Waiting for The Hills

machinima, The Hills, Second Life and Godot.

The project we present, a machinima that mingles texts drawn from the “scripted reality” television show The Hills and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot with video captured in the Second Life world, is intended as a playful meditation on questions of liveness, authenticity and genre confusion. These are issues which we consider significant to an exploration of new media, particularly as concerns cinema and performance studies, the fields that compose our individual backgrounds. In this brief essay, we present The Hills, a product that blends reality television with the fantasy of soap opera, through machinima—itself a complex and mischievous form which remains a site of contestation and opportunity—and the dubious reality of Second Life.