Thomas Hawranke, OoB, 2017 – 2018

Media artist Thomas Hawranke engages with video games, both challenging and embracing their boundaries to enhance and expand the camera’s vision. His oeuvre, spanning from self-playing video games to profound meditations on non-human agency within simulated spaces, has received global recognition. His 2017 series, titled OoB, was inspired by a serendipitous discovery of a glitch in GTA V. In gaming terminology, an 'out of bounds' (OoB) glitch occurs when characters or objects stray beyond the designed play areas, accessing regions usually hidden from players, such as behind walls, beneath the map, or areas lacking collision detection. These visual inconsistencies, which defy real-world physics, appear in various forms: wall breaches enable passage through solid structures, exploring beneath the map reveals vast, unfinished spaces, boundary skips bypass invisible barriers meant to confine the player, and physics exploits use the game’s mechanics to propel entities into forbidden zones.

Hawranke’s encounter with a crack in the game’s foundation led him into this uncharted territory, viewing the world from beneath the map. Modifying the game’s code to accelerate its implosion, he documented these uncanny perspectives, resulting in a series of surreal, fragmented landscapes characterised by floating trees, rocks, interrupted skies, and various natural elements detached from coherent ground. The chaotic assembly of these elements suggests a breakdown in the game’s spatial logic, highlighting the fragile boundaries between different layers of the game world. Multiple layers of terrain and visible seams underscore the artificiality and mutable nature of digital spaces. The minimalist compositions, often stripped of familiar grounding elements, evoke weightlessness, abstraction, and a sense of post-human weirdness. Elements like a transmission tower embedded in the landscape and floating segments in stark white snowy scenes emphasise the malleability of digital physics and geography. Broad, flat expanses with scattered debris and fractured terrain convey emptiness and isolation. Floating houses and trees above reflective water blur the line between the tangible and the immaterial, challenging stability and permanence in the built environment.

OoB highlights the fragile and constructed nature of digital environments, where the laws of physics and reality are subject to the limitations and errors of programming. Hawranke’s manipulation of the glitch becomes a deliberate exploration of these imperfections, challenging traditional photography by capturing views within virtual spaces and revealing hidden, often overlooked aspects. A quote from Arthur Machen’s The London Adventure, or the Art of Wandering (1924) in Hawranke’s artist statement provides further context. Machen discusses discovering profound allure and mystery in the mundane and often ignored aspects of life, suggesting an 'eternal beauty' within ordinary things, visible to those who observe with a fresh perspective. Just as Machen advocates for a deeper examination of the commonplace to uncover concealed marvels, Hawranke employs OoB glitches to expose the unseen dimensions of virtual environments. By documenting these glitches, he uncovers a hidden layer of the game world, typically inaccessible and overlooked, inviting viewers to explore the secret complexity within the fabric of digital landscapes. Under the code, the beach.

More by Thomas Hawranke: thomashawranke.com