Naked on Pluto/Template 1

Credits

Title

Naked on Pluto

Artist(s)

Naked on Pluto is a project by Dave Griffiths, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk. It is currently supported by LIMA. (Source)

Different version.

Year

Developed in 2010-2011.

Website

• Project page (archived 2016 on Wayback Machine)
• Development blog (live as of Feb 2020)
• wiki (live as of Feb 2020)
• Git repository (archived 2012 on Wayback Machine)
• Git repository (live as of Feb 2020)
• Facebook (live as of Feb 2020)

Video

A video presentation of "Naked on Pluto", by its authors, Dave Griffiths, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk. 5 min, September 2011. (Source)

Images

https://archive.bleu255.com/nakedonpluto/press/#screenshot

Software

Facebook Third Party App [1]

License

Everything in this project is released under Copyleft licenses (mix GPL, CC-BY-SA, FAL depending on material). (Source)

Production

Most of the work has been developed through several sprints at NIMk, BALTAN Laboraties and Piksel, between June and November 2010, as part of the FUNWARE residency. It was further developed in June 2011 with financial support from AVEK and BALTAN Laboratories most notably to work on the Facesponge workshop.

(Source)

Production documentation

Development blog (live as of Feb 2020)

Residencies

http://www.nimk.nl/eng/naked-on-pluto

https://www.baltanlaboratories.org/library/funware-residency

https://piksel.no/2010/07/15/funware-residency-naked-on-pluto-by-dave-griffiths-aymeric-mansoux-and-marloes-de-valk

? https://fo.am/activities/naked-on-pluto/

Part of collection

LIMA?

Description

Intro

Naked on Pluto is a Multiplayer Text Adventure on Facebook. When you enter the game, you find yourself on Pluto, in a city under the rule of Elastic Versailles revision 14 (EVr14), an Artificial Intelligence functioning as an entertainment colony. It is the Las Vegas of the Solar System, a true paradise for consumers and corporations alike.

Versailles is a capital of convenience, a non stop 24hr zone of endless pleasure, provided by Pluto’s huge entertainment corporations. Amuse yourself and your friends for hours on end collecting meaningless tokens, talking to our bland robots, or you could always just relax and take in the staggering conformity of your new home.

Take absolutely no notice of the areas you aren’t allowed to go into, even if it were possible to break out of the control zone around the Palace, why would you possibly want to – or indeed why change the core structures of this world when they have been so excellently taylored to fit your every desire?

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.

(Source)

Alternative intro

Naked on Pluto proposes a playful yet disturbing online game world, developed with Free/ Libre Open Source Software, which parodies the insidiously invasive traits of much “social software”. The city of “Elastic Versailles” is animated by the quirky combinatorial logics of a community of fifty seven AI bots that glean Facebook data from subscribers to the game. Naked on Pluto’s bot crew, which are hard to distinguish from other agents in this text-based environment, are dysfunctional gatekeepers whose access-control means are broken by the participants only to be elastically “healed” by the bots. Players attempt to override the game’s restrictions, teaming up in order to ultimately crash and escape from the system. Reporting on activities via a blog and Twitter, and issuing a constant stream of incitations to click, declare, poke and buy, the bots run havoc with one’s own and one’s friends’ data, generating more or less spurious links with chillingly escalating speed. Disconcertingly familiar faces and information from one’s personal and associated profiles are indiscriminately blended in a brash prosumer landscape which, like the original Versailles, is designed for promotional parades of inseparable personal and ideological attributes.

No player information is shared, stored, or relayed back to Facebook in this malleable social ecosystem where all that counts are glimpses of fleeting visibility.

Naked on Pluto caricatures the proliferation of virtual agents that harvest our personal data to insidiously reshape our online environments and profiles, highlighting the ambivalent hallmarks of major social networks: friends as quantifiable and commodifiable online assets, personas carefully fashioned contrived to impart a sense of “intimacy”, and disingenuous publishing of “private” data as self-advertising. The emergence of intelligence in this game is ultimately, hopefully, that of the players who manage to escape from it.

In October 2011, Naked on Pluto was awarded with the VIDA 13.2. prize.

(Source)

Biography artist

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 and media researcher. He has initiated projects such as: the ‘make art’ festival, ‘Puredyne’ GNU/Linux and the ‘FLOSS+Art’ anthology. His latest collaboration is ‘Naked on Pluto’, a Facebook game that explores centralized black box social networks. He currently works as co-supervisor for the Media Design and Communication Master of the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (NL). He is also a PhD student at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London (UK) researching on the creative misunderstandings between art and politics within copyleft practices.

Dave Griffiths (UK) 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.

(Source)

Context

• Cambridge Analytica
• Farmville [made by Zynga], Facebook app (parasiting on user data)
• Mafia wars [made by Zynga], Facebook app (parasiting on user data)
• Happy Calendar, Facebook app (parasiting on user data)
• Zynga
• Facebook API

Influence

(who has influenced the work, and the other way around, whom did it influence?)