10.5.2025 | Saturday | Hope Alkazar | 15:45
Total Refusal Retrospective
World at Stake
Susanna Flock, Adrian Jonas Haim, Jona Kleinlein
17' 35'' | 2024 | Digital
Total Refusal
A golfer fails to strike, a soccer team plays against itself and a rally co-driver faces an identity crisis. They are surrounded by an audience unable to act. Shot in sports video games, the film "A World At Stake" turns the ordering principles of victory and defeat upside down and negotiates social roles between individual sovereignty and collective passivity. In the face of catastrophe, a feeling of political powerlessness remains. Nothing less than the world is at stake.
How to Disappear
Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, Michael Stumpf
21' | 2020 | Digital
Total Refusal
How to Disappear is an anti-war movie in the true sense of the word, searching for possibilities for 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.
Shot in the picturesque war landscapes of “Battlefield V”, the hyperreal graphics become the backdrop for an essay-like narrative. The filmrevolves around the history of deserters – a part of human history, which has hardly been illuminated. Performances and creative interventions explore the scopes and limits of the audiovisual entertainment machine.
Shot in the picturesque war landscapes of “Battlefield V”, the hyperreal graphics become the backdrop for an essay-like narrative. The filmrevolves around the history of deserters – a part of human history, which has hardly been illuminated. Performances and creative interventions explore the scopes and limits of the audiovisual entertainment machine.
Hardly Working
Susanna Flock, Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, Michael Stumpf
20' | 2022 | Digital
Total Refusal
Hardly Working gives priority to characters that normally fade into the background of video games: NPCs. NPCs are non-playable characters that populate hyper real worlds to create the appearance of normality. Usually these digital extras play no major role in the story of the game. Here a laundress, a stableman, a street sweeper, and a handyman are the four main characters of this film. With ethnographic precision, the film observes their daily work: a rhythm composed of loops that makes them work daily and tirelessly. Their work neither results in a product, nor does it change anything about their status quo. In light of Hannah Arendt description of ‘animal laborans’ – in contrast to the acting subject –, the NPCs as individuum are an exaggeration as their work performance actually manifests their status.
Kinderfilm
Adrian Jonas Haim, Robin Klengel, Michael Stumpf
11' | 2023 | Digital
It's an ordinary day in Grand Theft Auto V. And yet, the car-crowded streets are marked by a grave absence. Searching for clues, protagonist Edgar explores the uncanniness of his normality and rediscovers a beautiful yet nightmarish world.
Operation Jane Walk
Leonhard Müllner, Robin Klengel
16' | 2018 | Digital
Operation Jane Walk is based on the dystopian multiplayer shooter "Tom Clancy’s: The Division". In this work, the game’s digital warzone is appropriated with the help of an artistic operation. 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 whenever possible 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.
Total Refusal
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 with numerous prizes like the Diagonale Film Award for the Best Short Doc, the Contemporary Visual Arts Award of Styria Province and Vimeo Staff Pick Award among others. 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 been exhibited at various exhibition spaces like the Architecture Biennial Venice 2021, the HEK Basel (2020) and the Ars Electronica Linz (2019).
