Los Santos Plays Itself: (Vol. 2) (Post-cinema and digital cultures) - Softcover

Bittanti, Matteo; Veenstra, Jordy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 8869775194 ISBN 13: 9788869775192

Verlag: Mimesis International, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

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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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Mimesis International
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 8869775194
• ISBN 13: 9788869775192
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 322
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland