By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to artist Morry Kolman about their latest work, Grand Theft Automated License Plate Reader. Morry’s mod adds Flock cameras into the GTA V. Morry’s art has always been particularly incisive and useing clever, digitally-driven techniques — take his film, MrBeast Saying Increasingly Large Amounts of Money, or the Webby-winning Traffic Cam Photo Booth.
You can find Morry at WTTDOTM.com and any social media with the handle @WTTDOTM.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Morry, thank you so much for coming back on.
Of course.
You are an artist who works in lots of different exciting mediums, whether it’s the medium of traffic cam or the sky and stars itself. We’ve talked a little bit about your work in the past. I am very, very excited that you have a new project out. And I would love to hear a little bit about what you’re working on with Grand Theft Auto and Flock.
Just yesterday, I released a mod for GTA five, called Grand Theft Automated License Plate Reader that puts 235 Flock cameras into the in-game map of Los Santos 235. By the way, is exactly one 10th, the amount of Flock cameras currently installed in Los Angeles, which Los Santos is heavily, heavily based on. The cameras are real working cameras, they are modeled to look pretty similar to Flock cameras. As you drive around the map, they take pictures of you that you can export.
They also obviously report you to the cops if you’re currently wanted by them. But very often, they will also just report you to the cops, even if you’re doing nothing wrong. Specifically, every time you pass in front of any camera, there is a one in 20 chance that you get a police chase started, even if you’re completely innocent.
And that was made to reflect the fact that Flock has a history of misreporting innocent civilians as criminals or potential criminals. And literally leading to situations where people are pulled out of their car at gunpoint. Even when they are completely law abiding and 100 percent in the right with the exception of their license plate getting misrecognized by one of these private surveillance cameras.
I want to talk a little bit about the technology that you’re talking about, because there are a few people and few artists that I know who have worked in the field of automatic cameras as much as you have. The specific cameras that you’re talking about, that you implemented in this very, very cool mod, are Flock cameras. And these are automatic license plate readers.
In the past, you’ve done traffic cam cameras, things like that. You seem very interested in the surveillance field. I’m interested in what made these cameras get on your radar. What makes them different from some of the other more conventional surveillance technology that we’ve seen in the past?
Well, I think, for one, Flock is a private company, right? I don’t like police cameras being everywhere, but at least the police report to the mayor, or the governor, or some public figure, Flock cameras are private cameras that get sold to local governments. They’re pitched to local governments to say, “We can increase your bottom-line revenue or top-line revenue by just increasing the amount of tickets that you can send out, etc.” But the governments don’t control that data. Flock is the one that ingests it and then they can use it for other purposes, which we as people and citizens often have very little, if any access, and oversight into.
Flock continuously is exposed to be selling this new data and one way or another, they keep on collecting data that they say they’re not collecting, selling data that they say they’re not selling. When I see an $8-billion private surveillance company, I see something with a target to hit artistically, at the very least.
It’s not just the camera. It’s the technology behind it — the fairly sophisticated algorithm – but also the people who control it. They’re the customer, they’re not the product.
Yes, exactly. Exactly. And you cannot petition a Flock camera in the same way that you can petition a precinct, right? Flock is, again, a private company, and unless they have a court order to do something, they’re not going to do it.
The other thing to mention is that Flock obviously is one of the biggest automated license plate reader companies. It is not the only one. But because they are in the news so much, and because they’re definitely one of the larger, if not the largest ALPR company in the United States, I wanted, as a way to bring awareness to all ALPRs, to choose the thing that has for better or worse become the household name of them.
Now Flock obviously gets a little bit of their attention. I want to talk a little bit about the medium that you chose, a game mod. What prompted that? Obviously, the level of immersion is deeply interesting. And the familiarity of the cityscape is very, very cool. Why did you choose? And how did you work with this particular medium?
I originally had a different idea for a game mod I wanted to do in Grand Theft Auto, which was all around replacing the cars in GTA with cars that have actually been seized by the U.S. government or actually used in crime as a way to take that immersion aspect that you’re talking about a step further and give people a way to learn about how government seizure works.
But that idea was both technically and conceptually complicated. I was talking to one of my friends, and we were talking about Flock in the context of Grand Theft Auto. And I was like, “Oh, that’s the idea. That’s what it has to be.” Putting Flock cameras in GTA is not only technically easier because you’re only ever dealing with one model, which is the one single model of a Flock camera.
But also the logic is way simpler. And importantly, it works really well with the medium because it has a gameplay aspect to write. The thing that you do in Grand Theft Auto all the time is drive around, you’re in cars so often in that game. And sometimes you’re in cars and you’re a criminal, right? Sometimes you are actively being wanted by the cops, and you’re trying to avoid them. But oftentimes, you’re just trying to get across town.
And I was like, how can I make people feel how annoying these cameras are? How can I give them a sense of like, “Wow, I’m going about my day doing nothing wrong, because for once in my playthrough of GTA, I’m actually trying to not arouse any suspicion, I’m just going to go to my house.” Then suddenly you have a helicopter after you, because you drove past 10 Flock cameras, and sure, nine of them didn’t do anything. But one just decided today’s the day that this guy gets a huge police chase coming after him.
I wanted a game that millions of people have played, I wanted something that dealt with both criminal, but also civilian activities. And I wanted something where you could feel the impact and irritation of these cameras in the way that you play the game. For the record, I didn’t really play GTA before making this mod. I’ve been playing it with the mod on the entire time.
And holy shit does it make the game way harder. I’m trying to mind my business because, again, there’s 235 of these cameras. They’re everywhere. I have found myself learning where they are, and I put the cameras in the game, right? I found myself figuring out which streets I didn’t put them on so that I can go drive down those streets so that for once in my life, I can make it across town in peace.
I feel like it’s probably something that especially people in communities or cities, towns, neighborhoods, etc where cameras have a larger presence, I’m sure there are other people that are thinking along the same lines where it’s like, “Hey, let me take this back road just for so I’m not being watched the entire time.”
I really like art that can make you change your behavior and feel deeply, deeply immersed in it. It sounds like you’ve done a very cool thing.
Yeah, yeah, I did. After a certain point, I coded in like a misreport slider, just so I could, again, make it across town once or twice. It’s been a ton of fun.
Also, this is a complete side note. But one of the great things about doing this mod now is obviously part of the reason I chose Grand Theft Auto as the medium. Aside from just the fact that you’re driving around in cars a lot is that as much as Flock is in the media right now, Grand Theft Auto is obviously extremely in the media right now. It was a perfect marriage of two different things: Flock and the anticipation for GTA Six.
Because I haven’t played GTA before, this mod has given me a very nice personal gift of having a very enviable position as it comes to GTA. I get to play it for the first time and have the complete opposite experience as anybody else who has ever played that game, which is “Wow, this game is amazing. I can’t wait for the sequel to come out in two months.”
That’s so good.
It’s like suckers. I can’t believe you waited 13 years.
Oh, that’s funny. Well, listen, a word of caution. I had the great pleasure of getting into the Game of Thrones books the month before A Dance with Dragons came out and then look at what happened after..
Yeah, very true. Your Winds of Winter is nowhere to be found.
Nope. Good luck on GTA VIII. But yeah, you really couldn’t have picked a better time to talk about these two particular trending topics, man.
Yeah, I mean, that’s half of it, right? A lot of my art is obviously geared towards virality, I often think about virality as just another medium to work with. If I had made this project in 2024, the point would have been the same, but the impact would have been wildly different. And that’s just always something that I’m thinking about in my work.
What is not like ambulance-chasing trends, but what is in the consciousness? What are people ready to hear an argument about? What are people ready to listen to and ready to experience? And then what can I give them? How can I take that readiness, take that preparation and openness and give them something to chew on, to think about, to share, to impact them, etc.
Yeah, I thought it was really clever to launch it with a trailer. That felt very in keeping with how games are announced. And even if people don’t actually download the mod or don’t actually play the game, you’ve been able to make an artistic statement just through a trailer embedded in a tweet, which is oftentimes how people can vicariously consume these games.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I had so much fun making that trailer. I’m not gonna lie, aside from the small feature tweaks, development stopped like a week and a half ago. And most of my work the past week was just making sure I had really good shots for everything in the trailer.
I also love that song. I think that song goes so hard, one that I discovered basically a decade ago, and I’ve been wanting to use it in something ever since. When I was watching the character Michael shoot the Flock camera with the rocket launcher, I was like, “There’s only one beat that goes hard enough for this. I need Spark Master Tape on this right now.”
Amazing, man. So I will encourage folks to check this out, whether it’s the trailer, whether it’s the game mod, or anywhere else. But Morry, where can folks find you? And where can they find your continued work?
Great question. I am findable on pretty much any social platform you can think of. My handle is WTTDOTM, short for Welcome to the Desert of the Meme, which is my college meme page. I’m also available at WTTDOTM.com, which is my personal website. It also has my portfolio and other work that I’ve done. That’s where you can find me.
Awesome, man. Thanks for coming on.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Edited by Crystal Wang