Man meets monsters
Man meets monsters
Inside Moderna Museet something strange has happened. Except for a few security guards, the whole building appears to be empty. The only sound I hear is that of my own steps, the soles of my shoes against the stone floor. After a few unsuccessful attempts I manage to slid past the information counter and into the collection. Suddenly a shadow approaches, there’s a monster over there near the Matisse. I need a weapon. Killing is what’s called for here.
No, it isn’t reality, it is Moderna Museet in the shape of a computer-based action game: Museum Meltdown, a new work by Tobias Bernstrup and Palle Torsson based on the 3D computer game Half-Life. It offers the visitors to Moderna Museet an opportunity to move around a virtual version of the museum. But anyone planning on taking a peaceful stroll around familiar surroundings will do best in leaving the joystick or mouse over to someone else. For, just as Half-Life, Museum Meltdown is a game of survival. The trick is to shoot first, before the monsters lurking among the Picassos, Rauschenbergs and Matisses end up making mincemeat of you. That a few works of art are destroyed in the process can’t be helped.
Moderna Museet has been rebuilt inside a computer with the building blocks that Half-Life were constructed from. It could be described as a sort of simplified architect program, and it works very well for the construction of 3D environments such as this one. In order to portray the interiors of Moderna Museet as closely as possible, Bernstrup and Torsson have studied the blueprints of the museum, and photographed walls, floors, ceilings, and (obviously) also the works of art in the collection. Then, an architectural skeleton was created in the computer and dressed in the photographs of the museum interiors. As a result, the player of the game moves around a version of Moderna Museet that he or she can recognise as Rafael Moneo’s – but still not.
In the virtual exhibition halls the player controls his movements with the keys of the computer keyboard, and the training you have in these kinds of walks will normally be decisive for your survival. In the game. And if you ask the guards what to do they reply in a thick American accent that you should get out of there. They are probably friendly, but they are not very helpful. Instead, the player should rely on weapons. And there’s plenty of it if you look around, in the library for instance. Handguns, crowbars or grenades – just pick your favourite. Blood squirts on the walls and the floors when I finally hit a monster. The next moment, I am the one who gets killed. But all I have to do is to start a new life and return to the battle. In the world of the computer games, resurrection is completely normal.
What I as a visitor am doing inside this virtual Moderna Museet all alone is rather unclear. In any event, it’s not to look at art. In the original version of Half-Life, the player’s task is to find out what has been going on at the Black Mesa Research Facility, where secret genetic experiments are taking place. In that game, it is obvious that the monsters are the result of an experiment gone wrong. At Moderna Museet, no-one seems to know where they came from. Perhaps some kid kneaded them in the workshop? Or is the goat the keeper of the secret?
In any case, Bernstrup and Torsson make sure that we get a big adrenaline boost. And once we’ve run ourselves exhausted through the virtual rooms, and had our share of gunfights, we can stroll quietly down the halls of the real Moderna Museet. But didn’t something just move over there next to The Dying Dandy?