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 will delve 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 will examine 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.
Hortense Boulais-Ifrene is a PhD candidate at Paris 8 University, conducting research within the Arts des images et art contemporain (AIAC, EA 4010) and Transferts critiques anglophones (TransCrit, EA 1569) laboratories. Her practice- based thesis, “Virtual Worlds in Ruins: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Media Archaeology”, explores the remnants of past paradigms of persistent online worlds at the intersection of various artistic and theoretical approaches, including exhibition curation, performed-lecture, virtual photography or video. In 2023, she curated The Loot Bag Theory of Fiction for the Ars Electronica Festival Campus (Linz, Austria), and in 2024, she co-organized the Rencontres de l’EDESTA symposium, Faire avec l’éphémère, at the National Institute for Art History (INHA) in Paris.
Screen Walks is a new 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.
