Plastic Scoop Zine

The use of real-time computer graphics engines to create a cinematic production.

Video games are most often used to generate a computer animation. A machinima is a type of cinematic production that appropriates computer-generated imagery and sound, usually derived from video games footage. Most commonly, it is a form of fan activity which aims to create records of gaming practice. However, this form has wider potential, and Machinima raises profound questions of authorship, appropriation and the possibilities of reworking ‘found’ materials for alternative purposes.

Virtual Gleaning Mandy Bloomfield Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature University of Plymouth Plastic Scoop continues and extends the trajectory of Andy Hughes’s work over the past three decades. Hughes is a gleaner.

His work wanders the wrack zones of contemporary consumer society, recovering and reframing waste objects that have - until very recently - accumlated off the radar of cultural attention. In a current moment in which we are finally waking up to the pressing urgencies of plastic, chemical and carbon pollution, his lifelong project to reorient our attention to trash becomes newly significant.

Hughes’s photography series of the ninetees manipulates scale and perspective to put the discarded remnants of throwaway society in the spotlight. In so doing, this work also treads the strandlines of abjection and aesthetic beauty, consumption and waste, instantaneity and posterity.

Hughes’s new work in Plastic Scoop takes this endeavour into the space of the virtual. He was first attracted to the game of Grand Theft Auto, he says, because of its visual qualities: its vibrant landscapes and attention to detail. But he became even more interested in the possibilities of the game as artistic medium when he observed the increasing presence of trash, other forms of visible pollution and traces of climate change discourse (and its denial) with the release of each new version of GTA. Most players of the game would be oblivious of these details as they follow the narratives of violence and acquisitive theft that the game dictates.

While developing the film, Hughes collaborated with a small focus group of University of Plymouth students and staff, to find out how acts of noticing vary across different players. Informed partly by this process, and partly by Hughes’s longer trajectory of working, Plastic Scoop plays the game against the grain.

GTAV Map Location | Chumash Beach

Shifting the usual frenetic temporalities of gaming, the film meanders through its virtual landscapes, hovering contemplatively over a roiling sea or dwelling upon a sunset in a beautifully-composed industrial landscape or street scene. These visual scenarios are accompanied by a soundtrack composed of archival material which intersects – sometimes jarringly, sometimes felicitously – with the visuals. One voice celebrates the innovations of plastics with increasing levels of absurdity as the film drifts among ocean and industrial scenes, lit up by a lurid but compelling virtual sunset. Elsewhere, the voice of T.S. Eliot intones a section from his poem The Dry Salvages against footage of a storm-tossed sea, upon which floats unidentified wreckage and a diver. The sea in this poem has often been read as metaphorical for universal human travails, but its redeployment here suggests a different perspective on the poem, which now offers prescient visions of the ocean as a non-human multispecies habitat, but one that also ‘tosses up our losses’ in the form of a variety of human waste.

As with collage work more generally, then, the juxtaposed materials transform one another through strange forms of connection and disjunction. Through such transformations, Plastic Scoop forges links between industrial and post-consumer pollution, production and waste, and, perhaps most importantly, acts of violence and the logics of capitalist production and consumption. In strange and uncanny ways, the film reveals violence in all its multifarious forms as endemic to a capitalist system reliant upon unequal relations of power, the ruthless exploitation of the natural world and human labour, and the transformation of physical and mental spaces into arenas of domination and individualist competition.

A bizarre set of characters roam this virtual world; an aeronaut emerges from the sea, a diver roams a highway shooting at signs promoting climate change denial, and a clown writhes in mid air, accompanied by whale song. These are alienated figures, struggling to function meaningfully in the environments in which they find themselves. The film often takes their perspective, sometimes situating itself literally inside their cranial cavities. Through these characters, the strange but frighteningly familiar landscapes they move through, and the competing discourses that surround them, the film raises a host of questions, such as: How have we come to normalise the environmental mess that we now find ourselves in? How might we perceive our world differently than we currently do? How can we thread a meaningful path through the tangle of environmental discourses of our times, without succumbing to either apocalyptic fatalism, escapism or unrealistic optimism?

It is not the task of art, of course, to offer solutions to such dilemmas. But if Plastic Scoop leaves its viewers with an disorientating image, an unsettling question, or even just a needling sense of disquiet, so much the better.

Screen Grabs | Street Cleaning GTAV Style, Video Vignettes

GTAV Map Location | Tataviam

Assembling The Deep Sea Outfit, United States Navy Training Film 1963

For Icarus

Elizabeth Perrotte, Program Director, Christies Education, London

‘Time and space dilate; a mysterious avatar free-falls, slowly, hypnotically, out of a clear sky,’ haloed as he gently spirals away from the dazzling sun. For an occult moment the boundless air becomes a deep ocean for his fall; a whale’s soundscape of low groaning vibrates through the visuals. Thoughts of Icarus accelerate the vertigo. Fragments of his mythic flight and plight; fragrant wax wings melting in the sun’s heat, fast flicker into view. This Icarus plunges from the blinding sun into rich technicolour dressed as Pierrot, the androgynous, melancholic clown from Commedia dell’arte. Suspended here in limbo between states: powerless yet vagrant, symbol of free will, escape, jouissance, hubris, collapse, catastrophic failure, so much waste matter. No ground in sight, impact deferred, there is always the hope of ‘clinamen’ the chance atomic swerve and generative energy celebrated by Roman poet/philosopher Lucretius in De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things).

If atoms never swerve and make beginning Of motions that can break the bonds of fate, And foil the infinite chain of cause and effect, What is the origin of this free will Possessed by living creatures throughout the earth?

Whence comes, I say, this will-power wrested from the fates Whereby we each proceed where pleasure leads, Swerving our course at no fixed time or place But where the bidding of our hearts directs?

For beyond doubt the power of will Originates these things and gives them birth…

Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, Bk ll:253-62, trans. Ronald Melville. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

GTAV Map Location | Pacific Bluffs

GTAV Map Locations Ocean/Pacific Bluffs North Chumash Beach Plastics, Young America Films 1945 Plamer-Taylor Power Station Ron Alternates Wind Farm

GTAV Map Locations Ocean/Pacific Bluffs Murrieta Heights North Chumash Beach Strawberry

GTAV Map Locations Grapeseed Downtown Los Santos The Way You Want It, General Motors Corporation 1950 Sandy Shores

GTAV Map Locations AirMagic 1955 Ocean/Pacific Bluffs 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, 1916 Murrieta Heights Sandy Shores

THE DR Y SALVAGES (No. 3 of Four Quartets) The river is within us, the sea is all about us; The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite Into which it reach es, the beaches where it tosses Its hints of earlier and other creation: The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone; The pools where it offers to our curiosity The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.

It tosses up our losses, the torn seine, The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices, Many gods and many voices.

The salt is on the briar rose, The fog is in the fir trees.

The sea howl And the sea yelp, are different voices Often together heard: th e whine in the rigging, The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water, The distant rote in the granite teeth, And the wailing warning from the approaching headland Are all sea voices, a nd the heaving groaner Rounded homewards, and the seagull: And under the oppression of the silent fog The tolling bell Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried Ground swell, a time Older than the time of chronometers, older Than time counted by anxious worried women Lying awake, calculating the future, Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel And piece together the past and the future, Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception, The future futureless, before the morning watch When time stops and time is never ending And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning, Clangs The bell.

Eliot, T.S. Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1943.

Screen Grab | Palmer-Taylor Power Station

Serres, M. (2011). Malfeasance. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.

Overlay Graphic From Gaming Workshop

Let us define two things and clearly distinguish them from one another: first the hard, and second the soft. By the first `I mean on the one hand solid residues, liquids, and gases, emitted throughout the atmosphere by big industrial companies or gigantic garbage dumps, the shameful signature of big cities. By the second, tsunamis of writing, signs, images, and logos flooding rural, civic, public and natural spaces as well as landscapes with their advertising. Even though different in terms of energy, garbage and marks nevertheless result from the same soiling gesture, from the same intention to appropriate, and are animal in origin.

GTAV Map Location | Near Submersible Wreck, Pacific Ocean

Overlay Graphic From Gaming Workshop

Screen Grab | Murrieta Oil Field

Overlay Graphic From Gaming Workshop

GTAV Los Santos Map | C-Type Large Format Printwork

Acknowledgments Dr Mandy Bloomfield and the Sustainable Earth Institute (University of Plymouth) deserve deep thanks for their generous support of this project, as does Lizzie Perrotte, whose viewing of the film was both helpful and inspiring.

For further information about the Sustainable Earth Institute & University of Plymouth www.plymouth.ac.uk/research/institutes/ sustainable-earth www.plymouth.ac.uk/staff/mandy-bloomfield

Thank you to University of Plymouth English students who responded with perceptive observations about the film and through interactive game sessions changed my course of thinking about the film and its narrative/non narrative potential.

The Sustainable Earth Institute’s Creative Associate Awards are designed to uncover novel and innovative ways of communicating research to a public audience.The awards have been made possible through funding from the University of Plymouth Research Impact and Innovation Fund, which is financed by the University’s Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) allocation.

Dominica Williamson (ecogeographer) reminded throughout the production to think about audience and co-production elements.

Thanks also to those people online who commented during production and also to Alison Wallace who offered technical advice.

For further video clips and recuts got to www.andyhughes.net Printed on 100% post consumer recycled paper.

Printed by Monkey Puzzle, Porthtowan, Cornwall.

Limited Edition Zine Copyright © Andy Hughes MA RCA 2019 www.andyhughes.net