Mag. art, visual artist Müllner Leonhard

How to disappear

How to Disappear deals with the topic of disobedience and the untold history of desertion within the material of online shooters set. Me and my collective Total Refusal creates ingame lecture performances based on texts dealing with war, objection and a research with the help of diaries, articles and studies of deserteurs from the First and Second world war to the Vietnam- and the Iraq war. Alongside the video game sequels Battlefield readers will be present in the game as avatars, and thus a large experimental part of the project lies in the unknown component of player interaction. The result will be captured in a short film. By appropriating the ingame voice chat, we will confront players with a series of curated literature excerpts. Readers will join both opposing players teams simultaneously and will be physically represented within the game world by their avatars. The lectures are then superimposed over the fictional entertainment landscape; they interlace with this audio-visual gratification machine; sincere voices fade into the delight of distraction. The readers aren’t supposed to be mere spoilsports; they are deserters, hijacking their fellow players from the fields of battle. “How To Disappear” is not intended as a paternalistic, moralistic performance, but rather one that appropriates the battlefield and the combatants as a stage and its audience and co-performers.