by Adela Lovric // Aug. 21, 2026
This article is part of our feature topic Play.
On September 5th and 6th, M-Cult brings ‘The Inexorable Non-Player Character’ to Dance House Helsinki in collaboration with Zodiak – Center for New Dance. Through speculative routes, this 30-minute, site-specific performance by Nina Davies and 2girls1comp (a modding duo founded in 2023 by Marco De Mutiis and Alexandra Pfammatter) joins two of the artists’ earlier works.
Nina Davies’ ‘Precursing’ investigates NPC (non-player character) dance trends on TikTok as subconscious acts of resistance against a future dictated by predictive technologies. ‘Dancing Plague’ by 2girls1comp is a video game mod where male-presenting NPCs in Grand Theft Auto (GTA) V are commanded to perform dance moves coded for the game’s female-presenting characters. Colliding these with live performance, ‘The Inexorable Non-Player Character’ builds on the online dance trends that trace their roots back to digital spaces, asking how our physical bodies and machines are caught in feedback loops, reshaping each other.
Presented in a new iteration as part of M-Cult’s ongoing ‘Gaming the Civic’ program in Helsinki, which presents game-based artworks that explore civic engagement and democratic participation in public spaces, the performance was first commissioned and presented last year by Berlin’s transmediale festival. We spoke with Davies, De Mutiis and Pfammatter about the concepts underpinning ‘The Inexorable Non-Player Character’ and the liberatory potential of breaking traditional scripts and movements in gaming and performance alike.
Nina Davies: ‘Precursing,’ installation // Photo by Jonathan Bassett, courtesy of Matt’s Gallery and the artist
Adela Lovric: What connects the two earlier works that were brought together for your joint performance, ‘The Inexorable Non-Player Character?’
Marco De Mutiis: The link between the body and the digital space is shared by the two works, but in almost complementary ways. Nina is looking at the idea of NPCs as something that has become almost more human-recognizable by machines, so it becomes something that is used in physical worlds by actors, by communities, as a way to behave and move. We actually look at the virtual game world and how these movements can be modified inside this space.
Alexandra Pfammatter: They’re almost opposed to each other in a way. Nina considers how the digital influences the physical, and we look at the way that this idea of how people are supposed to move is simulated in a digital world. The dancers are bridging these two ideas conceptually together by connecting the screen and the audience through physical performance that is however influenced by digital movement.
Nina Davies and 2girls1comp: ‘The Inexorable Non Player Character,’ 2025, performance at transmediale Berlin // Photo by Laura Fiorio
AL: NPC dance trends on TikTok are generally perceived as playful, entertaining and sometimes absurd. Your work ‘Precursing’ treats them as “subconscious acts of resistance against a future dictated by predictive technologies.” Could you elaborate on your understanding of an NPC outside of the gaming context and the potential you see in the robotic, imitative choreographies of the TikTok dance trends?
Nina Davies: I usually start my works with a fictional script. I always ask why people are moving like this today, and usually I have to speculatively answer that question. I draw a lot from looking at the history of folk dances, which used to actually perform a function in society. The best example I have is a fertility dance, where the dance is the catalyst to something else happening. So I always try to look at these dances as if they were to perform a function in society. I cast my net wide to try and pick up some references. I discovered that self-driving cars are trained in the worlds of GTA, so I’d come up with this idea that computer vision is usually trained to find anthropomorphic figures when it’s looking at an image, and I thought it would naturally recognize these pre-programmed movements quicker than normal human movement, because human movement changes cross-culturally. So I wrote a story that almost became this health and safety practice of being able to control these cars around you, being able to be recognized more easily.
There are some really famous people on TikTok who started the “moving like an NPC in real life” trend. I’ve come across one of their clips where they were in motion capture suits, doing the NPC movements to put back into a game, and I thought there was something really interesting about the loop of these movements. The idea is that they originally came from humans and they get put into a game and then out of the game they get put back into human bodies, and now suddenly people are putting these movements back into games and there is this loop that seems to continue. With this work and a few others, I like to think about the practices of moving in digital ways as a form of communication with new technologies that goes beyond language but opens up new forms of non-linguistic communication. So the idea that if a self-driving car recognizes an NPC body quicker than a real body, that exchange is a form of communication.
2girls1comp: ‘Dancing Plague,’ 2025, installation // Courtesy of the artists
AL: In ‘Dancing Plague’ the gendered roles of GTA V’s NPCs are switched. Beyond the gender bias, what does this subversion of traditionally gendered choreography reveal about gaming and the systems embedded or mirrored in it?
AP: We often look at games as simulated realities and this is especially apparent if you look at a game like GTA V. It’s more than 10 years old but we’re still talking about a relatively contemporary idea of the USA. The simplification there is usually revealing a lot of political and social realities. When we looked at the animation catalog, we found dancing especially interesting because of how divided it is. The game is going through a system where it constantly looks at the surrounding NPCs and evaluates them and their status—for example, are they currently in panic, or what part of the map they’re on—as well as traits like gender and race. We saw that especially those dancing animations are assigned to a very specific smaller scale set of NPCs, which were female-presenting. We thought, on a simple level, this could be seen as the way players want it. GTA V is marketed towards a specific target group, which is young heterosexual men, so it made sense that there would be a strip club for the players’ enjoyment that only includes female-presenting dancers and that they are mainly the ones who need to be able to dance in the grander scheme of the game.
MDM: To go to the level of software, there is this idea that gender is a Boolean—a value that can only be true or false, for example. Going back to what Nina was saying that, if the digital body that comes from the games becomes very much part of a shared environment that is dictated by all of this machine vision system, then the link between the reality that is simulated in-game and the consequences that it has outside of the game becomes clearer and even more important. The act of modifying this game is very much linked to the consequences that it can have outside. It’s a way to reshape or reclaim the politics outside of it too.
AP: A lot of our work has to do with re-complexifying those simulations that have been flattened. We don’t want ‘Dancing Plague’ to be seen as just a straightforward “women have to dance where men don’t.” We wanted to open a bit more of an ambiguous space. The more we saw those very stereotypically male-presenting figures, like construction workers and gangsters, dancing in that way, we thought it’s not just a tongue-in-cheek critique. We also wanted something that can feel uncanny or liberating.
MDM: And I think dance has this power, because it has this ambiguous space of movements, this idea of liberating the male-presenting body through dance, because this game is very much a kind of macho narrative of the gangster that is very heterosexual, in charge. So the idea of having male-presenting bodies that can move in a certain way is liberating.
2girls1comp: ‘Dancing Plague,’ 2025, installation // Courtesy of the artists
AL: Both gaming and performance involve rules, roles, repetition and the possibility of modding or improvising. How does ‘The Inexorable Non-Player Character’ play with the tension between following a script and breaking it, between what we consider robotic and liberated?
MDM: In terms of game studies, there is the idea of performance or feedback loops between the human and the machine that goes back to the idea of the controller. You have the human movement that has to be synchronized with what the machine accepts, especially in specific games. But the romantic or traditional theory of game is that the pleasure is derived from the mastery of the games. People have also claimed the opposite—that the pleasure is being mastered by the machine because at the end of the day, it’s a series of button presses that we have to do that satisfies the operations of the machine. So I always think, how interesting is this idea of performance in relation to a softer hierarchy that we do subconsciously? The act of playing itself could be considered, at a micro level, a sort of machinic performance.
AP: We always start from the script, and the script is almost like a set of steps. It reminds me of Fluxus performance art, where you have a written set of performance steps and you give them to different actors. This is also at the heart of ‘Dancing Plague’—what if I take this step and give it to a different compiler, and see how it changes the air around it. That was also interesting for us to see when we worked with Nina, because, in this sense, we’re almost like the choreographers-as-programmers, but we are not performers ourselves. We give movements to a performer and see how they would deal with them. It comes with the issue of translating the language, because when we make a male NPC dance, we do it through functions. But if we now involve a performer, we have to find a different language to do that. So what we did for these collaborations, for example, we gave a visual aid to Nina and the dancers, showcasing this whole entirety of the catalog.
ND: I’ve been really interested in the questions of new economies of movement, and reading about movement capture programs. Mostly in the Global South, but also people in California are starting to do it for money, where they attach phones to their heads and perform tasks like folding up laundry. That data is being used to train humanoid robots. The perspective is almost like the main player perspective. We have people in the world acting like real NPCs. And now we have people performing the movements of player characters to train these robots in the way that games used to provide a simulation for training in, say, battle combat or flying a plane. The real world has almost become a simulation game for humanoid robots to be able to train and prepare for this world. I’ve been thinking about how—maybe not so much in terms of performance in the classical sense, but—we are beginning to perform the game. And in a weird way, by being an NPC, you’re retaining some agency over your own movements. I have been working for the past year with a performer, Torien Cafferata, who had a really great example about this constant state of amnesia that a main player character is in in a game, looking through everything in the house to try and decide who they are. This constant state of amnesia is potentially where we may be heading.
Nina Davies: ‘Precursing,’ 2023, performance // Photo by Jonathan Bassett
AL: ‘The Inexorable Non-Player Character’ is presented as part of ‘Gaming the Civic,’ a program concerned with participation and democratic engagement in public space. What does an NPC—or a figure behaving like one—have to teach us about participation and citizenship?
MDM: I think the notion of “main character syndrome,” something that we’ve seen also bleeding out of the game space, is becoming a political metaphor. The NPC has become associated with a specific political meaning. We don’t claim to have an activist performance, but at the same time, there is something about taking this figure of the NPC, and even just seeing people performing and dancing as an NPC, that allows reflection about the relationship between these two worlds, which I would argue also has an intrinsically political dimension to it. We talked about metagames, and about how gamification in the past 10 to 20 years has spread out in the public space, as well. So I don’t think it’s far-fetched to imagine that this performance can be read as something that has different political implications in the civic dimension.
ND: The idea of resisting photographic capture is loosely a theme in all of my works. I think right now, with behavioral detection technology and machine vision, being able to recognize gait rather than just facial recognition, we’re at a point where, once movement becomes translatable into language, suddenly it starts to mean something. But the problem is that when we move, we’re not necessarily moving super consciously, so it’s a language that we essentially don’t have control over. That’s obviously used in interrogation systems of looking at nonverbal communication as tells of what someone is feeling. And I think that, maybe not specifically NPC, but the practice of dancing in general is a practice of being able to move towards consciously moving your body and practicing ways of moving your body. In that sense, I do sometimes wonder whether we’re subconsciously seeing these digitized forms of people moving rise because they actually do perform something in the digital surveillance world that we live in now.
Performance Info
Dance House Helsinki
Nina Davies & 2girls1comp: ‘The Inexorable Non-Player Character’
Part of M-Cult’s ‘Gaming the Civic’ Program
Performance: Saturday, Sept. 5; 4pm
Sunday, Sept. 6; 1pm & 3pm
Talk: Sunday, Sept. 6, 2026
m-cult.org
Kaapeliaukio 3, 00180 Helsinki, Finland, click here for map
