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Screen Walk with Hortense Boulais Ifréne

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About this film

If the utopia of inhabiting virtual worlds continues to haunt Silicon Valley entrepreneurs—driving them to always build new ones—fictional archaeologists continue to explore the scattered traces of digital ruins. In this Screen Walk, Hortense Boulais-Ifrène delved into her research on fictional archaeology. Using two case studies– Chris Marker’s Ouvroir in Second Life and the now-defunct persistent world of Microsoft AltSpaceVR–she examined how these strangely preserved yet abandoned spaces are suspended in an eerie limbo between memory and speculation, archiving and reinvention. Their preservation unfolds through diverse practices, including texts, websites, installations, and YouTube videos. Oscillating between nostalgia and an emerging genre of digital horror, these explorations document what might vanish overnight, re-enchanting these spaces through poetic intervention. Screen Walks is a series of live-streamed artist/researcher-led explorations of online spaces and artistic strategies designed to illuminate a thriving – often overlooked – digital cultural scene. A new online collaboration between The Photographers’ Gallery , UK and Fotomuseum Winterthur , Switzerland.

Directors & creators

Screen Walks

Subjects

Screen Walks, Hortense Boulais-Ifréne, research, virtual-worlds, games, history

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