Let’s Play: Brexit Reality

Art historian Valentina Tanni meets the Marxist media guerilla Total Refusal in the city of London by playing the game Watch Dogs Legion. The lecture performance centres on Valentina Tanni’s book Exit Reality, which explores a world saturated with hallucinatory qualities, emerging like a parallel planet from the galaxies of codespace. Walking, driving and flying through the digital city, they discuss the book’s central argument as it relates to London’s appearance in the game. The city, as uncanny as it is familiar, is not only the illustration of a techno-capitalist nightmare, but also a wild playground for hackers and gamers. Let’s Play delves into the question whether there is an exit from the surveillance technology dystopia we call reality within all constraints and dialectics of mass media.

Exit Reality is published in Italian by Nero, with the English translation co-published by Nero and Aksioma released in May 2024 as part of the .expub European project.