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.

20

Kinderfilm

film, Aug.2023

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.

19

Club Stahlbad

installation, Feb.2023

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.

18

Cooking & Culling

performance, Aug.2022

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.

17

Hardly Working

film, Aug.2022

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.

16

Deconstructing the Bridge

film, Apr.2022

Dark Tourism in the Mud of Market Garden

15

Flowers Don't Care

installation, Apr.2022

In Flowers don´t care Total Refusal explores the indestructible nature of the flora in three different war video game environments.

14

Disaster Tourism

film, Dec.2021

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.

13

Felt Real, Might Delete Later

performance, Oct.2021

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.

12

Murpod

installation, Aug.2021

Washed away from their alpine pastures, cows pass the riverbanks of Graz, floating in the stream as buoys of industrialized livestock.

11

Superwonder

film, Apr.2021

The constructedness of the digital firmament becomes visible and points of contact between late capitalists, conspiracy theorist and romanticist world experience open up.

10

Red Redemption

performance, Apr.2021

A Crash Course in Class Analysis through St. Denis

9

Everyday Daylight

performance, Jan.2021

Total Refusal meets with filmmaker and artist Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis in Los Santos, the digital city landscape of video game GTA V, to go on an art tour through the game world and discuss the concept of hyperrealism in capitalist media.

8

How to Disappear

film, Feb.2020

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.

7

Swings don't Swing

installation, Oct.2019

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.

6

Featherfall

installation, Oct.2019

"My character was disconnected, not my brain. " (User “not-a-jedi-yet” on reddit.com)

5

Circumventing the Circle of Death

installation, Oct.2018

A pacifist finger exercise

4

Sculpturing a Peace Monument

installation, Oct.2018

The video shows how a rough cuboid modeled out of the bullets of shooter game.

3

Operation Jane Walk

film, Mar.2018

A city through through the architecture of an online shooter game.

2

Morgenerst Abendletzt

installation, Apr.2017

"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!"

1

JOY

installation, Apr.2012

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

Collective

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).



Total Refusal
Michael Stumpf

Michael Stumpf

Philosopher, media culture researcher, builder, designer,
former competitive gamer

Leonhard Müllner

Leonhard Müllner

*1987 in Graz, lives in Vienna
Artist & game theorist, studied Visual- and Media Art in Linz, Leipzig and Vienna and is a PHD candidate in Cultural Studies

Robin Klengel

Robin Klengel

* 1988 in Graz
Artist, illustrator & cultural anthropologist, board member of Forum Stadtpark in Graz

Jona Kleinlein

Jona Kleinlein

*1993 in Stuttgart, lives in Vienna
Artist & filmmaker, studied at the Nordland College of Art and Film in Lofoten, Norway.

Adrian Haim

Adrian Haim

*1991 Vienna, lives in Vienna
Artist, musician, editor at MALMOE Zeitung, programmer for film series on politics of remembrance (Filmclub Tacheles, JFW)

Susanna Flock

Susanna Flock

* 1988 in Graz
Video artist, exploring the relationship of the body to its technologically mediated environment. Lives and works in Vienna

Press