Conversation on Conservation

Aymeric Mansoux in conversation with Julie Boschat Thorez.

On 30 June 2020, LI-MA continued its Conversation on Conservation series with a conversation with Aymeric Mansoux (artist/researcher) and Julie Boschat Thorez (artist/researcher) about the artwork Naked on Pluto (2010–2015). 

How to Reconstruct a Networked Artwork? 

Naked on Pluto is a Multiplayer Text Adventure created by Dave Griffiths, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk that is built as a Facebook game. The work reflects on the invasive means used by social media through these kinds of games, raising awareness of how our private data is being shared without our knowledge. 

In 2015, due to its dependency on Facebook and subsequent updates to the platform, the game fell into disrepair and became no longer accessible. Yet, all proposed restoration approaches were found to have a potentially huge impact on the meaning of the work, contingent as it is on the networked nature of social media. Instead, LI-MA proposed to revisit the interviews and other information surrounding the project, in this way activating the archive and making a reconstruction of the work accessible once more. Thus, in collaboration with LI-MA, Aymeric Mansoux reframed Naked on Pluto, so that visitors can continue to experience the work even if it is not possible to do so in the way originally intended. Remaining questions concerning this reconstruction include the following: Can we preserve the discourse generated by the work (i.e. chat histories) in this new form? And what new conservation alternatives could there be?