Peter Kolárčik started the master’s program at AVU during a long period of uncertain exploration when, after his podcast What Are You Working On?, he had no idea what to work on. He thus spent his first year trying to follow on his earlier experiments with conceptual intermedia humor, but he soon realized that this was a dead end. With some help from his teachers, he slowly began to explore what he had previously thought of a fun “side project”: songwriting. He bought himself a mixing board, watched guitar tutorials on YouTube, began taking vocal lessons, and finally found something that he enjoyed working on continuously (although his teachers felt he could have worked even more).

For his graduation project, Kolárčik presents three songs from an upcoming album on the subject of wage labor. The title track Robota (Work) and the accompanying video address his outlooks for a lucrative job as someone with a master’s degree in art while also looking at the necessity of wage labor as a source of income for meeting one’s basic needs. Using hyperbole and exaggeration, he describes a situation in which the most interesting art is done by artificial intelligence, while the most boring work is done by artists.

The song KFC, by comparison, is somewhat more serious in tone. An employee of a 24-hour KFC who woke Peter up every night by noisily tossing out the restaurant’s trash serves as a reminder of the absurdities of late late capitalism, which Peter tries in vain to escape via earplugs. His attempts at regular post-lunch naps prove equally futile, since the al-labor system refuses to adapt to his circadian rhythm. The post-lockdown song Nap thus calls for the establishment of a legal right to naps, implicitly asking: Of all the things that the lockdown brought us, why didn’t we keep naps instead of delivery services?