The Inexorable Non-Player Character

The Inexorable Non-Player Character is a performance by Nina Davies and 2girls1comp looking into how our digital and physical bodies are inevitably shaping each other.

The piece emerges from a collision of two earlier works. Nina Davies’ Precursing investigates NPC dance trends on TikTok as subconscious acts of resistance against a future dictated by predictive technologies. Modding duo 2girls1comp's Dancing Plague is a video game mod where male NPCs in GTA V are commanded to perform dance moves coded for the game's female characters, who now instead sit and watch.

Together, these two works merge into an uncanny live performance built on the online dance trends that trace their roots back to digital spaces, asking how our physical bodies and our machines are caught in feedback loops, reshaping each other. Through speculative routes, The Inexorable Non-Player Character reveals how these feedback loops end up influencing predictive technologies and AI systems. The performance plays with poetics of automation, digital liminality, performed self and loss and finding of spontaneous agency in a pulsating entanglement of the offline and online bodies.

This 30-minute-long site-specific performance was first commissioned and presented in Berlin by transmediale festival in 2025 and a new version is now presented for the first time in Helsinki by Art and Media Culture Agency M-Cult in collaboration with Zodiak – Center for New Dance. The performance is part of M-Cult's Gaming the Civic programme, which invites audiences to experience, play, and take part in game-based artworks that explore civic engagement and democratic participation in public spaces.

Gaming the Civic programme is supported by Alfred Kordelin Foundation and AVEK Audiovisual Centre. The performance is supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, the British Embassy and Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland.