EVERY STRIKE HITS DEAD CENTER——TOTAL REFUSAL solo exhibition
Introduction
Digital machines work with striking precision. They never question their role in the process of value generation, they don’t unionize, they don’t strike. At the same time, the bug is an imminent feature of their existence. They regularly malfunction and resist to work as intended. What critical potential lies in the crippled struggle of algorithmic entities? Is the glitch a role model for resistance and labor strike in the times of gamified digital capitalism?
Examining these questions, “Every Strike Hits Dead Center” is a critical negotiation of the concepts of “work” and, as its counterpart “leisure” on the example of NPCs – non-player characters – in video games. With a humorous approach, video game spaces are examined for their subversive potential, setting the stage for an updated critique of capitalism that focuses on human and non-human working conditions. The three works presented – the video installation Club Stahlbad, the film Hardly Working, Red Redemption and Loop Labor – question social norms in relation to “productivity” and “free time” both on the level of representation as well as in terms of their material conditions.
Artist
The artist, researcher and filmmaker collective and pseudo-marxist media guerrilla Total Refusal (Susanna Flock, Adrian Haim, Jona Kleinlein, Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, Michael Stumpf) appropriates contemporary video games and writes about games and politics. They upcycle the resources of mainstream video games, creating political narrations in the form of videos, interventions, live performances, lectures and workshops.
Since its foundation in 2018, their work has been awarded with more than 50 awards and honorary mentions – like the Best Short Direction Award at the Locarno Film Festival, the Diagonale Film Award for the Best Short Documentary, the Contemporary Visual Arts Award of Styria and the Vimeo Staff Pick Award. Total Refusals’ work has been screened at over 250 film- and art festivals – such as Berlinale, Doc Fortnight at MOMA New York or at the Oberhausen Film Festival – and has been exhibited at various exhibition spaces like the Architecture Biennial Venice 2021, the HEK Basel and the Ars Electronica Linz.
Artists’ website: Total Refusal | Total Refusal
Works Introduction
Red Redemption, 2021
Video, English with Chinese Subtitles
The city of Saint Denis is located in the southern USA and is a pastiche of New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century. It is the capital city in the video game Red Dead Redemption 2. Women and men toil in factories, sit in the mud in front of their shacks at night, while the bourgeois leisure class reads newspapers or poetry in well-tended gardens on the other side of the map. In between, the middle class strolls along the boulevard and visits the theatre. Hundreds of NPCs (Non-Playable Characters), the extras of this setting, meticulously stage the same class relations that shape the cityscapes of digital and physical capitalist realities alike. Within a pseudo-Marxist city tour, Total Refusal analyzes profit and surplus value, capital and accumulation in the mass medium of a video game.
Credits
creator: Adrian Jonas HaimLeonhard Müllner, Robin Klengel
Cooperation: Susanna Flock, Jona Kleinlein
Modding: RCPisAwesome
Hardly Working, 2022
Video, 20:30 min
Hardly Working sheds a limelight on the very characters that normally remain in the background of video games: NPCs. They are non-player characters that populate the digital world as extras to create the appearance of normality. A laundress, a stable boy, a street sweeper, and a carpenter are observed with ethnographic precision. They are Sisyphus machines, whose labor routines, activity patterns as well as bugs and malfunctions paint a vivid analogy for work under capitalism.
Credits
Realized by: Susanna Flock, Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, Michael Stumpf /
Music: Adrian Haim
Narration: Jacob Banigan and Lorenz Kabas
Lead Editing: Robin Klengel
Additional editing: Susanna Flock, Leonhard Müllner
Camera: Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner /
Modding: RCPisAwesome
Realised within the framework of the European Media Art Platforms residency program at Werkleitz with support of the Creative Europe Culture Programme of the European Union
Club Stahlbad, 2022
5-channel video installation
Can fun, euphoria and intoxication be programmed? Fidgeting limbs, blank stares – the dancing frenzy of the NPCs (non-playable characters) in Club Stahlbad hint at the extent to which the partygoers actually their leisurely escape from the gray daily grind. Based on the famous quote by sociologist Theodor W. Adorno, “Fun is a steel bath. The amusement industry prescribes it incessantly.”, Total Refusal exposes the striking similarity between work and leisure in capitalism through the dancers’ tireless monotony of pleasure. While other avatars maneuver through battlefields with delicate grace, the dancers’ movements remain clumsy and awkward. Their glitches seem more natural than the predefined dancing choreographies they perform. The fact that the electronic music that dominates today’s club and party scene is directly related to the pounding beat of the machines in the factories of heavy industry was already clear in advance to the critics of the culture industry, which now completely permeates our lives and sets the rhythm for us even in our supposed idleness. In the pale reflection of the NPCs, the reality of one’s own life is thus stares back at us far more than the initial amused discomfort would suggest.
Credits
Realized by: Susanna Flock, Adrian Jonas Haim, Jona Kleinlein
Loop Labor, 2023
video
“Loop Labor” delves into the significant role of non-player characters (NPCs) in video games, shedding light on the portrayal of Latin American field workers in the video game Grand Theft Auto V. Within games, avatars – directly controlled by the players – distinct themselves from NPCs who inhabit the game world as backdrop characters, side characters or extras.
The artistic inquiry explores connections between the marginalization of background characters and their real-world counterparts. What is the value of the labor performed by these NPCs in computer games? “Loop Labor” scrutinizes GTA V, examining inherent game mechanisms that mirror power imbalances in reality.
To intervene in these mechanisms, “Loop Labor” modifies the game code through a process known as modding, introducing critical interventions into the game world. Mexican NPCs, typically confined to their repetitive work loops, disrupt the game’s patterns and unite to challenge the status quo.
Credits
Realized by: Gisela Carbajal Rodríguez, Felix Klee
Supervisor
Taipei City Government
Organizer
Department of Cultural Affairs, Taipei City Government
Digital Art Center, Taipei
Sponser
Hearting
Heineken
Austrian Office Taipei
Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport
Venue
Digital Art Center, Taipei
No. 180, Fuhua Rd., Shilin Dist., Taipei City, Taiwan
Event
Opening & Performance
2023.12.09 18:00 – 21:00
Guide & Artist Talk
2023.12.15 14:00-17:00
