There’s this art installation called the Minimum Wage Machine. Between 2008 and 2010 conceptually-motivated artist Blake Fall-Conroy exhibited a box operated by a hand-crank, which spat out a US penny every four seconds, intended to be equivalent of working for the minimum wage in New York at the time. I take this art piece to be about how labour can be completely disengaged from utility. At your job, you create things you don t necessarily even consume. Marx, who had maybe one or two things to say about the role capital plays in culture, would call this “alienation”. How different, really, is turning a crank in an art gallery to lads in factories making electronics they ll never be able to afford? To collecting cocoa beans if you ll never get to eat a Freddo? For years I ve wondered if a big videogame might also try to leverage this kind of financial cynicism through interactivity.
I ve been playing Let It Die this week.