Shanks's 54, 2022

Shanks’s 54 is an installation built around a film made with the poet Mark Coverdale. Its starting point is 54 two-line verses that Coverdale wrote on repeated walks along a canal in Camden, London. The title joins that number to Shanks’s pony, the old phrase for travelling on foot, and to the industrial waterways along which the verses were written.

The film is staged in Grand Theft Auto V. Its verses are heard through the eyes of a homeless bystander, a figure as powerless as the game’s background characters, who watch the world pass and cannot act on it. Who is speaking is left open. The work turns the attention of a game built on spectacle towards the people its streets are designed to overlook.

Douglas presented the installation at B93, Enschede, in 2022. Alongside the film it included a recorded conversation between Douglas and Coverdale, an informal exchange about how the work was made and what it set out to do, placing the collaboration itself inside the installation. The film was later selected for the Neo Avant-Garde programme of the Milan Machinima Festival in 2023.