One of the essays I worked on this year was for COLL.EO's work, The Mythic Being in Liberty City. Excerpt below.
Masculinity in Liberty City: Adrian Piper’s Mythic Being as Digital Simulation
"No matter how much I ask my mother to stop buying crackers, cookies, and things, she does anyway, and says it's for her. Even if I always eat it. So, I have decided to fast."
One of the most stereotypical feminine statements, actually. I've heard men say this, but not often. It's a funny phrase to have the Mythic Being state over and over again. Set against the backdrop of Liberty City within Grand Theft Auto, Adrian Piper's already fictitious character is iterated, modified, and brought to digital life in a different way and within the confines of a gaming environment. Strangely, the type of bravado seen in the Piper’s Mythic Being is reminiscent of Andrea Fraser's work, Men on the Line described by writer Emily K. Holmes as a recreation “a public radio broadcast of four men discussing their relationship to feminism in 1972, during the height of the second-wave feminist movement.” Beyond Fraser's work, however, there is something far different about a woman of color playing to the tropes of masculinity as opposed to a cis white woman playing to those roles. There's something greater at stake when Piper plays to a dominant, hegemonic role of the masculine.
The gendered lens from which the piece originated from comes into play, quite literally, within a hyper masculine space of Liberty City where characters ride around in cars and crime is intrinsic to the game play, hence the name Grand Theft Auto. It appeases to the escapism that game play offers as a way of playing and performing criminal and illegal acts. The game becomes a cathartic release from physical reality. The modified character of Niko Bellic in Grand Theft Auto is given a proxy - a digital version of Adrian Piper’s Mythic Being.
