Hortense Boulais-Ifrene is a doctoral student in the research units Arts des images et art contemporain (AIAC, EA 4010, and Transferts critiques anglophones (TransCrit, EA 1569), at Paris 8 University. Her research-creation Ph.D., directed by Gwenola Wagon and Arnaud Regnauld, is entitled "Virtual worlds in ruins: an interdisciplinary approach to media archaeology" and is articulated at the crossroads of theoretical, artistic and curatorial research. In 2022, she co-curated the exhibition Back from AFK (Away From Keyboard) at Poush Manifesto with Lorena Lisembard. In 2020, 2021 and 2022 she was a production manager for the Ars Electronica festival. For the 2023 edition of the festival, she is curating the exhibition The Loot Bag Theory of Fiction, for the Campus Exhibition. 

Virtual worlds in ruins: an interdisciplinary approach to media archaeology

In the 1990s and 2000s, the emergence of online virtual worlds defined new paradigms of the inhabited, the uninhabited, and the passage of time. However, these persistent universes of immaculate appearance constructed by avatars are subjected to several levels of obsolescence and disappearance. In the context of Web 3.0’s construction, interrogating the ruins’ displacement into these synthetic environments paves new ways to its aesthetic, material, and historical reconsideration. Thus, this work of research-creation is a mediarcheological and poetic excavation of the near past through explorations of these worlds with layered temporalities. We will study them in their technological materiality and "on the surface". The first-person perspective, endorsing the role of an avatar leads to understanding the many effects of obsolescence. Our genealogical study is articulated from these two fundamental elements of cartography. Transposed to the virtual context, the ruins becomes a frame of reference in rupture with its history where past, present, and future are projected.

By combining the exploration of three research territories (The Sims Online, Second Life, and Active Worlds) and their vestiges, this project proposes to question what remains to imagine and evaluate the possibility of ruins by anticipation. Moreover, the mediarcheological methodology leads to thinking about the archive of these environments whose conditions of existence are based on political and economic decisions, code, and technical objects. In addition to a limited soft/hardware conservation, collecting the remains of these worlds allows us to think about their fragmentary nature and elaborate a multimodal preservation methodology based on memory and documentation.