This is the alpha release of Naked on Pluto! http://naked-on-pluto.net/
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Naked on Pluto part of Funware exhibition
November 11th, 2010 by Marloes de Valk
Naked on Pluto is part of the exhibition Funware, at MU, Eindhoven (NL). The opening is Friday November 12 at 20.00.
Funware – playing with software art
Adrian Ward, Amy Alexander, Annina Ruest, Bob Zimbinski, Carmen Weisskopf, Domagoj Smoljo, Roger Wigger, Christoph Haag, Franziska Windisch, Ludwig Zeller, Martin Rumori, Colin Green, Matthew Fuller, Simon Pope, Dave Griffiths, Aymeric Mansoux, Marloes de Valk, David Link, Electroboutique, Gazira Babeli, Joan Leandre, JODI, Jon Satrom, Ben Syverson, RTmark, Runme.org. Read more »
Plutonian Striptease XI: Mez Breeze
November 11th, 2010 by Marloes de Valk
Plutonian Striptease is a series of interviews with experts, owners, users, fans and haters of social media, to map the different views on this topic, outside the existing discussions surrounding privacy.
Mez Breeze creates code poetry and is a Futurist. She explores environments that involve online socializations or encounters. Such encounters involves the modification of online gaming environments such as World of Warcraft, EVE Online, and Second Life. Some other online encounters involve social networking and alternate gaming software such as Facebook, Passively Multimedia Online Game (PMOG), and Twitter. The texts or jargon produced during these encounters are what drove Mez to create her type of net poetry. She has won several awards including the “JavaArtist of the Year 2001”, the Newcastle Digital Poetry Prize and an Honorary Mention in the read_me 1.2 Software Art Award.
Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
straight away i find myself side-tilt>head-turn-questioning the phrase “in the news”: r u reffing the old skool>1-way monothreaded>tradition “broadcast” sense of “news”? if yes, then soc[ial]_net[work]s r often reffed>dissected there via a combination of novelty factoids [including the obligatory derogatory slant on any comm platform that threatens the longevity of the older>”traditional” news dissemination strains] + intrigue as 2 how they will impact the future of communication patterns generally. + let’s not 4get the [jump on the trundling-in2-the-relevancy-distance]bandwagon factor. Read more »
Plutonian Striptease X: Constant
October 31st, 2010 by Marloes de Valk
Plutonian Striptease is a series of interviews with experts, owners, users, fans and haters of social media, to map the different views on this topic, outside the existing discussions surrounding privacy.
Constant is a non-profit association, an interdisciplinary arts-lab based and active in Brussels since 1997. Constant works in-between media and art and is interested in the culture and ethics of the World Wide Web. The artistic practice of Constant is inspired by the way that technological infrastructures, data-exchange and software determine our daily life. Free software, copyright alternatives and (cyber)feminism are important threads running through the activities of Constant. Constant organizes workshops, print-parties, walks and ‘Verbindingen/Jonctions’-meetings on a regular basis for a public that’s into experiments, discussions and all kinds of exchanges.
Michel Cleempoel, graduated at the national superior art school of la Cambre – Brussels. Author of numerous digital art works and exhibitions, in collaboration with Nicolas Malevé. http://www.deshabillez-vous.be
Nicolas Malevé, a multimedia artist since 1998, has been an active member of the association Constant. As such, he has taken part in organizing various activities to do with alternatives to copyrights, such as Copy.cult & The Original Si(g)n, held in 2000. He has been developing multimedia projects and web applications for cultural organisations. His research work is currently focused on information structures, metadata and the semantic web and the means to visually represent them.
Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
Essentially because of their scale. Facebook reports having more than 500 million active users.[1] This, of course, inspires all kinds of commercial dreams. Social networks barely brought something new to the web. For personal pages, Friendster predates largely Facebook and the other social networks. And the functionalities they offer barely innovate. It is their momentum though since a large portion of the online population happily subscribes and uses these services. In our view, social networks are an internet in miniature, what the bourgeois garden is to nature: a domestic version, with fences, controllable, reassuring, narrow-minded. They have their own version of email, chat, links, search, page but everything in redux. As they are powered by social pressure, they are an endless source of anecdotes fueling the media.
It is important to remark that we hear a lot about proprietary social networks and too rarely about free social networks in the mainstream media. They exist though and are used by governments, businesses or academic institutions: ie, elgg[2], a social network releasing its code under the GPL powers various important platforms like Oxfam, Federal Canadian Government, Johns Hopkins University or Université Lille 1. Read more »
Call for testers
October 26th, 2010 by aymeric
“Good news everyone!”
We have reached the point where we can start having some players test and try break things with the current pre-alpha-thingy-candidate version of the game. We are looking for just a couple of testers who can cope with the fact that they will get early spoilers and experience a not entirely finished game narrative and interface. On the other hand you will greatly help us stabilize things, spot a few more bugs and make final improvements!
Take into account that you will have to use an issue tracker to report us problems (ie, using a website with a form to check for existing known problems and report new ones) and that we will ask you some questions after you played.
Use the contact form in this blog to get in touch with us :)
Plutonian Striptease IX: Employee of a social games company
October 25th, 2010 by Marloes de Valk
Plutonian Striptease is a series of interviews with experts, owners, users, fans and haters of social media, to map the different views on this topic, outside the existing discussions surrounding privacy.
Employee of a social games company wishes to remain anonymous.
Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
It’s new, there are new biz possibilities, media is interested in money and success stories.
In what way do they differ from older forms of communication on the Internet?
A huge amount of private data from users is available to be used in many ways.
Who is ultimately responsible for what happens to the data you upload to social networks?
Heh heh. The network should be, but I doubt that the systems will ever be very secure. So in reality: the user has the responsibility to think carefully what to upload. Read more »
Plutonian Striptease VIII: Owen Mundy
October 20th, 2010 by Marloes de Valk
Plutonian Striptease is a series of interviews with experts, owners, users, fans and haters of social media, to map the different views on this topic, outside the existing discussions surrounding privacy.
Owen Mundy is an artist and programmer who investigates public space and its relationship to data. He makes images, sculpture, and software that highlights inconspicuous trends and offers tools to make hackers out of everyday users. A former photographer in the US Navy, he co-founded Your Art Here, a non-profit organization in Bloomington, Indiana that puts art in public commercial spaces. In 2010 he created Give Me My Data, an application that helps users export their data out of Facebook. He is an Assistant Professor of Art at Florida State University and is currently based in Berlin funded by the DAAD.
Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
Assuming “social networks” refers to the online software, application programming interfaces (APIs), and the data that constitutes sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, I feel its popular to discuss them in the news for many reasons.
Online applications that enable enhanced connectivity for individuals and other entities are relatively new and there is an apparent potential for wealth through their creation and the connections they enable. News organizations are businesses, so they naturally follow the money, “reporting” on topics which are considered worthwhile to advertisers who buy space in their pages, pop-ups, and commercial breaks. Read more »
Residency @ BALTAN – a report from Dave
October 18th, 2010 by Dave GriffithsThe residency we did in september at NIMk was almost exclusively using paper and pens as we were working together to design our game world. We could go for walks while thinking, and mostly keep to analogue methods.
This residency was very different – naturally at this stage focused on the software, we started with an initial list of showstopping things to fix, and then used online methods of organisation via mantis and the wiki.
We also presented the project for the first time, at NIMk’s space invaders event, and we had some super volunteers from Eindhoven Technical University Game Experience Lab to test the game (which Aymeric describes in more detail).
One of the things that I was pleased to get a chance to tackle was how to cope with the basics of online multiplayer games: Read more »
Meet the users: Playtest Session at Baltan
October 13th, 2010 by aymeric
Today was a crucial and quite scary step for the project: playtesting.
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Sprint @ BALTAN Laboratories, day I
October 12th, 2010 by Marloes de Valk
Monday October 11, the first day at BALTAN Laboratories in Eindhoven! We walked to the SWA building, through Phillips Complex S, and at the 8th floor gasped at the enormous space of the lab. After a grand tour by director Angela Plohman, we set up and started to write down the master plan for this week. Lots of decisions to make, especially after the playtests we’ve held. The feedback we received made sure we zoomed in on the parts that needed the most attention first.
First task was to make the interface more user friendly. Most playtesters were too busy trying to figure out what to type and how to type it, instead of discovering the game world. We decided to simplify the vocabulary, write more elaborate help texts in case of an error, and write a general “help” that gives an overview of the vocabulary, what each word does, tips to speed up navigation through the world and all this with clear examples.
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