"Destroy Television" exhibition

Destroy Television

A mixed reality interactive virtual installation by futurist Jerry Paffendorf and metaverse architect Christian Westbrook, curated by and in collaboration with artist Annie Ok. This exhibition occurred simultaneously in the metaverse Second Life at Art Center as well as in NYC at Fuse Gallery from May 23rd - June 2nd, 2007.

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About:

Destroy Television is an avatar (a virtual person) in an online virtual world called Second Life. Everything you see inside of Second Life is created by the hundreds of thousands of people who regularly go "inworld" to use and experience it. People own the things they create and can sell them to each other in a real economy run almost completely on imagination without physical scarcity. Some consider it a very early glimpse into an all-encompassing future internet that seamlessly mixes atoms and bits.

Crazy things happen in Second Life (an often frustrating but creatively empowering Wild West where Fortune 500 companies mingle with robots, elves, and furries) and you have to remember that every avatar you see is controlled by a real person somewhere in the real world all coming together in the same psychological space. Destroy Television is a creature of this condition. She was "born" in a kitchen cabinet in Brooklyn stuffed full of computers as a household side-project for Jerry and Christian who live together and work professionally on virtual worlds. They playfully wanted to make an avatar that would surrender to the network, that anyone could watch and control, perform for and assume. They also wanted to stream and record her unique experience to share with other people.

Her presence in the house as an always-on gateway into the metaverse and her constant need to be moved, reset, updated, repurposed, and re-explained, pulled Jerry and Christian into the kitchen cabinet with her, making life in the virtual world an un-ignorable extension of everyday real life living, and, if Destroy has a point-of-view, vice versa. Documentation of this inspiration, experience and history was on display in Fuse Gallery in NYC as well as at Art Center in Second Life. The virtual exhibition at Art Center, created by Annie Ok, allows visitors from all over the world to experience it from wherever they may be, whenever they want.

For the 10 day duration, Destroy Television toured all over Second Life and her explorations were projected into Fuse gallery at the same time that they were projected virtually into Art Center. Destroy was programmed to take a screenshot every 5 seconds and every 30 seconds, the screenshot was also sent to Destroy's Flickr along with information about where she was, who was nearby, what was being said, and how many viewers were watching via destroytv.com. Viewers of destroytv.com could not only watch along on the live stream but also chat to whomever Destroy was near in Second Life via the site. All location SLurls, parcel names, avatar names, and chat history were automated to become Flickr tags and are searchable on her tag cloud. Shooting continuously in the virtual world for 10 days at ~17,280 shots a day resulted in 240,558 images, which were then turned into high speed time lapse videos, forming the most comprehensive documentary of Second Life to date. The raw, unedited high res footage can be found here. The low res versions of the videos can be seen on Destroy Television's YouTube. Current work in progress: an edited, slowed-down high res DVD of Destroy Television's lifelogging/lifecasting odyssey with artists' commentary.

19 photos | 499 views

items are from between 23 May 2007 & 12 Jun 2007.