Elliott Burns is an academic and digital art curator based at Central Saint Martins, University of Arts London, who via the online publication Side Quest addresses histories of artist produced computer games. Beyond the art game, areas of expertise include online curatorial practice between Web 1.0 to 3.0 and new media art. He co-founded the online curatorial project Off Site Project and has delivered curatorial / research based projects with Anonymous Gallery, the British Council, the Centre for Investigative Journalism, Distant Gallery, ESPRONCEDA Institute of Art&Culture, Phoenix Art Centre, the Royal College of Art, SummerWorks Festival, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. His writing has been published with DATA Browser, Furtherfield, HAU, Kunstlicht Journal and Outland.
Reactionary Replicas: 30+ Years of the First Museum Shooter
FROG 2026 – Talk
Ever since Orhan Kipcak and Reini Urban digitally modelled the Linz Brucknerhaus in DOOM, the art game genre has seen a near continuous trend of replicating culturally important art institutions within game engine software. This thematic tendency within the genre that was noted and named by Mathias Jansson as the ‘First Museum Shooter’ in 2011, due to the FPS (first-person-shooter) being the modification blueprint for many of these projects and the museum being the zone of artistic display most often re-rendered. However, beyond the aggressive indications of this title, the range of rationals leading an artist to meticulously craft the Arken Museum of Modern Art, Fondazione Prada, König Gallery, MoMA PS1, the Serpentine North Gallery, Tate Modern, the V&A East Storehouse or the ZKM Centre for Art and Media, amongst others, may be expanded upon. Alongside extending and filling gaps in the sub-genre’s history, this paper draws upon theories and practices of institutional critique to address the motivations behind the ‘First Museum Shooter’ and to note upon the form’s continued relevancy. Whilst additionally adopting art historian Griselda Pollock’s notion of the avant-garde gambit and Reesa Greenberg’s analysis of remembering exhibitions, which pathologies the need for institutions to stage exact or modified renditions of past shows, as means to question what other forms of practice the ‘First Museum Shooter’ might otherwise be ancestor to.