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 gener-ates 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 am-bient observation, modding, and infrastructural critique.
Los santos plays itself. Volume Vol. 2
| Titolo | Los santos plays itself. Volume Vol. 2 |
| Volume | Vol. 2 |
| Autori | Matteo Bittanti, Jordy Veenstra |
| Collana | Post-cinema and digital cultures |
| Editore | Mimesis International |
| Formato |
Libro: Libro in brossura |
| Lingua | inglese |
| Pagine | 318 |
| Pubblicazione | 01/2026 |
| ISBN | 9788869775192 |