Total Refusal: The Gaming Environment As an Artistic Medium (Robin Klengel and Leonhard Müllner)
Austrian art-cinema collective Total Refusal (Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, Michael Stumpf) uses the virtual space of computer games to create original audiovisual essays. Operation Jane Walk, for instance, takes us on a guided tour of the streets of New York from the dystopian shooter-em-up Tom Clancy’s The Division, while How to Disappear tests the chances for desertion in the game Battlefield. Simple questions are explored to the extreme, absurd situations are staged in order to push the limits of the rules of the game, or bizarre photorealistic copies of real places form the starting point for an essay-like reflection on various themes that relate to much more than video games and their players.
Since 2018, Total Refusal’s short films have won a number of awards and have been screened at dozens of festivals around the world. The group’s most recent film, How to Disappear, premiered at the Berlinale in 2020.
Two of the collective’s three filmmakers (Robin Klengel and Leonhard Müllner) will discuss their approach to the gaming environment as a cinematic medium, the specific nature of their narrative techniques, and the possibilities offered by working within a creative collective.
The event will be in English.
- Austria
- 2022, 90 min
ceny Robin Klengel, born in 1988 in Graz, Austria, is a cultural anthropologist, media artist, and illustrator living in Graz and Vienna. Klengel studied cultural anthropology with a focus on urban research in Graz and Berlin. He does research, writes texts, gives lectures, workshops and courses, and makes films in the field of artistic-scientific research of urban and digital spaces. Since 2021, he has managed Forum Stadtpark, an interdisciplinary cultural center in Graz, collectively with Miriam Schmid and Markus Gönitzer.
He is a founder of the Total Refusal collective (with Leonhard Müllner, Michael Stumpf, Susanna Flock, Adrian Haim, and Jona Kleinlein). His experimental films Operation Jane Walk and How to Disappear have been shown at over 240 film and media festivals (Berlinale, Venice Architecture Biennale, MoMa, IDFA, and many more) and have won more than twenty awards (including Best Austrian Short Film at Vienna International Shorts; Explorer Award at A Maze Festival, Berlin; Loop Discover Award, Barcelona; Best Short Documentary Diagonale ’20, and many more).
Leonhard Müllner, born in 1987 in Graz, lives in Vienna, where he works as a visual artist and media researcher. He studied visual and media art in Linz (AT), Leipzig (DE), and Vienna (AT), and is currently a PhD candidate in media studies. Awards include the Vimeo Staff Pick Award, Best Austrian Film, and prizes at the Vienna Short Film Festival, the Shortwaves Film Festival in Poznan, and the A Maze Festival in Berlin.