Total Refusal – Digital Disarmament (Michael Stumpf, Leonhard Müllner und Robin Klengel)
Circumventing the Circle of Death
2018
© Total Refusal; photo © ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
- Artist / Artist group
- Total Refusal – Digital Disarmament (Michael Stumpf, Leonhard Müllner und Robin Klengel)
- Title
- Circumventing the Circle of Death
- Year
- 2018
- Category
- Video
- Computer-generated
- Installation
- Material / Technique
- digital video (mp4, H.264), color, sound, stereo; video game: Fireglow Games, »Sudden Strike 4«, (2017), Windows 10
- Dimensions / Duration
- 00:04:43, Loop
- Collection
- ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
- Description
- In »Circumventing the Circle of Death«, Total Refusal turns the algorithm of a war game against its own logic. The strategy game »Sudden Strike 4« makes its units fire on one another automatically the moment two enemy forces face off or come to a halt. Leonhard Müllner, Robin Klengel and Michael Stumpf exploit exactly this rule: they keep their tanks in perpetual motion, driving them in circles so that the two armies never directly meet. As long as the vehicles keep circling, the firefight the game would otherwise enforce never begins. What remains is an endless orbit – the only peaceful encounter the game permits between the warring sides. Over time, the tank tracks inscribe their path into the white snow of the game's landscape: a drawing produced by movement alone. The three artists call their action a »pacifist finger exercise«. Within a game that re-enacts the Second World War and is programmed towards annihilation, they refuse to fight without leaving the game. Nothing is won here; all that is achieved is the deferral of a death the game has already scripted – a small, persistent disarmament carried out with the game's own means.
Author
AIR
Images
Total Refusal – Digital Disarmament (Michael Stumpf, Leonhard Müllner und Robin Klengel), »Circumventing the Circle of Death«, 2018, Digital video, color, sound, stereo, 00:04:43, Loop, .© Total Refusal; photo © ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
Total Refusal – Digital Disarmament (Michael Stumpf, Leonhard Müllner und Robin Klengel), »Circumventing the Circle of Death«, 2018, Digital video, color, sound, stereo, 00:04:43, Loop, .© Total Refusal; photo © ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
Total Refusal – Digital Disarmament (Michael Stumpf, Leonhard Müllner und Robin Klengel), »Circumventing the Circle of Death«, 2018, Digital video, color, sound, stereo, 00:04:43, Loop, .© Total Refusal; photo © ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
