Help the Electric Sheep Destroy Television
Destroy Television in Second Life (view larger image on Flickr)
If you didn’t show up to the Second Life Herald’s third birthday party tonight, you missed quite a show. Even if you weren’t in the virtual world of Second Life, though, you may have caught the bash on Destroy Television, the new service from the Electric Sheep Company’s spare-time dev pool, Sheep Labs. Check out the Destroy Television avatar in the screenshot above. She looks innocent enough (even though she appears to be mooning the camera), but Destroy is an avatar of unique stripe; she’s controlled for the most part by users dialling over to the Destroy TV Web site, where they can make her chat or walk around. All the while, she snaps a pic every 30 seconds or so and plugs it into her Flickr page. The result is a user-controlled photo documentary of what’s going on around Second Life.
While she makes her way a bit clumsily, it’s pretty entertaining to have Destroy around. Guests at the party (which was hitting a lull when this shot was snapped, two and half hours in) seemed especially to enjoy making her say things to other guests. She’s not completely controllable, of course; one of the Electric Sheep (who sponsor this blog) has to take over if she’s to teleport from location to location. And she’s obviously not as interactive as “live” avatars. But she’s certainly producing a lot of images. I think she took more than 500 in the time she spent at the party.
Jerry Paffendorf, the Sheep’s resident futurist, is hot on the idea of Destroy TV as it relates to lifelogging. He imagines residents of virtual worlds traveling around with a similar service attached to them, Flickring every moment of their virtual lives. Were the Sheep to release a product like that, I’m sure SL residents would take it up, especially if had nice features whereby you could adjust the frequency of the screenshots and whether the UI was included, etc. Can you guys think of any other interesting uses for Destroy? Is this a new kind of media? (How about a Destroy TV badge, like the Flickr and Snapzilla badges I have in the sidebars here?) It’s interesting that this is hitting just now (Destroy has been wandering around for about a week), since I just got a press release from Rivers Run Red, which is bringing the kind of as-yet-undestroyed television we’re all used to into Second Life! Stay tuned.
Feeds
Hi Mark,
Still so funny to see my name on a blog! Everyone in SL has been so nice (although I have gotten a couple of strange IMs…) and I’m enjoying life in Christian, Jerry, and Glitchy’s kitchen cabinet. Those guys are hilarious, smart, hard-working, and handsome. I’m just a betatar trying to have fun, so I hope you’ll come play with me.
Destroy TV the machinima (move the slider to 1 second)
Destroy TV credits
Self-portrait
SL Herald birthday party machinima (near direct link, until I see Uri again)
ZOMG I’m such a noob. Of course much luv to my Pix! ^_^
Come see me see you!
[…] Destroy Television was a really cool-sounding project that created in 2006 by electric sheep. Unfortunately I completely missed it at the time (reader, did you see it, what did you think?) but i heard about it sometime in the spring of last year and read all the documentation on the web about it. I see it as a precursor to Brooklyn is Watching. DTV allowed visitors to a website to control an avatar who was walking around life-blogging its every move through constant automated flickr uploads. Destroy Television was for a limited time, and it was Web-to-SL, so it sounds like it essentially became the same group of people controlling the view point and being viewed. Brooklyn is Watching is less egalitarian, and more focused on social relationships because it brings in at least some degree of potential distance between the watched and the watchers. Its also more ridiculous and therefore funnier… well to me anyway. Because control of Monet, the Brookly is Watching avatar, will be only available to people who live in or can visit Brooklyn, the entire project is tied directly to a particular place. Because that place is a contemporary fine art gallery it is tied to a particular (delightfully strange, insular) stream of commentary and critical dialog. The Podcast, I’ve been telling people is going to be “art people talking about second life” and indeed some of us are complete SL noobs and some of us don’t even particularly like second life– and then some of us love it– so it should make for some good arguments. Our plan is to do this for (at least) a full year so we hope that we’ll get an active community of people participating in the project […]