Red Redemption is an online lecture-performance by artist collective Total Refusal, presenting a crash course on Marxism and class analysis through the mass medium of the video game Red Dead Redemption 2, a western-themed action-adventure game set within a large and vivid open world.

Located in the southern USA, the capital city of Red Dead Redemption 2, Saint Denis, is a pastiche of New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century. Against the backdrop of hundreds of non-player characters (NPCs) depicting various social classes — women and men toiling in factories, middle-class men visiting the theater, and the bourgeois leisure class reading in well-tended gardens — a pseudo-marxist city tour of Saint Denis, led by a robot and two German children, reveals the class relations that shape its cityscapes, mirroring physical capitalist realities.

Red Redemption analyses profit and surplus value, capital, and accumulation through the medium of a video game. It offers an insight into the social, economic, and political realities that exist within digital and physical worlds through the collective’s artistic intervention in the video game.

A conversation afterwards will be hosted by SAM curator Duncan Bass. This session is held in conjunction with the series Open Systems Broadcasts.