Cutscenes explores—and blurs—the intersection of cinema and video games.
_GOD_MODE_ (Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, 2023).
“In the World through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.”
―Frantz Fanon
Video games are often seen as fantasy spaces in which players can escape their everyday realities and disappear into another world, free of the banalities and hostilities that mar this one. But Genetic Automata, a tetralogy of moving-image works by multimedia artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, reveals that this is a fallacy. Game worlds are not distinct from the real world; rather, they reflect it back to us, filtered through the presumptions and prejudices of their makers.
Achiampong and Blandy’s series—presented earlier this year at London’s Wellcome Collection, a museum that showcases artworks relating to health and science—examines where these cognitive biases originate, as well as why they have proved persistent. The films retrace the emergence and development of scientific racism, showing instances in which science’s veneer of objectivity has been exploited by white supremacists. Achiampong and Blandy demonstrate how these ideas continue to surface obliquely in contemporary technology and culture: in social media, virtual avatars, DNA ancestry testing, and video games.
Each of the four films centers on a historical figure, using these stories as starting points to investigate broader ideas. Broadly, the films ask: who constructs the cultural narratives that become foundational, and to what end? Who writes the scientific rules that inform our understanding of the world, and what happens when these theories are not questioned but accepted as fact? The first film, A Terrible Fiction (2019), starts with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, opening on arresting images of taxidermied bird specimens from Darwin’s collection, now housed at the Natural History Museum in London. After this footage of feathers, the film begins to look at the texture of skin, first via macro-lensed close-ups of the artists’ own bodies, and then through an examination of the digital topographies of video-game skin shaders, one of the historically limited options for marking identity granted by character-creation tools. Through these sequences, the duo implies that all of this is connected: a line can be traced from the prejudices of foundational scientific ideals to the failures of imagination of contemporary game creators. The narration focuses on John Edmonstone, a formerly enslaved, Guyanese-born naturalist who became Darwin’s taxidermy teacher, training him in the preservation techniques for specimens that became the evidential basis for his theory of evolution. As well as challenging ideas around eugenics, the construction of racial hierarchies, and other ways in which “science” is used to justify prejudiced beliefs, the film introduces a key motif in the series: the unacknowledged contributor whom history’s authors deliberately erased.
A Lament for Power (2020) focuses on Henrietta Lacks, a Black American woman whose cells were extracted without her knowledge or consent during a cervical cancer treatment in 1951. Scientists cultured these cells, valuable for their ability to endlessly replicate, and created the cell line known as “HeLa”—still in use today—which has been instrumental for cancer and HIV treatments, the development of polio and HPV vaccines, the mapping of the human genome, among many other applications. The film uses a video-game engine to visualize Lacks’s cells as a black blob that swells in size, taking over a blockily rendered, computer-generated city like a monster from a 1950s B-movie. These sequences, rendered in the game-creation toolkit Unity, are contrasted with imagery taken from Resident Evil 5 (2009), which was criticized for its ill-considered choice to transplant the zombie-extermination gameplay to a fictional West African nation and the problematic imagery that resulted. These two strange, computer-generated environs—the imaginative one made by the artists, in which Lacks’s cells eventually balloon to consume whole worlds, and the reductive one offered to players, in which white soldiers gun down invading Black hordes—demonstrate both the possibilities and pitfalls of virtual landscapes.
Dust to Data (Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, 2021).
The central figure in Dust to Data (2021) and _GOD_MODE_ (2023) is Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton, whose legacy includes the conception of eugenics. The British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie later filtered Galton’s notions into his pursuit of scientific archeology. In Dust to Data, alternating narration unpacks and questions Petrie’s theories, and a letter written by W. E. B. Du Bois is read aloud as an example of how the falsehoods of scientific racism were countered at the time of their initial circulation. In _GOD_MODE_, Galton’s noxious ideas are elaborated, exposing how his mistruths have seeped into various fields of knowledge, such as education, medicine, and political theory. In the film’s first half, Blandy (who, as identified in exhibition wall text, is “a middle class white man of English heritage") alludes to various forms of control, both overt (such as forced sterilization), or more indirect (such as global warming). Then, in the film’s second half, Achiampong (“a working class Black man of Ghanaian heritage”) questions the aftereffects of this discrimination, as well as what use allyship can offer, if any, without progressive action. While in the other films, the artists’ voices were either absent or unattributed, in this concluding work their positionalities and identities are most foregrounded and potent.
These final two films feature fantastical imagery rendered in the Unreal game engine: 3D landscapes, temples, skulls, rocks, objects, and mythical creatures create an otherworldly setting that contrasts the earthly, historical subject matter while bringing to mind adventure games like Myst (1993) or The Forgotten City (2021). Concluding speculatively, _GOD_MODE_ wonders whether racist ideologies can ever be left behind, or if traces of persecution, discrimination, and erasure will always afflict future generations. While _GOD_MODE_ warns that falsehoods are taken as facts when propagated by those in power, Dust to Data advises that “the past is a collective story, a story that we make . . . so we must remake it now.” The films suggest that everyone, whether artist, scientist, historian, or just a simple game-player, is responsible for writing new stories that challenge these dominant narratives. Before imagining, and inhabiting, a better virtual future, we must first address the imbalances and injustices of history.
I spoke with Achiampong and Blandy about the intentions behind their tetralogy, the nature of their collaboration, and what it means to take inspiration from the video-game cultures of yesterday and today.
A Terrible Fiction (Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, 2019).
NOTEBOOK: How did Genetic Automata come about?
DAVID BLANDY: The work followed on from our Finding Fanon series [2015–17]. After seeing the possibilities of the game space, we worked with Grand Theft Auto V [2013] in part two of that trilogy. Genetic Automata started from an investigation into DNA. As part of A Terrible Fiction, we both took three different DNA tests, acting as controls for this pseudo-scientific kind of test about what could be ascertained from our DNA, in terms of origins and identity. What we discovered was what we already knew: the genome is far more accurately traced over Europe than it is in Africa. I had a very granular result, which, subsequently, over the eight years since we did our first test, has completely changed. At that time, it came out that I was something like 60 percent Iberian, so probably from the Spanish Peninsula or something, but now it is talking about Russia or Italy. As they change the model, they update the results, and it shifts around and shows how absolutely absurd, or at least speculative, this kind of area of science is. Larry's results were just so . . .
LARRY ACHIAMPONG: . . . basic. What was it? 95 percent “African.” We know that the DNA from Africans is the most complex on the planet. Even before taking the test we had our own concerns. I felt that the data would not be as complicated as it should be, because the data pool that they have would be from people who are in most cases privileged, meaning the likelihood of getting a response to your own lineage can be small depending on where you come from. So like you said, David, yours was crazy complicated and mine was, well, quite simple.
BLANDY: The film series came out of the thought processes that emerged from that. Each of the four works starts from a little nugget of a story. The story of A Terrible Fiction, for instance, was about how, in Edinburgh, John Edmonstone, a freed slave, taught Charles Darwin about taxidermy methods before he went off to the Galápagos Islands and found the evidence for his theories of natural selection. Edmonstone’s part in that particular story was largely erased for many years. We imagined what that relationship would be like between the two of them, and then extrapolated that out into various ideas, such as us having a conversation through the work, and then thinking of all these different forms of systems and skins, which naturally got us on to thinking about virtual skins. In video games, you choose a character or a persona to play as, and, to some extent, it defines your actions.
ACHIAMPONG: Regarding Edmonstone and Darwin, in a way, David and I inherit that relationship. We always say that we're friends first, and collaborators second, but we'd have to be idiots to be under an illusion that our experiences are going to be the same. Even in the 21st century, the effects of the history of not only colonization, but also the racism within science, and the pseudoscience of eugenics, remain persistent. For example, in the early days of COVID-19, Black people were four times more likely to die from the virus, and Black women are four times more likely to die during pregnancy than white women. So how do you have a conversation around this through the work? I think, for David and I, the conjoined feeling of our approach to making the work feeds into this.
Finding Fanon Part 1 (Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, 2015).
NOTEBOOK: I noticed that in all your gallery texts, you state your class, heritage, ethnic background, and place of birth, outlining your differences in identity and background. How do you address your individual subjectivities and the specificities of your own experiences within a coauthored project?
ACHIAMPONG: With Finding Fanon, we'd already been exploring the cowriting process. In that work, we are allowing for the bringing forth of those subjectivities because I don't see how we end up writing something with the exact same kind of spirit or breath. As much as we're friends, we're still different people, and even outside of agreeing with one another, we have different life experiences. With Genetic Automata, the two voices, or texts, are not absorbed into one another, as they were in Finding Fanon, but given space to exist separately. This truly manifests in _GOD_MODE_, where there is this explicit conversation around the divisions between us, and we really pushed that, which was tough to do. I'll be honest in saying that the writing process of that work was literally calling our friendship into question. Because I've experienced a lot of betrayals from white people, and also, particularly during the lockdowns, or during Brexit, experienced a sort of fatigue, due to people only now beginning to realize that racism exists. I really went deep into that in this work, and that cut hard for me, and for David, and we had to have a conversation about what we wanted from the work. I’m proud that there was space that we were able to cultivate for that, because otherwise, in the art scene, solutions are created to problems inside of the artwork, but they don't really get enacted in the real world. As artists, we have the power to do and say a lot of things, but if our ideas just sit within the creative space, then what we're doing is useless. But if we use the abilities that we have to really create some food for thought or bring the elephant in the room to the dinner table, I'm up for that.
BLANDY: What was interesting about the process for _GOD_MODE_ was that in my writing, I was approaching it, as I often do, as a series of maskings: taking on different types of characters or embodying certain spaces. And of course, as the white man in this collaboration, I'm almost embodying the voice of Francis Galton, this heinous eugenicist. That is partly satirical, but it's also allowing that voice into the work, and then there starts to become this kind of elision, or tension, between what is my voice and what is the voice of these kinds of masks I'm putting on. So when Larry came back first with his side of the script, it felt very much like he was responding to my voice rather than the voices of these masks I had been putting on. That completely recontextualized how I was thinking about it all. I hadn’t been thinking that it was my voice, but now it has become my voice, so what does that mean about me?
Our collaboration is very much about thinking through my privilege and my position, and allowing that to be dissected and broken apart. A lot of my solo practice is also about taking apart different aspects of my identity and thinking about what it actually means. How am I implicated here, and how do I deal with that and then keep living? I suppose all of that came together in the making of _GOD_MODE_. You get this sense of a voice that is trying to come at the issue at hand from the right kind of place in the film’s first half, and then, in the second, Larry's voice comes in asking whether empathy and allyship is enough. It comes back to one of the phrases from the first Finding Fanon film, which is this idea of the “equal plane.” How do we establish what is essentially a new world where these histories, tensions, and privileges are gone, and how would we deal with that?
A Lament for Power (Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, 2020).
NOTEBOOK: You were talking about the story of John Edmonstone in A Terrible Fiction, and in A Lament for Power there is the story of Henrietta Lacks. In this series, you are making some figures more prominent and redefining the contributions of others. Could you talk about this rewriting of history?
ACHIAMPONG: With Henrietta Lacks, the knowledge is getting out there about how the agency of a Black woman could be taken in this way, but it is still not as known as it should be. People are really shocked when they learn about this story, but white Europeans have been doing this kind of thing for a long time, Black people in America being injected with syphilis being just one example. This violence has always been happening, but the space, politically and socially, in which to talk about it, and about the consequences for the people that are still experiencing it to this day, doesn’t exist.
Politicians in the UK are certainly not giving space for people to talk. The government recently called for legislation preventing schools from educating children under a certain age about sex and the complexity of gender, which is preposterous. But it's about control. The control of the story is the control of history. That's what the colonialists knew, and what the people that come after them have realized. It is the same with the repatriation of objects that were stolen from communities around the planet. Folks knew that if you took away these items, it was like taking away the soul of the people. How does this relate to someone like Henrietta Lacks? It does in a magnitude of ways, because talking about Lacks’s story counteracts generations of stories that depict Black folk as baboons, or as sexually prolific people, or any number of these ridiculous ideas and myths. So, to create a space to even allow the potential of imagination towards these untold stories, or even the pain these people would have felt and that their families are still feeling, felt like an ambitious task for David and me. But I think the fact that nothing has existed before about this, artistically speaking, meant that the important thing was that the work exists.
BLANDY: Alongside this overt dissection of race, science, and how those two things relate, we were also thinking about the mythmaking that goes into an extractivist culture, which is what science has often played into. For example, the idea of the IQ test and how that is skewed towards different ideas of what intelligence is—this idea of quantifying things that are unquantifiable in order to denigrate certain peoples. This idea of a pure objectivity, tied up in these notions of a perfectible human, is a whole part of the modernist project, and it is is basically fascist ideology entrenched inside how science is seen as something neutral, and something outside of culture, when it's entirely inside of culture and has to be understood as such.
When we presented the series at the Wellcome Genome Campus, it was incredibly well received. It was like we were bringing a conversation that needed to be talked about but just wasn’t in such a place. We both have a poetic sensibility in terms of how we write and think about things, and it's about constructing ideas in a way that people enter into the work rather than feel shouted at by it, because we want to actually change people's minds, or help them understand different perspectives. That's why, through the writing and the visuals in Genetic Automata, there's something seductive about the way that it's all put together. As you get drawn into that text and these game spaces, you discover more and more of the horrors that we're talking about, how these things are insidious and leach into everything, and how it's not just race and science but whole societal structures and how everything is put together.
A Terrible Fiction (Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, 2019).
NOTEBOOK: For me, the works are not about video games—they're about the things we've been talking about—but they are adjacent to them. Could you talk about how you incorporate the world of video games into subject matter that is, at face value, so far away from it?
BLANDY: We take two approaches across the four films. A Terrible Fiction is about sampling, taking an element from a game and looking at it as another texture. We had the skins of the dead birds from the Galápagos Islands, and our respective skins. We filmed each other with macro lenses, creating this scientific exploration of the surface of our body. Then we used the virtual skins of the Big Boss faces in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain [2015], using that as a stand-in for the idea of virtuality while also thinking about the specificity of the game’s narrative and its ideas around genealogy, and how they manipulate the genome to try and create super soldiers, and how this relates to this historic scientific desire to make a “better human.” But then, with the next works, starting with A Lament for Power, it was about getting under the hood of these different gaming engines. We started with Unity, and then Unreal Engine, using them as sites to explore these different kinds of metaphors. You have the little blob cell that expands to destroy a city in A Lament for Power, and the spider that crawls through _GOD_MODE_, transforming, at the end, into this deer. The game space becomes a place for these conversations to really be explored; it’s almost like a dream space, a space of pure symbols, wherein we can talk about things that are vital and real to our lives. That's what you're thinking about when you play Street Fighter or Grand Theft Auto. It's not just in spaces of academia that philosophy manifests. It's actually due to the experience of traveling to those spaces, inhabiting a different body or avatar, and having conversations across cultures that these works even exist.
ACHIAMPONG: Within games, and within the conversations happening within gaming communities, there are issues. Ubisoft is about to release a new Assassin's Creed game set in Japan, and one of the playable characters is Yasuke, historically known as the first Black samurai. A whole load of white gaming bros have problems with this. For them, a samurai can't be Black. They are not thinking to research anything and consider the actual history of Yasuke, let alone accept the idea regardless of that. We're talking about something in a creative realm, where the impossible becomes possible. For a lot of us, as gamers, we go into these spaces because we are told we are freaks in the real world. We have a space in which we have solidarity with one another. There are so many people who are queer or disabled, for example, who play games, because they can go into that space and be accepted or find a camaraderie, but you still have these aspects of toxicity that continue to prevail.
_GOD_MODE_ (Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, 2023).
NOTEBOOK: When I think about games as a culture, I think first about this toxicity of the player base, so I'm curious if you are hopeful or pessimistic about the medium.
ACHIAMPONG: Not only do I feel a sense of optimism, but also a responsibility as well. I'm a part of a range of different communities that I have been critical of, because of how racism, sexism, ableism, and such things have entered these environments. As an elder in these groups, I feel a responsibility to talk about why I think these things are not right. In my solo practice, I’m looking to develop a video game, and, in my research, I’ve found that indie is where it's been at for a long time. The big money companies are getting rid of jobs, cutting people they brought in during COVID. Yet, it's the indies that are still coming through with the ingenuity that has been showing the triple-A studios that you don't need millions of pounds but only a desire to tell stories or connect with people, as naïve as that might sound.
BLANDY: It's almost like the early days of ZX Spectrum cassette coding again. A couple of people can develop a game now and it can be hugely successful, or just really interesting artistically. So, there's that side of the community, and then there's the more consumption-based side, the fan bases of everything, and yes, there's toxicity within that, but I would say that, even at its worst, this is just revealing problems and attitudes that already existed and were coalescing around these games. For them to come out into the open, I think that kind of exposure is good in the end, because we can't keep pretending that these attitudes don't exist. Things like Gamergate are just a manifestation of structural issues that are in society. So, how do we change society? That is the question. Video games are part of the world, and we are part of the world, so they have got to evolve in the same way that we do.