Intro by David Elliott (Museum Meltdown, Modern Museum, 1999)

Millennium, Armageddon, Holocaust, Meltdown.... These words have a fin de siècle currency which transcends both fashion and Hollywood film titles. If the whole twentieth century has, in its horror, prefigured the Year of the Three Zeros, the event of the end itself might turn out to be rather an anti-climax.
But it has been a while since the last one. Then, at the dawn of year 1000, the end of the world was predicted. The faithful gathered on the high ground not only to be nearer to God but also to escape the holocaust which, they thought, the evil of mankind would bring down on itself.
Not much happened. Our present century, however, seems to have been a time of perpetual holocaust; a continual round of destruction, cruelty and slaughter. This is not because human nature has changed, but because we have become so much more efficient in inflicting these horrors on our planet and ourselves.
Our modern fantasy has been that we have conquered nature: not only our own natures but also the great natural forces which, for a short time, we may co-opt but never contain. But the fantasy will never be realised. The power of the atom released in a bomb or run out of control leads to meltdown. And after that?.....nuclear winter. Destruction and the resulting desert where nothing may grow.
Culture is the human response to nature: an attempt to tame, understand and enjoy it. Of this art comprises only a very small part. But in this increasingly secular millennium, art has become more like religion: an expression of abstract values, of worth; expressing beliefs and ideas that have to be protected from enemies and the ravages of time. Museums, the storehouses of art, have become like places of worship; secret places, holy places, places of meditation and reflection.
So when Tobias Bernstrup and Palle Torsson depict museums, and the objects that are placed within them, as sites of conflict and destruction in games of virtual reality, it at first seems like either a bad joke or an ultimate blasphemy. But to think this misses the point. Within the frames of play and modern technology the computer game re-enacts a primeval struggle for survival which lies at the root of culture itself - and which recent events in the Balkans have made increasingly poignant: "Who is going to survive, you or me?" Here, in the virtual museum, life and culture are thrown together. Like Oedipus confronting the Sphinx anyone who plays the game has to react within a split second to a fundamental and unresolvable moral question: "Which is more important, life or art?".

Whose life, whose art?.

Our reactions will be informative