Date: 2017
Medium: HD-Video, Stereo Audio
Duration: 4min 18secOriginally commissioned by Sam Stourdzé for The Rencontres d’Arles 2017.
French with English Subtitles.
Duration: 4min
Produced by Mary Conlon.
The film explores the nature of photography and memory. Using poetic, layered visuals, it shows how moments are constructed, preserved, and transformed within images. It questions the relationship between subject and viewer, exposing tension between reality and representation. By blending archival footage, staged scenes, and personal reflection, the film challenges documentary norms and invites viewers to rethink how time, history, and identity are shaped through photographs. Alan Butler uses immersive sound and precise editing to evoke the fragility and power of memory and image.
In Grand Theft Auto (GTA), players can swap their guns and knives for a smartphone camera, reframing the game’s hyper-violent world as a stage for street photography. Visual artist Alan Butler embraced this feature to create Down and Out in Los Santos (2015), a photographic series distilled from two years of immersive gameplay. From that work emerges The Constructed Moment, which examines how the “decisive moments” staged by the game’s non-player characters (NPCs) echo—and mimic—those of the real world. Though GTA is synonymous with adrenaline-fueled spectacle, Butler turns away from the action to observe the everyday lives of the game’s homeless NPCs. Here, another layer of estrangement reveals itself: these daily routines are not lived experiences but algorithmic scripts. The “decisive moments” his camera captures are thus not spontaneous truths, but carefully coded outcomes—simulations of reality masquerading as its fleeting fragments.