2023
Grand Theft Auto (commonly abbreviated as GTA) is an open-world action-adventure video game series in which the player controls an outlaw and his rise in organized crime. For this project, Mattia Dagani Rio uses an AI generative image system to reinterpret the setting and narratives of GTA V.
Set in the fictional city of Los Santos, the video game features narratives steeped in violence, bank robberies, and drug dealing, reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. It also incorporates stereotypical representations, including homophobic and transphobic dialogues and situations, often leading to criticism.
The video game exaggerates concepts such as hyper masculinity and violence, and while being a parody of them, it goes on to reinforce and cement a number of issues such as homophobia and transphobia. In this sense, Dagani Rio intervenes by reclaiming and reappropriating the video game, creating a new narrative among the characters.
In a transformative reimagining, the artist adapts the game’s aesthetics and visual language to craft an alternative version that centers LGBTQ+ characters navigating experiences of love, heartbreak, sex, and personal growth in Los Santos. This re-envisioned narrative replaces objectified women and violent gangsters with tender and vulnerable queer characters and their romantic lives. The original protagonists — Michael De Santa, Franklin Clinton, and Trevor Philips — are recast as gay men whose lives are informed by love and affection, challenging traditional, normative notions of masculinity linked to wealth, brutal competition, and misogyny.
Los Santos (a city based on Los Angeles, in which GTA is set) becomes the setting for a new queer narrative, with gay romances between the original protagonists of the series, as in a kind of Santa Barbara-style soap opera. The main characters are transformed and new images are created based on screenshots from the video game and new keywords in line with a new narrative (queer, gay, love,...), through artificial intelligence machine learning, which is based on a new storytelling that is composed like a homoerotic photostory.
Dagani Rio’s Los Santos stands as a powerful illustration of how marginalized and discriminated groups can forge spaces of resistance and representation within the prevailing gaming culture and broader visual culture, which often perpetuates problematic stereotypes and narratives. Instead of merely engaging with the video game as conceived by its designers, the artist creatively “plays” with it, subverting its explicit and implicit ideologies.