Join us as we welcome Derek Murphy and Mitchell Zemil to talk about their show Preserving Worlds.
Preserving Worlds is a documentary series about aging virtual worlds.
Virtual worlds are delicate things, and they can vanish with hardly a trace. You can archive the offline software, but dead worlds can only tell you so much. It’s just as important to document how people spent their time within them.
Preserving Worlds is a travelogue that takes you through some of the most interesting and impactful online games and communities of the past forty years to see what it’s like to visit them today. Along the way, you’ll meet people who are working against obsolescence to keep the communities they care about alive and accessible.
Derek Murphy is a librarian and filmmaker living in Boston. He has been directing documentary films ever since his misbegotten youth spent bumming around the abandoned buildings of Sarasota, Florida. His work is concerned with youth culture, reclaimed spaces, Social Ecology, Surrealism, Situationism, outsider art, internet communities, and the preservation and documentation of ephemeral digital culture.
Mitchell Zemil is an animator, filmmaker, and longtime collaborator of Murphy's, namely working as the duo's cinematographer, editor, and co-creative. He has also directed music videos and short films of his own and teaches animation as an adjunct professor at Montclair State University. He is currently based in Brooklyn, New York.
