TOTAL REFUSAL RETROSPEKTIVA /
TOTAL REFUSAL RETROSPEKTIVA /
Total Refusal describe themselves as a pseudo-Marxist media guerrilla that criticizes and artistically appropriates contemporary video games. However, as most mainstream game narratives employ the same infinite loops of reactionary tropes, the genre largely fails to challenge the values of their players and instead affirms hegemonial moral concepts. Acknowledging that this media is currently not realizing its cultural potential, the collective aims to appropriate digital game spaces and put them to new use. Moving within games but casting aside the intended gameplay, we rededicate these resources to new activities and narratives, looking to create »public« spaces with a critical potential.
In cooperation with the Austrian Cultural Forum Ljubljana. Screening in the presence of the filmmakers.
Superwonder
Total Refusal, Austria, 2021, digital format, 16 : 9, colour, 4' 33'', ap, svp
The starting point is the observation of digital worlds in current open-world engines spread out their cosms on pre-aristotelian discs. In Superwonder, avatars set out to penetrate the supposed infinity of the universe surrounding him. So the constructedness of the digital firmament becomes visible and points of contact between late capitalist, conspiracy theorist and romanticist world experience open up.
Featherfall
Total Refusal, Austria, 2019, digital format, colour, 10' 21'', svp
The video installation "Featherfall" is based on research in online forums in which video players exchange their dream experiences. "Featherfall" ties in with the archetypal nightmare of "falling down", which often occurs during puberty. Falling without ever landing" exists in video games in the form of a recurring programming error - a glitch - through which the avatar falls beneath the surface into the empty, non-programmed space. The glitch as a digital nightmare.
Operation Jane Walk
Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, Austria, 2018, digital format, colour, 16' 14'', svp
Operation Jane Walk is based on the dystopian multiplayer shooter "Tom Clancy’s: The Division". Within the rules of the game’s software, the militaristic environment is being reused for a pacifistic city tour. The urban flâneurs avoid the combats and become peaceful tourists of a digital world, which is a detailed replica of Midtown Manhattan. While walking through the post-apocalyptic city, issues such as architecture history and urbanism are discussed.
How to disappear
Total Refusal, Austria, 2020, digital format, colour, 21', svp
An anti-war movie in the true sense of the word, How to Disappear searches for possibilities of peace in the most unlikely place of an online war game. It’s a tribute to disobedience and desertion - in both digital and physical-real warfare.
Hardly working
Total Refusal, Austria, 2022, digital format, colour, 20' 34'', svp
NPCs are digital Sisyphus machines that have no perspective of breaking out of their activity loops. In the moments when the algorithm shows inconsistencies, the NPCs break out of the logic of total normality, and appear touchingly human.
Kinderfilm
Total Refusal, Austria, 2023, digital format, colour, 11' 35'', svp
It's an ordinary day in the game »Grand Theft Auto V«: The streets are crowded with cars; people follow their routines, barbecue in their gardens or sunbath on the beach. And yet the game world is marked by a grave absence: a missing future that was suspended out of safety concerns.
Protagonist Edgar follows the traces of what is missing in the algorithm of his reality. Exploring the uncanniness of his normality, he rediscovers a beautiful yet nightmarish world.
The pseudo-Marxist media guerilla Total Refusal explores and practices strategies for artistic intervention in contemporary computer games. It works with tools of appropriation and rededication of game resources. Since its foundation in 2018, the collective has been awarded numerous prizes like the Diagonale Film Award for the Best Short Doc and the Vimeo Staff Pick Award. Total Refusal has been screened at more than 130 film and video festivals like Berlinale (2020), Doc Fortnight at MoMA New York and IDFA Amsterdam (2018), and they have been exhibited at various exhibition spaces like the Architecture Biennial Venice 2021, the HEK Basel (2020) and the Ars Electronica Linz (2019).