Destroy TV reaches far and wide - one frame at a time (updated)

(Updated 6/23/07 to include Annie Ok's contribution to project)
For those of you keeping tabs on the Machinima frontier, pay close attention to Jerry Paffendorf and Christian Westbrook, if you aren't already. The duo are explorers into the virtual playground of Second Life - and they've become extremely adept at finding the world's edges and figure out ways to stretch them further.

Their latest endeavour is Destroy TV - a multiuser avatar in SL that catalogs its existence to Flickr, Twitter and YouTube. Recently Jerry and Christian collaborated with curator/artist Annie Ok to bring Destroy TV to the public, with an interactive installation of DTV run over the course of 10 days at the Fuse Gallery here in NYC and Art Center in SL. During this time Annie/Destroy explored large parts of Second Life, and was even married during the week-plus event (to Walker Spaight of 3pointD no less!). Annie describes it as one of the most intense and immersive experiences she's ever had - living as Destroy in SL for 10 days straight.

The fascinating part of the installation for me was the time-lapse of the virtual life, now released in its Director's Cut edition (in multiple gigs of MPEGs). Lifelogging, as Jerry describes it, is a unique look at the click-to-click moments of a virtual entity. With a stream of nearly 100,000 screen caps compiled together, the film becomes the Machinima equivalent of Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi. Yet one more way Machinima embraces old practices using new technology.

Destroy TV's life begun under the sink of Jerry and Christian's apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where they placed the DTV Macbook and cam software so that it was out of harm's way (save any leaky pipes). With a start there, I look forward to seeing what other projects spring forth from their kitchen.

Update: For giggles, I mashed some DTV footage (and sped up quite a bit) with a sampling of Phillip Glass' "The Grid."

I give you, ahem, Destroyaanisqatsi.

Machinima Festival Europe 07!

This has been cooking in the background since the start of this year, but now we're finally able to shout it out to the world - the first European Machinima Festival is taking place October 12-14th, 2007 in Leicester, England, at De Montfort University!

Put together by the fine staff at DMU and sponsored by Sleepydog, the festival is a collaboration of De Montfort University, the Institute for Creative Technologies (IOCT) and the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences. Read more about the event here in the release on the GamesIndustry.biz site.

We're all really excited to have an event based in Europe - to help promote Machinima within this section of the world, but also to act as a common ground for European artists and fans.

There will be more to announce shortly about the fest, so stay tuned!