[NetBehaviour] Naked on Pluto wins VIDA 13.2

[info]

Naked on Pluto wins VIDA 13.2

Naked on Pluto is the winner of VIDA 13.2, the prestigious international
art and artificial life contest. The VIDA Awards were created by
Fundación Telefónica in 1999 to promote artistic creation based on new
technologies and artificial life. A total of 198 projects from 36
countries entered into contest in this edition. The works will be
showcased at Fundación Telefónica’s stand in ARCO 2012.

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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.

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Further reading:
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VIDA announcement:
http://www.fundacion.telefonica.com/es/prensa/noticias/noticia/arteytecnologia/25_10_2011_amb_1883

5 min. video presentation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbOnKqF9SLE

Project blog, full credits and interviews:
http://pluto.kuri.mu

Paper about the project
http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/paper/naked-pluto

GPL/AGPL/CC/FAL code, art and misc. documentation:
https://gitorious.org/naked-on-pluto

The game:
http://naked-on-pluto.net

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