Together with LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, and in collaboration with EMAP, L.E.V. Festival presents Hardly Working, by media guerrilla Austrian collective Total Refusal (Susanna Flock, Adrian Haim, Jona Kleinlein, Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, Michael Stumpf). An audiovisual installation with a clear political content, where the main characters in the film are NPCs, non-playable characters who always play supporting roles in video games. 

These digital extras don’t have any relevant roles in the plot, but their work is analyzed with ethnographic accuracy in this piece. The audience observes how the actions of a laundress, a stableman, a street sweeper, and a handyman don’t generate any change, product or social benefit; but are performed in the story 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. But 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.