Art Center presents "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 will occur simultaneously in the metaverse Second Life as well as in NYC at Fuse Gallery.

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 is 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, will allow visitors from all over the world to experience it from wherever they may be, whenever they want.

During the ten days of this show, through June 2nd, Destroy Television will explore Second Life and record 240 hours worth of experience and information (not only images, but searchable information about the people she's seen, the places she's been, the things she and others have said) that will be made into a movie. You can also find and interact with her in Second Life by searching for Destroy Television and on the web at destroytv.com.

More info:
http://virb.com/artcenter