July 1, 2011 10:00 AM | Eric Caoili

One of the most played multiplayer stages in video game history, de_dust is an iconic first-person shooter map, one familiar and fondly remembered by almost everyone who's ever touched Counterstrike. It's been re-created dozens of times by fans in other FPSes since.

And now artist Aram Bartholl wants to create a 1:1 scale replica of the level, memorializing it with a concrete "art piece and museum", a public sculpture that the public can wlak through and "experience the loaded game space in the physical reality".

Before Bartholl can start work on the 115 x 110 x 15 meter project, he'll first need to have the Rhizome Commissions Program in New York City to approve his grant. An excerpt from his proposal:



"To win a game the player needs to know the 3D game space very very well. Spatial recognition and remembrance is an important part of our human capability and has formed over millions of years by evolution. A place, house or space inscribes itself in our spatial memory. We can talk about the qualities of the same movies we watched or books we have read. But millions of gamers experienced the same worlds in computer games. They all remember very well the spaces that they’ve spent a great deal of time in. Computer game architecture and game maps have become a new and yet undiscovered form of cultural heritage. How many people in the world have seen the real Time Square, the Kaaba in Mecca or the Tiananmen Square with their own eyes? Millions of players share the experience of the same computer games and 3D spaces they have ‘lived’ in for a significant amount of time in their lives. A computer game map like ‘de_dust’ appears to be more real than many other places in the world such as artificially constructed places like supermarkets, airports or cities like Dubai."

Having his proposal approved would be just the start, as grant would first be used to create a 1:100 scale model and pay for the eventual full-scale version's first planning phase (e.g. cost calculations and building plans).

This isn't the first time Bartholl has attempted to bring de_dust into the real world -- you can see one of his previous public space projects, in which he re-created the map's wooden creates on a real street after the break (as well as a video of a small de_dust model).

[Via Nullpoint84]