Hasta La Creative!

As technology continues to advance, so does the prevalence of cybercrime. Per the AARP, American families lost almost $7 billion to cybercrime in 2021 alone. Online security provider Aura wants to do its part to fight cybercrime, but to do so it needs a strong team. Luckily, there is one person willing to stand alongside…

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.

Source

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…

At the 95th Academy Awards on Sunday, Disney is set to make several new properties part of your world. Last year’s awards bounced back from a ratings low with an average of 16.6 million total viewers and a 3.8 rating in the key adults 18-49 demo. And the company is looking to build on those…

Coffee in the clouds, A protest against the Cannes Young Lions awards, TBWA’s North America CMO and more.

WeightWatchers capitalizes on Ozempic and Ford highlights women’s auto contributions–plus why it was a bad week for Pyrex.

The employee, Hernán López, and an Argentine marketing firm were accused of helping make illegal payments for rights to tournaments in South America.

Measurement company VideoAmp has hired its first CMO as it works to establish itself as a serious contender in the battle to dominate the space. Top line There’s been a vacancy for a lead measurement company since Nielsen lost its accreditation, and VideoAmp is looking to fill the gap. The company hired industry veteran Jenny…

On this week’s episode of To Dine For, host Kate Sullivan welcomes Randi Zuckerberg, entrepreneur and founder of HUG (and sister of Mark Zuckerberg). After graduating from Harvard with a bachelor’s in psychology, Zuckerberg was an early employee at her brother’s then-startup, Facebook. There, she created Facebook Live, learned the ins and outs of how…

For more than a dozen years Denny’s has positioned itself as “America’s Diner,” which means to convey a feel-good, nostalgic vibe without being stuck in the past or pegged as a boomer-only zone. With a new marketing campaign on the horizon, along with front- and back-of-the-house upgrades, Denny’s intends to refresh and restart its long-running…