Survival Interventions in GTA: on the Limits of Performance in Virtual Environments

Resisting death in virtual worlds – a struggle that manifests in death’s other, survival – has the potential to emerge as key site of critical intervention in the cultural and computational logic of video games. This essay surveys a number of artistic experiments that pick up traditions and concerns of performance art (in particular the critiquing of socio- political power systems through the radical, performative use of bodies) in order to address conflicts at the intersections between the individual and the system(s) that frames its existence. In doing so, my aim is to explore the performative affordances of GTA game worlds specifically, and those of virtual worlds more generally.