BPM

Total Refusal
BPM

Curated by
!Mediengruppe Bitnik

Exhibition
15 May–14 June 2024
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of Tactics&Practice #15: (Un)real Data – Real Effects

Nada Žgank / Aksioma | More

Digital machines work with striking rigour. Inexhaustible like metronomes, their existence is bound to precise rhythms and loops from which they cannot possibly escape. They never question their role in the process of value generation, they don’t unionise, they don’t strike. At the same time, the bug is an immanent feature of their existence. They regularly malfunction and resist to work as intended. What critical potential lies in the crippled struggle of algorithmic entities? Is the glitch a role model for resistance and labour strikes in the time of gamified digital capitalism?

Examining these questions, BPM critically negotiates the concepts of “work” and, as its counterpart, “leisure” on the example of non-player characters (NPCs) in video games. Video game spaces are examined with a humorous approach for their subversive potential, setting the stage for an updated critique of capitalism that focuses on human and non-human working conditions. The two multi-channel video installations, the ethnographical essay Hardly Working and the disco installation Club Stahlbad, both question the rhythmicality and loop-ness of life under capitalism. While the former focuses on the Sisyphus-like working life and the characters’ possible escape from it, the latter discusses the area of leisure as both a counterpart and an extension of the clocked work regime.

THE AUTHORS

The artist, researcher and filmmaker collective and pseudo-marxist media guerrilla Total Refusal (Susanna Flock, Adrian Haim, Jona Kleinlein, Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, Michael Stumpf) appropriates contemporary video games and writes about games and politics. They upcycle the resources of mainstream video games, creating political narrations in the form of videos, interventions, live performances, lectures and workshops.

Since its foundation in 2018, the group has received over 50 awards and honorary mentions, including the audience award at the Animateka Film Festival in Ljubljana and the European Film Award for best short film in 2023. Total Refusal’s work has been screened at over 250 film and art festivals, such as Berlinale, MoMA’s Doc Fortnight or the Oberhausen Film Festival, and exhibited at various exhibition spaces, like the Architecture Biennial Venice 2021, HEK Basel and Ars Electronica Linz.

CURATOR

!Mediengruppe Bitnik (read: the not Mediengruppe Bitnik) are contemporary artists working on, and with, the internet. Their practice expands from the digital to affect physical spaces, often intentionally applying loss of control to challenge established structures and mechanisms. In the past, they have been known to subvert surveillance cameras, bug an opera house to broadcast its performances to people at home, send a parcel containing a camera to Julian Assange and physically glitch a building. In 2014, they sent a bot called Random Darknet Shopper on a three-month shopping spree in the darknets where it randomly bought items like keys, cigarettes, trainers and Ecstasy, and had them sent directly to the gallery space. !Mediengruppe Bitnik’s works are shown internationally, and the group has received various awards including the Swiss Art Award, the PAX Art Award and the Golden Cube from Dokfest Kassel.

CREDITS

Author: Total Refusal

Production of the exhibition: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2024

Part of the series: Tactics&Practice

Techincal support: Glej Theatre, The Projekt Atol Institute

Financial support: the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, the Municipality of Ljubljana and Austrian Cultural Forum