Rutherford Chang’s high score on Tetris so far is 614,094, which puts him in second place globally and four places ahead of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. In his ongoing work Game Boy Tetris, the New York artist films himself playing the classic 90s puzzle game over and over again, as he attempts to reach the highest score ever recorded. All 1,555 of his so far attempts can be viewed on YouTube.

This week, as part of the Real Live Online festival of internet performance art, Chang will stream his efforts live. It’s something that thousands of people do every day on sites such as Twitch, where you can follow hardcore gamers as they expertly blitz their way through Call of Duty and the like. So what makes Chang an artist, rather than just a bloke with a camera and too much time on his hands?

Chang believes his mission reflects the modern workplace, where “we’re expected to repeat a specific task over and over” and “strive to be number one in our fields”. He points to the absurdity of this competition, which many people view as the sole path to success. “It’s the way capitalism makes us work, where you have to achieve more than others,” he says. “It’s endless, and it’s for everyone.”

He adds: “You can play what feels like a great game, but your score might not be impressive. Or you can lose based on one tiny mistake.”

You might think of Tetris as just a pleasant distraction on your commute, but it also symbolises humanity’s charge towards oblivion, according to Chang. “Every 10 lines you complete, you advance one level and the pieces fall faster,” he says. “Eventually they fall so fast that you can’t keep up and you die. You can’t ever beat the game. It’s about squeezing in as much perfection as possible in this limited time before your inevitable death.”

Whether you read Tetris as a parable for life’s finitude or the savagery of capitalism, there’s no denying the focus it requires. “It’s a pretty brutal game,” says Chang. “It definitely requires a lot of concentration, where you only think about this rudimentary logic. It’s meditative.” He laughs. “And it’s making me a better organiser.” Despite the acknowledged absurdity of his task, he could yet top Uli Horner’s world record of 748,757: “I can do it – all I need is a really good game.”

Game Boy Tetris is typical of Chang’s obsessional artworks. Born to Taiwanese parents in Houston in 1979, and schooled at Wesleyan university, he’s best known for We Buy White Albums, another ongoing work for which he snaps up original vinyl copies of the Beatles’ White Album. He now has 1,368. “It’s the ultimate record to collect – a blank canvas that’s sterilised,” he says. “But none of them are plain white any more; they all have a distinct character.” The album covers are covered in biro marks, scuffs and doodles, adding up to a triumph of rumpled humanity over mechanical reproduction.

Similar to his attempts to be Tetris champion, the White Album project is both possible and futile. “I could potentially get all of them,” he says. “But it’s absurd to try. I guess I’m interested in these impossible tasks I can try to complete, going to a point where no one else would go.”

Only the most finicky of artists would attempt works like Alphabetized Newspaper and NBC Nightly News, in which he re-edited the words in news stories, in print and video respectively, into alphabetical order. Part of a story about Donald Rumsfeld now reads: “detainees directed disputed do doctrine Donald effectively expect extract facility”. “I wasn’t sure what the resonances would be, or even if it would be intelligible, but it is,” says Chang. “There are a lot of frightening words used, mostly in relation to terrorism. We don’t really realise what exactly we’re taking in when we read it or watch it on the television.”

Tetris was the logical next step for Chang, an artist moving things around until they tell us something new. “I want to see deeper,” he says. “To rearrange things in a way that lets you see more.”

• Game Boy Tetris is streamed live on 10 January as part of Real Live Online.