Future Salon Focus: Machinima!

A bit of a late notice: Tonight (April 30th) I'll be the guest of Jerry Paffendorf and Timothy Moenk at the newly minted Electric Sheep's Media Island in Second Life, where myself and Pierce Portocarrero will be speaking (and showing!) Machinima at this evening's Future Salon. The discussion starts at 8pm EST/5pm PST - so if you're a SL'er or even not - join us if you can!

UPDATE: Just spoke with Señor Paffendorf and Second Life was attacked this afternoon (the result of SL's own version of a virus: self-replicating objects which ultimately overload their grid). This will take a few hours or so to resolve, to which, the Future Salon will be postponed tonight and re-scheduled for a future date soon. I will post the updated info as soon as I have it (and yes, with more than 24 hours notice too).

USC Machinima Presentation

I'm participating this weekend in USC's Networked Publics and DIY Media Festival. I had only about 20 minutes to present Machinima in all its glory - and in that, I selected 16 different films for this diverse representation (talk about tough). The Annenberg Center will be posting the HTML of selected films at some point (and I hear some blogs/vlogs of the event itself), but you can see the selected films here (Machinima: Finding Its Way).


Small vid of this mornings "Place" discussion (with WoW projected - though you wouldn't know it).

The weekend has kicked off with great discussion - looking at current infrastructures, distributions and the wide-range scattering of content creation and viewing--layered in the conversation with the future forms of each. Even more entertaining have been the backchannel discussions - which originally started out on IRC, but then switched over to AIM chat once there were too many people jumping in (I tried to start a Nintendo DS backchannel but it was just me and another who quickly grew tired of Picto-chatting crude sketches of the panelists).

The conversations around Machinima have also been great - with touches upon the subject I'm currently researching for The Machinima Reader. I had the chance to speak with both Michael Nitsche and Lev Manovich during dinner last night (enhanced with a few VTs) and we spoke at length about Machinima's historical, future and current identity. Quite a few folks brought up the question of Machinima vs. animation software - others (distant from video games) were still coming to grips with how games stimulate creative play. It fortified my beliefs in that Machinima is mostly defined by audience and the relationship to what has been created. I plan on digging deeper here, but it helps to begin to exploring it in a more public forum.

There's been some big Machinima-related news in recent days (didn't I say that last time?) -- I plan on blogging more during this weekend and touch upon those subjects.