Museum Meltdown
1996 project first to use a gaming engine as an art medium, using Duke Nukem 3D to shoot enemies around a gallery:
From the project’s website:
In November 15th 1996 we launched our first Museum Meltdown project at Arken, Museum of Modern Art in Ishoj outside of Copenhagen as part of the Nordic Biennal “The Scream”, Borealis 8. Our piece was a 3D computer game where we reconstructed the architecture of Arken. This by using the build editor of the game Duke Nukem 3D, which allows users to create their own maps, levels and graphics etc …
…The world of computer technology contains everything from high to low, from the hackers to the powerful multinational enterprises. This culture and its networks goes beyond democracy, aesthetics and ethics of the main society and could as well be defined as a super-culture or a trans-culture.The technology has a vast influence on our perception of reality. As it shapes the world around us, the enviroment and the actual tools of perception and the question of identity becomes more complex and important to redefine. As the concept of space and our own presence becomes more and more unseparable, the relation between democracy and technology gets even more important.
We decided to take the architecture of the museum one step further and turn the space into a violent computer game and hereby emphasize these questions.
You can visit the old site here - another version was created for the Half Life engine in 1999, which you can visit here.
There is also an interview with the artists Palle Torsson and Tobias Bernstrup here
(via gamefreaksnz)
