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The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
World at Stake
Credits: Total Refusal
Credits: Total Refusal
Credits: Total Refusal
Credits: Total Refusal
Credits: Total Refusal
Credits: Total Refusal
Credits: Total Refusal
Credits: Total Refusal
Credits: Total Refusal
A golfer fails to strike, a soccer team plays against itself, and a rally co-driver faces an identity crisis. They are surrounded by an audience unable to act.
Shot in sports video games, the film World At Stake turns the ordering principles of victory and defeat upside down and negotiates social roles between individual sovereignty and collective passivity. In the face of catastrophe, a feeling of political powerlessness remains.
Nothing less than the world is at stake.
Links: https://totalrefusal.com/home/world-at-stake
Directors: Susanna Flock, Adrian Jonas Haim, Jona Kleinlein
Screenplay: Susanna Flock, Adrian Jonas Haim, Jona Kleinlein
Producer: BMKÖS & ORF III, Pixel, Bytes + Film Stipend
Cinematographer: Susanna Flock, Adrian Jonas Haim, Jona Kleinlein
Sound recording: Susanna Flock, Adrian Jonas Haim, Jona Kleinlein
Sound design: Bernhard Zorzi
Editors: Susanna Flock, Adrian Jonas Haim, Jona Kleinlein
Composer: Adrian Jonas Haim
Modding: Nikola Supukovic, Jakob Sam
Color correction: Susanna Flock, Adrian Jonas Haim, Jona Kleinlein
Title design: Michael Stumpf
With support from: „Pixel, Bytes + Film“- Stipendium, Bundesministerium für Kunst, Kultur, öffentlicher Dienst und Sport (BMKÖS) in Kooperation mit ORF III
Susanna Flock (AT) explores body-tech relations and internet culture via video. She shows internationally, has won multiple awards, and is part of the collective Total Refusal since 2020.
Jona Manuel Kleinlein (AT), born in 1993 in Stuttgart, films, edits, and creates in digital and analog worlds and lives and works in Northern Norway.
Adrian Jonas Haim (AT), born in 1991 in Vienna, studied Political Science & Experimental Game Cultures and makes film, music, and politics in Vienna; programs for film festivals.
World at Stake subverts the logic of sports and spectacle within video games to explore powerlessness in the face of global crisis. A golfer fails to strike, a soccer team plays itself, a rally co-driver questions his role, while the audience remains frozen, unable to intervene. Through these loops of inaction, the film dismantles binary notions of victory and failure, revealing the paralysis that defines contemporary political life. Created by media collective Total Refusal, this machinima work reclaims virtual space to stage a haunting allegory of spectatorship, sovereignty, and the quiet dread of watching the world fall apart.