"Destroy Television" exhibition @ Fuse Gallery in NYC & GHava{SL} Center for the Arts in Second Life

Futurist Jerry Paffendorf and metaverse architect Christian Westbrook to exhibit "Destroy Television", an interactive virtual art installation, concurrently at Fuse Gallery in NYC and GHava{SL} Center for the Arts in Second Life.

GHava{SL} Center for the Arts is proud to announce "Destroy Television", an interactive virtual art installation by futurist Jerry Paffendorf and metaverse architect Christian Westbrook. This exhibition will occur simultaneously in the metaverse Second Life as well as in NYC at Fuse Gallery. It opens May 23, runs through June 2, 2007. It is curated by Annie Ok of GHava{SL} Center for the Arts.

Born and raised beneath a kitchen sink in Brooklyn, Destroy Television is an avatar in the user-created 3D virtual world of Second Life. But unlike other avatars that are owned and controlled by individuals, Destroy is an expression of everyone who controls and speaks through it at destroytv.com. As a result it encompasses many simultaneous voices and motivations, of which any given user can be one. For the duration of the show it 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. Additionally on display in Fuse Gallery and at GHava{SL} Center for the Arts will be an installation documenting Destroy's real life conception beneath the kitchen sink as well as its early days in Second Life.

Destroy Television unleashes numerous true intelligences on a world that's simultaneously finite and limitless. People who visit the avatar in real life at the gallery and in Second Life at the art center will be encouraged to interact, communicate, and perform with the avatar, and by doing so enter its lifelog, unforgettably.

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Bios:

Jerry Paffendorf is resident futurist with The Electric Sheep Company where he explores the future of virtual worlds and how they're coming to intersect with and impact the real world. Previously he worked with the nonprofit Acceleration Studies Foundation who research accelerating technological change, why it happens and what it means. He has an MS in Studies of the Future from the University of Houston-Clear Lake and a BFA in Fine Arts from Montclair State University in New Jersey. He's always talking at conferences, pushing new projects, lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and believes the 21st century will be absolutely insane as the web goes everywhere all the time and we turn the world into something like a video game and ourselves into something like avatars.

Christian Westbrook is a creative technologist who constantly seeks new ways to merge code, music, and art. He currently is metaverse architect for The Electric Sheep Company, building bridges between real and virtual worlds and improving open source tools that enable others to create. Christian has a BS in Computer Science from Rice University, where DTV's older brother, a robot named Virgil, still gives tours on sunny days, and is a big fan of sushi and Ableton Live.

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Contact: Annie Ok, GHava{SL} Center for the Arts | ghavasl (at) ghava.com

Jerry Paffendorf & Christian Westbrook: "Destroy Television"
Opens May 23, runs through June 2, 2007

Fuse Gallery
93 2nd Ave
(between E 5th & E 6th)
NY, NY 10003
Phone: +1.212.777.7988
http://www.fusegallerynyc.com

GHava{SL} Center for the Arts is located at
Haenim (11, 114, 550) in Second Life
SLUrl: http://tinyurl.com/2yxyc4
http://www.virb.com/ghavasl