Los Santos Plays Itself: (Vol. 1)

By Matteo Bittanti and Jordy Veenstra

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 generates 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 ambient observation, modding, and infrastructural critique.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 8869775208
• ISBN13: 9788869775208
• Release Date: January 2026
• Publisher: Mimesis
• Length: 362 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.8" x 5.5"