“The videogame world is a space that constructs and transforms our dreams and desires. […] Games are more like dreams than they are like books or movies. As such, they can make visible structures of which they are not yet consciously aware.”
(Alfie Bown, The PlayStation Dreamworld)
Total Refusal’s Featherfall is currently exhibited on VRAL and will remain online until February 11 2021. An investigation of the complex relationship between dreaming and playing video games, Featherfall was originally conceived as a four channel video installation which takes the form of an immersive, curved structure reminiscent of gamers’ most extravagant set-ups. As Leonhard Müllner explains, the single channel machinima was created by combining “the overlapping scenes” via “a different editing” process. In the single channel machinima, several videos looping in “each of the four screens” are clustered together. Müllner adds that the videos displayed in each of the four monitors in the original installation have different lengths.
Total Refusal, Featherfall, installation view, 2019. (Photo: Courtesy of the artists)
This video, produced by Total Refusal, shows the original video installation:
In this short video produced by Karl Wratschko and Lilith Kraxner for the Culture Department of Styria Province A9 in the celebration of the Art Award of the Styria Province 2019, Total Refusal describe themselves as a “media guerrilla group”:
Total Refusal is Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, and Michael Stumpf. In their practice, they critically analyze and appropriate digital game spaces and recontextualize them. Playing games but ignoring the intended gameplay, Total Refusal allocates these resources to new activities and narratives, in order to create “public” spaces imbued with critical, even subversive potential. Leonhard Müllner works as an artist in the public and digital space and is currently writing his doctoral thesis at the Linz Art University at the Institute for Art and Cultural Studies. Robin Klengel works in Graz and Vienna as an interdisciplinary artist, illustrator, cultural anthropologist and vice president of the Forum Stadtpark. Michael Stumpf studied philosophy at the University of Vienna and now is an artist, designer and cultural theorist. Two of their works, Operation Jane Walk and How To Disappear: Deserting Battlefield, were featured in the 2019 and 2020 editions of the MFF respectively. Click here to read more about Total Refusal.
