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 beyond the glossy and hyperreal textures of this media.
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.
Club Stahlbad takes a stab at the dysfunctionality of the established spaces of entertainment, where “fun” is obligatory as a ritualized counterpart to “labor” - subordinating both work and “free time” to the logics of capital accumulation.
Cooking & Culling is a live ingame lecture performance dealing with economic developments related to the service sector and the economy of attention, viewed through the frame of TV cooking shows.
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.
In Flowers don't care Total Refusal explores the indestructible nature of the flora in three different war video game environments.
Everything started with a utopia. To end the antagonism between the oppressors and the oppressed, between the owners and the own-nothings. To create a society that would be truly free, equal and solidaric.
For the duration of one week, video game avatar and NPCs are transformed into social media influencers. Their profiles are created in multiple social media channels such as Tinder, Instagram, Zoom, Twitch and TicToc.
Washed away from their alpine pastures, cows pass the riverbanks of Graz, floating in the stream as buoys of industrialized livestock.
The constructedness of the digital firmament becomes visible and points of contact between late capitalists, conspiracy theorist and romanticist world experience open up.
A turbulent crash-course in the art of counter-playing and misusing the violent world of GTA V
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.
As part of the digital scenery, playgrounds are not really usable in shooter games. They document different attempts to interact with the dysfunctional objects, showing how difficult it is to actually play within a video game.
"My character was disconnected, not my brain. " (User “not-a-jedi-yet” on reddit.com)
The video shows how a rough cuboid modeled out of the bullets of shooter game.
A city through through the architecture of an online shooter game.
"Wow, whats over this side? Ah, isn't this landscape just beautiful? Wow, this place is perfect! Alright, I'm staying here, don't care, I'm staying here. Haaaaaaaaa!"
JOY visualises the desire to be scared and the joy of watching people being scared while playing horror games.
For the earth to live,
capitalism needs to die. <3
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).
Video artist, explores the relationship of the body to its technologically mediated environment
Artist, musician, programmer for film series on politics of remembrance (Filmclub Tacheles, JFW)
Artist & cultural anthropologist, board member of Forum Stadtpark in Graz
Artist, game theorist and lecturer, studied Visual- and Media Art in Linz, Leipzig and Vienna and holds a PHD in Cultural Studies
Philosopher, media culture researcher, builder, designer,
former competitive gamer
Artist & filmmaker, studied at the Nordland College of Art and Film in Lofoten, Norway.
Media artist/theorist, game developer, teacher
Researcher, lecturer, publisher, virtual photographer and organizer of the Let’s Play Critical event series, PHD in Game Studies (University of Cologne)
Vladimir Nadein — film curator, artist and producer.
Artist, composer, architect
Sound designer
Artist, filmmaker, gamer
Gamer and researcher
Choreographer and dancer
Sculptor and architect
Art producer
Distribution agency, advisor and film ambassador (Marija Milovanovic, Valerie Dirk)
Film Producer (Lena Weiss / Eugen Klimt)
The Artificial Museum (ARM) showcases independent art on a web-based, avant-garde Augmented Reality platform.