Night of Vice  (2015)

Night of Vice an evening of video, live performance and sound presented the story of a night in Vice City, the virtual city of the 2002 Grand Theft Auto video game set in a fictional 1980’s Miami.

GTA: Vice City was a landmark video game for many reasons, but perhaps most lasting was its aesthetic value, offering an incredibly seductive world and one of the first definitive pictures of a millennial generation’s view of the 1980’s.

It is this virtue that eventually usurped the mission-based format of the game. Against the drive to produce things by completing missions and getting rewards was a powerful undercurrent where the game world itself seduced you: you, no longer a real player, but a virtual flaneur.

For a Night of Vice the experience of playing the game is used as a portal into 1980’s culture, channelling it into a musical and visual experience of its own that explores our memory and mythologising of that decade. In ‘Night of Vice’ the urban landscape of GTA: Vice City is treated as a real location for the shooting of a music video, a night of cruising the streets in a convertible under the neon glow of Ocean Drive as it radiates from our TV screens.

A collaboration with music producer Peter Humphrey, a group of musicians were commissioned to record a series of 80's inspired pop songs to which music videos were recorded 'on location' in the the digital landscape of Vice City.

You can listen to the music HERE