EVENT: NATALIE MAXIMOVA (SEPTEMBER 4—17 2026)
Background, Action!
digital video/machinima, 4 min 30 sec, sound by Perclane, 2026, Russia
Created by Natalie Maximova
Introduced by Matteo Bittanti
Background, Action! extends Natalie Maximova’s out-of-bounds practice into the production infrastructure of open-world games. Where The Edge of the World (2021) pursued the hidden peripheries of Cyberpunk 2077, the new work turns that breach toward the engine’s reserve of background bodies. The video follows the low-resolution crowd figures that help sustain Night City’s appearance as a populated environment. Maximova distinguishes these figures from NPCs, calling them “algorithmic crowd fillers” generated to sustain the appearance of a populated world until more detailed bodies are required. Cars and pedestrians move through pale blue space, detached from pavement, architecture, and social context. The world-making apparatus becomes visible at the point where the rendered world drops away. The title borrows from the film set: “Background, action!” is the cue that sends extras into managed motion before the principal scene begins. Redirected to the game engine, the phrase shifts action away from the event and toward the low-level routines through which a city appears alive.
Natalie Maximova is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in London. Working across machinima, game engines, and post-photographic methods, her practice examines glitches, edges, liminal and out of bounds spaces as sites where the politics of mediation in simulated worlds become legible. A background in documentary photography underpins a sustained turn toward video games and computer-generated environments as critical objects. She has exhibited and screened internationally at venues and festivals including Somerset House, London; Milan Machinima Festival/VRAL; Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw; Athens Digital Art Festival, Greece; Image Forum Festival, Tokyo; the Film Studies Center at the University of Chicago; Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede; Peckham Digital Festival, London; and Espace Arlaud, Lausanne, among others.