Sculpturing a Peace Monument documents a collective performance carried out inside the video game The Division. Using weapons designed for combat, players carve a stone monument in the middle of a virtual New York City. The act repurposes the limited toolset of the game, transforming instruments of destruction into devices for sculpting, as a rough cuboid is gradually shaped out of a concrete block. The image—composed of rapidly refreshed frames and saturated color—draws on the visual language of first-person shooter games, where precision and speed structure perception.

By staging an act of creation through mechanisms of violence, the work reflects on the entanglement of labor, leisure, and extraction within digital environments. The LED display itself—dependent on rare earth elements for its color and luminosity—anchors the moving image in material processes of extraction. What appears as immaterial action is thus sustained by mineral infrastructures. ‘Sculpturing a Peace Monument’ positions the viewer as a complicit bystander, confronting the ethical distance between action, representation, and consequence in increasingly mediated systems.

Total Refusal is a pseudo-marxist media guerilla focused on the artistic intervention and appropriation of mainstream video games. We upcycle video games in order to reveal the political apparatus behind the glossy and hyperreal textures of this media.
Video: https://totalrefusal.com/home/sculpturing-a-peace-moment