In the Beginning was Doom
When the small company id Software in Texas,
USA, 1993 released the videogame Doom few would have guessed that
this game would change the entire game industry, and even fewer
would have guessed which impact Doom would have on the art world.
Until 1990 most videogames were played in a 2D environment in
which you controlled a character or vehicle through a landscape,
as in videogames as Super Mario Bros, Pac Man or Space Invaders.
In the early 90's the First-Person Shooter genre (FPS) got its
breakthrough with titles such as Wolfenstein 3D (1992) and Doom
(1993) both published by id Software. The big difference with
these games was that they took place in a 3D world that was generated
in real time and they were played in first person (First Person
Shooter). The player didn’t control a character on the screen,
he was the main character in the game and saw the whole game from
first person view which mostly consisted of looking straight down
at a loaded gun.
Already at the launch of Wolfenstein 3D, id Software
had noticed that the players tried to build their own levels to
the game and when they released Doom the following year, they
did what they could to make it easier for the player to modify
the game. They separated audio, video and music from the game
and put them in WAD files (Where's All the Data?)(1)
Both founder of id Software, John Romero and John Carmack, had
begun there career by hacking and altering others' games and now
they wanted to give something back to the gaming community and
create something that gave extra value to the new game. In retrospect
it is clear that this was a wise decision. Doom sold over four
million copies and was long in the charts of the world's best
selling computer games. The videogame Doom did not only created
a whole new way to experience a videogame but also the conditions
for a whole new art form.
The FPS genre evolved rapidly over the next few
years with titles such as Doom II (1994), Quake (1996), Unreal
(1998) and Half-Life (1998). Powerful new graphics engine made
it possible to render even more detailed and sophisticated 3D
environments. Among the new games were also new special tools
that made it possible for players, to modify and extend the game
by building their own levels, characters, weapons, etc. Through
the Internet, which at this time began to connect players around
the world, there were easy ways to spread the new modifications
to other gamers. Suddenly there were a lot of new mods (modifications)
to well-known game titles as Doom, Quake and Half-Life, which
both extended the life of the games and created a growing subculture
and community around them. It was in this environment a whole
new generation of artists grew up with videogames and they soon
began experimenting with the game tools to se how they could be
used in artistic contexts.
The Artist-as-Gamer
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The breakthrough for artistic modifications
of videogames can be dated to 1995 when the Austrian artist
Orhan Kipcak created Arsdoom to the media festival Ars Electronica
in Linz, Austria.(2)
Arsdoom consisted of an entirely new level for the game
Doom II (1994). The level was a virtual copy of the exhibition
hall in Brucknerhaus. In the virtual exhibition hall the
player could found artworks of artists as Peter Weibel,
Seiichi Guruya, Manfred Wolff-Plottegg, Sabine Bitter and
others. The exhibiting artists were also the enemies in
the game and could be killed by the player by using weapons
as his fists, brushes, wooden cross and the traditional
chain saw from the original Doom game. Except beating and
killing the artists the player could also destroy the exhibited
art and create his own art. In the game the player could
pick up objects from different artists as Herman Nitsch
blood, with which he could spray the walls, or use Arnulf
Rainer pens to draw on the artworks. There was also a feature
that made it possible to turn all the artwork upside down
in a style reminiscent of George Baselitz's art. (3) |
Arsdoom represents a milestone in the videogame-inspired
art and marks in many ways a new approach between art and audience.
The audience is no longer passive consumers, but active arts producers
who have control over the exhibition with full rights to destroy
the works of art and shoot the artists. The concept of Arsdoom
has many of the characteristic features that define artistic computer
game modification. First, this type of art requires a certain
habit of playing videogames from the visitors, second, it is expected
that the visitor is active and interactive in order to experience
the artwork. If the visitors do not play or get involved there
will be no work of art. In Arsdoom there are also a fusion between
popular culture (video games) and high culture (the established
art world). Often this fusion is a bloody clash when the violent
aesthetics from videogames are confronted with the rules of "not
to touch the art" in the exhibition space. In art works as
Arsdoom the visitors/players has every opportunity to experience
the art exhibition without the normal conventions and limitations.
First Museum Shooters
It took not long before other artists started
to create their own levels to popular videogames. Palle
Torsson and Tobias Bernstrup were still students when they
in November 1996, were invited to the Nordic biennial "The
Scream: Borealis 8" at Arken, Museum of Modern Art
near Copenhagen.(4) Their
contribution to the exhibition was a videogame which they
called "Museum Meltdown". With help of the videogame
Duke Nukem, Torsson and Bernstrup recreated the architecture
from the Art Museum Arken and let the visitors as in Arsdoom,
take control over the exhibition hall where they could shoot
down enemies of various kinds and destroy the works of art.(5)
"Museum Meltdown" got two successors. 1997 Torsson
and Bernstrup made a version of the Contemporary Art Center
in Vilnius and in 1999 a new version of Museum Meltdown
was showed at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. In the press
release from the Moderna Musset exhibition the artists writes:
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"Museum Meltdown is a virtual reorganization of the
Museum of Modern Art and is based on the video game Half-Life.
The game's logic can be displaced as well as all living
art become objects for the player's destructive desires.
Museum with the task of conveying / preserve our cultural
heritage here is a scene of violence and destruction."
(6)
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In 1999 RELOAD Shift eV Gallery in Berlin arranged an exhibition
with the artists Florian Muser and Imre Oswald, who exhibited
a reconstruction of the Hamburger Kunsthalle created with help
of the videogame Quake.(7)
As in the previous examples, the artists created a virtual architecture
of a real exhibition hall and let the visitors take a walk in
the galleries armed to the teeth so they can defend themselves
against enemies sneaking up around the corner and disrupting the
experience of art. Arsdoom, Museum Meltdown, and other similar
works can be categorized in a special genre called "First
Museum Shooters". In "First Museum Shooters" artist
re-create real exhibition spaces, and in this virtual interactive
arena the forces of popular culture and high culture clash together
in a violent and often bloody confrontation. On one side, the
established art institution with its unique irreplaceable works
of art, exhibited as precious relics, and on the other side the
digital artwork that can be mass produced, copied and distributed
via the Internet. "First Museum Shooters" can be interpreted
as a metaphor for an ongoing paradigm shift in art, it is a metaphor
for the struggle between the old art vs the new art. There is
also a metaphor of how different generations consume culture.
The older generation is more accustomed to passively consume art
in institutions, stated in the expression "go and look at
art", while young people today expect to be able to participate
in and create their own art experience. The older generation,
are in the game metaphor, the monsters who defends and preserves
the institutional 'high culture" while the younger generation,
the player, create their own art experience by mixing elements
from high culture and popular culture and melting them together
in new impressions and experiences in an interactive Game Art.
Within the framework of the virtual world, the player can break
all the conventions and rules surrounding the real art exhibition.
He can do everything that is normally forbidden to do as loudly
destroying art objects.
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A Meta-Level
The Australian artists Stephen Honegger
and Anthony Hunt's contribution to the genre is a bit different.
There work "Container" was showed for the first
time in 2002 at Gertrude Contemporary Art Space in Melbourne,
Australia.(8) "Cointainer"
consists of a setup where a copy of a real container is
placed inside the gallery. Of course, the visitor asks himself
how did they mange to get such a large shipping container
into a small gallery? It can hardly have come through the
door. The answer is inside the container where you can watch
a video. The video is a machinima made using the computer
game Half-Life, and shows how an unknown person breaks into
the gallery by climbing in through a window at the back
of the gallery. The unknown person then seeks his way through
the building through corridors and staircases, until he
finally arrives at the gallery. In the gallery he opens
a secret hatch in the wall and presses a button. The ceiling
of the gallery opens and the container is slowly lowered
into the room. The unknown intruder then retrieves a gun
and walks up to the container and opens the door. Inside
the container there are a man looking at a video. The unknown
intruder simply shoots down the man and here ends the movie,
and also the explanation of how the container ended up in
the gallery.
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The original idea to "Container" came
from a need to create a dark space in the gallery to view a video.
The solution was to create a container in the gallery and also
making a fictional story about how it ended up in the gallery.
The visitor sits inside a proper container and sees a movie that
shows how the container has come into the room and how the person
in the film enters the container and shoots the viewer. It’s
an artwork about the creation of an artwork and therefore you
could say there is a meta-level included in "Container".
In other examples of "First Museum Shooters" you will
also find this kind of meta-level. As visitor you participate
in different narratives levels. The artwork is showed in a physical
real exhibition space in which the visitor enters, but the visitor
also steps in as a viewer and player of a virtual copy of the
exhibition space. To draw a parallel with the theatre, the visitor
is not only a person in the audience looking at the play but he
also steps up on stage and start to act and became a part of the
play he is viewing. The visitor is taking part both in the physical
exhibition and the virtual exhibition, he moves between different
narrative levels in the artwork. In that way you can see "First
Museum Shooters" as a form of meta-art, which discusses and
examines the experience of art in museums and galleries.
Everything I Shoot is Art
In connection with the 2006 graduation show at
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago artist Chris Reilly
made a reconstructed of the entire exhibition, 4500 square feet
spread over three floors, with the help of computer game Half
Life 2. Reilly works, with the long title: "Everything
I Do Is Art, But Nothing I Do Makes Any Difference, Part II: Or:
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gallery".(9)
A title that alludes to Stanley Kubrick famous film "Dr.
Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
"from 1964 with Peter Sellers in the lead role. Anyone who
visited the thesis exhibition in Chicago could walk around in
the real exhibition, but also make a virtual visit. In the virtual
version you had to deal with some nasty monsters as in many other
"First Museum Shooters". In Reilly artwork you can also
shoot and destroy the artworks in the exhibition, but it is also
possible to pick up paint cans around the building and shoot at
them. The result is a kind of "shooting painting", where
the paint can explodes and makes formation in different colours
on the gallery walls. Maybe Reilly had Niki de Saint classic work
of art "Shooting Paintings" in mind when he included
this feature. It was between the years 1961 to 1962 as Niki de
Saint Phalle did 12 performances in which she used a salon rifle
to shot at paint container mounted at reliefs and sculptures.
When the shot hit the container the paint spread over the object
and formed a "Shooting painting". For Saint Phalle it
was a statement that she as a woman could shoot her way in to
the male occupied sphere of art, but it was also a new way of
looking at painting. In a known quote she said:
"Ready. Aim. Fire. Red, yellow,
blue – the painting is Crying, the painting is dead.
I have killed the painting. It is reborn. War with no
victims." (10) |
A quote that just as well could be use to describe the genre of
"First Museum Shooters". Videogames can be compared
to a form of new real-time paintings and when artists uses the
FPS games to create new art forms, they are literal shooting there
way into the art history. Especially in works as Arsdoom and Museum
Meltdown you can see that the artists are killing and destroying
the old paintings and simultaneously creating a new form of digital
paintings on the screen. After fifteen years we still see new
examples of "First Museum Shooters". The Swedish artist
Paul Steen has for example created "Art Assault" a modification
of the free open source FPS game, Assault Cube.
"The computer controlled
bots are named after the 100 most successful artists
according to artfacts.net.
In Team Deathmatch mode the bots and the player
are randomly parted into two teams, Inside and Outside.
The maps in the game are based on real life artist
run galleries or alternative museums." (11) |
You can choose between 10 different maps including Magasin3,
Stockholm, PS1, New York, TATE Modern, London, Westwerk,
Hamburg and Worm, Rotterdam.
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One more example in the genre is Michiel
Van Der Zander’s machinima "Pwned Paintings #2"
from 2008. In this machinima we see a character moving around
in an art historic collection. The view is not first person,
rather third person, found in games as Max Payne. Armed
with a rifle the character moves around in the galleries
shooting at the painting so they fall of the wall. Pwned
is an expression used in videogames as Counterstrike, and
to say "You just got pwned!" is a way to humiliate
and show domination over an opponent that got soundly defeated.
In the same way van Der Zanden pwned the established artworld.
The statement is clear: The traditional art and art institutions
have been defeated, a new generation of artists are taking
over, artists that will shoot there way into the art history
and bring there own culture and expressions with them, in
the same way as previous generation of artist has done before
them. |
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Notes
(1) p.166 "Masters of Doom: How two guys created an empire
and transformed pop culture" by David Kushner (Random House,
2003)
(2) "Mythos Information: Welcome to the Wired World, Ars
Electronica 1995" ed. Karl Gerbel, Peter Weibel, (Springer
Verlag, Wien, New York, 1995)
(3) " Interview: Orhan Kipcak (ArsDoom, ArsDoom II) (1995-2005)"
by Mathias Jansson
http://www.gamescenes.org/2009/11/interview-orphan-kipcak-arsdoom-arsdoom-ii-1995.html
(4) "The scream : Borealis 8 : Nordic fine arts 1995-96"
by Kim Levin etc, (Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, 1996)
(5) "Interview: Tobias Bernstrup and Palle Torsson, "Museum
Meltdown" (1996)" by Mathias Jansson
http://www.gamescenes.org/2009/11/interview-tobias-bernstrup-and-palle-torsson-museum-meltdown-1996.html
(6) From the press release to the exhibition Museum Meltdown
at Moderna Museet in Stockholm
http://www.palletorsson.com/mmhome/MAIN.html
(7) "Interview: Martin Berghammer's RELOAD exhibition (Shift
e.V Gallery in Berlin, 1999)" by Mathias Jansson
http://www.gamescenes.org/2010/02/interview-martin-berghammer-reload-exhibition-shift-ev-gallery-in-berlin-1999-html
(8) "Interview: Stephen Honegger's "Container"
(2002) and "Escape from Woomera" (2003)" by Mathias
Jansson
http://www.gamescenes.org/2010/06/interview-steve-.html
(9) http://www.chris-reilly.org/art/everything-pt2/
(10) p.285. "Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art:
A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings" by Kristine Stiles and
Peter Selz, (Berkeley : Univ. of California Press, 1996)
(11)
http://www.paulsteen.se/aa.html
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