Panel Statement
Panel: Sniff, Scrape, Crawl: Part 2
“Naked on Pluto” is a multiplayer text adventure using Facebook, integrating a player’s personal data and that of his “friends” as elements in a satirical, interactive fiction. The game questions the way social media shape our friendships and the way social relations have become a commodity through targeted advertising, based on the phenomenal quantities of information we supply these databases with, literally exposing ourselves. The game was developed in 2010, as a response to the explosive growth of the data market, and the role social media play in this. To some, the trade-off between personal data and free services paid for through advertisement is more than fair, convenience comes at a price, but for many it has become almost impossible to make those trade-offs consciously and with a good idea of what the consequences might be. The goal of the game is to make these issues tangible. This paper aims at presenting the project and its context, more specifically how privacy and the mechanisms behind data harvesting can be critically examined using online gaming.
Naked on Pluto is collaboratively developed by Dave Griffiths, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk.
- Dave Griffiths (UK) was raised with 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.
- Aymeric Mansoux (FR) is an artist, musician and media researcher. As co-founder of GOTO10 he initiated several projects such as the make art festival and the puredyne GNU/Linux distribution for media art and design. Currently he is co-supervisor of study at the networked media branch of the Media Design and Communication Master of the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (NL), and a PhD student at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London.
- Marloes de Valk (NL) is an artist and writer. As part of the GOTO10 collective, from 2005 to 2010, she produced the chmod +x art festival, and co-produced make art 2007 and 2009. Her work consists of installations and software art. She exhibited work internationally and has led many workshops on Free/Libre/Open Source Software for artistic creation. She is editor of the Digital Artists’ Handbook (2009) and the publication FLOSS + Art (Mute Publishing, 2008).
Full text (PDF) p. 605-610