03/04/2025 – 30/05/2025
Preopening and guided tour: 03/04/2025, 18:00h
Opening: 03/04/2025, 19:00h
Permanent Raging Presence negotiates the spheres of work and leisure on the examples of video game NPCs (non-player characters) – not as opposites, but as two sides of the same coin: Labor and the reproduction of labor force.
Hardly Working is an ethnographic video installation that explores human working conditions under capitalism. It draws on the algorithmic loops of work that constitute the day-to-day of the digital extras who populate video game worlds in order to simulate “normality”. The apparent metronomic structure and perpetual repetition that define their existence are shared by Club Stahlbad, a multimedia installation that follows the NPCs onto the dance floor. Here, the paradox of coded ecstasy makes for an awkward spectacle that is emblematic of the enforced entertainment within the capitalist mode of production. In truth, NPCs don’t need to reproduce their labor force. In many ways, they are the perfect workers – Sisyphus machines, so to speak. They don’t tire; they don’t organize, they don’t resist – that is if they function as intended. Because ultimately, it’s the glitch that opens a crack in the door to escape.
This exhibition is a collaboration between Shtatëmbëdhjetë and the Ars Electronica festival, in the framework of one of four themes of Galeria 17, Techne.
About the Total Refusal:
The pseudo-marxist media guerilla Total Refusal is a collective of artists, researchers, and filmmakers who upcycle the resources of mainstream video games to create political narratives in the form of videos, interventions, performances, and lectures. The collective’s themes are informed by critical game studies and social theory in an attempt to promote and popularize a counter-hegemonic left. Their work has been screened at over 300 film and art festivals and exhibited at various spaces. Since their foundation in 2018, Total Refusal have been awarded with more than 65 prizes and honorary mentions.
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This exhibition is supported by the Kosovar Civil Society Foundation (KCSF) program ‘EJA Kosovo’, co-financed by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and Sweden. Ministria e Kulturës, Rinisë dhe Sportit, National Gallery of Kosovo, SMART Balkans.