 We're now live on HowlRound. I don't know, we should pick that up to make sure we're going. Here we go. We're going to experience a little bit of a delay and I'm going to make sure that we don't hear it on this end. So because now people are watching at home as we're feeding to everything, we wanted to make sure that we hit a couple of things of introduction as- We're toaster lab? Yep. Hello. Hello. We had intended to be live and do this in partnership. We continue to do it in partnership and in partnership in person with the Festival of Live Digital Art in Kingston, Ontario. That's also gone online and we recommend checking out their full program that all the performance is about to come up over the course of this next week. They've been doing the startup. We've been also tangentially involved in one of the large projects that's a collaboration between them and the National Art Centre that is called the Green Rooms, which is about imagining theatre and climate change, which is also moved online. And tangentially we're also helping with doing things around carbon footprinting around that. I wanted to do sort of address a couple of things before we start talking about the things that we have on agenda and update of the projects that we've been doing. We can do a little round of introduction. You'll see each of our advisory board members that has been joining. We've just come out of a close meeting where we've been doing updates on our projects, the projects they've been working on and sort of aligning what we're doing. We've had to do this pretty strong pivot. I want to do first a few acknowledgements and we're going to jump into, we're going to actually go to our advisory board member, Sydney, to talk a little bit about future events first. The topic that we didn't really get to cover too much of in our closed meeting about how we pivot around this component, what we're doing now in our future convenings, because this is meant to be our halfway point, three of six. Though everybody is sort of spread out at this point, I did want to recognize that we are here in Dr. Ronto, which has been taken care of by the Anishave, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Heron-Wendat and the Metis, and there's many indigenous people that continue to call this place home. We also want to make sure that we state our solidarity with Black Lives Matter and the crisis that's going on right now, and working in an anti-racist way to support those who are protesting and fighting for Black Lives in this time of overlapping crises. I am, for those who are looking at me right now, I'm a white male in Canada in a 10-year faculty position. I don't get a lot more privileged than that. I benefit from a lot of significant systemic and institutional privilege, but I also see part of my responsibility in holding this privilege as a way to work as an ally for those who do not benefit from this privilege or have experienced oppression as a result of this privilege. Toastalab's work is about revealing the hidden stories of place to support mutual understanding, to lift up histories that are being erased, and the Atelier is about boosting projects to make storytelling of this kind, especially with regards to technology, mixed reality technology, accessible in the breakdown barriers for artists to engage with them and ally collaboration with the first communities. You can see that in a number of the different projects that we've had the opportunity to collaborate with and some of the ones that we'll talk today. We also want to acknowledge that we are coming to you on Zoom and Facebook right now, and while both have become much more important connecting people when we're not able to gather together, both reinforce systemic issues in society. Zoom's concern for its users and their security and safety has been critique for long before the current pandemic, and it's recently made statements that put profits up ahead of security by publicly stating that it will cooperate with police and not encrypt communication for unpaid accounts, which is an issue that we see in Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as recently abdicated responsibility for false information posted to the company's platform, despite the issues that have caused, this has caused into fighting society, interfering in elections and virtually spreading false information. So we critique society and we also participate. Here we are, all of us together on these shared platforms. As we're starting up, because we're not able to gather right now, what I actually wanted to do, because he can't join us for the entire time, and right now, unfortunately, his videos is frozen with me. So Sidney, are you there? Sidney, now for his hair, is touching his hair. Well, if Sidney is able to join us again, what I want to talk about is some of our future events that are happening, our fall event. Oh, you're back, Sidney. Our fall event is meant to happen with partners at Indiana University related to a project that we're doing there, which is actually currently delayed and so far as being able to actually be there. And our winter gathering is meant to be in partnership with the conference on research and choreographic interfaces, which is directed by our friend Sidney Skye, a veteran board member. And I wanted, if you could say a couple of words about how you see that happening in the future, knowing that this is all very new and we will not hold you to any of this. I appreciate the lack of accountability, Ian. Thank you. So first, I have to say it's a pleasure and privilege to be joining you all today. Thank you, Ian, and Toaster Lab for indeed holding space and court. And I'm just really it's always a pleasure to see all of you nerds. So indeed in March, tentatively in March of next year, the Conference for Research and Choreographic Interfaces or CRC for short will be convening question mark in some way to be determined at or through or beyond Brown University. The current dates for that event are March 5th through 7th, but this too can be subject to change. CRC, if you're understandably not familiar, is a convening that seeks to foreground the contributions of artists, body centric, choreographic artists specifically to foreground their efforts to work with an intervene in emerging technologies. It started out with a principal preoccupation with interface and interfaciality, but is now per the zeitgeist deeply involved in questions of surveillance and status violence. So this is to say that we will be, of course, contending programmatically on some to be determined level with questions of of Black Lives Matter, of our covid and post covid moment. I also say that we will also be screening in some to be determined capacity. One of what I assume is one of Ian's favorite films, Johnny Mnemonic, which, while not a good film, is a usefully bad film. Other than that, we are currently very open and still figuring out indeed what the programming will consist of. We anticipate some manner of secretly discuss discursive kinds of programming like this. But we are also very open to suggestion here. So I'm very curious what folks, how folks want to engage in variously embodied or disembodied fashion. And I am very accessible and interested in in hearing from you, nerds and experts about what is useful and interesting to you. So for more information, check out choreo tech dot com or pay me personally. And Ian, is there anything else that you'd like me to ramble about right now? I think that's excellent. Thank you, Sidney. We'll can as we intend to continue to support that we'll also have information coming up through Torres Strait Island as well as anything gets sorted. I think that's that sort of like openness is something that we're all living with right now. And I think that you are very kind in your characterization of my relationship to 1995's Johnny Mnemonic. I didn't quite hear you. Did you say accurate and completely correct? I couldn't quite hear you when in and out. Yes, yes, let's go with you. OK, great. Thank you. I did want to acknowledge in checking the stream that we have two people who for or three people for various reasons who are other video off in our call right now because of the things that they're doing. But Jacob needs Vicki, Paul Segers and Megan Bernard. Also with us. But because of the way that we stream out of Zoom are not necessarily available on the live feed. So you might hear their voices coming up later. It is. Yes, thank you. And thank you, Sidney. Sidney, we know that everybody is sort of is dealing with a variety of things, including third grade math. So if you would like to return to your lesson and demands at home, we really appreciate the time that you've been able to share with us today. Thank you all. So to give us a little bit of context for how what we want to cover in the remaining time that we have this afternoon, if you're here with us in the Eastern time zone or from wherever you join us is the first thing that we want to do is make sure that we plug a couple of other events that were all meant to happen in rapid succession over the course of a couple of days with each other. But now we're happening over the course of a couple of weeks to allow for flexibility, given everybody is strange to man them their time and things that are going on. We do have a hackathon coming up, which we have labeled T-Morph, which is toaster lab mixed reality performance hackathon. And we put it into initials and I sort of went with it. So we're calling it T-Morph. It's going to start on about this time, the noon hour on Saturday, June 13th. It will run, which will have a kickoff event then. There will be a few different scheduled points for participants throughout that, but a lot of it is going to be self-organized as we learn how to do a remote hackathon with support from our friend Julie Driver from Artifact VR, who has a bit more experience in figuring that out, luckily, than we do. And we'll be doing final presentations of the projects that emerged from that following Friday on June 19th. All of those are available on our website. So if you go to toasterlab.com slash atelier, or click the Atelier link, you'll see that all of our events they are incurring the archive of our previous symposia and that the most current one, which labels it as folder slash howl round, which is how we're doing it, getting most of this out this time. We'll have the links to those. We'll also broadcast them there and onto our Facebook page however problematic we've identified that to be. We offer us a special performance, and we'll talk about the actual project in a moment that's a collaboration that has come together in these COVID times with our partners Dancing Earth, with whom we were working on the Groundworks Project that we've presented about before, in working remotely together and we've got a couple of things to share about that in a moment. Before we get into our updates on our boosted projects, which we'll hear from those of us here in the home office, literally our home office, and we'll talk a little bit, we'll turn it over to Adrienne Mackie in Philadelphia and her home office regarding updates to Trail-Off and the project we've been collaborating on there which we heard a bit with and we'll acknowledge some of the projects that we've had to rethink what we're doing and delay them so how that affects what we're doing. We've had a good check-in before this. Once we're able to do the updates, the remainder of our time will be spent in discussion with the board, talking about the various opportunities and challenges reflecting upon what we've shared with each other and what we know is coming forward and talk about what our thoughts are towards the future plans of the utility of the atelier. We've got another year that we're intended to be working in this way specifically through the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, but that doesn't mean that work stops because of that. So we know that a lot of projects are pushing forward and we're thinking about how we can continue to support that. Yeah. Is there anything you want to add? Ew. No. All right, so to give everyone an update towards where we are on a current slate of boosted projects, which we've been actively working on since our last symposium in February to give some more context insofar as how we work, we've been working in cohorts of three to four projects, roughly spaced out every four months. Projects, we go through a process of boosting those projects, which is to say that we add supplementary human, physical, financial, sometimes resources as we're able to, primarily bringing in expertise and some equipment to allow projects to explore mixed reality approaches to production that they might otherwise not have before. And even though they have access to the technology because we do prioritize accessible technology, providing the expertise to help them work through those processes of integration so that we can effectively create a bit of a field which our experience in this crisis time, well, the pandemic crisis time, not to put that crisis above any other crisis happening in this very moment, has been to pivot to online work, which has made a lot of what we're doing seem that much more important and vital to this moment to be able to share different ways of working remotely. This is the topic of our upcoming hackathon is working in remote work and low bandwidth areas so we can continue to deliver experiences there when you're not in dense, highly infrastructure areas or have specialized advanced equipment that might be out of reach. So I'm gonna do a screen share here to give you a little bit of to go with this update. Don't fail me now. So we should be seeing now my second screen here what we, the one of the projects that we did in which we started to build augmented reality assets in a few different ways was a production of Oh, What a Lovely War, which happened at Hart House here in Toronto. It's a project that we begin speaking with the director Autumn Smith over the previous summer when she wanted to bring in a video game aesthetic to the project that she was working on as we started to talk about perhaps supplementing it. It turned into actually a centerpiece of the project as we were working through it. So you can see a couple of the, you can see a couple of the shots from some of our early experiments working in creating a character that we could use through augmented reality. We've got this one dancing right here. Maybe it's been one of our favorite things to just make this character, this John Bull character which it's been entertaining to make this John Bull character this is all done through our existing Adobe subscription working with some of their AR tools and being able to bring them onto our phones. We ended up not wanting to necessarily work with this in the actual production. You'll see also on the right hand side of the screen there one of the things that we found in a post now that Apple and many other manufacturers have had depth sensing ability especially in their forward facing cameras if you have a phone that is able to do or it requires you to do face ID and face unlocking. One of the ways that it does that is further looking at the shape of your face and the sort of unique patterns there what this also opens up the ability is to do facial motion tracking within the phone itself. So we explored a couple of different programs ending up working primarily through real illusions programs creating a character through their character creator in which we were able to then animate through their live face program which uses a network connection to your existing device and then exporting the video from there. Oftentimes they're using it for animation but for ours we ended up creating this floating head the presence of John Bull which we ended up putting onto a green background so we could move them around in a keyed way inside a more familiar video server in this case using watch out so you can see some of the work and emotion here and the character through that work was shared on various parts throughout the entire video design which ended up becoming a core part of the overall sonography of that piece as well and was played by the director actually played by Autumn herself where we pitched if her voice after doing motion capture with her so it's matched to each other. So that's a project that we're working on documentation for we'll talk a little bit when we get towards the end of sharing where we are with the various projects about what our steps forward are and the focus on documentation there. Another project that we've done that is actually going to be we're going to be doing a final public presentation at least for the time being on June 18th is a collaboration with Dancing Earth on Indigenous Futurity is Dancing Earth and Cyberspace it is they were set to tour with a piece that some of it originated out of our long-term collaboration on Groundworks they had created a piece is a little bit more Southwest oriented called Between Underground and Skyworld and it can't tour anymore. And so in having some early conversations about what are the options for what we can do and seeing people turn to Zoom we started to look at how we could use Zoom or go beyond Zoom as a performance aesthetic so that we could create a live performance that works together. So the image that we're sharing on the screen right now is meant to look like Zoom but we're actually using primarily Skype because Skype will allow you to use the video feeds as NDI inputs network and network devices and using an open broadcast system or OBS studio you can pull each of those individual video feeds in together. So we've actually been able to provide each of the performers with a green screen relatively affordable pack and work with the devices that they have available to them to bring in a chroma keyed live performance through Skype that they're performing. And so while we're able to create the Zoom aesthetic as well and we sort of start there because that's what people are from to expect we've also started to do live compositions that bring in preexisting video ad sets from the show being able to scale and have people appear on screen together and in response to each other in different configurations not just locked into their Zoom boxes as we're used to we've brought in the ability to integrate text to one of the features that we'll be integrating into the show is essentially a Facebook chat that we're able to bring into the performance as well so that those who are watching it in a group of people that we're working with ahead of time will be able to add comments within a specific topic we can invite people that are in the audience each time to submit that videos and photographs as well that work into the compositions. So I just have one more these are a number of different screenshots that we have and the artists that are participating in this as I stopped to share my screen so we were back to our typical because of a back to our typical Zoom layout one of the things so the artists that we have here are spread across Turtle Island in the Pacific both in where they are right now in the origin with artists coming from Minneapolis Seattle, Albuquerque, Phoenix and well within the greater area of Wellington, New Zealand and so everything's timed out in such a way so that everybody is performing live together with this home office which you see us coming from right now serving as a control room that it all comes into Toronto and then goes back out live from here. So those are a couple of the core the core just a lot of projects that we've been focusing on the last couple of weeks as we've been doing this I wanted to turn it next to Adrienne to give a little bit of update around how Trail-Off has been working in Philadelphia. Sure thing. So for anyone on the stream who doesn't know kind of about the background of Trail-Off it's a mobile app that is a collaboration between Toaster Lab, My Company Swim Pony and the Pennsylvania Environmental Council of Peck and the aim of the project it's been like two years of active work sort of three if you count like a long conception we did a very extensive kind of fun research process where we did a series of workshops sort of looking at geolocative storytelling leading up to the actual production but the aim of the project is really to increase the diversity of narratives that we associate with natural spaces. So the core conception of the project is 10 trails throughout the Philadelphia region that have been selected by 10 authors who went through a very expensive community engagement intake process all of whom self-identify in some way as marginalized from the environmental space. So these are not the audiences that are currently being effectively served by environmental programming. They came in, took part in sort of like a few months of dialogue and dramaturgy with us did an expensive workshop that Justine was at back in March of 2019 and then spent around six months kind of in residence on their trail getting to become the master of all the different nukes and crannies of it and then wrote original stories whatever that means to them in some cases those were autobiographical or historical inspired in some cases they were original fiction works in some cases they were original epic poems that span the landscape but all in relationship to the actual environment that you see as you walk along the trail. So once the authors created those scripts we took them and then sound designer and composer Mike Kiley and I work together with over a hundred performers, actors and musicians to do the epic task of translating these scripts into actual audio dramas. I don't know that we knew this when we got into it but it was essentially creating like 10 full length produced theater pieces with original music on brand new scripts and all the dramaturgy that goes with it in recording of about three months period which I don't highly recommend to anybody on the planet to do it but the works honestly are just astonishing pieces of literature. They're incredibly beautiful and incredibly they range in both being incredibly funny and poignant incredibly moving incredibly provocative. I've been reading many of them over in the past week and just struck how much these authors are really speaking to the crisis that's happening in this moment and the stories that they're sharing really are the ones we need to be hearing particularly right now. After we recorded the works, Mike went away and created some incredible 3D sound design using binaural audio techniques in conjunction with both his own composition and music that we captured from artists that were identified as part of the process for pieces that had like particularly culturally sensitive music. And then put all of that work into a visual design that was headed up by Maria Shaplin with some assistance from Vanessa Oboyhi who put it all into sketch and handed it off to Andrew who has been just like an incredible wizard when it comes to actually translating this into something that's actually going to be a real thing that people use out on the trails. Our hope, and I have deep faith and excitement that the experience is really gonna feel like honest to God immersive theater for one person whenever they wanna do it. That it'll be a geolocative piece that syncs to the user as they walk and that you'll really feel held and carried in these amazing worlds, both in the technology and in the creative content. As I was saying earlier in our meeting tomorrow would have been the official launch had we been on the original timeline. But in a lot of ways I think the project will actually benefit from a little bit of extra space. We're gonna be connecting with Frinderts here in Philadelphia for the new launch in September. We're gonna have a whole series of extra corollary digital programming everything from others live streaming themselves walking the trails and talking about how they created it to some environmental justice panels some behind the scenes hopefully on tech social lab would love to have you guys involved in that too as we sort of share the process of how this piece has gone. It's a big, big, big, big, big, big thing. And it's really exciting to see it finally coming pretty close to close. I think that's it. Adrienne, thank you so much. I'm gonna update on a couple other projects that we've been working on that are basically on hold indefinitely but we're still trying to make the most of this time. And that was one of the things we talked about in our closed AGM before this presentation is how do you make the most of this time where you can be a little bit more reflective and slow down and try to see the positives in it. A couple of years ago in 2018 Toaster Lab worked with the Parkway Forest Park Community in Toronto. We through the Toronto Arts Council Arts in the Parks program received a grant to do a VR filmmaking workshop for youth who lived around that area and it was wonderful and they produced a wild array of content that we then happily embedded in a web app that was geolocated their content, their little films throughout the Parkway Forest Park area. Happily, we received a grant to do that again and we've been working with the Toronto Arts Council to redo the timeline for that project essentially and that's been a big, I think a big part for a lot of the folks that we've been chatting with here and elsewhere who are working in this way is how do we change the timeline to make the art even better? And that's I think what Adrienne was talking about a little bit too. So for Parkway Forest Park we can't obviously offer a workshop for children right now in a park. And so what we're doing right now instead is refining the curriculum that we would offer in light of any COVID-19 restrictions once community centers and parks open up again in Toronto and how much comfort we feel with offering that sort of experience and are there alternate modes of delivering that kind of education in a way that would be useful to people? And then the other aspect of that project is offering in the park a pop-up VR cinema where we previously had several Oculus heads that we shared with various community members to view the films. And now I think a big question with VR is you can't put something on your nose that other people have used immediately before you in a safe way right now. So how do we offer a similar experience with restrictions there? So we have some time to think those things through and we've been grateful that the Toronto Arts Council has given us sort of an indefinite timeline to work on that project. We would love to be able to say that we have something for this summer to present and share and educate on but it's just not possible. Similarly, a project called The Right Way with Teatro de Bolivoro, a DLT experience in Toronto was intended to go to the Venice Biennale of Theater this summer and that's been, can't get into forever. First phone until September until the time being. September until the time being although that may change as well. So we also are not allowed to go anywhere right now outside of Canada. So we can't do it. So thinking about international collaborations right now and Ian talked a little bit about that with the Indigenous Futurities Project finding more creative ways to still engage collaboratively, internationally is important to us. And we're still looking forward to trying to figure out how to complete that project but that would have a VR component and a live theater performance. So there's a lot of layers to unpack there in terms of actually being able to get that work done at the moment. But those were the projects that were going on between February and now. So we're so happy that some of them have been able to move forward and then the other ones we're just gonna have to be creative about the timelines. Yeah, the big change that we've experienced with Toast 11 this project has really at the time that everything sort of, mid-March when everything started to be modified or closed down, especially around art events and performance spaces, which is where we were attempting to do most of our work. There was, and we've been lucky that the various levels of funding available to us through the Toronto and Canada Council, we currently don't have an active Ontario Arts Council grant going but that there's been a lot of flexibility and willingness and attempt by both of these funders to keep the money within the artist's hands to help them, allow them to modify the project so that they're able to be accomplished or changed in a way. Part of that was this happened right in the middle of what we were doing in terms of the Atelier project. And as a result, a lot of the projects as we've mentioned have had to be modified but at the same time, one of the primary goals of it has been around documentation. It's always something that we had not quite gotten into, gotten all the projects that we've been working on, we've been so focused on the actual projects themselves and building the catalog to document that we found that this would be an excellent time to work on that documentation, especially because a lot of these projects and as it is also part of our hackathon give different tools towards ways of either making places, making content in places, as Adrienne was talking about, having an immersive theater experience that is socially distanced for one within a site-specific context. That is something that we may be able to do sooner in the future or could do now, depending on the scenario in which you're working, the types of distance collaboration that we're working on are really useful for artists trying to figure out what's happening. We've seen a large proliferation of either people putting things online to stream or working on doing readings and then full performances through Zoom and using those functions. And because so many of the tools that we've been working with and working to make sense of to people who might otherwise not come in as technologists to this question, that making that information available as soon as possible would be extremely useful. In our previous conversation, what I'd like to do now is sort of open up the conversation to our fantastic board who have patiently been listening to our updates. But we were having like, everybody is doing really exciting work. And I wanted to open up a little bit of a question about what documentation looks like around a lot of these projects. A comment that Jacob Nix-Vicki made earlier on, especially in regards to his projects and he may be able to comment on them a little bit more in a moment, at least briefly. That the way that we document these things is not just about writing them up, but also about how one experiences them, the experiential qualities of that. So Jacob or otherwise, I would actually open it up to the group to start thinking about like, how would you communicate to somebody else how you might be able to replicate these things, especially is they're using the types of tools that either you're creating or you're learning or in helping others to learn how to create with. I'll take the throw and then probably throw it on to the group pretty quickly. In my practice, a big part of it has been, especially in the dance world, trying to understand how choreographers and creators and producers can provide an authentic experience of their work that's mediated. And so that kind of comes down to a question of like translation slash adaptation, but it is possible. It is possible if you engage the same creative team and facilitate that for an analog or a live creative team to produce a version of their work or an experience of their work that gives that authentic quality of the live piece. It may look really different. It might sound really different. It might have a totally different format, but how do you convey that core, some of the aura of that experience? And that's what we are talking about now as well. It's just a lot more frantic and desperate now. When we talk about documentation, it needs to not just show what, it's not like a performance recording. It needs to show, communicate how it felt to be there. It needs to communicate how the audience experienced it and it needs to do that across all of the media that the show actually integrates, which gets really challenging because you are creating a multimedia show. What format is your documentation going to be? I'm gonna stop talking now and throw the discussion to the group. Yeah, thank you so much, Jacob. Beth, I might actually invite you to speak a little bit because right now this is something that you are concerned with on the academic side of your practice. Well, on all sides of your practice, but importantly within your current graduate work. Yeah, and actually within this international mixed reality group that I'm part of with Paul, say just as well, where we're looking at collaborating, creating and performing in VR and our conversation actually just recently turned to ideas of notebooks and workbooks and disseminating work within VR because of the embodied experience that happens within that context. So, yeah, so my academic work is looking at VR and I'm right now trying to figure out how to disseminate a project that was both a live performance and a virtual reality augmented reality performance and it's actually incredibly challenging and I have far too many pages written about it because it's so hard to figure out how to do exactly what Jacob was saying. How do you express the feeling of what it was to be there? How do you, and because it was a mixed reality performance, how do you express even if you rebuild the whole thing in VR so that you could potentially engage with viewing it in VR as a recorded experience, how do you capture that intangible piece of holding a real object and experiencing it in virtual reality at the same time? So trying to grapple with these ephemeral things and with recreating that embodied experience and we've actually had some really interesting and successful, I don't know what you call them, they were moments, they were experiences with each other talking and being in real time in virtual reality with other collaborators and other thinkers and actually just playing simple games, going on a walk through Dublin together and building memories together. So there was something really key in that virtual embodied experience that I think for a lot of this work holds something for a kind of dissemination, that there's an alternate kind of dissemination because I am certainly in the writing of it, which I've experienced something else in the writing of it too that I wanna touch on, but in the writing of it, it's really, really hard to capture and I'm gonna have a figure heavy document and I'm gonna have hyperlinks and I'm gonna build some stuff in VR to help express it, but it's proving really, really challenging. I was thinking about the piece, the locator piece at PQ but the idea of re-experiencing, and Ian you'll have to remind me of the name, but the piece where you get to re-experience the space and the idea of potentially re-experiencing a research project through an audio walk of where you were. Yeah, so it's hard and it's interesting going in and digging through old documentation and trying to get a sense of what old, particularly early virtual reality experiences were like and early mixed reality experiences were like and how much feels like it's been left out of the very traditional academic documentation. So yeah, I'm excited about this group because we all have very particular ways of thinking about these things too that feel like combined, there's some metaverse of like research dissemination that will exist between all of us. Yeah, in true branching narrative fashion, I sort of wanna either give Paul an opportunity because they know that he's part of that research group as well or and or in no particular order also ask Megan a little bit about that because of working with that particularly within a game development context as like leading a game studio at this point as what like how, what are you seeing as the challenges of documentation there and also what do you think could bridge back over into the types of documentation as we're looking at similar tools within a performance context? Yeah, well like documentation is always a huge part of game design which is hilarious because we spent so much time at the beginning putting everything together making it really pretty and then we put it in a folder and we forget it's there. I think that's pretty common for most people working in tech, I have never, I have joined so many projects at the last minute and they like hand me the game design document and they're like, but that's at a date, that's at a date, that's at a date. I was like, so where do I find out what's going on? And usually what ends up happening is they'll tell me to go check their flow board. So if that's like glow or if that's, oh man, I can't remember the other names, but you go through and you're like, well, yeah, I see all these notes but a lot of it's like in house context and I don't know what they're talking about. I do know a couple of studios have basically created like wikis which would be tied to these, I guess, glow charts, glow boards that kind of keep track of like what's going on. That one I found a little bit more helpful, but at the end of the day, it's like you really do need one staffer where their entire job is just updating and keeping track of the documentation. And that's the only way that I've ever really seen it work. So for what we do is we have our project manager is basically in charge of the documentation because he's the one that also has to be talking to everyone and he needs to have that high level. And if anyone new comes in and they have questions, he needs to be able to like answer those. So like in a lot of places, what they do is they give it to like a junior developer or designer. And so just like here, and I was like, that doesn't really make sense. Like this actually feels like the role that the manager needs to be taking on because they're the ones that need to kind of know everything. They're the ones that need to be able to look at that and say it's out of date. So in terms of documentation, I found actually putting it in the hands of the manager is way more effective than having a student or even a junior like take care of it and then just keep it in a folder somewhere. I think also like the larger your group becomes, the more necessary it is for that documentation to be like well updated. And I know I'm saying things that like everyone already knows. But I think sometimes we, and I may be going off base, so also like let me know if you need me to go in a different direction when it comes to documentation. No, I think this is great because what you're describing to me coming at it from someone with a bit more familiar with media production than necessarily development is like, oh, you need a script supervisor. You need like someone who's dealing with story continuity when you start to develop like a long and complicated narrative across things that it's like important to have that, that sort of expertise in there. I mean, not to, I know that you just said you can't just hand it to a student but I did want to highlight that we've added someone to our mix who is not just a student but Rachel who's joining us from a time being who has actually a long history in this area. I do, in fact, I actually spent 15 years working in automated software testing, quality insurance, providing training and consulting to large and small companies all across North America using HPE sweet tools. Now I am a master's student at York, I finally finished my undergrad, took me six years, but yeah, so I'm now working as a master's student at York in the, excuse me, in the digital media program. I will be churning out and geolocated AR application of my own working with students with disabilities to tell stories at York University's Kiel campus so far that still seems unscheduled. But yeah, so documentation and the challenges of keeping it up to date and managing it and the communication between all areas and the usefulness of having somebody more senior who has responsibility and familiarity with the process at all levels, definitely I can back you up on that Megan. Yeah, well, I also found it, how to phrase it, it was like once you put it in the hands of somebody who had, I guess, more to do, which is not to say like students don't have a lot to do, but I guess more to do in terms of making decisions. It's authority, it's about power and control. And I mean, I started, started, started as a computer science major looking at going into development, my parents were both programmers. So like nobody writing code wants to deal with documentation and that's fine. As theater artists, none of us building a set really want to deal with the purchasing problems that are involved in that, right? That's what management is for and that's part of the supportive nature of those roles. But it really helps to have somebody, it was always easier to do the job as a consultant than it was as a junior member of a staff. So hopefully I can bring a little bit of that to this. Right, and then I feel like you will respect the documentation better when your manager's the one being like, guys, like I need your info, you got to keep me up to date. And it's supposed to like that poor junior who's like, oh man, would be really nice if you could tell me all the changes you've recently made. Yes. I've been in that position. It's really nice to be able to look at someone and say, you know you're paying me $500 to write this for you today, right? Would you like me to sit here and do nothing or would you like to give me the information that I need to get this done? I love all the knowing nods. I'm actually for those. I'm enjoying it too. I have good documentation experience. I've just been like, yep. Yep. Yeah, so. It would be great if all of you have Rachel and our wonderful advisory board like for this next phase. So it's really like exciting to think about now what that documentation can look like for the projects that have already happened or the ones that are going forward too. And then I love the ideas like of looking at expansive ways of putting forward those documentations in the world and that it can be its own creative project on its own. Yeah, the question that raises, that relates to for me that I sort of had coming into this was related a little bit to what you were saying, Beth. And I'd love to, especially if Tanya and Patrick have some thoughts on this because I feel like you would, is as we're thinking about these future convenings together of moving into a more experiential space. I mean, I think that's one of the limitations of Zoom performance. We're doing a Zoom performance right now. We're performing a meeting. So, and this is different than we would be if we were doing it in person even when we've been streaming that. It's been a critical conversation, but especially when we were in Vancouver around like who is this audience for. So I might, Patrick, both as having been co-organizer for that and someone who's thinking about sonography and VR and Tanya, especially with regards to like beta space and the different types of equipment that you're making available to like figure out how to use in different ways. I wonder if either of you had some thoughts for a time we might convene in the future. Maybe if we do another symposium as a virtual symposium, how does it actually become a symposium and not just a webinar? I am going to defer to answer that only because I'm getting every fifth word at this point. Oh no. That's why I killed the video. And I'm so sorry, I'm trying to keep up, but I'm not even sure what you really asked. But I think it was about how do we make sure the user experience stays at the forefront of this? Which I am not gonna answer at the moment again because I bad connection, sorry. It's part of the reality. Well, you're having a true mixed reality. Tanya. All right, some ideas that we're looking at in cinema and media arts, at moving all our courses online. We've been looking at different VR platforms that sort of replicate bodies in a space. So something like Mozilla Hubs. Or I just had a tour of Adaptica, which is they're doing like these big campuses with different rooms that you can just walk to and see different things. So that might be an interesting thing to look at. And then another idea is maybe just a set of a bunch of different spaces that are physically distant and then have like a sort of mixed experience that way. So like maybe three of us could go into beta space and look at how things are set up there and then maybe broadcast from there and connect beta space with another space, maybe like at UBC. And so we can have like a bunch of maybe different virtual spaces that might replicate this kind of spatial connection differently than simply on Zoom. I get that would be my approach, I guess, to... Yeah, I mean, we're sort of... Everybody went quickly to Zoom because it was there and we had a bunch of things on our calendar that we still had to talk about. So we used an available tool that seemed to solve that need, but doesn't necessarily replicate the experience. As the farthest away. Oh yeah, go ahead. Oh, sir, I would just say that a lot of the questions also revolve around accessibility. And like we're finding right now, especially as we explore virtual spaces for conferences or for just creative work, it really, really leaves out some people and really includes others. And this is all with a case with technologies. So it's one of those tricky situations that find I'm out in rural Ontario. It's still Ontario and I can't get a really good bandwidth to use a stable video connection, let alone go into Nios, VR or whatever and have that kind of experiential quality. So yeah, so I think the questions are huge and I think there's lots of permutations there to it to how to make it accessible at the same time and as long as people are thinking around how inclusion might function then at least the dialogue is open in that regard. And I also just wanted to, and I don't know if we have time, but I wanted to circle back a little bit to the documentation question. Maybe you didn't, maybe you want to move on, Ian, I don't know. Oh, no, no, please. Well, I guess from my perspective again, to keep out a few of these things that perhaps it's for the group coming up to determine what the aims of the documentation might be. So there's sort of things that we're thinking about from a practitioner standpoint or a creator standpoint, but perhaps we're thinking about developers in that mix that are more technically minded or academics. For example, a lot of us are going to be thinking theoretically about this work. And certainly that crosses over to funding bodies or funders. So I think that the aims of the documentation are really important to think about as a group because of course it's difficult to do everything, but we'll all have a sort of vested interest in a different mode. And then I also think about the multifaceted ways in which the documentation can be presented as everybody's already touched upon today and how we really communicate embodied performative live experiences that branch into things like software, video or virtual whiteboarding or these wiki pages or how things are downloadable or replayable. So this idea of, can we go on those walks again individually, can funders and academics go on those journeys and that leaves out part of the other conversation which is the community task aspects of theatrical play. And then I guess finally, I would also think a little bit in terms of the broader thematics around the documentation. And that might be things that are more specifically tailored to experience of the particular case studies or how the documentation might split or split into different case studies that explore different thematic areas. And I'm thinking along the lines of things like embodiment or presence, immersion or liveness is more theoretical angles that might complement the work as well as of course the principles behind the technology. So how the nuts and bolts of making things happen and what kinds of softwares have been evolved or creatively developed uniquely and the fast pace of technologies and how we all seek. And I think this might be common to a lot of us that as theater practitioners, as scenario designers, we are always, we're working generally with not the largest budgets but we're always trying to do something that the technology does not allow us to innately let us do and to try and break it in some way. So I think that's another kind of angle in which we sort of think outside of some of these very typical development paradigms in terms of UI that lend itself well to kind of another thematic area of documentation. So I just thought I wanted to put out those sort of, those kinds of things that I've been thinking about in terms of how one goes about with this huge group to think about what it looks like and where it looks like going. That's very helpful. Yeah, we are, we're a time for our stream. So before we get kicked off of there, I did want to, the only person we haven't heard from is the person who was farthest away from us physically. And I just wondered if you wanted to sign us. Are you going to post to us in our hearts? Maybe. Andrew, would you like to sign us off? As soon as I can find the unmute button, there we go. Sure. Wow, so this meeting was fantastic. I really appreciate hearing from all of you and I sincerely mean that. I really appreciate hearing from all of you and I think it's super important, especially now, especially with the world and the state that it's in that we find a way to forge these connections. I think Paul said it really, really well, kind of in spite of the technology and in spite of the limitations and in spite of the current state of affairs and in spite of the fact that theater is not, you know, we'll see when that happens. It can live theater as we know it. All of that said, yeah, these, so these projects at least are fantastic. I'm super looking forward to working with everybody as you go forward. I find myself, I think because of the physical distance, I'm in that weird category that Paul was saying about being both more included now because essentially I exist remotely on East Coast time but I suddenly found all of these events and things that I have been missing are now online. So I've been attending, like I've attended more live events in the last three months than I think I did in the previous year, which is really weird. So anyway, I guess I'll leave it there but I think that we're moving, this is the right group, I think to move into a really interesting phase in kind of human connection across us. And I hope that we keep forging our ways through that. The only specific comment I have with regards to the technology is that I will say, even as someone who builds the tech that the only mistake I think we can make is to select only one. That the way that this tends to happen is that the online representation is really always a limited by definition. It's a limitation on what we can do in person. So if you try to pick a single platform you end up kind of automatically limiting it for somebody or some subset. But if you don't do that and then instead we just focus on what we're trying to do, which I think we're all on the same page with which is creating a real experience and a real connection. I think that we'll do okay. We'll find our way through this. So I don't know, there's my benediction for you. Yeah, thank you. That's very nice to hear. And you are all close in our hearts too. Yes. I wanted to say. Thank you all for joining us. I'm gonna say goodbye to our live stream now. You don't have to run away right now. You can if you want. This is the time that you put, but I'm going to stop our feed for the time being. Thank you to everybody who had joined us from.