Humans bossing humans around, non-player characters lost in routine, and Sora making anyone a movie maker. A/V for this virtual moment

Our occasional audio-visual sample of the profounder end of the digital content pool. Above, a string of adverts for a job agency in Thailand, by Wuthisak Anarnkaporn. Some of the best alienation scenes in the modern workplace you’d hope to see.

Along the same “critique of work” theme, here’s this intriguing montage of games footage, contextualised by Aeon:

Does capitalism make ‘non-playable characters’ of us all? An uncanny exploration

‘There will never be enough nails in the wood.’ The ‘pseudo-Marxist’ Austrian art collective Total Refusal creates short films with visuals generated entirely from within popular video games. In Hardly Working, they train their focus on just a few of the hundreds of non-playable characters who populate the background in the western action-adventure game Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018).

These often-seen, rarely scrutinised carpenters, laundresses, stable boys and street sweepers occupy a circular, uncanny reality centred on the repetitive tasks that hardly make a mark on the world around them. At first dryly humorous, the proceedings grow disquieting as the narrator prods the viewer to consider the ‘infinite loop of labour performance’ of life within a capitalist system.

This is more of a placeholder for a benchmark - but it’s worth noting that we tend to run videos here that are made by human auteurs (though not entirely - some abstract animation over the years). But OpenAI’s launch of Sora, its text-to-video AI converter, is a good excuse to begin sampling what is going to be a major source of A/V for us going forward. Certainly, the quality of the text prompt for the computations is key: some appalling cuteness, and some adolescent genre fantasy, spoil the mix above. But the implications - that our verbal imaginations can be near-instantly realised in video/fim - are enormous. We can only hope (and maybe educate) for more William Blake’s in this world, than penny dreadful merchants.