Founded in , Total Refusal upcycles the resources of mainstream video games to create political narratives in the form of videos, interventions, performances, and lectures. Join us for the opening reception on March 14th at 6pm. The urban strollers avoid the combats whenever possible and become peaceful tourists of a digital world, which is a detailed replica of Midtown Manhattan. Superwonder Superwonder is about the representation and perception of the world, mediated by the experience of contemporary video games.
The starting point is the observation of digital worlds in current open-world engines that construct their cosmoses as pre-aristotelian discs. A flat map is the centre of the circling universe, which can have the form of a box skybox , sphere skydome or be a dynamic, multi-layered animation skysphere.
The sprawl of information within the age of digitality also yields the dissemination of the flat earth movement. In Superwonder , avatars set out for penetrating the supposed infinity of the universe surrounding them. So the constructedness of the digital firmament becomes visible and points of contact between late capitalist, conspiracy theorist, and romanticist world experience open up Hardly Working Hardly Working gives priority to characters that normally fade into the background of video games: NPCs.
NPCs are non-playable characters that populate hyper real worlds to create the appearance of normality. Their work neither results in a product, nor does it change anything about their status quo. Here, work becomes a pure performance, carried out for its own sake. NPCs perform so-called surrogate actions that generate no social benefit. These actions are performed and enforced for the sake of appearances to ensure a social order.
NPCs are digital Sisyphus machines that have no perspective of breaking out of their activity loops. In the moments when the algorithm of their existence shows inconsistencies, the NPCs break out of the logic of total normality, display their own faultiness, and appear touchingly human.
