 It was a text I wrote in 2010 for my PodPlace project. I almost forgot the name of it. So I want to read that one first and then I'm going to read an excerpt from Landline and maybe talk very briefly about the journey from writing Look Up to Landline and how my thinking about locative audio plays has changed a little bit. So I'm going to do a little roulette here. Well, I'm just going to start at the beginning. So I'm going to also read the stage and sound directions because I feel like that's an important part of this script. So this is section one. The location is at the top of a spiral staircase in the Woodward's Atrium. The sound is a field recording of the room. The music, none. Everything I'm about to tell you happened. It may seem like I'm making it up. It may seem like I'm talking about someone else, but I'm not. I'm talking about you and me. I want you to remember. Close your eyes. You could close your eyes if you wanted. Ever feel like this is it? Do you remember saying that? How about, what were you thinking when you chose me? Or, from the first moment we met, I could imagine the end. Imagine the end. Open your eyes. I'll take you there. Don't worry. Just follow me. Turn around and walk down the stairs. Do you see the elevators? Turn left and walk through the exit doors. We switch to a field recording of the room that fades out and music fades in. I keep all your letters in a blue folder. Your letters from the beginning. And all the postcards you sent me from all the cities all over the world. Walk through the exit doors. You walk through the exit doors. Are you sure you don't want to come with me? It's not that I don't want to. I can't. Section three. The music you hear becomes tinny and far away. This is the overpass. Stop. Look outside. Dissolve to another overpass in another city. Twenty years ago, you had a job in an office tower in Calgary answering phones. I had a job in a tower five blocks away. Our towers were connected by overpasses like this one. We met for lunch without going outside, which was nice, especially in the winter. Remember winter? We sat in the windows and watched the traffic moving in both directions. And you said, which way do you want to go? I flipped a coin. Tails. West. Then we went back to work, quit our jobs and started driving. Cut to now. Keep moving out the exit door. Promise you won't freak out? I'm not sure things are working between us. I guess I should say, I don't know if things between us are working for me. Don't freak out. The music goes out. The sound is a field recording of the elevator lobby. The location is the elevator lobby. See the elevator? Press the up button. Inside the elevator, press R. The sound is the real sound of the real elevator. We only met 20 years ago, so how much could I possibly know you, you know? We're here. Step out of the elevator, turn to your left, exit by the door around the corner. All of the field recordings and sounds fade out. We go outside. There it is. We're on the roof of a parkade. So there's nothing above us. There it is. This is it. This is what we wanted. Walk towards the tall buildings and everything they hold. Look up. You see that building that looks like a flying saucer? The tower with the revolving restaurant on top. It was too rich for us back then. We were living off of instant noodles and Kraft dinner, but then you made a friend who worked at the front desk and she would sneak us into the elevator to the viewing level. Walk briskly towards the flying saucer as it fades from view. Stay to the left. Cut to interior, inside the tower. The music is a drone. You are leaning your forehead against the windows and looking down at the city lights in the night. You're teasing me. You're daring me to climb up onto the ledge and lie back against the window. Let me take your picture. I'm doing it. You're saying, don't look down. You're laughing. We're laughing. Cut to the rooftop now. Do you see an arrow to your right? Stop and turn right. Do you see how to get to the other side? It's around the top of a parkade and you can see the other side here. Follow the arrow. It will lead you toward the mountain. You can't always see them, but trust me, they're there. Stay right, okay? I don't want you to get hurt. We were laughing, but I was lying. I was hiding, my legs twitching, fight or flight, my muscles braced, waiting for that pane of glass to break free of its housing and crash down to the ground. You wouldn't remember that. I never told you. Stop and turn around for a second. Look up. Okay, I'm going to stop there. So that's look up. And I want to point out some features, the use of the second person like you all the time. So what I was trying to do was implicate the listener that this is their journey that they're taking. So then we'll cut over to landline. So landline... I'm just going to come down to... Sorry, one moment. In landline, you are directed to take a walk out in the city and find your way not by geographic landmarks but by landmarks of energy or memory or emotion. So I'll start with the first scene when you're supposed to find your first location. For this first scene, you will need to find a location that reminds you of an old friend. The answer may be obvious and you may see a place right away. On the other hand, you may have to ask yourself what is it about this place that reminds you of someone I know? You have one minute, so act quickly. When you're happy with your spot, simply stand by. So we give you one minute to find your location. Now, stop. Observe the place you've chosen for the first rendezvous. Look behind you. Imagine that the person you miss is standing there. Wave to them as if they are walking up to you. I understand this will be hard at first. You may think you're alone or maybe you feel a little anxious because nobody is waving back. Imagine them waving back. Or what if I told you there is a person, a mirror, 1,500 meters away from you or let's say 150 kilometers away from you and despite that distance, the two of you are engaged in the same activity. You are together. You are both waving. You can take my word for it or you can check right now by sending a message to the number you are given. If you trust me, no need to message. But we can wait a moment to see if your scene partner shares your sense of trust. Right now they are looking at their phone. This act is about here and there. Lights up. Introduce yourself. Message the number you were given at the beginning. Give yourself a name and describe yourself. We give you 50 seconds to do that. You have 30 more seconds. Fill the time with words. Describe the location you're standing in and what it is about your friend that caused you to pick this location. We give you a minute and a half to do that. Describe the last time you talked. We give you a minute and a half to do that. Lights down. Consider the parallels between your experience here in Vancouver and your partner's experience in Kitchener. We give you time to do that. From time to time you will be given opportunities like these to reach out to your scene partner. The two of you can message as much or as little as you like. It's up to you to negotiate together. Some people like to talk. Some people like to answer. Some people like to listen. And for some people it depends. Is there anything you'd like to say to your scene partner right now? This is your cue to start moving. You have the courage to explore if you want. And maybe I'll just leave it at that. That's about 15 minutes. So that was a little tiny little excerpt of Landline. For look up and the pod plays, can you give a little bit more of a vision about what the audience was doing at that point? Absolutely. So for the pod plays, the audience member would have either provided to them by us an iPod or they would download the audio track to their personal device and we would give them a map and we would direct them to go to the starting location. So for that play that you just heard, the starting location, if you're familiar with SFU Woodwards, there's that spiral staircase that looks like an umbilical cord. If you go to the very, very, very, very top of that, it just ends with a piece of plexiglass so you don't fall off. So that was the starting point of our play. And the narration of the story is interspersed with directional text that takes them on a journey. So they're listening to me telling them where to walk through space and then in the time that it takes them to traverse that space, they're getting snippets of the story that relate to the environments that they're in. And for that play particularly, I chose the route and then I walked through the route and tried to let the spaces talk to me and use that as the leaping off point for the narrative. Does that make sense? Yeah. Okay, they're all naughty. But I'm curious about this Deryu project. If you can describe it, because Kathleen makes it sound impossible to describe. It's not impossible to describe, it was almost impossible to pull off. Deryu is similar in a lot of veins, it's also a little bit different. Essentially, it's an augmented reality application. And so what that means is that it's smartphone based and there are visual triggers particularly, not necessarily auditory or anything like that, they're scripted very finite kind of demarcated triggers that are recognized by the camera. So it's basically the smartphone application which I made has an array or a series of images which are all the targets and the audience kind of traverses the space which is again very kind of crafted and kind of articulated space. And as they hold their phone up to that space so if it's this microphone kind of hold it up like this and that image is kind of analyzed in real time and it's recognized and then that's a trigger. And so with Deryu, Deryu is actually the second iteration of a larger project called Second Story and so the only animal, Kendra and Eric, are kind of the primary instigators behind that and have been kind of the main technical collaborator. And so the first edition we did was called Ghostlight and it was in Blood Alley which was a fascinating and also problematic space. And this second edition Deryu was in a parking lot in Granville Island as part of the fringe and with both of them the content is video. And so already there's a little bit of a leaping off in terms of what the traditional augmented reality is. As often augmented reality kind of works with how to describe this, kind of 3D models, things that kind of show up in your camera that don't necessarily encompass the entire scene that you're seeing. So for example, if I was looking at this microphone the microphone would kind of turn into a face and it would maybe start talking or something to me. With us what we're doing basically is we're situating video content basically overriding the frame of the camera. So we're basically triggering and just playing full screen video content. But that video content is shot from the exact vantage point that you start at so that as you approach it and we know that you're at this angle and this far apart, that's exactly the first room in the video and it's shot in this space and it's set in this space. So at that point you're kind of encouraged to follow the camera panes and you see actors and actresses over here and it cuts where you're hearing those behind you and you kind of move around. You kind of follow it with you and so you're immersed in that space. It's kind of like a microscope though or like you're looking through the glass. Yeah, you are. Obviously you kind of go halfway in terms of probably similar to, well I did a run of landline so I understand, but how far you kind of get into that makes reality. You're kind of half immersed, I would say. Certain people go a little bit deeper, they're willing and ready to go there and certain people are kind of a little bit reticent to take that leap. So it's site specific. I wouldn't necessarily call it locative. We kind of played with geolocation as triggers or as kind of ingredients to help kind of qualify a trigger but we ended up always using things in a fairly, not a packed space, but a space of about, I don't know, three or four hundred feet squared for seven or eight targets. So the way that the camera, the object recognition kind of looked a little bit better in terms of just by itself rather than trying to rely on GPS, which is invariable, or describing kind of exactly where we're trying to go from the audience. Would GPS need to be more, GPS doesn't strike me as something that can be pinpointed? It can, but it varies. So with Mare, I've done a lot of locative sound work as well. So with the MIMUB, we've made one of our first kind of forays into this was a project that we did when we were on our residency in the Baltic where the idea was basically you would just kind of record anything, audio, and kind of pinpoint that kind of audio track at a particular location. It would only play back if it came to that location. It's in a certain boundary of that. But GPS depends on the cloud cover, which all this is we know in Vancouver is quite footprint, so that depends on whether you're kind of quasi inside or not. So in that parking lot, we're kind of covered, it's not, it's only one layer of cold wood and the signals can kind of get through there. It's just a... There's the interference back there. There's interference. Just like if you're on Facebook or Instagram and you're trying to check in or kind of tag where your photo is coming from, it'll probably give you a range of places with the walk radius right here because it knows that there's that kind of margin of error. So playing with, you know, like blast theory, I'm sure you're familiar with, obviously they kind of led the forefront of a lot of this kind of work back in Bristol. They had a lot of, like, really, really locative-based triggers and stuff like that and I'm not exactly sure what how they kind of dealt with it, but I understand, you know, that there's always a little bit of more error in that instance. And so obviously you're kind of getting into a place where you're suggesting a user and kind of trying to guide them, but also leaving a fair amount of room for oscillation variation. Well, because Landline happens simultaneously, Landline happens simultaneously in two cities. This is a key piece of information. So we start audiences in Vancouver at the exact same moment as audiences in Kitchener. So Dustin and I wanted to make a piece that was happening simultaneously and at first we really did experiment with the notion of overlaying my instructions onto your city or your instructions onto my city and that was just crazy because it was really actually impossible. Unless you're in a wide open space in terms of urban space, it was just, it was breaking our brains to try and have the same instructions being neared. And so that's what moved us more into trying to find, and we wanted the piece to be able to move from different cities. So if we figured out for Vancouver and Halifax, which was our first iteration well there's no way there's no telling that we could figure it out for Ottawa and Calgary like they would take a whole other round of problem solving so that's why we moved off of the geographic landscape into the internal landscape and Dustin is really influenced by the situationist movement and the idea so the idea of the deriv and the idea of the psychogeography of a city and the energy lines and the movement through the city that's purposeless. So what were those mistakes? Because the situation is one of their famous things for the deriv was they would take a map of Chicago and they would try to navigate through London with it. It would like intentionally creating mistakes. So like you're following a street and the only thing is a fire escape you just keep going straight so you go up and then you're on the roof and you're on a new level of city and they would document that so like what were the when you were kind of moving away from the geographical to the internal landscapes what were mistakes that you were scared of? Mistakes we were scared of that's a good question What broke things? Well the user always broke things which is great users but it's because what became we knew that we wanted to make space for the people to talk to each other and then where where people were always dissatisfied is they either felt like they didn't have enough time or they felt like they had too much time nobody was like that was perfect you know what I mean they either fell into one of the two camps so the timing of things was distracting for people or not distracting that was something that felt dissatisfying to the people good question we made this piece so long ago like we made it in this fall of 2013 I'm looking at Chelsea because she was there and she's nodding I'm like how old was my kid yeah he wasn't one yet 13 in a very bleary time of my life and and I think I think the other thing that was discordant for us was like how to find the other city in the audio track so we would place audio field recordings from the other city into like so if you see the show in Vancouver you'll be hearing the audio will be from Kitchener Kitchener and Dustin did a really great job recording especially in Halifax and he got he got some real like a real sense of spatiality in the recording and that was disruptive to people so there's the one that keeps coming to mind is the motorcycle there's one moment where you talked about the motorcycle the big motorcycle like it comes like right behind you and it's very loud and it's very present that was a disruptive moment because you can't tell in that moment if that's happening in real life and you should get the heck out of the way or if it's in the audio recording I don't know if that answers your question though because it goes there I'm just casting my mind back were there things that didn't work like what no not at all I rather liked the kind of emotional part of it of being forced to kind of have think about this in a different way emotionally rather than rationally we so often streets or just conduits I don't think I went in straight lines through the whole piece I think I was like we were in kind of Yale townish so I was cutting through alleys and lobbies of hotels I was super zigzaggy which was great I think that was kind of really I felt kind of the theory that you were trying to go for in terms of the way that you were trying to craft the experience to come through it because of the emotional direction and it gave me permission to navigate the city in a different way the thing, now that we are talking the thing that I remembered and I have this I want to kind of say this and then ask it about dairy because I didn't get to see dairy but one of the things that was dissatisfying to me and to Dustin maybe more to me was that the pod plays that I worked on and the commons project which was his audio headset piece was the question of aging that was on the street that was not pre-recorded was the question of the audience's agency so in theater at that time and still every so often I am kind of obsessed with what is happening right now what is happening right now what is the problem what is the potential for everything to fall apart and how much control can you put into the audience with the pod plays everything was time to the second like you have from this water to that water hydrant is one minute and that is when the next thing happens and once you are there is when I am going to say this so that you see that and I have to turn you in that direction so that you see that it is on your left but with so the story is happening because I am telling you a story but it doesn't feel like the audience has agency in it if they are truly the character of the play if they are truly the protagonist or that they are inside of the piece then they have to be making some choices but there was no room for them to make choices in the pod plays so part of what landline was for me at least was like how can we make this really live even though it is pre-recorded even though it is I have recorded the next three versions of landline they are all in the can like they are done we just go in and field recordings and pop it back in and we are let me make it sound so easy it is not quite so easy I look at Chelsea again because we are installing the show so that is where we started to get this idea well could we open that channel of dialogue at first we started thinking about you over there would be telling me where to go in Vancouver and I would be telling you where to go in Kitchener and I can't quite remember why we discarded that idea that is probably not even quite the agency you are looking for it is but we don't want to be bossing each other around we just want you to actually get in touch with some of your impulses and and not have my voice bossing you around in quite so much detail as I had to boss you around in pod plays so did I mean with dare you because again they are moving the screen to follow the trigger point it is the impulse as well yeah that is something that we thought about a lot with dare you more than those like the first version so dare you was part of the fringe and so there was a ticketing system and there was there was a seven minutes for all the videos to play kind of back to forth so we had an hour so there is roughly 13 minutes of finding the target of the introduction of the kind of outtake so like this so it is we are providing we had 20 devices that we are providing you know same so like you are taking them back you are charging them wiping the screen so like that kind of putting them back into the pool so it was yeah we didn't give that as much but it is I think that it is an important question there is an act of engagement regardless that starts to at least lessen that a little bit but ultimately their narrative pieces that allow people to kind of follow their own impulse through it but generally we are trying to kind of script that impulse so we work with youth kind of yeah recent graduates or theater students or film film students for this and there was a lot of questioning about how we can kind of encourage the audience to do something at certain times through kind of just the general user experience and the narrative hooks but without really forcing it or guaranteeing that they are going to be able to do it there was also I should mention two of the seven pieces had kind of live performance elements that kind of came in either at midpoint or towards the end of the piece so there was one that was kind of a two part video and so it was this kind of film noir piece and you were sitting down kind of on these crates like this and that was kind of the trigger and you would sit down and you were watching it and then it would kind of you would end and you were looking like this and then this it would stop and you would just see the camera it would go back to the camera view which looked almost indistinguishable from the end of the video and then this performer would walk out which was one of the performers in the video and she would speak something to you and then she would kind of hold this letter in front of you and that was the next target and you'd hold your camera up and then the first frame would be that letter and then you kind of went like this and so she'd have a bit of a conversation with you as well so and there was another one as well so that was cute and it was like on a bit of a cycle so we yeah because of that I think that we weren't really able to kind of give it its free reign as possible a good handful of the comments were that people would like it to be more of a scavenger hunt kind of and just find what could possibly be an exciting target and with the Blood Alley edition that happened a little bit when people are, first of all Blood Alley as a space and this Parkland as a space they're kind of these moody kind of textured spaces obviously in Blood Alley the content was all working with people that have long decades of histories in Blood Alley but there's, you don't often give yourself and most people don't give other people a lot of permission to spend a lot of time in Blood Alley it's a fairly tenuous space but people were looking at different pieces of graffiti and just kind of they were really trying to way find which got a little bit dangerous and obtrusive in a certain way for the traffic that goes through there and the population that's there when you're you know there's intravenous drug users and you're kind of waving cameras around with them and that can feel threatening absolutely right so they kind of knew what was happening and we had PHS workers and stuff like that that we'd work with trying to figure that out as well but obviously there's a kind of a gentrification issue of that space as well so it's there has to be, there's an ethics involved in there that kind of has to be involved anywhere that's interesting to bring up the ethics of it because one of the conversations Dustin and I don't have it a lot because I think Landline is pretty set but it is part of why we have you guys have devices that you provide for people we're mostly especially within Canada we use, we run the show off of people's personal devices we alert them that texting rates apply but we have spare phones for people who don't have phones which is important to me and became more important to me after I read critical play I'm sure you've read that of course he has and if you haven't you should it's an excellent book just the idea that when the art is taking place off of these devices that are such strong markers of the middle class that it is exclusionary inherently exclusionary and I feel sensitive to that I don't know, I mean with Landline I don't know in many situations the show is offered for free and we have devices available for people if they need it but it's also like how does the person who doesn't have the device find out about the show in the first place but it does make me think of the pod plays the very first pod play we did was written by Tetsuro Shigematsu and it was commissioned by the Powell Street Festival and it took place as a walk around the Oppenheimer part and during the Powell Street Festival and the Powell Street Festival is they're very sensitive to the fact that they come in for one weekend at the beginning of August for this big party in the downtown east side and that there's a whole other community that uses the park in different ways throughout the rest of the year so we decided pod plays was going to be free we had our iPods that we were going to give to you in exchange for something and it was going to be whatever was of value to you so we held people's wallets, credit cards but we also had somebody's empty wallet we had an empty bag because we just decided we couldn't say no we can't say no and we did have one of the iPods the walk was 10 minutes and one of the audience members didn't come back for about 45 minutes and so we thought well there we go there's our experiment so we came back and so we were proved wrong which was great to be proved wrong in that sense and because of the human interface at the beginning of the show and at the end of the show when you get the device back it was probably the first time that I've ever had an opportunity to have a conversation with a guy who lives around the corner from Okapalapar so that felt like a success that felt to me like a successful housing or installation of that kind of work that it was truly available to anybody who came up regardless of whether you had access to the technology or not because we were providing it for you we realized early on that we had to do the same thing with Daryu and with Ghostlight and haven't had any issues with that either but we did a very similar thing with Ghostlight the app was in the app store and you could kind of get it the video content like yours, the audio content is this kind of big thing so we had Wi-Fi on site they could download it and what not but there was too many changes to last minute with Daryu so I decided not to put it on the store and I just put it directly on these devices where did you get your devices from? about seven of them were mine I do smartphone development a lot so I have the history of devices or some of them were Marais there was four that came from the only animal that were a mixture of personal devices and ones that we had gotten through some of the funding for the last part of this we rented some from Radx they had them from various projects and a mobile agency that I worked with kind of loaned a few as well so we ended up having 19 yeah it was the I don't know I'm kind of thinking about this a lot with I don't know if you're familiar with Harold Fletcher Harold Fletcher he teaches at Oregon University I guess kind of social practice and he's kind of one of the premier premier kind of relational aesthetic kind of coming from more kind of contemporary art he's residents with contemporary art gallery on their field house project but he's done a lot of work with this and he kind of parachutes into spaces and kind of does this stuff and what I'm kind of curious about both of these is picking up on that part is that we have to be conscious and kind of respectful of places that we're kind of going into but we're we're kind of having coming in with kind of a pre-built framework and mostly pre-built content with not necessarily kind of building that content from the yeah I've heard him speak a couple times and he mentions like these kind of object failures that he kind of has when he doesn't necessarily start from zero with the kind of community so when he gets invited to come and do projects or he's doing a project in Vancouver with the community whatever that is so they're at the Barard Marina Parkhouse so that's obviously a fairly localized community but yeah he doesn't ever come with an idea before that and that's not necessarily the kind of economically logistical world that we can kind of stay in obviously the theater can be made that way but maybe not these pieces in that but do you feel like it would change like if you had a larger kind of co-creative process with people beforehand well yeah I think it would have to change otherwise it wouldn't be honest it's often when I start the projects I have an idea in my head of what the thing is that I want to make and it's such a rare opportunity to just make the thing that you want to make that would be hard to go like no but what do you guys want to do and then be like don't you think my idea is the best so I think that there's definitely some value to just go like no I'm going to make the thing that I want to make but if your practice is to take the technology or take the possibilities to a group and say like well what can we do I think there would be I mean immediately I start thinking well we have to think about like what or group group talk about like what are the capacities what are the capabilities what can we do with this machine and then which leads to the inevitable chicken egg question which is what is what leads the story making or the content developing whatever you want to call it narrative story content thematic is it the device that leads it or do you figure out what it is that you want to say or talk about and then look for the right platform I mean for a while Dustin and I were considering that we would that landline would be like a series of envelopes that you open right so it's not it wouldn't be a smartphone at all and we also considered it that it would be not time-based we're like well the show could start and then it would end at a different time for everybody else and it could take an hour or it could take a week but it depends on your pace so the platform of it so that's the chicken egg platform what do you I mean have you put very much thought about what it would be like to co-create with a larger community inside of well yes yes and no like I ultimately with the dairy project I'm a creative voice but I'm not a creative leader that is kind of Kendra and Eric Eric really on this one and the content in and of itself really is so the content is solicited and Eric and I kind of work together to kind of facilitate that in terms of what content works and what content doesn't and so we've we've learned lessons in the first iteration in Blood Alley and we've learned more lessons we definitely had successes based off the lessons that we learned before and then failures and things that we hadn't learned properly in terms of what content works and how it works and what not with it and that kind of user experience so that kind of is there but the framework again is kind of pre-built right come in there's scratching at the door is that Kendra so maybe are you coming in we're live streaming you're on the spot yeah because content is one thing right but then the framework of that is the technology is it can be relatively rapidly iterated it's like it's the same thing with like lighting you don't necessarily walk into have a script done and then kind of on your first rehearsal go to the lighting director and be like how does the script feel to you what color do you feel whatever that is a lot of times the technology takes a little bit more time to kind of iterate on and really the job of the creative technologist in this is to kind of put that as kind of in the hands of the content people and the creative people and then get feedback on what's working and what's not and provide potential solutions or expansions or delineations of that and to do that again and that's that's something I'm familiar with and so that kind of work quickly like that but yeah I don't know I don't know that there's what exactly it would look like to kind of transcribe like the Herald Fletcher way of doing things kind of technology it's the technology itself can be kind of a red herring like I'm a total geek and I love doing this stuff and I love the conversation between kind of creative technology and other art farms but I'm also not interested in pieces that just kind of use technology for technology's sake and it's really about it kind of supporting something and if it doesn't need to be that complicated that's great that kind of means I'm often out of a job but that's okay I think that I mean it's the approach for landline at least that Dustin and I take is like if we can't do it, if we, he and I can't figure out how to do it then we can't do it because we don't have a third person who's smarter than us or an expert or you know our our so our repertoire is our repertoire I think that's honest though if you're not kind of stepping out of your bounds because it's a lot of the problems that we deal with is this is that people get hung up on the technology via the content and the user experience and you know we have since we're providing 20 phones some are Android, some are iOS some do patterns, some people come with a BlackBerry and don't know how to operate either obviously people you know when we did the Blood Alley version we were really trying to focus on trying to make the kind of experience as seamless and as easy to use for people as much as possible and then there's kind of, there's experts on hand in order to kind of guide that as well so you have to yeah try to make sure that the technology is kind of seamless as possible yeah and we thought about like how many things are you holding how many things are we asking you to hold in your hands so we you know we put it on we talked for a while like should we get smartphones and play the sound off of the smartphone but I think ultimately we decided let's just put it on the iPod the iPod goes in your pocket you never have to touch it again don't touch it and then it starts with the audio track it's because somebody touches the iPod or they decide they're like I don't like these headphones I'm going to use my own headphones and then it restarts the track and they're 10 minutes off so there's no way of getting people to comply people will always do their own thing which is the wonderful thing about people yeah absolutely for sure I've worked out enough apps that there's always people that find different ways of breaking things that they're like how will you actually enter actually we the struggle that we have Dustin and I is like we kind of want people to not follow all of our instructions like we want people to find the game inside of it or to take it over make it their own and so the subtle ways that we can find to say like we say things like how far you go is up to you and all that kind of stuff so like this is your experience and some people do that and come back to us and say as if it's a criticism you know I was having such a great conversation with my friend that I barely was listening to the audio track and like that's great that's actually better than what we had planned you don't actually need to listen to the audio track all the time it's there if you need it that's all I'm saying I wonder if there could be a way to they're good to understand to listen to how much that conversation is going so to look at the frequency of text messages and maybe just start to kind of like the audio we wanted them to be on like so we could track them GPS and then we could watch there would be a whole installation aspect of it with Dustin or I as the operator watching them and being able to send at some one point we're talking about sending them instructions or like mission control exactly mission control and then you could come to us helping these people but you would be watching the people in Kitchener and the people in Kitchener but people would watch you operating as well transparency and visibility exactly but we didn't do that we came out with about a hundred ideas and we decided to do this one but hopefully we'll do another one we'll talk to me a bit I will because I don't live in the same city as my collaborators and you don't have to anymore it's there are some things that like when push came to shove and we were like actually building the piece no when we were actually building the piece in September 2013 he was in Halifax and I was in Vancouver which was really handy because it was like we had an extra four hours on the workday so because he was four hours ahead so he would I could work late at night and get it first thing in the morning and be able to pick it up and it was just like this expanded workday it was amazing how often did you actually use well so I guess the question the tool that you're using is a smartphone how often did you leverage the power of the smartphone and you making a piece about the smartphone the tool actually the tool we're using is I would say that we don't the actual power of the smartphone is when we do the piece international so when we're doing the piece within national borders we we are really only leveraging the ability of a mobile phone because it's all SMS text messaging but when we're international we don't do text messaging because it costs an exorbitant amount so we use Skype and that's when we are actually it's a smartphone play I guess it could be more smartphone if we ran the audio track off of your thing but we also didn't we also felt like we didn't want people to have the audio track in their keeping so we didn't want them to be able to do the show without us so we don't give it up we don't give it up for free except when it's for free but that's somebody else's business but yours is a smartphone play or dare you I shouldn't say you lose now that Kendra is here yeah dare you is extremely smart sometimes too smart but yeah it's a to kind of bring back when we're talking about landing devices or having devices available in a middle class it's been able to run on more variety of devices older iPhones, older Android phones than I initially kind of thought it would be but it definitely it's a power hungry beast and it computes a lot of power it takes a lot of power to kind of compute what it needs to do yeah there's some pretty heavy stuff they're hot when they get back in yeah they are yeah we I think when things get really smart with ours is when people go off script so if they start sending photographs back and forth or you know Google Earth images or stuff like that or they Google each other then it gets smart but mostly it's text messaging and I suppose we could figure it out but the new iTunes music player on the iPhone is crazy it's so complicated I don't even understand how to make it work so I don't have the time to figure it out why can't you play my music iPhone that I bought the music that I uploaded why must I be connected to the I don't get it they just want more of my money well they want more of your data they want more of my data speaking of do you have any is there an archive I guess not really it's pretty decentralized right you have the record of the people and maybe their numbers we have a record of the people we have their names we have their email addresses and their numbers and nationally we log them into Skype identities that we've created so we actually have the log of their chats we can't really publish that because we don't have we haven't asked for permission there are screen grabs of conversations that we did that audience members had in 2013 that we got permission from them to be able to publish them as promotional material everybody's conversations I don't really go back and read them partly because your darkest days and you're sitting there it's because as we originally conceived landline as a one on one show and then at the end they meet in a video chat that nobody witnesses except for those two people and that was very important to Dustin and I that it was not it was not mediated and is not observed and that it was purely those people it belonged to those people so that's the biggest reason why I haven't gone back and read it through the Skypes and also like there's a lot of them but people often will come back and tell you about and they'll share disclose as much as they want or they'll email us afterwards and say like my person was about to go to a wedding and I want to know what it was like can I can I get their email address so we have to mediate kind of those kinds of requests of people who want to get back in touch with their partner which is exciting like that's kind of best outcome of the piece is that two people would walk away and actually continue a relationship outside of the piece what about funders they were asked in terms of like a tangible result in the US in terms of any of that data our landline was created the funding to build landline came out of New World's seed development money so it wasn't funded as a project and then Dustin is really savvy and also based in Halifax so he gets to access things like Atlantic Canada operation opportunities funds so a lot of the money that we've gotten to tour the piece is actually industry growth money through Atlantic Canada and then we've received one touring grant from InterArts to do this tour this current tour and nobody seems to they just want to know that we did it which is great they don't ask for any kind of because I guess because it's not like a community building like it's the outcome is that it happened it's not the number or quality of relationships that have been found but if they did we have we have evidence that people do you like the CIA redacted we could redact everything and just put the like just leave the landline the landline landline was awesome landline how are we doing for time over there should we take any questions like five minutes of questions if there are I mean if there are any questions we don't want to put any pressure on you I had a question both of you refer to mistakes problems can you give us an example of something that you encountered that you didn't expect and how you overcame it well the biggest problem that we have we have two problems when we run the show one is people showing up on time or not showing up at all that's a problem because for landline to work we need one person in each city and so we're very sensitive to making sure that the audience the box office numbers match so we're always trying to figure out how to put that in our rider like you need to provide 100% attendance or we're not doing show and that can be sold tickets that can be volunteers that can be staff people but there has to be one person in each slot so when Dustin and Sean were at the forest fringe like that's a fringe so there's not a lot they didn't have a lot of support from the quote unquote organization because it's a fringe like it's just very DIY so they were out in the bar like saying you do you want to do a show you do you want to do a show and at the same time I was in Iceland and the presenter had given a lot of comps away but when people get a comp they don't always feel obliged to attend the performance so we would be standing like we just have these empty so we've built into our pre-show routine well we've built into our rider that we have to keep an eye on attendance and we have to like have volunteers on hand that's the biggest thing because of the pain and heartache and deep anxiety like I cannot sleep because there's ten people in this city and zero people in that city and what are we going to do so that's one thing and then the other problem we have is the ghost and the machine like you send standing by to your person they don't get the message send it again they still didn't get the message send it again they still didn't get the message okay we'll swap it out on your phone they'll send it back he didn't get the message and like who knows and then ten minutes later they're like oh I got five you know like there's that is something that we just cannot there's I don't know it's the cloud cover or the timbre or the satellite or some leg that we can't we can't control that and that is also deeply anxiety producing yeah how about you I think I would say kind of the the main thing is you know we designed it to be an immersive experience and that's really the way it is is that the you know I hide the status bar so you don't see your notifications if you're using your own phone or providing our phones that are in airplane mode so you're not even trying to like connect to you know Siri or Google or anything like this but the with any of this you know I often get the phones kind of back at the end of the run and like it's not the app that's open it's like something totally else and I don't know how they got there like if it's like the stocks application like why are you checking stocks after this video I don't know maybe like whatever that is but I think it's just either that's that's partly just human error and fingers and we're holding stuff in landscape and it may be the soft keyboard or whatever that is or it may be if they're on their own device you know if they do get an notification somebody calls them in the middle of it what's happening there's another conversation how do they as that audience obviously you have to kind of give that that's in their court about what they do about that you know when you're kind of looking when you're kind of encouraged them to make kind of emotional kind of agency driven decisions around how they're navigating contents they may come across a place that they have a memory of they may run into a friend on the street they may be really hungry or have to go to the bathroom really bad and kind of sneak in somewhere whatever else that is right so there's going to be kind of whether those are technologic or kind of logistic or kind of emotional or psycho geographic little eruptions that are going to happen yeah and that's what we're doing is kind of explore the humanity of it so it's you just have to embrace that yeah it just makes me think about one of the pod plays with a presenter and it was a version, it was in process and so you know I felt nervous because there was a presenter and she was doing it and I didn't want to do it because I've done it so many times so I was just following her and I was kind of keeping track on the audio guide and she was like slow, she was so slow I said to her like did you not notice that you were getting like falling behind on the cues and she's like yeah but I was just trying to be like the worst audience member why would you try and be the worst audience like just be yourself like the audience is going to hear like you should be here now and notice that they're not there and they're going like I had no words in that moment but I just thought like right of course is because I was watching her do the thing so the guy what's that, yeah exactly so the guy looking at a stock is like that's the other thing I find with the smart phones and I think it was part of why Dustin and I moved away from having everything on one device is like it's too easy to get distracted it's too easy to go somewhere else and do something else and Dustin actually doesn't even have a phone a mobile phone I can't text message him ever which would be handy at times but he doesn't he doesn't have one it's not part of his personal kind of cyborg identity yeah there's a there's a thinker, a writer more within kind of user experience a mobile that talks about designing for one eye and one finger one eye and one finger and that's kind of all you can ever guarantee that the user is going to give your application right and for maybe 30 seconds right that's the thing is that like where the spikes of attention within these they change over time if you look at like the New York Times will look at metrics of when people read and spend long times on their page which is either like at like 7 a.m. or 7 p.m. right so the morning commute or when you get home at night and things like that so but where we're in and out of this stuff all the time if you look at the recent apps on your phone right now it's everything right so it's where we're kind of stepping into an ecosystem that we're kind of like swimming uphill upstream in terms of kind of swimming uphill is even harder so stick with that swimming uphill yeah in terms of kind of the expectations that we're setting on users sometimes yeah yeah because well that makes me think of my dear friend Flarity and my other dear friend Heather Brown when I first started working in radio who said they're not listening they're not sitting in a chair listening to the radio they're doing something else they're washing the dishes they're cleaning up after supper so whatever you're giving to them is half an year or a quarter of an year depending on how many people are in through any other questions any other questions yeah I'm not sure if this is yet was one of your one of your concerns or one of the things you want to achieve with your project to be accessible you were saying to be accessible from the community but I noticed the theory you said you have unless you have an actor inside the experience so you have an actor there with the visual cue so without that your experience wouldn't be complete I know with some pod play you're able to download it and do it at your own time so has that been a concern to you or have you ever thought about trying to make your project accessible for audiences with you experience it whatever they want well the pod plays for sure we're something and still are something that people can when they please we created a whole podcast series that would give you instructions about where to be in Vancouver and I'd have to revise it I'd have to listen again to make sure all those places actually still exist but you know the the the strange thing is like the is how you pay people for that or how you get paid to do something like that and ultimately I think like the solution is for it all to be free except for the fact that I worked on it the actors worked on it and how do we fund it that's where I get tripped up because I would love to be able to offer everything for free but people need to be acknowledged for the work that they put in so that's the kind of conundrum of the user wants the user expects things to be free I think a lot of the content on smartphones the people expect it to be free and easily accessed but the reality is that there's a lot of work that goes into them so how do you sort that out with landline we don't want because because of this the adaptation or the idea that the audience is an agent and that we are really playing with this idea of liveness what is the live aspect of it it is a performance so you have to show up at a certain time and be there and do the thing and that's an intentional choice to make it a performance and an event rather than something that you can do because somebody said to me oh the pod plays are great I listened to them last night we almost don't even have to be outside and I was like oh well if that's your experience then I failed if you feel like you can listen to them just fine from inside your bathtub then I didn't do my job because there's something that's missing and you don't feel that that's missing then have you listened to everyday moments fuel theaters everyday moments it's a series of pod plays you can find them on the guardian culture podcast and they are short plays written for specific times of day in very specific places but they're like places you can find anywhere so like the middle of a bridge in the middle of the night with a group of friends or a grocery store at 5pm those are fun I like that to kind of analyze the space but specify it with second story we definitely for the ghost late the blood alley version we thought about that a lot obviously we only had a two day run of it initially so obviously having devices available and kind of being on site and having wifi to download the content and making that as accessible and viewable as possible the app both for iOS and Android was also on the app store and people could kind of download it at any point we even found though the target images that I shot several iterations like months to weeks to days before and we're kind of continually refining in blood alley moved by the time we actually ran the show so like the stop sign which was on was ripped off there was graffiti it was graffiti over top of things there was another thing that had this other thing behind a fence that was kind of put in place of it so it's just such a transient dynamic space which is kind of part of the magic of it obviously so I ended up kind of even if people had already downloaded the app for a version by the second day I was like just give me your phone and I'm going to put the new version on it because I haven't had a chance for Apple takes seven days at least to kind of vet new apps and Google takes sometimes a day so the videos themselves the content themselves was also kind of online so that you could look at it in any of the time as well would dare you similar concerns that hasn't changed necessarily but there was kind of too many moving parts at the end that we decided just to kind of host a event that will go online eventually and people will be able to look at it but yeah it's it's lit in a certain way the would dare you the yeah nothing like none of the targets will be there anymore it's like the actual environment the actual wall the actual texture of cobblestone so you could conceivably go back there now well not right now because of the light value obviously you'd have to be there during the daylight but you could conceivably go back and re-trigger things but with dare you you wouldn't be able to you could still eventually kind of watch the videos even in that spot as well that kind of stuff will change as well and that's just just kind of part of it in terms of the crafting of the production of it obviously there's you delineate kind of that experience a little bit yeah how do you take these locations? like the importance of the location for the listener and but for yourselves when you're moving out of the city to city where does it really matter more of a virtual location for landline we have we've established parameters that we need for our for where it's going to be presented so we know that it has that the venue has to be somewhere relatively quiet so there's two spaces involved there's like a box office space there's a meeting chat space at the end so we know that we need those two spaces we know that we need to have stable and strong internet connection because we run about like three or four different links our box offices are talking to each other Dustin and I are talking to each other and there's the video chat so we need to be able to support all that and then we want both all of those things to be drop down somewhere in the city that is something that we need to walk around in so there's some presenters that we could explore or there's some presenters that we've decided not to chase after because they're in art centers that are in very pastoral parks for instance so if you walk the distance that you can walk in ten minutes so our desire is that within that ten minutes you pass through a variety of places so that there is park space there's retail space there's maybe residential space so we're looking for a place in the city that has those options so that when an audience member is following their impulses or their instincts they have a variety of places to go to they're not inside of the same space or they're not on a bridge without any option that's how we determine or that's what we hope for we also look at things like safety so for instance in Kitchener they're going to be doing the show at 9pm partly because we figured 6pm is pretty much the earliest time we could get audience on a weeknight in Vancouver it's still I think pushing it a little bit that we're going to have people wandering around downtown Kitchener with headsets on at between 9 and 10pm that does feel like it's on the edge of safety for us we are going to just go with it because this is the we discussed that with the presenter and found the place that we feel like is the safest so that's another another not only do we have to find a place in the city but we have to find a place in the day where it's feasible in both places that we can attract the audience and that it's safe for them to walk around I mean there's a real kind of desire on our part to have it's so far apart that it's night time where you are and morning time where I am and you get that real kind of dynamic dramatic contrast we haven't been that far apart yet I think the farthest we've been apart is 4 hours for us it's there's largely similar concerns we found with Blood Alley at a certain time of the day the sun would kind of come over the south facing buildings and kind of throw all the kind of image targets on the north wall into havoc just drastically different light values so trying to kind of have the application have readings of several different times a day with Darry as well it was inside and lit the ambient light that kind of came in through a couple of different entrances to the car park and so there were different targets for 6pm for 7pm for 8pm and for 9pm all of which kind of just triggered the same video that's something I would like to not have to manage as much because that just takes a lot of my kind of space mentally but really it's we're talking about spaces that that work for other reasons I was working technically and my job is to kind of figure out how I can work technically with Blood Alley obviously there's a dynamic history there it's a very evocative space with the car parking it was evocative space not necessarily historic I have no idea about the history of that building per se but I think that there's more kind of logistical or strategic partnership for funding kind of kind of inspired reasons why those spaces were chosen but obviously they kind of work separately with Blood Alley we really kind of took content up from the ground and with Dary we kind of put content in there and created for that space both of which kind of led to different results but both exciting results so did the content add all the job because you were saying like Blood Alley and when you're not in the car park there's generally kind of that there's a lot of history of those spaces and all those sort of dynamics was that addressed at all in the work in the open timer incident yes for sure that the piece itself is about that space and the piece went through two drafts the first draft Tetsuro actually had a personal experience when he went to when he was working on the play with a video camera to tape the walk to videotape it so that he could go home and refer to how long it takes to walk from here to there and what he saw and all that stuff but as we were discussing earlier having cameras down inside the downtown east side can make some people feel very vulnerable and he was chased out of the park and took off so the first draft of the play he was recounting that experience so it starts as kind of a historic tour, cultural tour of the open timer park from the point of view of a Japanese Canadian and then is interrupted by the contemporary life of the park the day-to-day life of the park and we were dissatisfied with that because it left the sense of the park as a dangerous space and as a space that was not welcoming and as the protagonist is chased out and decides never to come back which is not the the Pao Street festival has like a very deep dialogue with the community and is trying to address some of those fears inside of the Japanese Canadian community were like we should just have the festival somewhere else they're trying to build bridges so they were not satisfied with the piece either so we gave Tetsuro the assignment to go back to the park to talk to people which he did and he had I think a transformative experience for him that he brought into the piece so yeah in that case that piece specifically is very much about what you're talking about the social and cultural dynamics and it also does exactly what I wanted them to do which is to layer these stories like this city is shared with stories it's all over and communities and they're all kind of stacked on top of each other and I think the Oppenheimer incident is one that really successfully shows that those things are all here at the same time yeah again I guess with the blood alley edition all the content came from the community so we worked on the animal worked with Portland Hotel Society and had a series of open sessions where people can come and give their stories about it so everything there it was an account of what something that actually happened in blood alley over 30 years or something like that I think so there were stories of a girl who moved down from ran away from her parents moved down from Powell River that was the first place he came somebody gave her acid people that crashed their bikes into each other and fought and been husband and wife for 30 years some like heartbreaking and like heartwarming stories from that and so there was 60 stories or something like that that were volunteered and kind of out of that those were filtered and they were kind of reenacted and directed so the yeah that content was all like very split and it happened there so I think it's fairly true to the space so I think we found an ending I think you did I think it was wonderful I thank you for being our you know salon leaders and I would like to remind everybody that we are have this conversation has taken place on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Slewa Tooth and Squamish Nations and we are very grateful for that and we're also very grateful to the playwrights Guild of Canada Council for helping us get you guys together I think it's fantastic thank you that was really fun yeah and high five and if you haven't yet bought your ticket to Landline Chelsea is here to assist you if you want to she can do it for you she can do it it's all there that was really fun thank you that was great she did it