Naked on Pluto is part of the exhibition Robots+Avatars, shown at FACT, Liverpool, 16 March – 27 May 2012.

Robots and Avatars Exhibition showcases the most exciting visions and innovations from international artists, designers and architects, exploring their impact on the future of work and play. Robots and Avatars departs from pop culture imagery and re-imagines these technologies for a new reality: how do we envisage our future relationships with robotic and avatar colleagues and playmates, and what point does this evolution cross our personal boundaries of what it is to be a living, feeling human being?

Robots and Avatars is a programme of work which began in 2009. It was originally conceived and produced by body>data>space who led the project through research and development into an EU Culture project involving 5 other UK and European partners

The exhibition presents immersive experiences – from physical limbs rendered into pixels through the act of touch, collaborative landscapes stretching beyond the confines of popular gaming, to wearable and interactive technologies that guide and confound, including a new Commission developed in collaboration with the National Theatre: “Visions of our Communal Dreams”.

The Robots and Avatars Exhibition presents at FACT, Liverpool (UK) from 16 March to 27 May 2012, and will tour onwards to AltArt, Cluj-Napoca (Romania) and KIBLA (Slovenia) in 2012.

With Jussi Parikka, Pau Waelder, Aymeric Mansoux and Mónica Bello. Recorded (VO EN/ES) in Barcelona the 24th of February 2012 as part of the I+C+i Our Life Online session at CCCB.

Internet is changing our way of understanding the public space. The Web has become a dominant structure that covers all aspects of contemporary society. The proliferation of virtual agents, designed to stimulate non-fortuitous reactions and meetings, reconfigures the profile of individuals in dynamics that are innovative but also invasive, and generates new forms of control. In this brand new context, identity and simulation become decisive themes of behaviour on the Web.

For this installation we wanted to create a highly formalised room, all right angles, straight lines and consistent colours of blue, dark grey and white. VIDA’s crew of architects and builders put in a lot of effort for us to achieve this, and were also very helpful tweaking it according to our strange requests.

During the opening event and later on, it was interesting to see different types of visitor. The older, perhaps more contemporary art focused groups had an extremely short attention span and so were not really engaging with the work much. The younger visitors however were tending to stay longer, even logging in to Facebook in order to try the game (and alarmingly, sometimes leaving themselves logged in). I think the initial hook for this engagement were the slogans on the edges of the bookshelves – for future installations we need to consider different strategies for setting the scene, as it will need to change with different locations and contexts.

One of the great things about these events is meeting the other artists (and VIDA award winners) who were setting up and exhibiting their work – Paul Vanouse with Ocular Revision, Sebastian Muellauer and Toni Nottebohm with Protei and Verena Friedrich with Transducers. These projects are an interesting combination, with more finished and specifically designed for installation work (Ocular Revision, Transducers) mixing with the more in progress, or conceptual things like Naked on Pluto as software art, or Protei, which is a large collaborative project still very much in active development.

Session organised in collaboration with Fundación Telefónica.

WORKSHOP: Facesponge with Aymeric Mansoux and Gerald Kogler. 10h-14h

Have you ever wondered what is going on “behind the scenes” on social networks like Facebook? In this workshop we will explore our so-called social data and get a glimpse at how it is viewed by the company and third parties who access it. In order to break several myths about Facebook applications, you will be invited to take part in designing small programs that extracts and manipulate you and your friend’s online information. Nothing will be written back to Facebook at any time, we will only be reading existing data. No data will be collected or viewable by anyone else.

No programming experience is required. Basic knowledge of javascript can be useful to explore more advanced possibilities of the Facesponge sandbox.

This workshop is part of the Naked on Pluto project, a critical text adventure Facebook game concerned with issues of online privacy and control within centralized commercial social networks, designed and written by Marloes de Valk, Aymeric Mansoux and Dave Griffiths.

Facesponge is developed in collaboration with Baltan Laboratories.
All Naked on Pluto software is released under free culture licenses.

Schedule:

* Naked on Pluto presentation
* Gameplay session
* Anatomy of an FB app
* Introduction to Facesponge
* Breaking FB apps myths
* Group discussion

Practical information:

* The workshop will be taught in English.
* You will need to bring your own laptop.
* Places are limited.

DEBATE: Identity and simulation. Artificial life on the networks. With Jussi Parikka, Pau Waelder, Aymeric Mansoux and Mónica Bello. 19h-21h

Internet is changing our way of understanding the public space. The Web has become a dominant structure that covers all aspects of contemporary society. The proliferation of virtual agents, designed to stimulate non-fortuitous reactions and meetings, reconfigures the profile of individuals in dynamics that are innovative but also invasive, and generates new forms of control. In this brand new context, identity and simulation become decisive themes of behaviour on the Web.

REGISTRATION:

Workshop + Debate: 6€
Please send an email explaining the reasons for your interest to cursos@cccb.org
Limited capacity!

Debate: 3€
Tel-entrada (tel. 902 101 212 / www.telentrada.com)
CCCB page for the event

In the last days Dave and the whole VIDA team are putting together the final bits of the installations. Come and check the result from the 16th of the 19th of this month.

My first approach was to write a scheme bricks representation for Javascript objects, and see how bits of the game looked if rendered in this way.

This is part of the ArrivalLobby, and all the internal information is present with no explanations, which is great, but it results in very large images. The next thing was to try filtering the objects to remove most of this information:

function node_filter()
{
    this.filter=function(obj)
    {
        return {objects:obj.objects.map(function(object) {
            return object.name;
        })};
    }
}

This code provides a single method for filtering locations in the game – it simply returns an object consisting of a list of names of things found at that location. These filters can be easily changed over time, to include different information or process it in different ways. Rendered with the same code as before, this makes the location diagrams much smaller:

Add a few more locations, put them together in a circular formation (the projection will be onto the floor space in the gallery), add some bezier curves to indicate paths between locations and it looks like this:

There is also some relatively complex jiggery-pokery to detect when bots have moved from one location to another and animate them. The moving bots display more detail including what they are wearing and who has ‘liked’ them. In this image you can see the AdverBot004 moving to the HelpDesk, and the HyperClock and GreenwichClock on the upper right as they move from the Palace Garden.