installation – Naked on Pluto

Naked on Pluto in Taiwan

Dave Griffiths — Mon, 23 Sep 2013 09:34:19 +0000

Naked on Pluto is being exhibited as part of Taiwan’s
SUPER-CONNECT–2013 International Techno Art Exhibition – here is a screenshot of the wonderfully re-created surveillance library including game player log books and propaganda messages:

Robots and Avatars

Marloes de Valk — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 11:36:12 +0000

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.

Photos from the Naked on Pluto installation at ARCO

aymeric — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 11:42:49 +0000

Thanks to the VIDA team for the nice shots.

Report from ARCO 2012 Madrid

Dave Griffiths — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 12:16:01 +0000

Naked on Pluto entered the world of contemporary art last week as part of the VIDA/telefonica exhibit at the ARCO 2012 art fair in Madrid. This was the culmination of a lot of work making the game into an installation format, which represented the library as the centre of control and surveillance in Elastic Versailles. The installation consists of books printed from information stored in the game archives over the previous year, slogans and glowing LED books on the walls. We also had terminals running the game with the projection of the live game world in a circle in the middle of the space.

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.