HARDLY WORKING | TOTAL REFUSAL

Hardly Working (2022) is a 4 channels video installation by Austrian collective Total Refusal (Michael Stumpf, Leonhard Müllner, Robin Klengel, Jona Kleinlein, Adrian Haim, Susanna Flock) and the fifth video intervention in the programming of Metamorphosis, the fifth edition of Digital Video Wall (DVW), an annual project curated by Gemma Fantacci and structured in thematic chapters aimed at promoting the dissemination and experimentation of digital art.

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. Usually, these digital extras play no major role in the story of the game. Here a laundress, a stableman, a street sweeper, and a handyman are the four main characters of this film. With ethnographic precision, the film observes their daily work: a rhythm composed of loops that makes them work daily and tirelessly. Their work neither results in a product, nor does it change anything about their status quo. In light of Hannah Arendt description of ‘animal laborans’ – in contrast to the acting subject –, the NPCs as individuum are an exaggeration as their work performance actually manifests their status.
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.

The pseudo-marxist media guerilla Total Refusal explores and practices strategies for artistic intervention in contemporary computer games. It works with tools of appropriation and rededication of game resources.
Since its foundation in 2018 the collective has been awarded with numerous prizes like the Diagonale Film Award for the Best Short Doc, the Contemporary Visual Arts Award of Styria Province and Vimeo Staff Pick Award among others. Total Refusal has been screened at more than 130 film and video festivals like Berlinale (2020), Doc Fortnight at MOMA New York and IDFA Amsterdam (2018) and they been exhibited at various exhibition spaces like the Architecture Biennial Venice 2021, the HEK Basel (2020) and the Ars Electronica Linz (2019).

Text, direction and concept: Susanna Flock, Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, Michael Stumpf / Music: Adrian Haim / Narration: Jacob Banigan and Lorenz Kabas / Lead Editing: Robin Klengel, additional editing: Susanna Flock, Leonhard Müllner / Camera: Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner / Modding: RCPisAwesome / Cast: A_F_M_Asbtownfolk_02 as “The Street Sweeper”, A_F_M_SDSlums_02 as “The Laundress”, A_M_M_NBXDockworkers_01 as “The Carpenter”, A_M_M_VALLaborer_01 as “The Stable Hand” / Coproduced by: Kunsthaus Graz / Cofunded by: Land Steiermark, Kunstraum Steiermark Stipend / The Work was realised within the framework of the European Media Art Platforms residency program at Werkleitz with support of the Creative Europe Culture Programme of the European Union.

© Total Refusal, Hardly Working, 2022, video still, courtesy the artist