Rodrigo Azaola
Impunity landscapes IV, Microtransactions
2023
Single-channel HD video with sound. 1’ 50’’.
Impunity Landscapes IV: Microtransactions explores liminal financial spaces where the notion of territoriality dissolves and national jurisdictions become redundant. These immersive worlds, created using generative adversarial networks and other generative artificial intelligence techniques, expand infinitely.
Within them, digital representations of value or “virtual currency”—which are neither issued nor backed by central banks or state authorities—constitute a market that generates tens of billions of dollars annually, derived from the buying and selling of avatars, virtual weaponry, spaceships, submarines, and other elements that enhance the gaming experience in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs).
Thus, an unsettling panorama emerges in which the notion of territory is stretched algorithmically through AI generative networks, where the creation and dissemination of wealth escape the scrutiny of traditional authorities. In this work, names of shell companies, extracted from leaked financial databases, playfully evoke land acquisition and gaming lore, interwoven with virtual environments that enable synthetic monetary flows.
Sonically set in the “chip-tune” style (using old computer hardware and video game consoles), Microtransactions is an exploration of hybrid ecosystems where new forms of wealth, extraterritoriality, and algorithms devoid of human intervention coexist.
This work was exhibited at MoneyLab#13, 3 November–1 December 2023, NeMe Arts Centre, Limassol, Cyprus; Kaugummi im Motherboard. Gr_und, Berlin. December 2024.