Dancing Plague is a video work based on a custom modification for the video game Grand Theft Auto V. The mod overwrites the workings of Los Santos—a fictional city based on the real world Los Angeles—with a simple alteration in the game mechanics: when the player presses the H key, all male NPCs are forced to dance uncontrollably. These feverish movements interrupt the default behavioral scripts of the game, which often focus on crime and violence. As drivers, construction workers, bankers, and airplane pilots abandon their routines, the system around them falls into a dystopian state of disarray.

The concept originates from a discovery the artists made in the game’s animation library: almost all of GTA V’s dance movements are reserved for female performers, often sex workers. Therefore, an NPC that has its gender boolean set to male will never attempt to execute these animations. By forcefully transferring them onto masculine figures, the work exposes the gendered assumptions embedded in the game’s system. Movements coded as seductive or decorative suddenly become uncanny when performed by male bodies, revealing how identity is constructed through gestures. The resulting choreography creates a visual language where masculinity is both liberated and challenged.

The video’s soundtrack is scored by Azu Tiwaline, a French-Tunisian musician known for blending contemporary electronic music with sub-Saharan trance traditions. Her track “Magnetic Service” underlines the mod’s themes of ritual, trance, and liberation. These associations are also evoked by the video’s title, which draws connections to the historical phenomenon of dancing plagues. Such manias occurred mostly throughout medieval Europe, where groups of people danced uncontrollably for extended periods, sometimes until death. By referencing these events, the work suggests a collective loss of control within rigid codes. It indulges in moments of hysteria and contagion, where subversive movement spreads, challenging both the logic of the game and the cultural norms it reproduces.

Dancing Plague (2024) by 2girls1comp (Marco De Mutiis & Alexandra Pfammatter) 
Music: Magnetic Service (Extended Version) composed & produced by Azu Tiwaline featuring Cinna Peyghamy with the authorization of Livity Sound & Cylid Publishing.  
Created with: Grand Theft Auto V (2013), Rockstar Games

2girls1comp is a modding duo founded in 2023 by Marco De Mutiis (IT) and Alexandra Pfammatter (CH). Their work changes the logic of video games as an act of creative counter-play, revealing the social and economic fabric in which they are immersed: from reclaiming global digital infrastructures to commenting on free labor within the capitalist ideologies of the gaming industry.

Dancing Plague is not a video game nor a machinima; it is an artist mod: a radical intervention into the architecture of Grand Theft Auto V. By modifying one of the most globally influential hypermasculine cultural artifacts of the twenty-first century, Marco De Mutiis and Alexandra Pfammatter, working collectively as 2girls1comp, queer the logic of the game from within.
Once infected by the “Dancing Plague,” male non-player characters abruptly abandon the behavioral scripts that structure the game’s performance of masculinity. They stop driving cars, cease acts of aggression, leave behind the spectacle of places like Muscle Beach, and instead begin performing stylized, feminized pole-dance choreographies. Through this viral disruption, the mod destabilizes the gendered codes, fantasies of dominance, and militarized masculinities embedded within the game’s world.
By introducing artistic modding as both a critical and aesthetic practice, 2girls1comp expands the political possibilities of game culture and digital art alike. Dancing Plague stands as one of the most incisive and subversive artist mods of its kind: playful yet deeply challenging the normative structures of digital masculinity.