[ISEA2011] Panel: Dave Grif­fiths, Aymeric Man­soux & Mar­loes de Valk – Naked on Pluto: a mul­ti­player text ad­ven­ture using Face­book

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