selectparks - Arsdoom

Arsdoom is a Doom II game modification made by Orhan Kipcak and his team for the 1995 edition of the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria. In Arsdoom the player becomes an active part of the ongoing exhibition, both by being able to explore a digital version of the Brucknerhaus venue and by having the power to kill off digital representations of the exhibiting artists, thus destroying them and their work.

Making use of the Doom II engine and AutoDesk/AutoCad software Orhan Kipcak created a digital version of the Brucknerhaus exhibition venue. Not only was this digital version geometrically equal to its real life counterpart, it was more than that. Because of its digital nature, the environment opened up new posibilities for user interaction. One could enter the virtual space on the exhibition site, through special servers set up for the duration of the exhibition, but it was also possible to get the necessary files from a special ftp server and access the game from a remote location. For the first time, visitors didn't need to actually be physically present to be part of an exhibition. Also, interaction in the virtual Brucknerhaus wasn't limited to moving through the digital space. The visitor was armed with color brush, water hose, rapid fire wooden cross and other weapons that allowed new (violent) forms of interaction between user and artwork/artist, and through the weapon a user carried he 'slipped on the character mask' of one of various iconic artists of postmodernism such as Baselitz, Koone, Nitsch and Rainer.

In Arsdoom, the metaphorical red ribbon in between museum visitor and art work is broken, and users were able to 'alter' exhibited work and 'fight' the artists. Thus the user could become curator as well, deciding which artists were to stay and which were to be destroyed. And of course with the demise of an artist came the destruction of his virtual work.

Not all of these aspects of the original Arsdoom game modification are fully present in this version, since the artist enemies have become bots and their termination does not affect the digital space, but it gives a good impression of the project.

Further details on the project can be found on the Ars Electronica website, http://www.aec.at/en/archives/festival_archive/festival_catalogs/festival_artikel.asp?iProjectID=8643

Download the files here.