How to Disappear

How to Disappear – Total Refusal

Medium: Battlefield video game machinima essay film Date: 2020.

About How to Disappear

“How to Disappear” is an anti-war movie in the true sense of the word, searching for possibilities for 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.

About Total Refusal

Total Refusal is an open artists’ collective which criticizes and artistically appropriates contemporary video games. However, as most mainstream game narratives employ the same infinite loops of reactionary tropes, the genre largely fails to challenge the values of their players and instead affirms hegemonial moral concepts. Acknowledging that this media is currently not realizing its cultural potential, we aim to appropriate digital game spaces and put them to new use. Moving within games but casting aside the intended gameplay, we rededicate these resources to new activities and narratives, looking to create “public” spaces with a critical potential.

Vimeo link

The Convenience Store

The Convenience Store – Jonne Hansson

video still from The Convenience Store, 2018, digital video from Grand Theft Auto V in-game editor (PC), voice-over by Jonne Hansson, August Bällgren and Evelina Maria Odette Jönsson, sound design by Agatha Lewandowski

The story follows three (not long time ago) graduated artists who went to Umeå Academy of Fine Arts in Sweden and then moved to the fictional city Los Santos (based on Los Angeles) in hope to succeed as artists. They have struggled in living and working within different artistic fields. Some years have passed since they all graduated, and one day they accidentally meet each other in a convenience store. In a setting, similar to Kevin Smith’s cult classic “Clerks”, they are awkwardly starting to have a strange, meta-referential conversation with each other.

Jonne Hansson

MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL interview linkVimeo link