COLL.EO The Mythic Being in Liberty City HD video, black and white, sound, 15' 30" 2016 colleo.org The Mythic Being in Liberty City is a replay of Adrian Piper’s 1973 performance The Mythic Being entirely produced and (re)enacted within the virtual space of Grand Theft Auto IV’s digital metropolis, a replica of New York City. The work exists as a) machinima and as b) a set of framed digital prints on archival paper measuring 12x18 inches. The Mythic Being is one of Piper’s most celebrated works. In the early 1970s, the artist created a fictional character, in many ways autonomous and in many ways opposite of Piper, wearing an Afro wig, reflective sunglasses and a black t-shirt, roaming the street of New York. Piper produced a series of performances, cartoons, classified ads, and drawings on black and white photographs to document the evolution of her alter ego. The character named “The Mythic Being” first appeared in 1972, as an experiment in a domestic setting. At that time, Piper performed the role of a black man, walked around, appropriating the manners, gesture, and swagger of masculinity. She took photographs and disseminated them as paid advertisements in The Village Voice. Subsequently, The Mythic Being went from private to public sphere, appearing in the streets of New York. In two staged performances titled The Mythic Being Cruising White Women; The Mythic Being Getting Back, Piper/The Mythic Being gazes at women walking in the streets, pretending to mug a man in the park. Both performances were documented with black and white photographs. In 2016, COLL.EO replayed the performance in Liberty City, by modding the game and replacing the main character, Niko Bellic, with an avatar of Piper/The Mythic Being. This recursive game of impersonation seems to suggest that Piper’s 1970s role-playing performances prefigures the game activities of the twenty-first century. The Mythic Being, like GTA’s Niko Bellic, is a dangerous character, one that “embodies everything you hate and fear”, to borrow a line from Piper, a chauvinistic, ruthless alpha-male who roams the city. The phallocentric view of the world that Piper criticized in her performance is the normative mode of play of the Grand Theft Auto games. The Mythic Being in Liberty City is therefore both an appropriation and a subversion of Grand Theft Auto. Overtly political, this work challenges both the idea of masculinity in video games and the meaning of performance in simulated environments. Part of COLL.EO's "Grand Theft Auto IV Interventions" series, The Mythic Being in Liberty City is a replay of Adrian Piper’s 1973 performance The Mythic Being entirely produced and (re)enacted within Grand Theft Auto IV’s virtual replica of New York City. The work exists as a) machinima and as b) a set of framed digital prints on archival paper measuring 12x18 inches. colleo.org