[ominous sound] [soft music] [waves crashing] - There you go. - Hey, how’s it going? - This is great. - When would that have been? - When? - Yeah - Oh god, I don’t know how many years… Fifteen years or so... - It looks like a really great party space. - Oh, we had some good times there. - My wife used to say, uh... “How come you go down there to cook?” “You can’t cook when you’re hungry.” - It all depends on the situation, eh? - Yeah, but you have to have the right environment for inspiration. -
Perfect. Woah, they’re nice and blue, eh! - What makes them more blue than usual? - Eh, some of them are different colours. - So they’ve been... What are you... where are these guys sittin’ at? - He pinched me! Sorry! - You’re on video, I can’t tell you. - It’s true. - Jonathan, they’ll pinch you. It’s so cute. - Woah. - Cool! Thank you so much. - I wouldn’t leave them out of water too long. ’cause like, uh... - they don’t like it in the warm too much like this. - So we’ll put them in the fridg
e? - If it’s cooler... you can put ‘em in the fridge - There we go. - Yeah, I guess in the winter time we were keeping them outside, but yeah. - Oh yeah. - We’ll put them in the fridge. - Get some ice... - Okay! - Thanks, Albert! [guitar music] - That’s... the end! - This is to make your life easier. - Thank you, Tommy. - You are the expert at that. - No... I just look like it, I guess. - You look like it when you’re wearing those shades, for sure. [harmonica and guitar music] - Not much else I
can say. You got some water there... - Yeah, the fizzy stuff. Do you like that? - Yeah, yeah. - Wait, did you prepare it? - Oh yes. What did you think I was making all that noise for? It might... I thought I did a pretty good job. - Did you fill it thrice? - Thrice. I did. - Well, thrice filled... You know what they say: Thrice filled is best. - Tommy approves. - Is it fizzy? It doesn’t look fizzy... - Just trust me! - I like... I shook it so hard! [heavy breathing] - Oh, I didn’t include the ga
me... The press... the trailer, sorry. We're gonna need to rethink this. - Well, once we have changed the um... components of it, just in terms of there being like one screen with like a box and a background, and then things inside the box the way they are... - Mmhmm... - the faster I can do it. - Can I just scroll through... There’s one thing... So with all of these, the boxes... they're just... the cropping is really, really close. - That’s the aesthetic. - I know But I think, like, it... it t
akes away from the accessibility of like, actually reading the text. - Yeah. - And I think that... - It’s a lazy aesthetic. - And then I think this is like not doing anything here just because it comes at the end. It's not really a call to action to like, like, we should just be entirely just: game, game, game, download and forget about like... we should have a link to the larger thing. But then even here, like with all the... With our links to social media, they're so small and they're they jus
t look the same as like... They just look like a part of the image there. - Good to go? - It started as this way to break down the idea of techno feudalism. And that's why it's actually like a “peasant sim.” And like now we have here, we have all these additional systems that are on top of it. I mean, we need it for like the tech system, we need the commodity system if we are going to have those mechanics. But we do still have this really strong aesthetic of Farmville farm simulator, MORPG, um..
. We don't want that sort of data harvesting Vegebit system to be overshadowed too much by... the just the exchange system right off the bat. - But I think you have to remember that the system of exchange is a framework for the entire economy that we want to model here, even though at the same time, it's a... We want to talk about something that's almost post-capitalist in that it's a feudalism that is after capitalism, while at the same time it's constructed on a capitalist system of exchange a
nd commodities. - Mmhmm. The player takes the role of the peasant in this, in Peasant Sim. Because you're... You're just playing as yourself, you’re playing as somebody who like logs online but has a very particular relationship to... to ownership relationship... Type-relationship with whatever you produce. - We are trying to make the peasant garb visible and you're wearing the peasant garb and you're using the peasant implements like the hoe, the rake, the shovel, the... the barrel, the cart. A
nd then the whole process... The point of the whole app is to make people see their peasant garb to take off the glasses of ideology that are hiding the peasant garb from you, and so that you can realize the extent to which you are peasantry. Yeah, one prominent underlying theme is the lie of um... progress under capitalism, in a way. Or that... one thing you're talking about about Marx and people mistakenly maybe thinking that Marx is too obsessed with history and feudalism, especially, and dra
wing too
many conclusions from that. He was really interested in how capitalism worked at the time, and the dynamism that the circulation of commodities caused. - He wasn't getting down on the dumb trinkets that were being produced. He saw it as like a necessary step in order to move toward... To have that accelerated technological production, to be able to like have these machines that produce these things and made it possible for us to... organize labour in these... In a way that produced more
goods to serve the needs of more people. - And that that was a... a necessary step towards socialism that, like capitalism, does represent progress to a certain extent, towards like a better society. But, but that... The extent to which
capitalism is productive is long... Or, sorry... Progressive, has long since passed. Whereas now it's completely a conservative movement and completely about now regressing, actually sort of devolving. Capitalism, wanting to devolve itself back to a feudal state
, back to being... It wants to be what it came from, what it progressed away from, and return to more feudalistic relationship, so... And techno feudalism is then like a really easy way to talk about... like a broader... or it’s a particularly fruitful entry into like a broader Marxist dialogue, or like, to address the Marxist view of history. [birds chirping] - Oh mercy! [humming] [footsteps] I was thinking for the panel... or... well it doesn’t necessarily, like... Carrie, when we were talking
, when we were having our meeting, she was talking about like we could just have additional components to the exhibition. Mainly because like augmented... I think this will be the first
augmented reality-focused show that the gallery will be doing, so... it'd be a good opportunity for... for them, it’d be a good opportunity to have some sort of like more involved... aspect where the audience can actually kind of engage with the medium itself. Like, beyond the exhibition itself. But like thinking
about that space... - Right. - of augmented reality. And like we could... We have we can also have other people come on. But I was thinking with the Peasant Sim... [water splashing] [ominous sound] [soft music] [ominous sound] [soft music] [flute music]
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