Leonhard Müllner & Robin Klengel
Operation Jane Walk
A City Tour through the Architectures of an Online Shooter
Operation Jane Walk is based on the dystopian multiplayer shooter Tom Clancy’s: The Division. The game’s digital war zone is appropriated with the help of an artistic operation: Within the rules of the game’s software, the militaristic environment is being re-used for a pacifistic city tour. The urban strollers avoid the combats whenever possible and become peaceful tourists of a digital world, which is a detailed replica of Midtown Manhattan. While walking through the post-apocalyptic city, issues such as architecture history, urbanism and the game developer’s interventions in the urban fabric are being discussed.
Robin Klengel (born 1988 in Graz) lives and works as an artist, illustrator and cultural anthropologist in Vienna and Graz. He is interested in individual and collective tactics of spatial appropriation, and mechanisms of order and control of the urban as well as the digital public spaces.
Leonhard Müllner (born 1987 in Graz) lives and works in Vienna as a visual artist and media researcher. He intervenes in the public as well as in the digital space.
Together with Michael Stumpf, Jona Kleinlein, Adrian Heim and Susanna Flock they form the collective Total Refusal ( totalrefusal.com), whose film Hardly Working, an intervention into a video game like Operation Jane Walk, recently won the Short Film Award at the European Film Awards 2023.
Operation Jane Walk is based on the dystopian multiplayer shooter Tom Clancy’s: The Division. The game’s digital war zone is appropriated with the help of an artistic operation: Within the rules of the game’s software, the militaristic environment is being re-used for a pacifistic city tour. The urban strollers avoid the combats whenever possible and become peaceful tourists of a digital world, which is a detailed replica of Midtown Manhattan. While walking through the post-apocalyptic city, issues such as architecture history, urbanism and the game developer’s interventions in the urban fabric are being discussed.
Robin Klengel (born 1988 in Graz) lives and works as an artist, illustrator and cultural anthropologist in Vienna and Graz. He is interested in individual and collective tactics of spatial appropriation, and mechanisms of order and control of the urban as well as the digital public spaces.
Leonhard Müllner (born 1987 in Graz) lives and works in Vienna as a visual artist and media researcher. He intervenes in the public as well as in the digital space.
Together with Michael Stumpf, Jona Kleinlein, Adrian Heim and Susanna Flock they form the collective Total Refusal ( totalrefusal.com), whose film Hardly Working, an intervention into a video game like Operation Jane Walk, recently won the Short Film Award at the European Film Awards 2023.