Lorna Ruth Galloway, Twentysix Gasoline Stations in GTA V, 2016

Lorna Ruth Galloway reflects on the processes of mediation of the photorealistic simulation of GTA V through a laborious process of appropriation and reconfiguration. Her starting point is the seminal 1963 photo book Twentysix Gasoline Stations by Ed Ruscha. Thanks to the simulation of California provided by the game, the artist is able to find gas stations in the digital world and use the screenshotting function to take pictures in the style of the original analogue photographs. Yet the screenshots are not the final form of Galloway’s project, who goes on to produce charcoal screen prints from the digital images.

The work shows a process of mediation: from the physical world to the photograph and onto the game world, then extracted through screenshots and back outside of the screen as a screenprint. Materialising the filling stations through this process not only creates objects that allows the viewer to reflect upon the layers of representation and through the history and development of photography and CGI, but also shows how the same image can assume entirely different meanings depending on the surrounding context, media and materials. If the photograph of the gasoline station in 1960s United States was a symbol of the open road – with the car as a metaphor for industrial progress and freedom of movement – fifty years later the same architecture comes to represent the environmental impact that fossil fuels have on the planet. The in-game gas station also suggests the massive energy consumption generated by global servers needed to support computational processes and networked media, including computer games themselves. Through these charcoal screen prints of game screenshots, Galloway simultaneously plays a tribute to Ed Ruscha while revealing the contemporary complexities of the game image and its economic and environmental implications.

More by Lorna Ruth Galloway: lornaruthgalloway.com