Theater With Your Software: Destroy Television Art Show Opening On the 23rd

OK, my excitement meter is high. Core meetup info in one sentence below, more background in the paragraphs under that:

Please mark your calendars for next Wednesday, May 23rd 7-10 PM for the opening of the Destroy Television art show at Fuse Gallery in Lit Lounge, the place where we had our meetup after Virtual Worlds 2007 (2nd Ave and E 6th St).

---

My roommate Christian Westbrook and I are putting together the show -- or putting the wheels on a car that a lot of people will be able to hop into and drive -- which is more than a show in the gallery, really a 10-day anything-goes performance on the web and in Second Life fully documented in automagical Flickr pics and some machinima archiving that also incorporates the real world creation, history, influences, and trials of the Destroy Television avatar, and teleports straight into issues of privacy, transparency, identity, and the culture and technology of virtual worlds. And that ain't no idle art-speak, that's what it does alright! I seen it, I lived it, it keeps going on. Plus, you know, open bar.

If you liked Justin.TV you'll LOVE Destroy Television. Ha. Or maybe vice verse, or some combination. DTV did come first, and on the surface they're nearly identical premises: live video from the point-of-view of a person running around a world who you can communicate with through chat. Justin.TV crashes less frequently, but you can't click to teleport through to his apartment in San Francisco. Trade-offs.

Waxing a little bit on Destroy Televisions origins:

I remember Christian asking one day last summer: "What can we do with an avatar named Destroy Television?" The funny, ambiguous, and to us playful name came first. If you're familiar with Second Life you know that you can choose any first name you'd like for your avatar, but you're limited to a set of last names that's pretty much luck of the draw, making the registration of a clever avatar name an event. An avatar named Destroy Television certainly sounded like it should *do* something, and we had it to play with. The name came first and the ideas were built around it.

Inspired by a WebNoPoint0h mix of influences including Subservient Chicken, Just Letters, the old SLTV, and lifelogging concepts, the framework for Destroy Television was created: a multi-user web-streaming lifelogging Second Life avatar machinima chat room... or something like that. We cleared out a cabinet underneath the kitchen sink, stuffed it full of extra computers laying around the house, and Wala! Destroy Television was born. She became another character in our apartment and in Second Life, and like a baby she needed constant attention and feeding and tending to (both in SL and in the kitchen) as she or Second Life or our streaming server or internet connection crashed, or someone pushed her into the ocean, or people sent her IMs or group invites, or she moved to Virginia for a while to live with her aunt and uncle Chris and Becky, or any number of things. But she wasn't really anybody, even by virtual worlds standards: there wasn't one person or personality behind her, she was whoever picked up the controls and started speaking through her and her life was whatever she happened to see around her, people poking at her and performing for her. And when people poked and performed, they were captured in the lifelog: a generative media machine for a virtual world.

And besides what you could see of her in Second Life, she lived another life in the background in the real world, as a challenging and ultimately influential idea for The Electric Sheep Company, a metaverse start-up with whom Christian and I both work, making Destroy Television a kind of 20%-time side project for us, but also something of use for and something that would reflect back on the company. After a lot of discussion her name was changed from Destroy Television to DTV, and she began to be used to periodically stream Electric Sheep events in Second Life out onto the web. I remember when she did live coverage of the Rockefeller virtual Christmas tree lighting on NBC.com. That was a fun feeling, knowing where she came from, seeing her working with Real Television! What does the D stand for again? Dimension? Shhh. :)

I've developed a bit of a mantra around some of the things we build in virtual worlds: "Theater with your software." I try to imagine a company that's 1/2 Google and 1/2 Disney, making tools that work to organize the digital world and at the same time creating characters and stories and experiences that bring the whole thing to life and transcend the technology. I'm thrilled and still happily surprised (thank you, Annie Ok!) that we have this chance to revive DTV in her Destroy Television form in an art setting that has slightly different rules.

Meetup is giving me the gong for hitting 5,000 characters so that's my cue to stop here. Will blog and write with more details, but hope you can meet and participate.

Good times,

Jerry