‘There will never be enough nails in the wood.’
The ‘pseudo-Marxist’ Austrian art collective Total Refusal creates short films with visuals generated entirely from within popular video games. In Hardly Working, they train their focus on just a few of the hundreds of non-playable characters who populate the background in the western action-adventure game Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018). These often-seen, rarely scrutinised carpenters, laundresses, stable boys and street sweepers occupy a circular, uncanny reality centred on the repetitive tasks that hardly make a mark on the world around them. At first dryly humorous, the proceedings grow disquieting as the narrator prods the viewer to consider the ‘infinite loop of labour performance’ of life within a capitalist system.
Directors: Susanna Flock, Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, Michael Stumpf
Website: Total Refusal
video
Family life
The precious family keepsakes that hold meaning for generations
10 minutes
video
Neuroscience
This intricate map of a fruit fly brain could signal a revolution in neuroscience
2 minutes
video
Archaeology
What did the first people who entered Tutankhamun’s tomb see?
5 minutes
video
Information and communication
Coverage of the ‘balloon boy’ hoax forms a withering indictment of for-profit news
17 minutes
video
Childhood and adolescence
Marmar is living through a devastating war – but she’d rather tell you about her new dress
8 minutes
video
Meaning and the good life
Wander through the English countryside with two teens trying to make sense of the world
10 minutes
video
Computing and artificial intelligence
The ‘cloud’ requires heaps of energy to stay aloft. Could synthetic DNA be the answer?
12 minutes
video
Art
A puppeteer makes sense of an overwhelming world by shrinking it down to size
5 minutes
video
History
There are fragments of Romani Gypsy history all over the UK – if one knows where to look
3 minutes