Los Santos Plays Itself (volume 1)

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.