Marie-Laure Delaporte: Who’s afraid of GTA? « The best-selling cultural product in the world»: from the screen to the museum

« By far Grand Theft Auto is the most beautiful environment. It’s also one of the most terrible games. It’s really aggressive » says in an interview Joan Pamboukes during the exhibition Open 1 World: Video Games & Contemporary Art. In fact, video games, and more precisely Grand Theft Auto, became a source of inspiration for many contemporary artists. Some of the specific features of GTA make it a particularly used video game for its creative potential: the fact that it’s an « open world », its different social and political interpretations, and even its technological functions. Consequently, GTA became an artistic medium and a media in itself taking part in the phenomenon of visual contagion, as a framework for reflection, between hybridization and remediation of contemporary images.
If Joan Pamboukes uses GTA V in order to create abstract photographs, in a similar way to Benjamin Bardou in his work Do Computers Dream of Electronic Sheep? (2013) by creating the futuristic urban atmosphere of the movie Blade Runner anew (1982, Ridley Scott), other artists twist and employ the game in order to understand its ideology such as the audiovisual installation Finding Fanon 2 (2015) from Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, questioning the post-colonial condition or the video 11 Executions (2015) of Hugo Arcier pointing out the flow and access to weapons in 2 real life.
Finally, GTA is an incredible object of remediation as theorized by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin. It offers the possibility to artists to reinterpret the game as well as other works of art such 3as the ones by Ai Wei-Wei in Study of Perspective (2015) by Roc Herms, Godfrey Reggio’s film KOYAANISQATSI (1982) in a remake by Alan Butler.

Marie-Laure Delaporte has a Ph.D. in contemporary art history from the University of Paris Nanterre. She is the author of a dissertation entitled "L'artiste à la caméra: hybridités et transversalités artistiques (1962-2015) » defended in December 2016. Associate Researcher at the HAR laboratory (Histoire des Arts et des Représentations - EA 4414), she has led her postdoctoral researches on the links between video games and art during her fellowship at the German Centre for Art History in Paris in the research group « Arts and New Media ». She took part in several conferences about the subject: Le jeu vidéo, une herméneutique en acte (January 2021) organized by Liège Game Lab and Le jeu vidéo, au carrefour de l’histoire, des arts et des médias (March 2019) at École Émile Cohl (Lyon). She recently published online the articles « Les artistes ont-ils peur de Mario et Lara ? » and « La réalité peut-elle être virtuelle ? »