The Inexorable Non-Player Character is a performance focusing on feedback loops in which digital and physical bodies shape one another.
The work links Nina Davies’ film Precursing with 2girls1comp’s Dancing Plague, a video game modification, through a new live performance based on online dance trends that have their roots in the GTA V series. By tracing the movements of NPCs from game worlds through TikTok videos to real-world contexts, the project reveals how they end up influencing predictive technologies and AI systems.
The performance is part of Art and Media Culture Agency’s Gaming the Civic programme, which brings together media art, game design, critical thinking, and the gaming industry. Programme explores how games can function as platforms for civic engagement and collective imagination.
Creators
2girls1comp is a modding duo founded in 2023 by Marco De Mutiis and Alexandra Pfammatter. Their work changes the logic of video games as an act of creative counter-play, revealing the social and economic fabric in which they are immersed: from reclaiming global digital infrastructures to commenting on free labor within the capitalist ideologies of the gaming industry.
Nina Davies is an artist who considers the present moment through observing dance in popular culture and how it is disseminated, circulated, made, and consumed. Previous research projects have included; the recent commodification of the dancing body on digital platforms and rethinking dances of today as traditional dances of the future. Oscillating between the use of fiction and non-fiction, her work helps build new critical frameworks for engaging with dance practices.
Her work has recently been exhibited at The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; Aksioma, Ljujljana; FACT, Liverpool; Western Front, Vancouver; and Artspace, Sydney, and she has performed her work at venues such as Tate Britain, Somerset House and The Photographers Gallery in London. In 2021, she co-founded Future Artefacts FM, an artist-run program that showcases artists working with speculative fiction for broadcast which she co-hosts with artist Niamh Schmidtke and curator Rebecca Edwards.
