The Grannies follows a group of artistic game developers (Andrew Brophy, Marigold Bartlett, Ian MacLarty, Kalonica Quigley and friends) as they find a way to go beyond the map while playing Red Dead Redemption 2 together. Styled as a kind of digital travelogue, the work uses screen-captured footage the artists took as they played, following their explorations of the unpredictable, procedurally generated landscapes outside the game world.
By exiting the bloodthirsty world of the Wild West frontier, these artists found an abstract, seemingly endless digital space where the building blocks of the game were laid bare. Through their eyes, what might be seen as a glitch or a bug to another player piques curiosity about the materiality of the game’s environmental design. Textures collide at strange angles, revealing layers that are meant to be obscured. A strange grey cube hangs on the sky, monumental in its lack of finish and finesse compared to the landscape around it.
The unexpected terrain and landmarks The Grannies discovered out of bounds don’t serve a story or game function. They only matter because they provoked curiosity and emotion in the people who found them – not because they help direct players towards a goal.
These artists’ explorations are not just a way to escape the game’s map, but to escape the game’s expectations of how a player should act, and its methods of anticipating their actions.
Artist Statement
The Grannies is a multichannel installation film. It was originally commissioned as a display for Now Play This festival at Somerset House in 2020, with the intention of being exhibited alongside Ian McLarty’s game Red Desert Render. Sadly due to Covid this installation never took place, but now a few years later it finally premieres at ACMI.
The Grannies is a work that is part of a conversation. It’s a slow conversation that has flowed between different creatives around the world over years, and through different mediums and forms. It’s a conversation I first came to when artist Kalonica Quigley tweeted a thread detailing the adventures of The Grannies (Kalonica Quigley, Marigold Bartlett, Ian McLarty and Andrew Brophy) as they first broke out of bounds in the game Red Dead Online.
In their travels beyond the edge of the playable world, The Grannies happen upon surreal landscapes and terrain. Hyper real textures clash, unnatural geometric shapes jut out the ground, walls of water levitate in the air. It is a world that feels all at once otherworldly, absurd and haunting. But what might appear as a nonsensical or random space, is actually one born from intent.
As game designers and visual artists, The Grannies are aware of and appreciate the deeper meaning these abstract spaces show; these are the seams of the virtual world, its scaffolding, the materiality of how it was made. Here they see its craft, humanity and history. Through their play and exploration they are in dialogue with the work, ideas and skill of its makers. But more than this, they are also creating something within it.
The Grannies’ story, created and shared through prose, emoji and photography over twitter, is one which resonated with many people, myself included. Like The Grannies, I wanted to be in conversation with this story and their work, to listen to it and to create something new with it.
That something new is a multichannel installation. Created in collaboration with Luke Neher and Sam Gill. Our contribution to this conversation is in the medium of space, film and sound. It’s one which gives weight and a physical presence to that moment of play. It asks audiences to stop and sit with the story in person, to see it at scale, to experience it as a physical thing, and give it their time and focus to appreciate it as an experience that was lived and was real.
I hope that those who get a chance to experience the work realise they are also part of this conversation, one that starts with hundreds of games designers at a major commercial studio, that passed to a group of mischievous artists independent game designers, then on to a group of international film and exhibition creatives, passing through different forms and mediums along the way. That conversation now passes to those who experience the work and will carry their own interpretations and thoughts from it with them, and I hope might in turn create something new born from it.
Marie Foulston, director of The Grannies
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Credits
Music by Sam Gill and Luke Neher
Sound design by Sam Gill
Starring Kalonica Quigley, Andrew Brophy, Marigold Bartlett, Ian MacLarty, and friends. Voiceover is excerpted from an interview originally for P3 Spel, conducted by Angelica Norgren.
Visuals captured from Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar Games, USA, 2018
Courtesy Marie Foulston
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In ACMI's collection
Previously on display
23 April 2023
ACMI: Gallery 3
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Moving image file/Digital
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moving image