Everyday Daylight

by Total Refusal [Graz/Wien]
Interactive game lecture performance in German language
80 minutes

How can one enjoy freedom in a world where the scope of action is predetermined by the code?

How do video games often feel more perfect, more real, more meaningful than the real world?

And how can these places be used for artistic practices?

As part of their computer game lecture, the group Total Refusal will meet in Los Santos, the digital cityscape of the video game GTA V. Together with the audience, they walk and drive through the digital metropolis and discuss their shared practice: as media artists, they intervene in contemporary video games, breaking their logic in order to deconstruct the mechanisms of their hyperreality. Along the way, they visit locations in the game that have been used as film sets for important works of media art.

The group Total Refusal describes itself as a »pseudo-Marxist media guerrilla«. One focus of their work is the artistic intervention and appropriation of mainstream video games. Their approach to video games aims to reveal the politically powerful mechanisms that lie beneath the glossy and hyper-real textures of these media.

Concept and text: Leonhard Müllner, Robin Klengel, Michael Stumpf in collaboration with Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis and Susanna Flock