Ascending Men

Los Santos, 2023

A surrealistic photo experiment in the world of Grand Theft Auto V. For this work I modified the game via modding and made use of the Rockstar Editor, a tool that allows players to edit, create and share in-game content via social media. What I did was to experiment with how far the Rockstar Editor was able to push the creation of images and videos with the available processing power of the computer. I tried to use as many different tools that the game offers and as few external tools as possible.

Inspired by the 1953 painting Golconda by René Magritte, which depicts a scene of "raining men". The artwork shows white-collar workers ascending near the Maze Bank Tower, the tallest building in the game. The four images and a video show a dissimilar atmosphere in the well-known world of GTA V, where it is very difficult to tell if they were created in the game.

Four printed pictures on a wall and a video on a monitor.