 Welcome, everyone. My name is Tiarin Gruber, and I used she, her pronouns. It's my pleasure to welcome you to the Level Up Symposium presented by the Associated Designers of Canada with support from Toaster Lab's Mixed Reality Performance Atelier. I am a member of the board of directors of the ADC and really excited to be your host for today's event. Today is the final day of our symposium, and today is the first of three events that we have marking the final day of our four week long symposium. Level Up Symposium has been a really special opportunity for people across Canada, the United States, and around the globe to gather and discuss live performance in the digital sphere. To begin our session today, I would like to acknowledge that I'm currently located on Treaty 6 Territory, the traditional lands of First Nations and Métis people. Edmonton, as it is known colonially, is and has been home to a diverse range of Indigenous nations and peoples, including the Cree, Blackfoot, Métis, Kodatsu, Iroquois, Dene, Ojibwe, Soto, Anishinaabe, Tsutsina, Inuit, and many others. Since time immemorial, this land has been a meeting place for this diverse range of Indigenous peoples who have enriched this place with their histories, languages, and cultures. As a settler, I have benefited from Indigenous generosity, hospitality, and knowledge, and for that, I wish to express my deep gratitude. Thank you. In this spirit of gratitude, I would like to acknowledge the support of Canada Council for the Arts, our primary funder of the symposium as a whole, as well as our dedicated member volunteers and volunteers on the board of the ADC who have made this symposium possible. Thank you so much to everyone who's donated their time and care to making this symposium what it is. We're equally grateful to these additional sponsors, IATSI, University of British Columbia, CITT Alberta Chapter, Concordia University, Ryerson University, York University, and Theatre Alberta. For your information, all the symposium events have been and will continue to be recorded and presented in a freely available archive. Check back in a few days after any event you've missed to see the recording at levelup.designers.ca. Thank you for joining us today. You are watching this Level Up livestream either on the Level Up website, levelup.designers.ca, on HowlRound at howlround.com or through our partners at Toaster Lab, or on the respective Facebook pages of the ADC or Toaster Lab. Regardless of your viewing platform embedded on the same page as the video is the chat function. It's right here in the right-hand corner of your screen questions can be asked in the chat at any time by clicking on this icon and we'll be right out to the presenter during the Q&A portion of this session. If you have any technical difficulties at any point in the session, please email levelupatdesigners.ca for immediate support. This event can be enjoyed through auditory or visual access or a combination of both. I will re-allowed all questions we address from the chat and this information will also appear visually at the bottom of your stream. Visual access is also supported with captioning live for all speakers today here at the bottom of our screen. And it will be available also in the archive. If you require technical assistance to support your access, please email levelupatdesigners.ca for immediate support or to provide much-valued feedback following our events. If you enjoyed this session, I hope you'll consider donating any amount to the associated designers of Canada to support our National Arts Service Organization, achieve its goals in the areas of advocacy, mentorship, and industry promotion. As the symposium is growing to a close, I hope that if you attended sessions or maybe even multiple sessions throughout the symposium, you'll consider making a small donation to the ADC to show your support of designers across Canada. Donation links are available in screen on all viewing platforms and Emily will also post the link up here, sorry, in the chat. Thank you for your patience with our announcement. Today's event is really exciting. It's the Level Up Artist Q&A. So we've selected a number of artists from throughout the events across the spectrum to last four weeks. And today we'll be featuring the artists Brittany Bland, Sammy Chien, Mark Caniglio, Milton Lim, and Zoe Sandoval. We're really grateful to have the five of them here with me today. And I'm really excited. I'm gonna just give each of them a chance to wave hello to you and say a brief hello to the attendees and talk a little bit about what brings them to the Q&A today. And while they're each introducing themselves, feel free to start flooding our chat box with questions. I have a number here that I've prepared but we're most interested in hearing from you, our attendees who've been with us today and through the past few weeks. So let's take it away Brittany. Hello, Brittany Bland. Hi, hi, very nice to meet you. Yeah, hello everyone. So like I said, I'm Brittany Bland. I'm a video designer hailing from the United States for specifically the Northeast. I'm really excited about how my craft, specifically as a projection designer can help elevate storytelling and a specific focus on empathy and storytelling and also different kind of new forms of interactive media as well. And I'm also coming from the areas of the Quinnipiac Drive. I wanted to say that and then Connecticut. And yes, thank you. Thanks so much for being with us today, Brittany. You did such a fantastic talk a couple of weeks ago that's available in our archive and we're so grateful to you for that as well. And we're so happy you could join us specifically with your focus on storytelling. It is the digital, the dramaturgy of digital performance and design at this symposium. And so that emphasis on storytelling and really connecting with audiences has been really important to us. So we're so grateful you're here today. Thank you, Brittany. Thank you. Let's hear from Sammy Cheehan. Hello, Sammy. Welcome. Oh, Sammy's just muted. Yes, sorry. Wonderful. We can hear you now. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome to the panel today. How are you? Good. It's an honor to be on this panel with such a badass team all together and joining. Yeah, so my name is Sammy Cheehan and I'm an interdisciplinary media artist. So I primarily work in a life environment, theater and dance. And I guess in this ADC context I'm a projection designer for theater as well. And I work with integrating technology into a life environment that I work with, you know, community engagement, activism, and also I integrate technology working with spirituality as well. And I'm also a practitioner of Qigong and movement exploration and research. I think, yeah, and then I wear many different hats and we can talk a lot about that as well. And I'll leave it at that. One of the primary software I use is Isadora. And I guess we'll get to meet the creator, the father of Isadora here. So I'm very excited and honored to be on this badass panel. Thank you. Yeah, and we're so grateful to have you today, Sammy. Sammy was one of our artists in one of our live design experiments which happened about 10 days ago and produced some really incredible work and really in a spirit of exploration and risk-taking and was really foundational to that group's success. So we're really grateful to have Sammy here today and have Sammy's perspective. And where are you coming from, Sammy? Where are you physically located at the moment? Right now, I'm in Vancouver. Wonderful. And I really miss Taiwan because I was born there and seen all my relatives enjoying the Lunar New Year right now and be able to actually meet in person. It's one of the safest place right now but I am grateful to be in the beautiful city of Vancouver with lots of mountain and water. So thank you. Yes, and beautiful warm weather. So thank you, Sammy. And now next I'm gonna introduce a man who probably needs no introduction for this audience, the creator of Isadora, Mark Kniglio. We're so grateful to have him here with us today. Hello, Mark. Hi. Thanks for inviting me. So my name is Mark Kniglio and my pronouns are he, him and dude. And I am the co-founder of the media intensive dance company Troika Ranch. So for 20 years or so we were based in New York City and we were focused completely on making dance pieces where the bodies of the dancers could not only dance but be able to control media, sound, music, light and that sort of thing. And along the way, because there wasn't a tool to do what I needed to do, I invented this software Isadora which I only intended ever to be used by me but somehow a lot of other people really have enjoyed it. And yes, it's true, Sammy said, I'm a father. It's true. I am a father of a 20 year old daughter because she's turned, well, she's a little over, depends on when you start to count the birth. But anyway, she's about 20. So hopefully she's gonna get less temperamental now because in her teens, it was kind of a problem. No, I'm kidding. Anyway, that's me. Well, thank you, Mark. I know so many of us really benefited from your tool as young artists and starting out and that for a lot of us I know for myself, I should maybe only speak for myself but that working with Isadora in the first few years of working with video really opened my eyes to the way in which we could create theater magic and the kind of stage mage I wanted to be. So thank you so much for being here with us today. So excited to hear your perspective. Next I'm gonna introduce Milton Lim. Welcome, Milton. Milton did a wonderful project presentation as part of the symposium you can see in the archive and we're really grateful to have Milton with us today. Hello. Hi everyone, my name is Milton Lim. My pronouns are he, him and I'm coming to you today from Vancouver, BC, the traditional ancestral and occupied territories of the Coast Salish peoples, the Musqueam, Squamish and Slavitooth First Nations. I am very, very happy to be part of this panel. I'm also an Isadora user so thank you to Mark and I'm happy to be on the panel with my dear friend Sammy who I went to school with. So I'm looking forward to this conversation. Wonderful, thank you so much, Milton. And our fifth artist on the panel today is Zoe Sandoval. We're so grateful to have you here Zoe. Zoe also did a wonderful project presentation as part of the symposium. And again, you can do that on the archive if anything our artists are sharing with you today intrigues you. There's a more opportunity to hear from them. Zoe, please give us a little bit about yourself. How are you today? Hello, hello. My name is Zoe. I use she and they pronouns. I'm calling in from the LA area, the ancestral lands of the Gabriolino and Tongva people also Chumash lands. My work kind of sits at the intersection of art, technology, filmmaking and theater. I came to theater in a roundabout way studying filmmaking and was really kind of entranced by the liveness of theater. And so it's really exciting to be in this space and here with everyone. And I'm really excited for the conversations we're gonna have. Thank you so much, Zoe. On that end, while we're waiting for, or to that end I should say, while we're waiting for some audience members to chime in with their questions, I'm gonna ask you this first one and I'll jump out and just let the five of you respond as your thoughts come to you. So the question is, and I'll put it in our chat so you can see it visually as well and it'll appear at the bottom of our screen, is what is one new form, modality or technology you're feeling inspired to explore in your practice since either attending the symposium or since COVID interrupted your usual workflow this past year? I'd be happy to take this one to start. So I never was a huge fan of virtual reality. Really, I love mixed reality. I love augmented reality. I'm a big proponent of being in a physical space and the importance of embodiment when navigating an experience. And I always had this weird relationship to VR but due to the nature of this global pandemic and being in the United States which seems like it'll be perpetually closed. I have been painting in VR using tilt brush which is now open brush, which is incredible. They've made it open source and drawing in VR has been an incredible kind of meditative experience. And he would have asked me even a year ago would I be using VR for anything? I'd be like, absolutely not. But it's been really, really gratifying. It's really great. I actually have something surrounding VR as well. I would say that my relation to VR also wasn't very strong rather than like my first experiences like in like the gaming world and stuff like that which was also exciting. But recently I've had several conversations about kind of like duality as far as like having an experience in VR that also takes place in a real location and how those two can like and how those two experiences can like fit and fold on top of each other. And it's really interesting to like to think that like you could craft a 3D world have that very constructed in a real kind of space or and then also have like a whole another separate VR experience and the two kind of like interact and weave and combine it in different ways. So that's something that I've been thinking about. I would say that I am eager to explore anything that is gonna allow us to move people's hearts and to also give them a sense that they're together somehow. I think one of the things in the initial talk I was invited to, I get the beginning of this festival that I went on and on about was the notion of co-presence. And there's a number of ways we can do that. I think we can use Zoom. I mean, we have a sense of co-presence here the together as we speak, yeah. And but we don't feel our audience really the people that are here with us and how does it work if you have a Zoom grid with a hundred people? And so I'm really thoughtful about that but I'm also when I say anything that can move our hearts I'll just recount quickly. The other night there was an experiment that included one of the team members from the Isadora team, Ryan Weber and some other wonderful artists. I don't know, was that you there? No, that was the other one. Okay, anyway, regardless it was all based in Discord which is a chat system which I'd never even seen before. And I was kind of like, okay and I was really so unconvinced at the beginning of it. And then they did something where they had this private chat that wasn't actually private that was talking about someone who was on screen and this whole drama emerge that I absolutely didn't expect. It threw me into a place where I didn't know where I was anymore and I was absolutely in this weird play that happened inside of the chat and see like, I love being surprised like that and I think that every technology has the potential to do that if we dig in and repurpose it and reimagine it as something else. So, you know, mostly I just wanna move people's hearts and I think people miss being touched and feeling like they're in a community and anything we can do to support that while this plays out, that's what we should be doing. Damn, so good, so good. Definitely with that moving hearts. Yeah, I gotta say, one of the biggest thing I find too similar on what Mark is talking about is to look at what is possible and reintegrate, reuse the available technology that's here and then now, you know that Discord has been there as like a game streaming streamer kind of a platform, you know and there's so many things like, you know the VR has been available but then, you know, what we're doing now in the way that we use VR, you know in the, especially in the experiment that we did for this symposium, it was interesting because it's such a complex tool but then we're using Isadora to screen capture the VR, you know, and then pipeline it to OBS and stream that and mixing like, you know repipeline to Isadora so we can all mix each other's like video like VJN, right? So, well, using the technology that's actually not new but in new way and contextualizing in the way that we can feel this co-presence that Mark is talking about like how do we, you know find new ways to bring us all together using what we know, you know but in a ways that we didn't know about is like the new embodiment and new representation of like how we can integrate into this virtual life format and having those agency, enabling those agency I thought it's actually a very powerful thing, you know to just like, we spend like, you know 10 hours to in the experiment just be like hey, how do we jam together? Like last jazz musician, you know how do we explore that? You know, so you do VR and tel brush, you know with and then I'm like, yeah let's just capture that and you can improv with your light painting and we can, you know that we can just move with your webcam to kind of merge our bodies together and there's something about the co-presence and celebrating still online or interconnectivity and with the technology that's available, you know it's actually not too far from like what we know, right? Yeah, so just like a little liminal space that we push through and then be like, yeah here we are, you know and what else is available now? What can we do now? What's more in here, you know, to explore? Yeah. I think on my end I'm really excited about artificial intelligence and I know that might sound a little bit antithetical to some of the conversations around being together and maybe it's not but I think the biggest reflection I've had around COVID has been especially in the live performing arts the response to the digital and live binary which I think is a unfair one but generally speaking the thought that there are so many people in the live performing arts that don't see that digital is so much a part of our lives the dependency on smartphones on different applications the programs that we use that digital is so intertwined with the way that our culture has grown in the last especially two, three decades and has accelerated. So I think as I come back to a lot of my love of gaming video gaming specifically I think about the leaps and bounds that are being taken in terms of liveness and behavior and I'm really excited to see how that integrates into live performance and so far as I guess interactivity but also replacing some of the things that performers would often do so that there's really a longer conversation about permanence, about time and about how we tell stories and how stories are remembered and I think I brought it up in my talk a little bit but Jesse Schell in his 2013 game developers conference I guess keynote he had this great idea that the next step for video games is to have virtual companions and that those people will remember the stories and that we'll learn about our ancestors through these virtual companions and that seems like such a radical thought but he ended off the keynote saying tell me how that isn't how the future is gonna go. So I'm excited to see how the performing arts integrates those sort of ideas and how we really complicate the ethics and the conversations around who's making it and what that looks like. It's like the future of Tamagotchi's. That's so wonderful. Thank you everyone for your responses. One of the things I've found really meaningful about this symposium has been that ability for artists to come together and I think even in my own career as a projection designer I've noticed a lot of times I have to kind of talk people into how the technology will be something the audience can empathize with or relate to or that we can use technology to create empathic responses. This concept that digital is somehow cold and alien and non-human is something that I know I personally had to fight against in a lot of conversations and I think that what this symposium has allowed us all to do as artists who work with these mediums all the time is to really open that door to saying this is part of the human experience this is part of how we're gonna create connection co-presence and replace in some ways or try and make up for the lack of that sort of limbic presence that we're used to having with people in space together so it's really wonderful to hear all of you speak about connection as being a sort of a common factor that we're all seeking now and that these tools are available to us to form that connection as opposed to something which distances us from the story or from each other or from our abilities to empathize. So that's, and especially in a time like this it's really exciting to see sort of empathic connection as being a primary goal for artists. Our next question and I hope that you'll be willing to share with us your thoughts on this is do you have advice for fellow artists moving out of their comfort zone right now? How have you tackled learning curves or career hurdles or setbacks in your personal or professional trajectory? Also, I was asked this recently but like it seems like there's so much to know about digital and especially for people who don't engage in it in terms of a creative practice just yet. My advice for that person was just to start anywhere because whatever you start with will show you more about what you want to get out of a particular platform or program and then you'll find out like and I think generally speaking the sharing of knowledge is much more robust in digital communities that I've seen like especially with Isadora the forum is just ripe with people ready to respond and to help out and share their knowledge. So I think as soon as you start you'll find a community of people who are willing to steer you in the right direction but sometimes starting is the hardest thing. Yeah, and right now is actually one of is actually one of the best times I think because everyone is being forced to kind of start something new and look at something new, explore a new idea. So I think everyone is actually very forthcoming with like their experiences and what they've learned and what was a misstep for them and like what didn't work and why it didn't work. I mean, I look at like even though like Zoom or OSC is I think like a paid for like how you use it but like the spirit of which like that was created and how it's been used on productions is like really interesting and there's been just like an outpouring of different like forms and such talking about these topics. So yeah, and also like, yeah don't be afraid to ask for help and support. You know, ask those people that are in the field that are already experts, you know, most of us I think are actually very generous souls and are very happy to help others. Something that's been really helpful for me is learning programming from a visual perspective. I have like a filmmaking background, visual arts background. And so learning how to program with something like Touch Designer or potentially Isadora and learning logic based systems with those kind of environments was really helpful for me and learning I think what I'm trying to get to is finding what your best learning style is and working style is is super important. And so whether or not you wanna get into something like programming finding out whether or not, you know oh actually it feels really natural to just write in raw code that like works for me or instead like being like actually having these nodes connect together helps me understand how to make within a digital world and experimenting with different software, different programming language, different digital modes is better than limiting yourself to one and then being upset that it didn't work out. And so having openness to try different things and experiment is really important. Okay, I don't wanna go after Mark. Because Mark's got drops on gold. I'm joking, I'm joking. So for me, I think if I may tackle on some of the spiritual perspective about learning curves, I think in the comfort zone is that being an interdisciplinary media artist and working with new technology, I always find that I start to understand how using technologies, understanding the mind how actually the mind is being programmed to resist the unknown. So when we, what we do as artists, as creators is that we are constantly being in this kind of a, in the place we're taking risk, you know and the mind is telling you, the brain is saying that hey what are you doing, be careful, you know there's all the new things that this is unknown, you know and when we go into it but the heart and the soul, the intuition is saying yes, keep going, that's why you exist, you know. So if I may give an advice to fellow artists to, like when you feel uncomfortable, you know when tapping down places like those like things that you feel resistance, you know just take a moment to sense what is the resistance is the brain that's telling you to be scared of, you know is the brain trying to protect you from survival mode saying that, hey like, this is new for me, I don't know what's going on, you know and you know, is it gonna make me money? Is it gonna, are you wasting your time? You know, that's coming from the source of fear, right? And then listen to the heart being like is this a place you wanna go, you know if intuition is telling you that this is a run path, you know you're just wasting your time, you know that's not what your alignment is then, you know, listen to that but if it's something the brain is telling you to be scared of, you know you gotta reprogram, you know I'm learning about reprogramming the mind like each day I wake up and I try to do a different thing every single day, you know if I do these things this way I'm gonna try to do another way, you know to just exercise those neuroplasticity of like hey, you know, exercise those muscles like saying, trying out new things so yeah, it's a hard place to navigate you know, I'm, you know everyone here are, you know your time is so much like gold right now, right? And there's so many tools out there it's overwhelming, right? It's like what do I invest my time into right now? And then it can be really, really overwhelming and I do, there are so many things I wanna learn but I'm just gonna trust that in this moment right now I have this offer that speaks to my heart I'm gonna, you know I'm gonna take this time to just be present with it and then whatever outcome comes out, you know it's part of what meant to happen right now so and then whatever ripple effect that happens that intersect with the things that I'm using right now I think it's kind of meant to be so yeah reprogramming our mind is I think it's a very important step before we start reprogramming the software itself yeah, what do you think, Mike? I can't top ignoring fear I actually can't everything that everyone said that's some really wise those are all really wise pieces of advice so I'll just offer something super practical which is not my advice but the advice that my mentor and teacher Morton Saboknik gave me as a young artist when I was really frustrated at a certain point that I was working so hard and I believed so much in what I was doing and absolutely nobody was paying attention and expressing that frustration he said may I give you a little advice and I said yes and he said never give up because every day someone else does and I think that was the best that's probably the best advice I ever got as an artist and hey I mean I'm still here right so that's what I would offer along with really some beautiful responses from everyone else Thanks everyone, yes I received some similar advice Mark in the beginning when I was really struggling competing with colleagues and other up-and-comers and feeling like I didn't want to have to compete with my peers and I had another artist who said to me you don't have to some of them will get smart and move on to better things and you'll still be here making theater and I never forgot that and here I am making theater even in this strange time so yes thank you everyone and Sammy to your point a longtime collaborator of mine who really helped me on my digital path Elijah Lindenberger who was a workshop leader in this symposium he often says follow your heart song and I fully believe that we have to follow our own curiosity follow what works for us because if it doesn't work for us then we can never use it as a real tool of to communicate honestly with others so we've got some questions coming in from our attendees we sparked their imaginations and they're beginning to pour in the first one is for Brittany it says Brittany first thanks so much for your presentation and showing biographic pictures so intimate you mentioned Chicago cinematic shadow puppetry what exactly did you mean could you tell me some more about that yeah so I was actually just looking at this so now I can actually remember what I was trying to say I during like I probably like six months to a year before I had started making that process I had been able to see Ada Eva which is a production by manual cinema so I do believe that they are still a Chicago based production company and that's who in their form of storytelling that was theatrical but also cinematic and also how they were able to expose the details of the process to kind of show like how one experience is actually rather serene and emotional and another is actually rather rapid and almost chaotic was like really it was really interesting to me and so that's the group that I was talking about I also apparently Zoom LSC is a free tier so that's a small correction from what I said before thank you very much for that but yeah it was I was talking about the artist group manual cinema who is dear to my heart I think they're just great great artists awesome thank you so much Brittany there's a follow-up to that question here continued I was wondering whether it was because of overhead projecting techniques or other things that inspired you with that shadow puppetry yeah honestly I'm really like as a person that is always at like two brains like one is extremely technical like I was just talking about how I'm really like interested in like coming from a gaming experience about like VR and things like that and there's always like the other part of myself that is really interested in kind of in memory and and just like kind of simple like how like simple things can hold so much power and so what was really interesting for me is the fact that like as a as like I think I was still like maybe in school around then but as a projection designer we're always had the immediacy of like a of a digital format you know we're creating things rather quickly on the fly where you know we're interpreting signals like that and it's really amazing but for someone to have so much like power in a paper cutout and to be able to have a sequence of paper and like how they so meticulously sculpted the perspective that it has the same if not more power as like a lived experience was like really interesting to me and how simple it was was like several overhead projectors with a lot of experience and technique I must say but but uh them being able to to boil that process down into something that was like um so seemingly simple was really interesting to me and I also love the character I do love the character of overhead projectors I think there's something just like like they're still around when not when I was a kid and and in school and I remember teachers like writing on them for like class and stuff like that and there is there is something to and maybe that even brings it back to my feelings of my obsession with memory you know in that way so Thank you so much Brittany I worked with a director Stefan Zeparowski and he used to use the phrase the decay of light that when we when we break things down a bit and take off that clean sheen that we do get closer to what it feels like to have dreams or memory or or that internal human experience and he really spoke to that there and you're just describing that for me shadow puppetry is of course the original the OG projection design and so anyone who ever thinks projection or AR is sort of a new reality I like to remind them that from time immemorial we've had access to shadow and in our digital art gallery if you check there we have a wonderful project being highlighted in the digital art gallery of traditional puppetry and shadow puppetry being captured in the 3D world as a way of using digital techniques to preserve that so for anyone who's curious about shadow puppetry or different ways that it can work in a contemporary context there's some you know potential area of interest available in that digital art gallery for you I have another question just while we're waiting for our audience to to warm up and ask a few more my next question is are there any artists you've discovered or connected with for the first time through this symposium what excites you about their work and if it is if you don't have one from the symposium maybe even just in recent times that's something that you're exploring now are excited by well I'll jump in and just say that as I mentioned the other day I went to a couple of the experiments one that Sammy was a part of and then another one and I'm just happy to see artists trying stuff I think the beautiful thing and what was really great about those experiments was and it goes to what Milton was saying a minute ago just try anything and you know what and during these times show it no normally we'd like kind of keep that in a little silo and we'd like do our experiments and feel like we feel confident about it in those situations they just kind of threw the pasta on the wall to see what might stick and I really enjoyed being there for those experiments where we can let ourselves fail and find out what's going on so I'm sorry I don't remember all of the individual names of the different people but like I said this thing with Discord for instance also I was just caught off guard by how intrigued I was by what they did and I give kudos maybe you know Erin you can say some of the names of those people if you know them but I was really taken with both of those experiments and the young artists to me young anyway that I saw they're working yeah I'll just give you know right on that wave and give shout out to the artists I met in the live experiment and get to spend like 10 hours to collaborate online who never met in person before so you really gotta just be able to like feel inside the presence via virtually Kimera Reddy and Christine Lee and Hugh Connaker and some people actually I'm kind of known from the Isadora foreign from the Isadora like global international community as well and see their names and be able to just like work with them it's like really interesting to do and then there are like Kimera and Christine who are like super underrated artists who does like really amazing stuff so you know kudos to ADC for putting stuff like this on for us to be able to explore each other's talent yeah and then be able to meet artists from ADC that was new to me and Drew and Darren are new people for me I had a panel with Emily before so it's just really a great way to celebrate and meet each other that's fantastic thank you so much to both of you for sharing I agree Mark it was such a pleasure to see the live design experiments and what was so exciting about it too was everyone who came out to participate as well and so that became my whole other community sort of coming together to talk about it afterwards or participated in it during the moment depending on the format and so that was a really exciting thing for me I guess my next question would be do you have and we have the names there which will be posted in the chat it's Brandon Crone Daniel Tao Elief Nicole Eunju Bell and Ryan Weber was the group from last week for our final experiment who did the discord project which was just such a pleasure to be a part of my yes my next question is do you have a message of hope or tenacity you'd like to share with our attendees if so what would that look like from you what's your hope for other artists at this time what are you hoping for yourself at this time in terms of keeping your inspiration up and keeping your well full if you'd be willing to share about that I'd love to hear about it I looked at this question last night and I the one thing I wrote down was that we have everything that we need to build new spaces imagine new worlds and craft new ways of making that speaks a bit what I've been thinking too is that we have despite the chaos and the tumult like of these times that there's still this capacity to play and to make I've been finding myself in a space of not making recently mostly grounding kind of being a hermit helping my family acting as a caregiver and that has been like almost like a role in our performance that I've been enacting with my family and I've been trying to find ways to play in that even though I haven't been making in the traditional sense of making that I usually have been and so this capacity to play and to to make even when things are you know seems like they're collapsing around us is really is really important even if it doesn't feel like you know play or making I've been telling myself that at least I was I was thinking that similar to the tool statement I was talking about how we as theater makers or as as artists are really like at a interesting time I think that instead of speaking specifically from an American standpoint I see a lot of lack of imagination as to what who we can be who we can become and what our country actually is and I think that you know as as artists like that we are just like in this tremendous place to be kind of the a beacon of that to to everywhere else and be able to kind of show that to the world and I also feel that you know we have to also like just just kind of like take care of ourselves emotionally and mentally and I feel like if that's the work that you have to do right now then that's just as important as everything else because if if you aren't able to have your yourself like feel full then you won't be able to present that out into the world and I think that right now that there's just like such a dire need for people to be present and to give some type of like you know imagination and creativity out there so yeah I want to jump right in on what Brittany had to say because I really appreciate that and I'll I'll just make it a little bit personal by saying like and I'm sure everyone's having this experience but today was a really rotten COVID day for me today I hated being in isolation I missed being able to hug my friends I was desperate just to have a you know and I'm lucky I have a partner that I live with but even still that broader sense of contact uh was just not a great day for me but you know the thing is what we can offer each other is the camaraderie and creativity that I've seen happening at this festival in the times that I've been here because in every single one thing that I either spoke at or visited I felt like I was at home with people that I recognize these are people that are curious people that a lot of them have some kind of technical expertise which is always kind of cool for me because I'm a nerd and you know I I want to talk to those people because they're also thinking about what is the form what do we do with it and I think making contact like if you had an experience if you met someone if you even didn't meet someone but you're curious about what they're doing now is your perfect opportunity to reach out because if you start meeting online and making something together that's that's gonna fit that's nourishment that's like food as far as I'm concerned and we all need that food so much right now and I think we all have the space to offer it I think a lot of us do anyway so if there's any a words of hope or or you know towards this it's that there's a lot of people out there that are like you and that think like you and would like to create with you and just see if you can forge a new connection maybe as an outcome of people you've experienced through this festival that would be to me the most hopeful outcome beyond the sheer creativity that happened during the whole level up gathering damn yes oh god this is like the joy of like sharing our pain and be able to really like go into personal places and not be scared of that this is a beautiful place to be seriously thank you Mark and everyone's the kind and wisdom if I may you know add to this beautiful pool of maiden thoughts is that now I've been thinking you know similarly that you know taking those risks and taking the resistance in the way you know how do we recognize this is the this is the human journey that we sign up to you know that we sign up to this shit like we're here to actually experience all these things you know like since ever since a kid you know like all everything that didn't kill me made me stronger right like anything about now it's like the universe is getting ready for this final exam you know and there's all the quiz all the all the midterms are like happening and you thought the midterm was the final exam it's like no it's like there's more coming up and it's just giving us opportunity really test our strengths and resilience of like you know you start filtering out people that you don't want to you don't resonate with anymore you know and and then you know you really really maximize you know you try to be you have tried to cherish the time that you have and the people that you are connecting with you know I think I think ultimately I take it I know a lot of people are there's a fear of talking about the the joy of being isolation there's a fear of actually celebrating what is happening now because there are pain and suffering that's happening out there but you know I feel like this is a safe space for for us to be able to celebrate that and also share the joy and the gift you know that is happening to us right now how do I how do we make this the challenge and resistance to make a leap right to trust the process I think I think one of the biggest lesson and hope I find is that how do we zoom out and see the bigger picture that the universe has offer for us and trust the process you know because again our brain only knows so little with the past how many years of experience but our soul and heart you know it's just so you know how many thousand years experience you know already it knows bigger picture that has lined up for us you know and the stars are lining in ways you know and it takes some time to those degrees to kind of turn and connect right so I have a lot of hope in in the process that's about in right now and even just to connect with y'all virtually doing this you know this is like it's amazing like we got to really start new stuff and and connecting the new world and yeah so I'll just feel just share that the hope and high vibe with everyone here and to the audience yeah thank you so much everyone for sharing did everyone get a chance to say what they were hoping to say I didn't want to stuff on anybody I think it's just really wonderful to hear these messages of hope I know that they fill me up every day that I've been hosting any symposium events have been really good COVID days and Mark I hear you I've had some really crummy ones so it's just been such a joy to be able to come on this platform and and be with be in communion community with and in communion with my fellow artists something that I have been noting since COVID just in the recent weeks really it took me a long time to come around to this thought but that my lifestyle pre COVID as a designer working in different cities or even just different theaters within the same city different touring to different countries this was such a rhythm for me for so many years and that in every single one of those situations I'm always interacting with new people and I'm getting new energy as an extrovert I'm really filled up by meeting new people hearing their perspectives hearing their creativity and being able to share and be of service to them being able to offer them my support my care my experiences from elsewhere and really you know spark the creativity within them and that that has been such a huge part of filling my own well that I wasn't even aware I was benefiting from just because it was my lifestyle and it's only in recent times that I'd be like in recent weeks that I began realizing how much you know the isolation took away from me in that respect in terms of you know I was looking at it before in terms of productivity number of projects that have been delayed or you know in benefits like being able to spend more time with my family but I wasn't really considering how much my creative well was filled by the creativity and care and generosity of other artists so since being in this symposium I've been able to identify that and I hope maybe me saying it out loud maybe helps some others to identify it within themselves and I've recognized as something that I need to take forward from this that I have to meet new artists of course I need to reach out to my community of people I know already but I need to expose myself and push myself to keep connecting with artists who are new to me we have some wonderful questions from our audience the first one on our list here is can you each speak about your experiences with sound design and how you integrate audio into your creative processes this has been coming up again and again from our audience so I know there's a lot of people that they're curious about it I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts well I'll jump in just quickly first because a lot of people don't know because I'm known for Isadora in this you know this era but I'm the I'm trained as a composer I was never trained as a programmer that's my actual training and I wrote all the music for all of the Troika Ranch pieces which you can find on you know archived on our website the thing that I thought was so lucky about my collaboration with Dawn Stopiello the co-founder of Troika Ranch was that we made everything together I was at every rehearsal that's not how it normally works with dance you know usually they start with a piece of music often and then they create a dance to it right but I got to see the dances first and I got to work almost like a film composer where I could react to what I was seeing and without getting into a lot of detail I'd say that because I was trained as a composer I felt just it was really awesome to be able to just look at the work and feel it and respond to it and then create sonic elements and music that would support and enhance you know what I was seeing in the movement and of course for a lot of the work with Troika Ranch also those dancers were musicians because they were wearing sensors that allowed them to produce the music and that was the other part of it that for me was so interesting was that I you know traditional composing you write it all on paper and you give it to a musician and do it like this and here I had to give it to those dancers and their dancing would change the way in which they were performing that music that was a real negotiation and collaboration between us which I really treasured to let their bodies find new ways to activate and portray my soundscapes that was something that was really exciting so that's a very personal experience for me but I guess the thing I would like to say is just to be able to see what's in front of you and react to it and make things that reflect that that would be the thing that I think is so important about good sound design almost like our classic theater adage acting is reacting right that you know that we are really again back to that dramaturgical point we are an integral in contributing storyteller in each live event we participate in as designers yeah thank you mark I love the question it almost gives us an opportunity to talk about our hidden talents like mark actually I just watched mark's archive trucker ranch archive there's a video of mark rapping freestyling you know and it was it was a younger self it's so good we all got this hidden talent so if I if you don't mind and we get to see with my head shaved which is really really frightening so many good things out there to dig out yeah I do have a background in electrocution music and cinema for the ear you know this whole sound imagination thing so so I do approach sound in a very regular and serious way you know and so I feel sound design is so underrated because we are in our that kind of colonial society are trained in such a visual way that it's visually dominant so so it really pushes away from this our imagination we actually haven't born with you know so so in my work I really like audience I like to do a lot even when I do online lectures I ask people to close their eyes and then just like feel the sound and go into this middle of the state space to let our imagination unfetter you know so so there's so much power in sound and I can that has not it doesn't have that visual limitation that we have in the logic critical sense like you know being being in constructing in the visual sense so so then like we you know I talk about sound painting where you you listen to sound and imagine this like abstract painting that comes out from your mind and then how do you create your performance with those imagination right and I also do film as well sound design for films so and commercials sometimes so then you know all people said sounds half of the picture right but you often you don't put as much time you put like 10 percent of time budgeting to sound compared to like you know cinematography right so then a lot of times when the movie looks bad it's not because the picture is bad it's the sound that's bad some a lot of movies like really moving it's not because the story is like the sound is so good you're just so immersed into the in the story you know so yeah that's kind of like how I felt like sound like it's it's really really powerful thing and it's so underrated and and you can do so much with it and I know Melton also has that hidden talent doing sounds so I mean it's like a sort of mountain as well to tell you you know what do you think about the sound you you make I'm not trained in any sound at all and I have a lot of friends who are so I feel a bit sheepish to say that I do work with sound but I do use Ableton and Isadora in conjunction for a lot of live performances and I tend to think about sound in spatializing things especially the visual elements that you know if you have a square moving across the screen if there's a low tone vibration that's going along with it it really feels like there is a weight to it and a heft and you can suggest those things in sound sometimes more easier more easily than than visually but I try to work with those things almost like kinasonically so that we have a spatial relationship to it an affectual relationship to the visual but also in in terms of theater in like the imagination of the mind and so there are some things that are not visually seen but audible and represented in other ways and so thinking I draw a lot from I think anime video games in cinema and thinking about sound and how it's often used sometimes as background but more or less also as its own kind of active agent in the space yeah that's me maybe I'll throw it over to either Brittany or Zoe sure yeah so I am not sonically trained in any capacity but my approach to sound is largely from an archival perspective I really like using the freestound.org as well freestound and then the internet archive to find a lot of my sounds the pieces that I do that are kind of installation immersive environments I usually like finding sounds that are very environmental so sounds of a rainforest or sounds of the actual environment and then having those and layering those in order to create this kind of fantastical or magical environment for my installations but I don't really have any kind of training or techniques or I mostly just like hear the sounds and like probably usually like meditate to them or think about them and feel them in order to kind of layer them together to create this sort of atmosphere yeah I mean I would say that I'm also not classically trained in any type of like either producing sound or implementing sound into my process but I would say that the transformative power of sound or audio is like either matches or even surpasses that video I 100% agree with Sammy in that regard and I feel like sometimes some of the things that I am doing like they just will not click until like the sound designer or the artist is in the room when you get to hear what they're producing and you get to kind of marry the two like that's when like the whole scene really comes alive and for me any time that I can have sound be live and I think I've been very lucky to have a few collaborators that also love like making sound live in the room that is a joy for me to have and I really love it when you can kind of really respond immediately in that way but yeah I hold a lot of respect for my sound designers because they I think like your image is kind of like is the I don't know the impact and like the music is like the vehicle you know that pushes it there so I really enjoy that collaboration Thank you so much and thank you to our attendee who asked that question it's so wonderful to be able to have a conversation about sound with the five of you I know here at the ADC that we have a lot of conversations about how we can better support the sound designers that we have in our membership because this challenge in the Canadian model of producing around you know composing and sound design being too separate and very heavy very important jobs and there is still a lot of conflict in terms of how they're contracted and how they're you know prioritized from a producing perspective and from a you know budget perspective and that there are a lot of sound designers out there who are doing you know truly integral work and that it's an area where we're still hoping our our community and our producers in general will kind of like pull their socks up a little bit and start showing that love in a more powerful way so it's wonderful to have that conversation here and to be reminding everyone in the community how integral this component of all work is all live work we have some wonderful questions and comments from our audience here what do you think about the use of open systems in generating drama for example bots like Annie Dorsen generating chance procedure content design music etc from code and so on really the AI question there totally I'm very excited about that idea and especially Annie Dorsen's work thinking had a conversation with Arnie Eigenfeld who's a composer and works at Simon Freese University he's known for his work with MuseBots and GenerativeMusic and there was one time he was showing a piece of work and there was a dance that was a part of some visuals plus a lot of his music that was being played by his MuseBots and I remember telling him afterwards that I found the most exciting part was actually when he was showing the back end for it because with a lot of GenerativeMusic if you only see it once you don't really know that it was generated and you don't see the back end but to see all of his MuseBots saying like okay we're going to be more patient at the side there's a macro structure that's orchestrating everything else and you can really see the complexity of it I think that was more exciting because so often in live performance we're locked to traditional kind of theatrical timing where you can only really spend maybe an hour with it two hours if you're really lucky but then other times where say in playing video games I get to spend 60 plus hours with something I can really start to analyze these differences and these changes when I go into either a generative world or a generative soundscape and I can really start to play with those things but in such a set time limit it's really difficult to understand the complexity of something when you have such a short time spend with it is my thought so I hope that it in one way changes the performance structures that we're used to seeing that we can allow for alternative ways of experiencing and engaging with work but also I do hope that there is more development and it's not even that I hope there will be more development in terms of generative systems like that it's coming it's coming something I mean I actually Milton I'd love to talk to you privately more about what you're doing with AI I'm actually also super interested in AI but the the thing that we have to watch out for and I don't know the artist work that is mentioned in the question I'm sorry to say I'll look up afterwards but I think this makes me think of a lot of times when I teach Isdor workshops at some point someone will get grab the random actor which generates random numbers and start outputting something because of this thinking that that is adding information or adding something it said they're adding drama was the thing that triggered me or generating drama and I this gets a big wagging finger for me saying listen you have to think about this for a little bit because you know another sort of random number is this sound if this will pick up on the system right his is actual random numbers of of audio that's what we call noise so you know randomness is not information because it does not understand context and that's where Milton was talking about the work of this artist who has systems that are kind of finding ways to pay attention because the key to making this work is to understanding context because when you understand context you can generate surprise without understanding context it's actually impossible to generate surprise so that's the thing I guess if we're heading in that direction it has to be a thing that really starts to understand the bigger context of what's going on then I think you can do something super interesting also I think as as performance creators we have to be willing to let go of certain things about performance traditions if we're allowing chance procedures to come into the works and I think especially about friends of mine who play Dungeons and Dragons and thinking about the excitement of getting you know just just rolling and and the random number generator that's ostensibly happening and I know our our dear friend and visitor community Monty Martin often says like we are operating as the computer as a group when we're working and playing a campaign of D&D so but there are there are lots of things that don't hold up in terms of traditional timing traditional spectatorship that if we are willing to let go of these things then we can really start to dig deep into these contexts that Mark is bringing up at the risk of saying too much I just have to tell one wonderful story about John Cage so at CalArts one of my teachers was his assistant for many pieces right and he was later in his career and so the first thing that for this piece was to throw the eaching to find out what the duration of the piece would be right so he throws the eaching and it the what it results in is a piece that would last 42 hours and he turned to my teacher and he said we can't do that I don't know it's just the great John Cage story thanks for letting me tell it on that note actually we had a comment in our chat here which said good to hear the composer's perspective Mark like hearkening back to your earlier comment I've seen two production of John Cage's your your operas one and two which were some of the best drama I've ever experienced and digital design was integral so there's some similar wavelengths happening in terms of these ideas if you're interested in AI I know one of the pieces I was the most excited about you maybe shouldn't pick favorites like parents in our digital art gallery we have an example there of a dancer who did a duet with an AI version choreo so there's some sort of bot dancing going on there as a sort of iterative performance with her or with their own movement and then also with the bots movement alongside so that's a really interesting piece if you want to spark some curiosity around that idea does anyone else have any other thoughts or feelings about AI and generative programming coming in yeah yeah I I personally am really I there's a tension I feel around AI right the ethics AI but the spontaneity and the absurdity of AI brings me joy like seeing computers be dumb and say dumb things makes me kind of happy to in some weird way like thinking about natural language processing or things like that or having you know scripts that are generated on the fly I did a project back when Google Glass was a thing we scraped Twitter for specific tweets based off of a sentiment analysis and then the actors each wore Google Glass and they read their lines on the fly and they were given to them as these tweets that were selected and curated and most of the time the conversations between the actors were very absurd and usually made no sense but there were those moments of synchronicity that were uncanny and really funny and exciting that I thought lent itself to a lot of play that was really enjoyable I also think that there is a potential for media design using kind of style transfer or different techniques to apply texture and patterns to imagery that has a lot of potential and so I love the randomness of noise and the ability to create texture with noise and so I think in the right context it really can make something feel more organic and richer Yeah, there's something really precious about throwing the door open to the universe at times in our artwork and seeing what floods in you know making space for those things which can be you know kind of glorious and terrible at the same time and I think that's something that can give a lot of us energy Thank you Zoe So I Yeah, sorry Brittany, did you have anything you want to talk about AI? Oh yeah, sure, but you're already gone go ahead do your thing Okay, cool cool Yeah, just I kind of want to go beyond AI a little bit so let me know if it's like going off tangent but to me that this whole chance operation like you know whole notion of chance it is it kind of enables and it introduced new ways how we engage with technology rather than just a tool you know when I say tool it's like something you use that doesn't respond you know it's reacting and and you know how Mark first when he introduced about how Isadora being the daughter you know it's not kind of it's not really a joke to me it's actually a really beautiful analogy that everything we do everything the whole consistency in the world in the universe right now everything consists of consciousness right so imagine when we create technology right what is the consciousness that we are actually conjuring in that and how do we interact with this piece of technology and how does that respond you know in terms of wave wave wave planes you know quantum physics how what is the kind of interaction between and having simple things like you know the the random actor you know generating different data to us he kind of allow us to understand that you know with different results can happen and how our embodiment changes to interact engage with the this tool that we are using its moment right and that elevates this whole embodiment interaction and how we respond and those weaving kind of intricacy becomes the the whole whole way that that the fund from the old traditional you know conventional form of using utilization of a tool to something else that you know I think when I use this door I think of I'm collaborating with another artist you know I'm collaborating with the software you know it's always a collaboration in some way you know how do we find of you know ways to actually coexist and and create a dialogue in the moment of time so I think that that's one one big thing for me is to to this notion of chances and then having software with certain capacity agency to create different result is to the way we engage with it and what the stuff we create with it and how we treat the technology itself and then the work then you know have a report of fact to how it also outputs to the audience as well right so so yeah that's kind of how I see you know the this dialogue can go a little beyond AI I know AI has a very I know specific thing and then but I'm thinking about we this you this world it is a holographic universe that it's a it's a create one of the most intricate AI the creation has made you know for us to actually experience complex simulation right so I mean it is already what we see is it isn't a deep AI that we are in right now you know I know I don't want to get too far into it but think about that this is a beautiful creation that we are in right now and we're trying to create little more things you know they're like okay keep going keep going you're on the right track you know I remember being in university and my first year philosophy classes they were using the matrix they were hinge so much of our learning on the matrix and I was like what did they have before the matrix like I'm sure that there was other parallels but they they brought so heavily out of that specific pop culture movie but yeah I think Sammy the the larger discussion is is a ripe one and maybe going back to your conversation about the given platforms that we're using and the kind of identity that comes with it I love the fact that I when I see a piece of work sometimes I can be like oh that was made with Isadora and I can tell and sometimes it's a little bit hard to say exactly how you can tell but it has this kind of its own style that that is often embodied and I'm sure like we could we can deconstruct that a little bit but I wonder if like Mark how can you tell automatically if something was made with Isadora all it takes is particular effects that I really know right but let's let's let's well yeah but I think well I want to let Brittany say something but now you you brought this up I have to say one other thing it's very interesting to me years ago someone said who had just been to a workshop I'd give and said wow all these Isadora users they're so generous and and I said yeah I know it's wild isn't it how how everyone's like that and he said but you're like that too and I said well thank you I I want to be a generous that's how I am and he said do you think that your personality is so embedded in the software that everyone who uses it is like you and that is like there's a truth in that and it's so bizarre to me that my way of being as a human being is in the software somehow and I think that you know every software has that you see things and you know things about it so I don't know I mean we're getting way off AI now but Brittany what do you have to say yeah yeah so I mean I'm very much like in the like like interest stages of my like learning of like yeah AI and and it's introduction like into like my workflow although I mean if you're from being honest like it's already there and then you're already using software program like programs that are using AI to generate effects your projection mapping on buildings that are using AI to kind of figure out like what architecture is like so I mean we already like exist in this in this world where where AI is already immediate in tactile and so it's just going to continue to grow and I guess the like my question about it is how like present it will be as like something that is obviously like like is it important for us to know that the AI is doing this or not kind of like the question of like in live video it's like if if it's live you're shooting this live the audience can't tell does it matter you know so like to like that doesn't matter that it's live you know so I kind of like and having this like question about it and I've been reading I think by Benjamin Walters there's like this essay the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility and it has all these like interesting questions about these schisms that are happening in our mental and in our ability to perceive actual real life and art and duplicate art as a as a part of life and it kind of goes through like like the many different schisms because schisms being like may say painting sort of that but then the main one being like photography and how that was immediately available and reproduce art and then you go to cinema and how that like kind of makes a new schism and then you go to kind of like computers and AI it doesn't go that far because this is I think published years and years ago but like how that but how we're we're approaching like a new schism but all of these things are actually just trying to take us back to the original thing which was the question of like what does it mean to express what it is to be human so it's really interesting to to have these two things happening and I'm I'm very much in like a a research mode wondering place with that but those are the questions that I'm that I'm um yeah concerned with that's fantastic Brittany thank you so much I mean I think all of these oh yeah Mark go ahead sorry I just this topic is so interesting to me and and Brittany that's what you were saying about being huge about finding the schism because the actual schism I guess you said this is between it was like cinema and what's reality cinema or reality now it's like what is human right but I want everyone to keep in mind that I at least in my opinion AIs are absolutely going to eradicate us I guarantee you it's going to happen they will get smarter they will become intelligent and they will either at best eradicate us or at worst they will enslave us and artists are going to be part of that process in fact they're going to be a critical part of that process and there's nothing you can do to stop it I mean I really don't believe that you can stop it but you have to keep in mind that you're actually part of a process of training these creatures to become sentient that's actually part of what's happening and I I mean because also Zoe method said the word ethics and or ethical in what you were saying and that triggered this for me so I beyond my apocryphal you know dystopian view of how this is going to go I would really encourage people there's an old book that Troika Ranch based one of our pieces on called the age of spiritual machines written by Ray Kurzweil who was one of the progenitors or super important figures of AI early on and he makes a prediction in the book which was again you know from 25-30 years ago or something where he says that the singularity what he calls the singularity will happen in the year 2060 he plots out the whole path of how this would happen and that's when AI becomes sentient and takes over right and at the time reading it I'm like well yeah come on 2060 you know but you know what 40 years from now I'm not so sure that he's wrong so I really actually encourage anyone who's curious about this topic and and curious about what it means that's a really good book actually to check out it's called the age of spiritual machines by Ray Kurzweil if you're curious about this topic it will get into a lot of these questions and think about what the future means when that moment happens to add on that and speaking to Ray ethics in AI I think it's really important especially when using systems like natural language processing or facial recognition technologies there are encoded biases in all of these systems and these biases are inherently white supremacist and patriarchal and if we do not acknowledge that we do not acknowledge the systemic systems of oppression that exists and so as artists I think it's really important that we acknowledge that and if folks are interested in readings around that I highly recommend Sophia Nobles algorithms of oppression she's a professor at UCLA as well as Ruha Benjamin's Race After Technology because even in using these this for my own work like style transfer you know there's a lot of grappling with right who made these systems what am I what is my training set what is this based off of it's really interesting to see AI systems kind of manifest themselves on social media platforms like Twitter like the images of two people side to side and it for some reason always picks one particular image and it's the image of someone who was lighter-skinned and you know if that is not already like a clear social experiment of how these systems were encoded I don't know what is but it's really important to also acknowledge that as artists and creators yeah I mean I think about I think there was some controversy I mean there's always been controversy about oh not always in the past like five ten years but like about Google and the search engine and I think someone tried to search in like beautiful woman or something like that and it was just like all white women look like a certain type of feature like a facial kind of like certain features and I want something on my face looks like but like yeah and I've even like I've even like even on our stock stock video websites when I'm trying to pull images for things I recently did production where I was trying to find mainly the silhouettes of people of color and the only things that it kept on bringing up was like some like 1970s like afro-tastic like like black women and I was like that's not it and so and even in stock in stock companies where I go and try to find like pictures of people you know more of the images that are generated by AI that it says well this is the person that you should totally put into your thing it's always like a certain it's usually a whiteness and whiteness is like a commodity and its value is a commodity in that sense so it's like really interesting to see how it's already here at the commodity right that we have to like you know mark and zoe all right that we have to be here and usher that change before you know it just becomes solidified because of like we haven't we weren't paying attention you know or we're advocating there we go our tech Emily put a comment in here that I think is so apt regarding this issue it's a self-eating worm the more the AI is taught off our current internet the more it enforces these biases this almost circles right around back to the very kind of like positive comment we made about how marks sort of generosity is a signature within the way isadora functions that not only positive signatures can be enforced that also you know negative bias white supremacist bias all kinds of harmful and actively detrimental bias is can be written in and is written in to these very human softwares and it's something that I've been again grappling with within my career for years is this idea that technology and computers to those who are not working with them all the time or not familiar with them seem like something outside of humanity they're outside of the human experience this is a perfect object and then you plug it in and you push the button it will function according to the way the operators manual says it should and I always say to my text who I'm teaching they haven't worked with video before I say it can tell if you're nervous so you need to be calm you need to come into the space with the right headspace and they always look at me like I'm just completely baffling to them and I say because this was made by a human every piece of technology in this booth even you know no matter how many monitors we have no matter how many riddled it is how riddled it is with switches and toggles and lights blinking this is all human and a human made it and it knows that you are a human responding to it and so you know when we talk about AI and we go into Marx dystopian future part of me wonders I mean are we creating something outside of humanity that's going to destroy humanity or is this the evolution like there's still human objects because they were created by humans and I'm often heard to say that like you know it'll definitely break because it wasn't made by a god you know a human person created this software hardware projector or whatever we're putting into the theater and so it's bound to break it's bound to fail the same way the actors on stage are bound to trip or fall or lose their lines because all these things are human but anyways don't want to distract and loop back to a previous thought when we're on such a good role with the AI but it's so good to bring up these biases because they're everywhere and you know let's just use Isadora as an example a few times in workshops I have encountered people who have dyslexia and working in this linear way with Isadora was super hard for them it models a way of thinking that actually is super comfortable for me but also a lot of the dancers who are very spatial unlike me I said earlier before we started that I zed dimensions make me nuts but you know the dancers are super spatial it was really a struggle even as much as I tried it to make it so easy for them that linear method of connecting things that's absolutely a bias right so it's everywhere I mean and but the topics that you bring up are societal in implication I mean maybe mine is too but but really the things and this is something we it's just got to be thought about so carefully and it's like because also if you look at all of the images that come out of the early deep dream stuff there's all these images of dogs and chalices and whatever because this is the best example because it was trained with dogs and chalices that's the actual image training set so it looks really bizarre when you look at it but that's because the training set and you have to look no further to that very early example of this kind of thing to see how those biases absolutely determine what the AI does does anyone else want to speak to the concept of bias in the technologies that we're using in our work? Maybe I'll add to the discussion that I was chatting with a friend of mine Marcus Youssef about artificial intelligence and in a lot of science fiction that there's this idea that there's an authoritarian regime that it runs everything and more and more we're seeing that corporations are actually more in control of these kinds of decisions and in a hypothetical future I was saying that you know maybe maybe it's not that there's one platform that is being used but it's actually a network of different platforms and I think that that's something I'm coming back to a little bit in terms of how I'm thinking about different biases and how we might as individuals elect to use certain things versus another and I think especially generationally to watch like I think I'm from the Facebook generation then right after me is the Instagram generation now there's the TikTok generation and there's probably something else right now that's coming up that I don't know about but each of those has a defined kind of set of ways of behavior or that we interact with it and we've been taught by those certain things of how sociality is constructed in digital spaces thinking about like likes or versus hearts versus I don't know what you do with TikTok because that's not really something I participate in and with all those things I think in the future to consider not one singular platform but multiple ones and that's less so of a provocation more just like a hope that we'll have multiple options and not just one singular entity that we engage with absolutely I remember reading an article about five years ago about they'd done a sociologists had done a study in eastern Canada with a number of teenagers and it was about how texting is engaged in terms of their social interaction and the result of the study in brief was that texting like if you're standing in a circle of people in presence that the people that they are texting with are considered as present and as important as the people who are physically in the same space with them so teachers and adults in their lives were confused by this idea of they'd all stand around silent texting people or they would interrupt someone so they could text thinking this is kind of like rude right in like sort of a different generations perspective but that for them this was considered that person who is in sort of telepresence as Mark talked we were talking about the concept of telepresence in another discussion that this person who is present through the text messaging was considered by this social generation to be as present as a person who is physically in the room with them and so this idea that we are adapting and that now in this COVID presence too that we are adapting to you know what is the new what is the new social politeness look like what does it look like who is present and who is not present in a space and that that is no longer defined specifically by our physicality so yeah Milton I think that's so relevant that different generations also are really being you know the way in which we engage with one another is being manipulated by these these companies and these platforms that we've all become so attached to and then again we can go back to to the previous point about who is writing those platforms what are their biases and how are they influencing us on so many levels beyond what we're sort of consciously aware of I think to Mark made a point a little bit earlier about ethics and about our responsibility as artists and who's writing this code who's bias is getting written into things and it really sparked for me something I've heard from a number of different collaborators I've worked with across the country which was this some call it a prophecy a quote from Louis Rial the Metis leader who said my people will sleep for 100 years when they awake it will be the artists that give them back their spirit and this idea that artists can be leaders of change and I think that over and over again the concept of ethics has come have been almost every single event I've hosted as part of our symposium and that we as artists many of us have a different engagement with or have a different spirit in relationship to things like ethics and who's in charge and where the bias is and that we are inherently curious about this stuff and maybe even more so than that that it becomes like almost for some of or for some of the artists I work with it becomes almost the well from which they draw all of their creative spirit and so how can notice anyone here want to speak to how our values as artists can make us leaders in communities and help us change these things for the better I'm maybe can jump in and something that's tangentially related but I think super important in this particular discussion is thinking about where are the sites of change and where do artists activate those spaces and I wonder these days if art is the place where people to come and be changed more generally speaking when I talk to a lot of people in the performing arts often the conversations that come up my friend Patrick Blankarn and I have done a lot of different interviews across Canada with different artists and often live performance about liveness and it's about gathering and I think that actually for the most common person maybe theater or dance or live performance is not the place where they find liveness and gathering the most important often there's sports there's video games there's other things and so I wonder if there's a point of reflection on the state of relationship to art in our countries in our places because I think that there needs to be something broken out of that if we want to see the change that we want to position our art can make yeah because I think that there's a lot of insularity about how art gets produced at least within a Canadian landscape I'll say that we're publicly funded and then there's so much talk about outreach and everything else but really it's just getting to the same people who would normally come to a theater space or to a dance space and the thing that I'm really excited about in terms of digital dissemination is that it could reach into other arenas of thought of sharing of engagement but I don't see that happening if we're so tethered to physical venues or to normal chains of engagement where it's just a mailing list or a subscriber series so yeah I hope to see more of these discussions in public spaces in like civic policy engagements like how do we and I know like Franco Bonny back at the theater center was very big about this in Toronto but like how do we have art in these spaces of juncture where a transition where people we can we can actually have people in the discussions that normally wouldn't go out of their way because art sometimes feels like it's an elective in school like you don't really have to participate in it and that's not the case for everywhere in the world like Mark are you still in Berlin like is that the case over there um no I'm at the I'm in Vienna these days at the moment but um yep that's that's just my thought about art I believe totally can be a change catalyst that can be we can be change agents as artists but uh maybe it's because thinking a lot about grants these days the way that we talk about change is sometimes not as effective as one would hope change can actually be yeah I mean art can be incredibly powerful and incredibly dangerous and we have to wonder particularly in our Canadian society when we're raised to believe that art doesn't matter you can't get a job in art art is an elective this is very much a cultural phenomenon here and you know why why are we being taught that why are people being why is art being de-emphasized so much you know how can we get that power back Brittany sorry I think I talked over you there no no no you're fine um yeah I mean I was thinking about this at the end of of my last seminar talking about like the place that regional and kind of like local theaters are and how they could actually how they are actually already positioned to be actual centers of communal gathering and how right now I think a lot of places are chasing the idea of being like about like equity diversity inclusion and and representation and things like that but and but are still kind of being contained in like a local like like a very kind of like limited kind of approach and I was thinking more about like how how theaters could band together to do more like site specific works bringing things to people especially after COVID and and and not just like you know preach about this you know thing but actually go to people where they are and create that this ritual of gathering because because this ritual of gathering but like Milton was talking about it already exists you know people are already going to games cinema whatever I mean and so I think that like theater like also has to like go to people and not kind of stay doing it's like play you know stay doing my season of like certain like Western plays but also like do things like where people are and take things to them and and kind of re-indigrate this this like ritual of like gathering and learning and being like together which I think is at the heart is always the heart of like art and and theater making in general but do you think that like there's been like a excuse and we'll go back to that in like the modern theater and and like where we actually are in society as to where we think we are and yeah I don't know I also think that like it's interesting when you I don't know when you teach art in a certain way I think you then end up getting very specific ways that art looks and what art assembles so I also like have to like kind of like take a lens lens of that and to take a look at that and kind of think like what are the implications of that system as well absolutely we had a pedagogy panel in our very first week of the symposium where we brought together a number of educators and talked to them about how does this kind of digital disruption or this new digital modality influence teaching models and I know for myself you know that institutions move very slowly but that this changes happened very quickly and so I'm really curious and excited to hear from our you know artist slash professor colleagues how they're able to engage with changemaking in terms of curriculum and in terms of opening the doors for possibility for new artists as opposed to continuing to entrench an idea of this is how things are meant to be and I know for many of us as artists digital tools have cracked open those things that we perceived as barriers and allowed us to move outside of you know what we were originally taught and I'm interested to see how that kind of you know critical thinking and sort of self exploration and self directed art making can be infused and I know many professors already have a huge emphasis on that so thank you for really tying it into that that connection too of you know the way in which we're teaching people to create art is going to have a massive impact on what what our society is presented with this final product yeah that really yeah that all really resonates with me what what you were just saying Erin and what Brittany was saying and what Milton was saying because I've also been thinking a lot about like what is the new Polis right what is the new Agora what is the public space that we can gather and be together and it feels like almost there's this like desire to be hyper local because that's what we have access to right now as well as hyper global because of the nature of the internet and I'm really curious to see what kinds of experiences integrate something that is so site specific but also is shared widely it's so funny that we're talking about this because I am I just applied for a program that was looking at this like what are new practices in kind of community art making that center around ritual and participatory engagement with folks in local spaces so that they can connect and in kind of participatory and interactive art but also have introspection about their own art making practice so this all totally resonates with the work that I've been doing as well and yeah I'm really curious about you know what potential there is in this time in the it's like love in the time of color it feels almost like but it's like you know love in the time of COVID art making in the time post COVID what's what's happening you know absolutely Zoe it's so specific there's such an interesting thumbprint on all the work that we're doing right now earlier Emily our tech again with such a wonderful insight commented in the chat hashtag 2020 and it's it really feels that so many of the conversations we're having so much of we're doing what we're doing does feel like it's sort of got that thumbprint on it of the current situation but what's exciting to me also is that in all these all these conversations that we're really kind of getting into the thick of some of these tools and that they will persist beyond I think some of the artists I've been talking to have really been emboldened by the ability to directly reach their audience and to not have to rely on institutions to cast them not to have to rely on structures that have failed them in their artwork and that they can now feel really emboldened and really empowered by the situation to directly reach out and touch people as individuals at the same time because they can't see them through the screen feeling you know super isolated and like they don't know who their audience is anymore so there's these strange really extreme dualities that are all at play once right now which is part of what makes it such an interesting time but I think the disruption the disruption of existing power systems is incredible I mean that actually the problem is is that we can't be together and that for me at least I miss it you know but but the fact that it disturbed those power structures they won't go back to being what they were before because everyone's had a taste of how it can be I think because of this and that's really important this is wonderful we have a few more minutes I think we're gonna wrap up at about quarter to the hour so does anyone in the audience have any more questions or anyone on the panel want to discuss anything further so I guess I would just say that um I when we're talking about deep AI stuff and the computer crashed and took me into the matrix and I was like oh no everything was like glitching and I can still hear Mark and I can still hear everyone I was like okay where's gonna go how am I gonna come back you know and it's like I should I should be comfortable comfortable being this body of technology but then you know at the same time you can you can just do this and then you know you're in a different space you know and I you know you you kind of gave me a kind of inspiration of like the world well in right now you know as a performer was so comfortable with body right while moving while doing things that we are we are like you know like we're used to and then now in the new world that we got a shift and adapt and re-embodied like what is here and and not knowing there's so many possibilities that can come out so so I was joking that I took the I went to a matrix and took the red pill and came back and jumped right into the talk but yeah I was kind of joking too I know everyone's kind of hungry here and I was gonna do use Isadora to do a buffer so then I can capture myself and then I can be on the loop just going like this and then I can make myself a quick lunch and then come back and then and then you know and then put again but um but yeah I just I just want to say I'm really inspired by by this panel you know even though we're hungry and it's early for Vancouver in the morning and there is so much things that are here for us to carry I think for me to carry with all the wisdom and gift from everyone here and I think you know that's kind of a well our job as an artist we're here for that like to to really I feel like a lot of people question like why do we need art in this kind of time you know why why do we need art you know we need we need scientists we need doctors you know I mean everyone are here for there's something for everyone and I think more importantly we have an important job here to inspire the humanity like we to know that we are well existing we are living the world that is beyond the Darwin pre 1920 western science kind of value and many more right like there is much more than just human evolution in that old notion of that we born and we die you know and we need we need to just like have this like you know the the biological evolution of biology in in that I think as artists we we have a big job to do here and now like it's more important ever that we got to make sure like hey like all these years we've been studying we'll be investigating when cultivating is here then now be like hey y'all humanity like there is so much more that we can offer for you you know to like I know you're bored I know you are stuck I know you're all frustrated but you know this is the time for us to offer our expertise to let you know that there's so much more in here and the heart you know the mind and the the things we've been standing and creating and sharing that open doors for us to understand that we're just getting closer to why we are here on earth you know bit by bit so so yeah I just want to say that thank you old artists and you know who's been doing this hard hard work and not knowing sometimes you don't know why and you're just like I'm doing anyway because I trust my my soul my intuition and no you have a huge heavy and like really high responsibility for for the society right now to let people know that no you're well well not lost you know well we have hope and we have we have experts in this been doing this for years and decades and to to to you know to take that torch and and to shine and to to keep going and to elevate and break out from the conventional restriction of what we think the world is and that all-value system is about the crumble and the new world well beginning to enter together with joy yes sorry I speak a lot I just want to say that yes unless anyone really is burning to jump in I think that Sammy you've really just captured it for all of us there and just said that you know just to really share that as artists here we need to come together in community we need to do what we do best and help everyone through this and help remind everyone to wear their masks so with that note I just want to say a huge thank you wait I have oh please Mark I do want to interrupt I have a burning thing to say get in there I think it's really I would like are the five of us and everyone else who participated to give some super big applause for the entire this is the closing of the festival right or this is like the summing up or something so thank you to all of you on the team who made this happen it's an really amazing astonishing thing that you pulled off doing this so thank you thank you so much that's so generous of you Mark and I'm so grateful to all five of you for sharing your time with us today yeah the symposium is nothing without our artists it's just been such a joy and such a gift to have such experts and such really incredible artists on our team sharing with the world all that they know it was a huge value of the symposium to bring particularly people together who have been working in these mediums already who have this wisdom and to make them available to the whole community and so to those of you on this panel and beyond all the artists who contributed by giving project presentations and sharing their work sharing their experiments you've just created a huge gift for the community at large and the community has come out in huge numbers we've had you know more than 50% higher than our registration numbers at almost every event you know really the work you're doing I know you can't see the audience out there but they're there and they're with you and they're really grateful as am I for your time so with that I will say thank you to our five panelists and I'll just do some quick outro reminders don't forget to check out our digital art gallery and our live online event listings there's some wonderful work in both of those links on our website which is levelup.designers.ca and also our archive is present at the website as well and you can see the work that all five of these artists did in their various presentations throughout the past four weeks please don't forget to donate to the ADC if you've got benefit from this symposium overall we hope that you'll share if it's possible for you now and please check out our last two events we have at drinks with designers tonight which is our final social event wrapping up the event sorry the whole symposium and we do have a closing ceremonies event in a few minutes time where we're just going to talk a little bit about what was achieved with the symposium what our goals were and send a big thank you out to all of those who helped us make it possible so please send your feedback via email that's really useful to us when we're programming upcoming events and into the future and again a big shout out of gratitude to our five artists today Brittany Bland, Zoe Sandoval Mark Kniglio, Milton Lim and Sammy Chien thank you all of you for being with us today