Background, Action! is a video made in the out-of-bounds spaces of Cyberpunk 2077. Borrowing the command language of a film set, the work redirects “action” away from event and toward maintenance. The figures it follows are not NPCs but algorithmic crowd fillers, generated to sustain the appearance of a populated world until more detailed bodies are required.
The work foregrounds this normally unseen layer of world-making and connects these proxy bodies to questions of background labour, interchangeability, and the systems that determine which bodies become visible and which remain infrastructural.
The soundscape is built entirely from processed bodily material, carrying traces of a human body pushed almost beyond recognition.
Digital video (machinima), 3840 × 2160, 4:30 min.
Made with Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Projekt Red)
Sound: Perclane
A related essay extends some of the ideas behind the work. It brings together my artistic out-of-bounds game practice and experience working as a film extra across multiple productions to trace the industrial and theoretical relation between film extras, simulated crowds, and background labour.
[link to read]
2026
Background, Action!, video stills.