Elegy: GTA USA Gun Homicides

Self-Playing Game Mod/Data Visualization and 1-year Live Stream, 2018-19

Elegy was a gaming mod for Grand Theft Auto V that reenacted each day the total gun homicides for one year from July 4th, 2018 to July 4th, 2019. Gun homicide data was scraped continuously from the Gun Violence Archive. Gun homicide totals are revised daily on this website, this data was then fed directly, algorithmically, into the project – starting at 0 each midnight, each day the new total body count since January 1st was reenacted in it’s totality and so on. The project launched on July 4th, 2018 when there were 7,293 gun homicides in the United States – by the end of 2018 this number will grew to 14,730, on January 1st, 2019 the homicide count for the year began anew at 0. The project was live screened on Twitch.tv. The work was accompanied by a looping soundtrack of the first radio recording of "God Bless America" as sung by Kate Smith in 1938.

Developed in collaboration with Albert Elwin and the Biome Collective. Project consultant James Wood.