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Hardly Working
TOTAL REFUSAL
PYLON is pleased to present the 4-channel video installation "Hardly Working" by artist collective TOTAL REFUSAL at HYBRID Box.
Total Refusal, a collective of artists, researchers and filmmakers Susannna Flock, Adrian Haim, Jona Kleinlein, Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner and Michael Stumpf, intervenes as a pseudo-Marxist media guerrilla in current video games and publishes texts about games and politics. The open collective critiques existing games practices and opens a new perspective on the genre with tools of appropriation and repurposing of game resources.
Since its inception in 2018, the collective’s work has won numerous awards and been presented at more than 130 international film and video festivals and numerous exhibitions, including Berlinale, BFI London, Doc Fortnight at MoMA, NY, HEK Basel, Ars Electronica, and Venice Biennale 2021.
Duration of the installation: September 10 - October 1, 2023. Open one hour before and after the events in the Festspielhaus Hellerau.
HYBRID BOX Modular Gallery
Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 56
01109 Dresden
This work was realised within the framework of a European Media Art Platform residency program at Werkleitz-Centre for Media Art co-funded by the European Union. This presentation was co-funded by KONTEJNER | bureau of contemporary art praxis.
The exhibition is presented by PYLON and is kindly supported by Landeshauptstadt Dresden - Amt für Kultur und Denkmalschutz and Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen. Gefördert durch die Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen. Diese Maßnahme wird mitfinanziert durch Steuermittel auf der Grundlage des vom Sächsischen Landtag beschlossenen Haushaltes.
The four-channel video installation foregrounds characters that normally take a back seat in video games: NPCs (“non-playable characters”) are non-playable characters that populate hyperreal worlds to create the appearance of normality. Normally, these digital extras do not play a major role in the story of the game in question. In Hardly Working, however, a washerwoman, a stablehand, a street sweeper, and a handyman from the computer game “Red Dead Redemption 2” become the main characters. With ethnographic precision, the four films observe their daily work: a rhythm of endless loops that makes them work daily and tirelessly.
Following Hannah Arendt’s description of the “animal laborans” – as opposed to the acting subject – the NPCs as individuals are an exaggeration, as their work merely manifests their status. NPCs perform so-called “surrogate actions” that provide no further social benefit. Rather, their actions are performed and enforced for the sake of appearances, thus maintaining a social order. NPCs are digital Sisyphus machines that have no perspective of breaking out of their action loops. In the moments when the algorithm of their existence shows inconsistencies, the NPCs break out of the logic of that total normality and show their own defectiveness, thus appearing touchingly human.
This work was realised within the framework of a European Media Art Platform residency program at Werkleitz-Centre for Media Art co-funded by the European Union. This presentation was co-funded by KONTEJNER | bureau of contemporary art praxis.