Felix Klee

ARTICLE: THE LABOR OF GAME IN FELIX KLEE'S COSECHA MECÁNICA

Is appropriating a video game that glorifies capitalism to frame the delusions of the American Dream the ultimate subversive act? Felix Klee’s Cosecha mecánica creates a counter-narrative about labor, productivity, and exploitation.

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Created by Felix Klee in 2020, Cosecha mecánica (née Stoop Labor) is a short black and white machinima depicting several non-playable Latino and Latina characters working in the fields as American propaganda celebrating cheap Mexican labor plays in the background. At one point, a field worker sings “Lo que quiero es una máquina lechuguera” ("All I want is a salad harvesting machine").

Cosecha mecánica questions the relevance and function of so-called non-player characters (NPCs) within computer games (and the game industry as a whole) through the example of Latin American field workers in the globally successful video game Grand Theft Auto V. Their portrayal reproduces and simultaneously critique existing power relations. Cosecha mecánica — which was presented at the 2020 Milan Machinima Festival — climaxes with a NPC worker fleeing the scene and observing a derailed freight train from atop a hill, a metaphor for the disruption of supply-chain and the logic of “business-as-usual”.

Mechanical harvest - the literal translation of Cosecha mecánica - is a reference to the labor practices of the North American agricultural industry, whose workforce is almost equal in size to the so-called digital workforce, according to Nick Srnicek (Platform Capitalism, 2017).

Cosecha mecánica juxtaposes the propaganda film Why braceros? (1962) produced by the Council of California Growers to justify the “bracero” farm labor program to Californians who felt threatened by the influx of workers crossing the border from Mexico, contemporary audio field-recordings, and background characters of a video game to provide a commentary on labor practices in the XX and XXI centuries. For the record, between 1956 and 1959, over 400,000 Mexican workers were recruited by North American farmers to work in their fields: the program was discontinued in 1964, when Congress decided not to extend the law. Incidentally, sixty years later, immigration still plays a key role for the agricultural industry in the United States.

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ARTICLE: A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG ASSEMBLER

What does Felix Klee mean that the screenplay of My paws are soft, my bones are heavy was “written by an artificial intelligence language model”? A few notes about GPT-2 and their implications for machinima.

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Klee used a Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2) to generate the screenplay of his machinima. (GPT-2) is an open-source artificial intelligence created by OpenAI in February 2019 which can translate text, answer questions, summarize passages, and generate text output on a level that can be almost indistinguishable from human-generated content when used for short texts. One of the most popular applications based on this technology is, incidentally, a video game: AI Dungeon (2019) which used GPT-2 to generate dynamic text adventures based on user input. The screenplay of My paws are soft, my bones are heavy reads as follows:

My paws are soft.

My bones are heavy.

I can smell the sea.

I have an itch.

I can hear the wind.

I’m going to be here for a long time.

So let me take a nap.

My dreams have been full of death.

I’ve seen animals die and be reborn, but

never have I seen a human do the same.

So let me go into the ocean and drown.

It’s cold now.

I wonder if I’ll ever see land again.

The sea is my only home.

My one place where I can feel

myself, my body feels heavy.

My clothes are brutal.

My ears are tired.

I can hear my own heartbeat.

My tail is limp.

I can feel my own blood in my head.

I’m not human.

I'm not a beast.

I’m just another one of my kind.

And so I’ll stay here for as long as

it takes to get through the darkness

until the end of the world of the

world that I know I want to sleep.

I want to sleep.

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Emissary Forks At Perfection (live simulation, 2015-2016) Created by Ian Cheng, Producer Veronica So, Technical Director Samuel Eng, Modeling & Rigging Joshua Planz, Modeling Breht O'Hearn + Aaron Bohenick, Sound Design Greg Heffernan, Animation Chad Waldschmidt, Graphics Programmer Chris Clapis, Content Designer Jessica Wilson, Technical Artists Yang Wang + Zhenzhen Qi, Story Consultant Sean Manning + Alexander Benaim, Published by Metis Suns.

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EVENT: FELIX KLEE (MAY 13 - MAY 26 2022, ONLINE)

My paws are soft, my bones are heavy

digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound (stereo), 4’ 57”, Germany, 2021

Created by Felix Klee, 2021

Can an artificial intelligence dream? Apparently, yes. In this oneiric short, it imagines itself as a virtual mountain lion wandering through digital landscapes. After jumping off a cliff, the animal dives into the ocean, looking for some tranquility. Written by an artificial intelligence, narrated by a text-to-speech converter and shot within a modified video game, My paws are soft, my bones are heavy is blatantly post-human.

Felix Klee is studying documentary filmmaking at the University of Television and Film in Munich, Germany. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts Munich — where he studied time-based media under Julian Rosefeldt and painting under Pia Fries — Klee previously studied painting under Thomas Hartmann at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg and was a guest student at Universidad de las Artes Aguascalientes México. He co-founded the ReKollektiv, a collective of media artists and directors working towards the democratization of footage and a collectivist approach to film editing. From 2020-2022 he served as an advisory board member at Locarno Film Festival. Klee lives and works in Munich, Germany.

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