Naked on Pluto
June – November 2010
Artist in Residency by Dave Griffiths, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk with the project Naked on Pluto
"You are 4.3 billion kilometres away from the nearest human, what would you like to do?"
Naked on Pluto is a Multiplayer Text Adventure Game on Facebook. You wake up on Pluto, in a city under the rule of Elastic Versailles revision 14, a corrupted Artificial Intelligence and former entertainment colony. It used to be the Las Vegas of the Solar System, a true paradise for consumers and corporations alike. Until something snapped... What happened and how to escape?
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 simply 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 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.
Naked on Pluto is developed during a shared residency at NIMk, BALTAN Laboraties and Piksel, between June and November 2010, by Dave Griffiths, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk. The project is licensed Copyleft. The research and development process is documented and can be followed on http://pluto.kuri.mu and http://facebook.com/is.so.convenient. The game can be played on http://naked-on-pluto.net (teaser only a.t.m.).
Naked on Pluto is also part of the international touring exhibition Funware, opening November 12 at MU Eindhoven.
Biographies
Dave Griffiths 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.
n 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.