Why don't the cops fight each other?
digital video, color, sound, 9’ 41”, 2021, United States of America, 2021
Created by Grayson Earle
Why don’t the cops fight each other? is a desktop documentary that chronicles the attempt by the artist to modify the behavior of virtual police officers within Grand Theft Auto V. This work also engages the modding scene that emerged around Grand Theft Auto, a community of people creating tools to modify the game’s environment, characters, and mechanics. While these mods allow for an almost infinite manipulation and transformation of the game features, one attribute seems completely immutable: the police officers in the game will never fight each other. Through an exhaustive forensic analysis of the game’s source code and interactions with mod developers, the artist illustrates the extent to which the cultural imaginary concerning the real world police is projected into the game space.
Born in California, Grayson Earle is a new media artist and educator. After graduating from the Hunter College Integrated Media Arts MFA program, he worked as a Visiting Professor at Oberlin College and the New York City College of Technology, and a part-time lecturer at Parsons and Eugene Lang at the New School. A member of The Illuminator Art Collective, Earle is the co-creator of Bail Bloc (2017), a computer program that bails people out of jail and Ai Wei Whoops! (2014), an online game that allows the player to smash Ai Weiwei’s urns. In 2020, he hacked the Hans Haacke career retrospective exhibition at the New Museum to criticize the Museum's efforts to union bust its employees. His artworks have been exhibited internationally. He is currently residing in Stuttgart, Germany, as a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude.
CRUCIFIXION AND EPIPHANY
digital video, color, sound, 22’ 59”, 2020 (Hong Kong)
Created by Edwin Lo
Introduced by Luca Miranda
A follow up to Those Who Do Not Remember The Past Are Condemned To Repeat It (2020) and The Rupture of Promised Land (Or We Can Never Get There) (2020), Crucifixion and Epiphany is a commentary on religious iconography through the lenses of video games and archival materials. Using the format of desktop documentary, Lo disrupts the conventional dichotomies – real vs. simulacral, fiction vs. fantasy – to visually articulate the “downfall of mankind” narrative. Following Kevin B. Lee’s dictum that desktop cinema has cinematic aspirations but operates as a blank canvas, Lo’s screen performance is a captivating and multi-layered visual experience. Crucifixion and Epiphany is a creative (re)mix of multiple sources, a hybrid of machinima, desktop cinema, and archival footage. A study in media res, this work is the outcome of an experimental practice that resembles the vernacular obsession for narrativizing the so-called lore of popular fantasy video games on YouTube and Twitch.
Edwin Lo is an artist and researcher working with sound in various contexts and media such as performance, text, recording, video, installation and video games. Lo received a Master of Arts from the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. His work was exhibited in several countries, including Hong Kong, United States, Berlin, Tokyo, Shenzhen, Paris, Brazil, Switzerland, Sweden, and Shanghai. His work was presented by the Goethe-Institut and Para/site in Hong Kong, the Tokyo Arts and Space, the Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago, Loop in Barcelona and Meinblau Projektraum in Berlin. His artist residencies include China, Germany, Japan. Lo lives and works in Hong Kong.
