Notable women’s sports advocate Kelsey Trainor is teaming up with Human Rights Campaign for a collaboration based on her popular Invest in Women brand. Trainor and the advocacy group’s partnership is making it unequivocally clear that all women are women. Though it’s timed to Women’s History Month in March, the campaign will continue well into…
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Also: ad industry employment data, macroeconomic news in a nutshell, and more.
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Right now, your refrigerator’s door bin might be home to some almost-off milk, a scattering of garlic bulbs and a jar of relish from 2022. Now, Unilever has actually made something useful for you to put in there: a “Smart Jar” that tells you if your fridge is at the right temperature. In 2019, the…
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The retailer will also be the exclusive seller of the first Roku-produced TVs.
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Last week, while visiting the (excellent) exhibition Out of Office. This isn’t working for us at IMPAKT Centre for Media Culture in Utrecht, I discovered one of those rare works of media art that reminded me how glad I should be to have fallen 19 years ago into the merry world of art and tech.
The artwork is by Total Refusal, a collective of artists (Michael Stumpf, Leonhard Müller, Robin Klengel, Jona Kleinlein, Adrian Haim and Susanna Flock) who define themselves as “a pseudo-Marxist media guerilla.” That certainly got my attention. Their practice consists in appropriating mainstream video game material. They scrutinise it, look behind its sleek, realistic aesthetic and uncover its covert political apparatus.
Total Refusal, Hardly Working (trailer), 2021
Total Refusal, Hardly Working, 2021
Out of Office. This isn’t working for us. Exhibition view at IMPAKT. Photo: Pieter Kers
The work the collective is showing in Utrecht (and at the Milan Machinima Festival this month if ever you’re around) is Hardly Working. Entirely shot inside the Red Dead Redemption II Western-themed shooter game, the short film focuses on four NPCs. NPCs are non-player character. They can’t be controlled by players and exist as background, as part of the landscape. Their main purpose is to add authenticity and an element of normal daily life to the game. The four characters under close observation are a street sweeper, a horse groom, a laundress and a carpenter.
Total Refusal’s film isolates their working patterns. The characters are locked into a life of repetitive gestures. For hours, they bend over their chores, barely moving away from their positions. Nothing of what they do seems to have any tangible impact on their environment. Their efforts are purely performative. They sweep, build, clean and cut for the sake of it.
Total Refusal, Hardly Working, 2021
Total Refusal, Hardly Working, 2021
At night, they don’t work but they do not really sleep either. They don’t need to. They are the ideal workers. Yet, that is when you suddenly feel sorry for them: they sit on a street corner, stare into space, loiter in a bar, waiting for their “shift” to start.
The artists call the NPCs in the game “digital Sisyphus machines”. A voice-over comments on their fate, their monotonous existence, the absence of children, the resignation on their faces. Yet, not everything runs smoothly in the digital Far West, sometimes the characters glitch, hesitate and show their flaws.
The work, Total Refusal explains, probes some of the issues posed by labour in late-stage capitalism. Are our bullshit jobs any more glorious? Are we the NPCs of our own system? How absurd does human labour have to be in order to ensure social order? Can we start glitching, individually and collectively?
Total Refusal, Hardly Working (excerpt), 2021
Total Refusal, Hardly Working, 2021
Total Refusal, Hardly Working, 2021
Out of Office. This isn’t working for us is at IMPAKT Centre for Media Culture in Utrecht until 10 April 2023.
Hardly Working will be screened at the Museum of Interactive Cinema in Milan, as part of Neither Artificial Nor Intelligent program, Milan Machinima Festival 2023 on March 25 2023.
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| THE ORIGINAL? DropLabs EP01 Vibrating Sneakers – 2019 Syncing music to shoes that vibrate Source : TechCrunch, The Verge Agency : DropLabs (Israël) |
LESS ORIGINAL Anghami – Sole Music – 2023 Syncing music to soles that vibrate Source : Dubaï Lynx, BestAdsOnTV Agency : And Us (United Arab Emirates) |
As augmented reality, metaverse activations and gaming formats of all kinds continue to grow as media channels, marketers are looking for high return-on-investment ways to advertise within the sector. But that’s proving relatively slow to materialize. While interest in the metaverse has cooled off somewhat since the peak of hype last year, brands are continuing…
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