LET’S PLAY: BREXIT REALITY /
LET’S PLAY: BREXIT REALITY /
Performance
Art historian Valentina Tanni and the Marxist media guerilla Total Refusal meet in the city of London by playing the game Watch Dogs Legion. The lecture performance will centre on Valentina Tanni’s upcoming book, Exit Reality. Tanni's book 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 with reference to London’s appearance in the game. The city, as uncanny as it is familiar, is not only an illustration of a techno-capitalist nightmare, but also a wild playground for hackers and gamers.
In collaboration with Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana. Free tickets will be available on the day of the lecture
Valentina Tanni is an art historian, curator and lecturer. Her research is centred on the relationship between art and technology, with a particular focus on internet culture. She teaches Digital Art at Politecnico University in Milan; New Media Aesthetics and Contemporary Art Language at NABA – New Academy of Fine Arts in Rome; as well as Meme Culture and Aesthetics and Digital Media Culture at the John Cabot University in Rome. She has published three books: Random: Navigando contro mano, alla scoperta dell’arte in rete (Link Editions, 2011), Memestetica: Il settembre eterno dell’arte (NOT/Nero Editions, 2020–2023) and Exit Reality: Vaporwave, backrooms, weirdcore e altri paesaggi oltre la soglia (NOT/Nero Editions, 2023).
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 numerous prizes like the Diagonale Film Award for the Best Short Doc and the Vimeo Staff Pick Award. 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 have been exhibited at various exhibition spaces like the Architecture Biennial Venice 2021, the HEK Basel (2020) and the Ars Electronica Linz (2019).