Date: 2018
Medium: HD-Video, Stereo Audio
Duration: 20min 07secOriginally commissioned by Fotomuseum Winterthur for SITUATIONS/Posthuman, 2018. This film is riffs on the 60s Italian postmodern, exploitative pseudo-documentary mode called Mondo film. It was produced in jest as a 20 minute explainer video for a 9 second video loop called ‘Sturtevant/a_m_f_skidrow_01 Finite Infinite‘.
In Sturtevant/a_m_f_skidrow_01 Finite Infinite, a short video loop portraying a non-player character (NPC) from a computer game is projected on a rotating beamer in the installation space. The installation builds on Butler’s previous work, Down and Out in Los Santos. There, the artist embarked on a journey through the social landscape of the video game Grand Theft Auto V to document the lives of homeless NPCs in the virtual city of Los Santos. One of the characters he encountered is at the centrepiece of his new work: a homeless NPC that bears a striking resemblance to conceptual artist Sturtevant. The character is transformed into a hybrid, computational entity, half human-looking, yet resembling a dog running endlessly in circles. By directing our gaze to the characters that inhabit the uncanny borders of non/human, the artist challenges the viewer to rethink anthropomorphic representation and consider these digital entities and bots as autonomous creatures that do not subjugate to a human hierarchy.