The BackRoom of Cuteness & Playable Warfare w/ Noura Tafeche & Total Refusal

Be My Guest! — On the Lure of Cuteness and Playable Warfare will unfold as a live networked dinner performance and special episode of WebRTC BackRooms by Me AndOther Me, in conversation with Noura Tafeche and Total Refusal. At Kontejner, we will gather around a dinner table that extends into an oddly cute virtual space. Virtual cameras will move through images and objects that seem not to belong together — a body pillow and a rifle, a TikTok dance and a military uniform, an NPC endlessly repeating the same task. As we eat, the table will become a lens through which these fragments open onto videogame worlds, platform economies and military infrastructures. Noura Tafeche’s research into Kawayoku will guide us through the strange intimacy between cuteness, military aesthetics and platform culture. At the same time, Total Refusal’s counter-playing will open videogame worlds from within, tracing questions of desertion, NPC labour and player agency. Their practices will meet around a shared concern with how images, interfaces and platforms quietly shape the ways we make sense of the worlds around us. Across the evening, images will mutate and return, gradually revealing how fantasies of heroism, forms of labour, demands for visibility and political ideologies move through the increasingly blurred languages of entertainment, propaganda and play.