even able to customize the shape of the penis, the vagina, and the color of pubic hair. The digital prostheses we interact with are also undergoing continuous recycling processes. It would not be so strange if our male avatar was discarded because it is unable to maintain an erection, as it happens to the protagonist of Shozin Fukui’s 964 Pinocchio. Your observation about the relationship between repetition and customization is entirely appropriate. It seems to me that as the possibilities for customization increase – in relation to the increase in the number of products that can be purchased – moulds and dies tend to diminish. I don’t mean this in the artisan sense of the term, as it relates to the printing press. Rather, it is connected to quintessentially capitalist phenomena such as planned obsolescence and electronic waste. There are aspects related to video game consumption that cannot be underestimated. The sheer size, and thus power, of the video game industry and the continuous influx – and reflux – of products that promote certain narratives can produce a narcotizing effect on those who consume them.
Matteo Bittanti: In Cheatimerism, we are presented with rows of Rapid GT cars and Trashmaster trucks. The former symbolizes power, speed, and that kind of vulgar aesthetics that is so prominent among the parvenus as well as the élites. The second is the inevitable consequence of conspicuous consumption: trash is what happens when the excitement of novelty wears off and when keeping up with the Joneses requires yet another upgrade. After all, technological obsolescence is embedded in most products and consumption-as-identity-building is standard within capitalist societies, thus the vicious cycle continues at an even faster speed. Such a mechanic is not only ingrained in capitalist society, but also in gaming, which can be considered a manifestation of the so-called sovrastructure. How do you see commercial video games reinforcing the dominant neoliberal ideology?
Luca Miranda: The question is not only very interesting, but also very complex, so my answer requires some preliminary clarifications. The development of the neoliberal ideology as the dominant zeitgeist of the West is rooted in industrialism, in the techniques of measuring happiness, and in the invention of leisure and the so-called “free time”. When Rudolf Clausius defined the concept of entropy in 1880, there was a widespread concern about the possibility that working in a factory was physically damaging the workers. In this sense, grinding, a term that in video games refers to performing the same kind of trivial actions over and over again, can be considered the equivalent of salaried work. Already in the first half of the Nineteenth century, the managerial class introduced the notion of the worker’s wellness and almost simultaneously, the modern consumer was born. It quickly became essential to study the actions and behavioral patterns of both workers and consumers, as William Davies argues in his book The Happiness Industry. How the Government and Big Business Sold us Well-Being (2015). Today, the same research takes place through Big Data, Data Analytics and the “smart” device we carry or wear 24/7. When I visit an online ecommerce site, my interactions, intentions, and purchase history are classified, analyzed, recorded, and sold to third parties. When I play a video game all of these data are invested within a statute that binds work and free time. Back in 2006, Celia Pearce argued that the boundaries between gaming and production, work and leisure, media consumption and media production have become increasingly blurred (note 2). Commercial video games integrate tasks and activities so that the player is never satisfied. Things such as DLC (downloadable extra content) and certain feedback/reward systems are specifically designed to expand the work ethos and its uncritical acceptance.
Matteo Bittanti: Are the piles of waste we see in our environment the highest form of art that our culture has produced? If so, are landfills our greatest museums? Does trash possess an inherent sculptural nature that can be modelled even in the digital dimension? What was the underlying logic behind the positioning of the cars in Cheatimerism?
Luca Miranda: If we look at waste as neutral objects it is undeniable that they acquire a different meaning depending on the context in which they are placed. Thus their significance changes according to their positioning and their function. In the history of art, certain types of objects express different ideas of what art is and what it can do whereas other forms are rejected, only to be rediscovered in a different age. The avant-garde paintings that were positioned very high up on the wall, almost removed from the viewer’s gaze, in bourgeois art exhibitions are comparable to the goods that do not deserve to appear in the front row of store windows. One could argue that comparing these two classes of objects is just plain wrong. I could understand such an objection. But the objects we dispose of do not ask us to be thrown away: it is our culture that asks us to throw them away and it is precisely because of cultural reasons that objects are created with the specific purpose of being thrown away. Soon it will become hard to distinguish between Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Venus of the Rags from the little girl swimming in garbage in the aforementioned documentary Plastic China (2016). The ineluctability of the object-as-waste is directly proportional to the ineluctability of our own decay. But it could not be otherwise, since the same culture that incessantly demands happiness, positivity, health and uses motivational slogans like “be yourself”, “believe in your abilities”, “you can only count on yourself” is made by people who can’t help but demand the very latest gizmo. Even the contributions of great poets become waste: I saw a quote from Beckett printed on a discarded mug in the landfill not too long ago. If art can be considered a visual and critical discourse within a specific era, then landfills are open air displays of a new kind of art. I don’t mean that any waste in landfills is a work of art: that would be naive. But if you look at landfills from a certain perspective their status is comparable to that of site-specific works or Land art. An imprint, a trace in a place that serves not only to generate a dialogue with a territory, but also to stimulate critical reflection. In the case of landfills, critical reflection is replaced by an uncritical relationship, which increases proportionally to the increase in the mass of waste we produce. In Cheatimerism I wanted to use a function of the system (the cheat) as a discursive register and two models of vehicles (Rapid GT and Trashmaster) as actors. They embody the dynamics of production – of luxury, but not only – and of product disposal: piled up in heaps, they form a national coat of arms and a funeral stele at the same time. In this sense, the figure of the car is paradigmatic: an easily replaceable, recyclable, forgettable cult object. An object of encumbrance (material, symbolic, pollutant) and mackerel (scrap object par excellence, able to be transformed into a metal cube). The phenomenon of luxury cars abandoned outside the city of Dubai, in the desert, is emblematic of consumerist excess and financial collapse. Here the most luxurious brands become artifacts that predict the apocalyptic scenarios so common in video games, movies, and other cultural artifacts.
Matteo Bittanti: The soundtrack mixes different sources: there’s audio from the game but also ad hoc content. Can you describe your process and intent?
Luca Miranda: My original intention was to use long panoramic shots accompanied by in-game sounds. I decided to keep this feature. I like the idea that the sounds generated by the vehicles are combined with the noises of everyday life simulated in the game, such as the ocean waves, the huoh-huoh-huo sound made by seagulls, NPCs’s chattering, the rustling of the wind, and so on. The cars are very noisy: they rumble, sometimes they clank, often are silent; there is a sort of implicit sociality and organicity in all of this. My fascination for the “car talk” and their nervous agitation is reminiscent of Alexander Brenton Smith’s work, which I find very inspiring. The soundtrack also features a live recording of an improvisation with two guitars played by myself and the musician and sound designer Domiziano Maselli [a member of the Eremo art collective, Ed.]. Over the years we experimented with musical improvisation, creating tons of audio samples. The intention was not to create audio tracks for specific works, but rather a library containing compositions and sounds that could be used depending on the mood required by a specific work. Therefore, the audio track used for Cheatimerism is a mood-sample that I used to evoke a certain kind of feeling in the viewer. Specifically, a sense of uncertainty and estrangement. I do not know if I succeeded. In addition, on the original track I slowed down the speed and slightly obscured the timbre. I am fascinated by the idea that a sample can be manipulated until it becomes something completely different, as if it respawned under a new guise.
Matteo Bittanti: What remains unrealized? Is there anything you’d like to add?
Luca Miranda: Well, there's always something to add, even though I feel I’ve been way too verbose. One aspect that is definitely worth investigating is the relationship between videogame culture and the culture of rejection (in the sense discussed above), in the aesthetic, narrative, social, and political dimensions. I am also interested in exploring the avatar’s gaze. Intriguing works in this sense have been made by Brent Watanabe and Joseph DeLappe, respectively with San Andreas Deer Cam (2015-2016) and Elegy: GTA USA Gun Homicides (2018). What would happen if the act of seeing were left to the virtual actors themselves and human beings were ignored? In other words, what does an avatar really see?
Notes
1 Cheating is historically linked to the internal processes of the gaming industry. See for example the simplified gameplay mode in Gradius (1985) for those players who found it too hard which was inserted by the developers themselves. Mods, on the other hand, are connected to a different genealogy: art and hacking. Consider for instance the demoscene. That is also true when modding became a practice supported by the video game industry, with Doom (1993).
2 See Celia Pearce, Productive play: Game culture From the bottom up, in “Games and Culture”, vol. 1, n. 1, 2006, pp. 17–24.
cheatimerism
Digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 14’ 55’’, 2020 (Italy)
Created by Luca Miranda, 2020
Courtesy of Luca Miranda, 2020
Made with Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar Games, 2013)
