3pointD.com

Just when you thought it was safe to watch lifecaster Justin.tv, or broadcast your own life with Ustream, along comes a virtual life you can not only watch on the Web but take part in controlling, a kind of collaborative stream of avatar consciousness — and one that’s going to be on display in a real-world art gallery from May 23 to June 2. Curated by the excellent Annie Ok of the GHava{SL} Center for the Arts in the virtual world of Second Life, the show will be designed by Electric Sheep Jerry Paffendorf and Christian Westbrook, and will involve Destroy Television, the interactive avatar-bot designed as a research project of the Electric Sheep Company, who streams live images of Second Life to her Web site (although that seems to be dark at the moment). Just what form the exhibit will take has yet to be revealed, but the show will take place simultaneously at the Fuse Gallery in New York (at 93 Second Avenue, between Fifth and Sixth Streets), and in SL at the GHava{SL} Center for the Arts, which is run by Annie’s SL self, Xantherus Halberd.

Destroy Television, for those just tuning in, is a Second Life avatar kitted out with a Web interface that captures Destroy’s every logged-in moment via a video stream. What’s more, browsers at the Web site can also collectively control Destroy’s movements and chats via the Web — if one of the Electric Sheep isn’t controlling her at the moment. It will be interesting to see how gallery-goers react to the opportunity to not only peer into a virtual world, but partially inhabit it at the same time.

One interesting aspect of the show is that “For the duration of the show [Destroy] will be recording a searchable video lifelog of its experience that visitors can easily explore, edit, and comment on. They can also click through its live online video and visit Destroy as an avatar inside Second Life, surf over to its lifelog afterwards and find themselves in its perfect memory as part of the menagerie.” So you’ll be able to easily browse back to any point in the 10-day stream after it’s all over, via a tool like Click.tv.

Besides having Destroy around in the gallery in some form, the show will also include “an installation documenting Destroy’s real-life conception beneath the kitchen sink as well as its early days in Second Life.” You can look in on Destroy’s Flickr page for a peek at some of what she got up to early on. And in fact, the title of the exhibition (”Destroy Television”) is itself nostalgic, given that Destroy was renamed DTV by the Sheep at some point in her history, presumably to avoid clashing with company’s media clients. Nice to see her back under her original moniker.

No word yet on whether Destroy gets her own wine-and-cheese reception, but we hope to see you there. For more information, contact GHava{SL} at ghavasl[at]ghava.com.