Total Refusal

“Introducing this live online performance, a class analysis of Saint Denis. It’s like a basic crash course in Marxism, but done in the most capitalist medium of our times, the video game”. Thus begins the machinima film by Total Refusal, the multiple award-winning group from Vienna. Machinima (machine+cinema) is the production of films using video games with new storylines and scripts. Creators arrange to meet in virtual worlds, usually popular games, attempting to tell stories of their own, often speaking their own prepared lines. So-called non-playable characters (NPCs) are often given a new role. In “Red Redemption”, we find ourselves in Saint Denis, based on the US-American city of New Orleans during the beginning of the 20th century. Workers toil in factories and sit in the mud outside their huts at night, while the bourgeoisie read newspapers and poetry in well-tended gardens or go to the theatre. Hundreds of NPCs meticulously enact the same class relations characteristic of both virtual and real urban capitalist cityscapes. In this sort of Marxist city tour that Total Refusal is restaging for HAU, the artists use political precision and humour in the mass medium of video games to analyse profit and surplus value, capital, and accumulation.