Screen Walk with Hortense Boulais-Ifrène

While the vision of creating and permanently inhabiting digital worlds continues to drive entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, fictional archaeologists dedicate themselves to tracing the remnants of past virtual spaces. In this Screen Walk, Hortense Boulais-Ifrène examines two case studies of fictional archaeology: Chris Marker’s Ouvroir in Second Life and the now-defunct virtual world of Microsoft, AltspaceVR. She demonstrates how these simultaneously preserved and abandoned spaces – hovering between memory and speculation, archiving and reinvention – are reexamined, documented and thus preserved through texts, websites, installations and YouTube videos. Oscillating between nostalgia and an emerging genre of digital horror, these explorations document what could disappear overnight and reinvent these spaces through poetic intervention.

In Screen Walks, a series of live-streamed explorations of digital spaces, selected artists and researchers investigate artistic strategies taking place online. The project gives an insight into practices using the screen as a medium. From re-contextualising pictures found on online marketplaces and uncovering data brokers’ invisible circulation of images to analysing in-game photography and the social, political and economic implications of games – Screen Walks examines various approaches, offers a behind-the-scenes look at artists’ work and uncovers new, current and forgotten digital spaces. Screen Walks is a collaboration between The Photographers’ Gallery in London and Fotomuseum Winterthur.

The event is free and takes place on Zoom. Details on how to access the talk will be confirmed upon registration. REGISTER HERE.



Biography:
Hortense Boulais-Ifrène is a PhD candidate at Paris 8 University, conducting research within the Arts des images et art contemporain (AIAC) and Transferts Critiques anglophones (TransCrit) laboratories. Her practice-based thesis Virtual Worlds in Ruins: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Media Archaeology, explores the remnants of old online worlds from an artistic and theoretical perspective, including exhibition curation, performance lecture, virtual photography or video. In 2023, she curated The Loot Bag Theory of Fiction for the Ars Electronica Campus Exhibition in Linz, Austria, and in 2024, she co-organised the Rencontres de l’EDESTA symposium Faire avec l’éphémère at the National Institute for Art History (INHA) in Paris, France.

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