“You are 4.3 billion kilometres away from the nearest human, what would you like to do?”
Naked on Pluto is a text-based multiplayer game on Facebook. You are stranded on the planet Pluto, naked, alone. Your world is empty except for fragments of data, objects relating to your past life on social networks – but seen through the distorted lens of the game world. You can explore this world, at first alone and later in the game you’ll be able to invite and interact with friends. You can add and manipulate objects you encounter, interact with others and bots. Once you enter deeper into this world and web of data, you become aware of increasing complexity, characters appear you may recognise – are they friends or animated bits of data? Information is substituted and modified in subtle ways. Is it possible to remember what was ever real in the first place?
The game explores the limits and nature of social networks from within, slowly pushing the boundaries of what is tolerated by the companies that own them, carefully documenting this process as we go. Story and play are combined with an investigation on how exposed we are on social networks, and how our data are being used.
The project will be developed during a shared residency at NIMk, BALTAN Laboratories and Piksel, between June and November 2010, by Dave Griffiths, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk. They will be in residence at BALTAN Laboratories in October 2010. The project is licensed Copyleft. The research and development process will be documented and can be followed at http://pluto.kuri.mu
Naked on Pluto will be presented as part of the Funware exhibition at MU in Eindhoven in November, at HMKV in Dortmund and as part of the Piksel festival 2010.
Biographies
Dave was raised on an early education in weaving, bell ringing and 8bit computers, and is now dedicated to changing the world with free software, live animation and noise. He works as a self employed artist/programmer, mainly working with the FoAM art laboratory and performs as part of slub – a livecoding band. He creates installations, open source software and teaches workshops around the themes of games, music and the lisp programming language. Past work includes computer graphics for games, feature film special effects and machine vision research for Sony’s EyeToy group.
Marloes de Valk (NL) is a Dutch (software) artist. She studied Sound and Image at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague, specializing in abstract compositional computer games, HCI and crashing computers. Her work consists of audiovisual performances and installations, investigating machine theatre and narratives of digital processes. She has participated in exhibitions throughout Europe, teaches workshops, gives lectures and has published articles on Free/Libre/Open Source Software, free culture and art (a.o. in the Contemporary Music Review and Archive 2020. Sustainable archiving of born digital cultural content). She is editor of FLOSS + Art (OpenMute, 2008) as well as the Digital Artists’ Handbook (folly and GOTO10, 2008). She is a former member of artist collective GOTO10, and has helped develop the puredyne GNU/Linux distribution and make art festival. She is currently collaborating with Aymeric Mansoux and Dave Griffiths on a social gaming project.
Aymeric Mansoux (FR) is an artist, musician and media researcher. In 2003, he founded GOTO10 with Thomas Vriet, a non profit organization and artist collective, with the goal to promote the use and support of free software in electronic music and media art creation. Aymeric has been active in the collective until 2010 and initiated several projects such as: ‘make art’, a yearly international no nonsense festival for software artists using and writing free software; ‘Puredyne’, a popular live GNU/Linux distribution for creative media and the ‘FLOSS+Art publication’, the first collection of essays on FLOSS and digital art production. Since 2009, he is mentor and co-supervisor of study for the networked media branch of the Media Design and Communication Master of the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (NL). Aymeric is also an MPhil/PhD student at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, researching online art and design communities, free culture licenses and resources, and distributed collaboration.
(via Baltan Labs)