Grand Theft Avatar

Last week, Second Front did a live performance at the San Francisco Art Institute on a panel titled "From Cinema to Machinima" (moderated by Christiane Paul and Lynn Hershman Leeson). The problem is that Second Front is out of cash. Dead broke. We're forced resort to extreme measures.

Here is our hit: The Linden Treasury.

Don't let the doe eyes and the dragonfly wings fool you: the vaults were heavily guarded (guard is our own Lizsolo Mathilde).

Tran Spire, Great Escape, Man Michinaga and Fau Ferdinand assembled in the "evil genius" room to plan the heist. Not only do we want to pocket some Linden Dollars for ourselves; we also planned to free the currency from the virtual bank.

After all, Linden Labs owns huge swaths of land, they make their own laws and the mint their own currency. They essentially are a nation-state.

First, we donned costumes to resemble those on the panel. Man Michinaga disguised himself as Christiane Paul. Fau Ferdinand is Camille Utterback toting a cute scarf and giant gun.

Tran Spire looks suspiciously like Char Davies — armed and tres dangereux.

And Great Escape assumed the identity of Scott Snibbe, mild-mannered mastermind.

Stick 'em up! Here you can see us arriving in the copter. The janitor (played by Gazira Babeli) stopped scrubbing the floors and put her hands in the air. Smart move.

Patty Hearst (played by Bibbe Oh) was the bank receptionist. Sigh, we miss the days when Patty was fun.

KA-BOOM! We used custom-built explosives to crack the vault. Yikes! Howard went down. We didn't mean to hurt anyone...

A-HA! Sacks of Linden dollars. Great Escape grabs all he can while gunfire erupts in the background.

We hop in the copter with the police in hot pursuit. Fly away money, be free!

As the grand finale, we hop on a H-Bombs and ride them Slim Pickens style into the sunset. Yahoo! Yee-haw!



Photos courtesy of: Jeff Aldrich, Great Escape, Tran Spire, Man Michinaga, Bibbe Oh and Aliselborg Zhaoying.