 First off, my name is Billy Clark. I'm the artistic director here at Culture Hub. We're really, really happy to be trying this out. It's the first time that we've really tried to have a conversation like this. That's about the work that we're really excited and have been engaged in for a long time. And I know all of you guys have been too. So thank you very much for joining us. The format was sort of inspired by a long time, LaMama artist, Lois Weaver. It's called The Long Table. And the idea was that it's about reclaiming the dinner table for a place for actually a meaningful conversation. And instead of having a dinner of food, it's a dinner of dialogue, and that anyone can join that table and be a part of the conversation. So it's a format that we've done over the past couple of years, and we've had different topics. And this time, we decided that it would be really cool to have one of these long tables where people are participating from all over the world and that we're really talking about this idea of staging the network, so how we can use video conferencing technologies, the internet, different types of technology to work together, to collaborate together over distance. All of you guys are very much engaged in that process. So what I'd like to do is just go around the table. Everyone could do a short introduction, let everyone know where you are and basically what you're doing, a little bit about what you're doing. And then once the introductions are over, we'll actually start the long table, which is a very strict 45 minutes. So we'll really stick to 45 minutes, and we'll knock it off whenever the 45 minutes is up. The idea is to end it, and then even if there are still thoughts, things that want to be said, that those can then be said in a communal space afterwards. So we can still stay connected. We can continue to have conversations, but the actual formal event of the table will end at 45 minutes. Any questions? No? OK, great. And we have a couple audience members here, just a few. But any of you, if you want to join the conversation and sit at the table at any point, you can come and join the conversation. You're all welcome. And you don't have to stay. Anyone can leave the conversation at any point as well. All right? So why don't we go to Pablo here? We'll pass the baton to you. OK, so hello, everyone. Thank you for having me here. I'm Pablo, Pablo Cesar. I'm right now in Beijing. So it's like 6 o'clock in the morning here, something like that, 6.30, actually. I'm a researcher, actually. I'm not an artist. I'm not a performer. I'm a researcher. I work at CWI. That's Central Viscundi Informatica. That's the National Research Center for Computer Science and Mathematics in the Netherlands. Myself, I'm a computer scientist. And of course, as a researcher, what I do is that I look at problems. I try to find solutions. I analyze data. I have hypotheses. And then I basically run trials. In this specific case, and thanks to Falmouth and Yan there, the problem was about distributed performances. So that's exactly what I've been doing for the last three years. We've been doing research on distributed performance arts. We've been doing research on how you can split the audience based on network. How can you split the stage? And we have run a couple of performances that I would say experiments. You will hate me for saying that, but that's how I see it as a scientist. And basically, I'm here to learn from you because I guess you guys, you've been doing this for so much long time that I've been doing. That I think I have a lot to learn. I get some knowledge from what I've been doing. So I've been really trying to research all the infrastructure. I do a lot of networking, media composition. Can you include videos and other things in the performance? And I'm really willing to hear much more about what you are doing and learning from you guys. Thank you, Pablo. Shall we jump over to Sarah? Hello. Good night for me. I am in Paris. I want to say hello to the people in place and to the people that is watching us by streaming. Thank you for the invitation. I hope everybody gets a good time together and learn each other. My name is Sarah Malina-Eddish. I am an artist and director of Intact Project. It's a project about art and telepresence. With more than 10 years of experience, we are working on different formats to tele-share in a multi-user way. At the same time, lately since 2011, we are working much more in robotics to transform the presence in physical phenomena. Our network is large. More than 300 artists have participated in Intact Project in different countries, Canada, United States, Ecuador, France, and Spain. And voilà. It's more or less what I can share with you in general. And I'm here to learn from you and respond to any question if I can. And I just want to say that I learn English by myself. So I ask a little question if sometime I ask you, repeat any question. Thank you. So maybe we can jump to Ian. Can you hear me? Yes. Yeah, great. Hi. I'm Ian Biscoe. I'm at Famic University in Cornwall in the United Kingdom. We're right down at the end of the country here. Just there we go. Tipping out into the ocean. So my background is actually as a systems engineer in aerospace and communication. So I used to work with people like Boeing and NASA on projects like satellites and took a late entry into research. So for the last few years, I've been here at Falmouth. I'm involved with a number of projects, one of which is V Connect working with Pablo. And as Pablo said, one of the projects we did was working with Miracle Theatre on a two site production of The Tempest, which happened just a month ago. I'm also going to be doing some work with Jason up in Manchester, who I'm sure will introduce himself next. And during the summer, I produced a digital arts festival where we had a performance which Jesse and Jason were involved in. So that was linking New York, Manchester, I think Paris and a few other places live with a stage that was in the middle of our old town during a toolships race. And I've just started work on an online orchestra project where we're working with composers to develop an environment where people in remote locations that play orchestral instruments that want to play together can come online and play. But obviously orchestras are used, it's not jamming, so they're used to very small delay issues. So in that project, it's not just about technology, we're working with composers who will actually be composing orchestral pieces that embrace latency. So I'm in a number of different online performance projects and very interested to hear what other people are doing here this evening. Great, thank you. Let's jump over to Jason. Hey everybody, thanks for inviting me here. I've been working basically as part of Contact Theatre with Billy and Jesse over there, a number of telepresence-led pieces of work which has actually propelled me into, I'm now a research PhD candidate at the University of Manchester Metropolitan University and part of my work is about discovering intimacy within mediated environments, in particular things like telepresence, but also in much less media-rich scenarios. Like I think everyone here, my background has been kind of chaotic with... I've made large-scale outdoor theatre performances back in the early 90s, just after I got a couple of degrees in sciences. So coming into the arts as an artist was kind of a laborious and strangely convoluted process, but now it seems to put me right in the middle of somewhere I really want to be. So there's a number of projects, I think, that I have a project with Ian, as he discussed earlier, which involves using the Janet network and some telepresence equipment that's being developed there. We're also hoping to do some more work with some of the other guys around the table. And of course, we have an ongoing relationship with Culture Hub. And I don't think... I think I can speak for everyone in saying that there is always something new to learn with this stuff. So yes, we're waiting for that. Thank you. So just to introduce myself a little bit, my name is Billy Clark. Again, artistic director at Culture Hub. My background is experimental theater. And I sort of stumbled into this world. I was at La Mama. And for those of you that are not familiar with La Mama, it's a 50-plus year experimental performing arts presenter here in New York. And they had been working for 30-plus years, I guess at the beginning, maybe closing on 40 now years with an institute in Korea called the Seoul Institute of the Arts. We founded Culture Hub in 2009 as to be a link between those organizations and to try to see how telepresence technology could connect those two locations to have more interactivity, both for education, but also being, I think, from the very beginning, forward-thinking in the sense that we wanted it to be a platform to see how we could explore this as a platform for extending these very large analog networks that La Mama and the Seoul Institute had created. So we really started to focus on this aspect not as a creator, as many of you are really trying to develop platforms, but really from a user perspective, how would the performing arts utilize what is out there in the market already? How can we strap things together and use it? And obviously, our collaborations with contact in the beginning and over the years have been a really big part of that development. So I want to pass it off to Jesse so he can introduce himself and also maybe start to frame a little bit of some of the things that he's been thinking about and that he's been discussing with all of you about where this is going, why it's going there, and why we should care. Hi, everybody. So experimental media is my day job. That's what I do for a living. That's kind of a new day job for me. I've been doing this for about three years now and I find it's terribly invigorating. I don't want to stop. My background includes a lot of different things. I've studied jazz, I've studied humanities. Most recently, media studies at the news school. That's what brought me to New York and after that I started looking around for media work and I landed here quite fortunately. So since becoming a part of Culture Hub, I've been learning how these things work. When I first started working here, I didn't know what S-video or composite was. For the nerds out there, they'll understand just how naive that is for a technician to not know the difference between different video cables. But since being a part of this place, it's been thrilling. It's just constantly feeding new information into my head and trying to make use of it. So now I want to see this practice grow. I want to know where it's going. I want to solve some of its problems and make it less frustrating and more fun for people actually to pick up and make a part of their daily practice. Not just artists, but everybody. I think it's the kind of thing that should be a utility. It should be like tap water. That's kind of what the internet already is and I think moving into artistic practice is going to happen inevitably and the more thoughtfully we do so, the better. I don't know, what do you guys think? Well here, I'll do something a little bit more packed. I'll bring up a subject that might have a little bit more content to it. I'm a big fan of instruments. I love a beautiful instrument. I very much, since working here, consider the venue to be an instrument. I think this studio here can be best described that way. It's something that you can use to express yourself. Not just to do a job, not just to do utilitarian tasks, but as an expressive thing, as something that can extend from you and what a network does best is extend a venue. Or at least that's very much what we're talking about. That's how I often frame this job. We are extending venues worldwide. A venue can be as simple as a bedroom or it can be as complicated as the Met, as an opera house. That's how I frame this. That's how I usually explain this kind of thing to people that don't know what I'm talking about to my parents or someone that I meet on the street. I'd like to know, how do you guys explain this? How do you guys try to wrap this practice into a nutshell? If I have to call someone out, I would start with Ian because Ian, I've spoken to you less and I'm really excited to hear what you have to say. You might be muted. Audio. Is that okay? There you go, there you go. Thank you. Yeah, sorry. I was about to throw my two cents worth in anyway, Jesse. So I think for me it's, I think there's one important thing to think about and that's whether it's a one-way or a two-way street. And in your definition of extending, for me initially that means streaming out like the National Theatre in the UK here where they do live performances and send them out to other locations. And yeah, there's still a lot of work to be done there but what really excites me is participation is extending, linking theater spaces, linking performance spaces and also interacting with the audience. So that's a two-way street, whether it's a two-way street between actors and performance in two or more locations or whether it's involving the audience remotely in traditional theater. So they're not just passive observers, they're actively involved. So that's, and there's a whole lot of metaphors around that with when you've got more spaces involved, you've got potential for new types of writing, new types of performance, which is using obviously the power of the internet unoverlaid technologies, but it isn't just about technology, it involves writers, theater directors, actors, performers, people in all those areas coming together to explore that new environment, which is more than something surrounded by four walls. So taking from Ian, if you'll mind this, I completely agree with that, but of course I work with Ian a lot. So I guess we agree on many things. But for me actually, the most interesting bit so far is being trying to figure out how can you involve the audience? So how can you make the audience that is remote as part of the play? And that's something that of course sometimes is forgotten because basically you want to reach out to many people, but that's not enough. You want to know how they feel or you want to sense the audience somehow. So for example, we've been doing a lot of research in that we've been actually running a number of interviews with artists trying to figure out what artists feel from the audience. So we don't have any data now, right? This is a very complicated question, I think, and we still have to do much more. But that's one of the things that we are trying to, so I think if you are looking at the future, I think bringing the audience into the theater play that's going to be a key issue and of course a very, very important one. I think as well that everything that is enabled is to split in the stage. So what we were doing with the tempest, having the stage split into two places. So those are very, very nice, I mean, very challenging topics to be researching at least. I know that you guys have been doing that for a long time anyway, but still the challenges are in there. I mean, the network is still, the latency is high. It's very difficult to add other media that actually you want to add in those cases. It's difficult to, so how visualize how the audience is feeling. So I think all of those, they are very good research questions for me for the coming years. And I guess for you guys to make something new to happen. And that's really the beauty of that. I agree, it can be a tremendous challenge to actually try to understand your audience or to have any kind of sympathetic moment through these screens. It does happen. Billy, you have some stories about that. There's a couple of stories that Billy has told where you have been shocked by the amount of emotional content that can come from a projector. Yeah, I think that's a really good conversation. I always tell the same story. So sorry, Jesse, but, because I go back really, really early. I mean, when we were trying to do this, we were utilizing Skype and we were trying to connect Lamama's summer program, Lamama Umbria, to the solans, to the arts, to have an exchange. We had a long-time Lamama director. Andre Serban was their Romanian theater director that had directed the trilogy at Lamama back in the 70s. And he was sort of leading as the artist on our side. And then on the Korean side, there was, we were linked with an auditorium of several hundred students. And they had given this amazing display of traditional arts and dance and mask and all of this stuff. And we hadn't really prepared anything. And so I think Andre felt a little embarrassed, like we should, you know, we should at least share something. So he asked this one Romanian student to stand up and to sing a folk song. And as he did, this very well-known Pansori singer started accompanying him on percussion. And when that happened, in that moment, when that happened, my wife, Mia and I, we both started to cry. It was very, very moving. And I've thought a lot about why that was, trying to sort of dissect it and figure out what was the factor that made that so moving to us. And I think it had to do with the fact that these two communities, this one that was there in Italy and this other one that was in Korea, were very, very dear to our heart. And in that moment, there had been this spontaneous ability for those two rooms to be connected in a very, very palpable way. And that was what was moving about it. So I think that there's this idea that this stuff can't exist in a vacuum. It has to exist in a building of communities. So if we don't have a connection with one another, then we're not gonna make compelling artwork together. And that there's a level of education, there's a level of practice, group practice, and all of these different layers that have to sort of exist in order for it to be compelling. But I do think that energy, that transference of energy can transfer in a way that is impactful and meaningful. By now, Billy, after seeing this, and this is open up to everybody, by now after doing this for a while, are there some practices that we're beginning to develop? Are there actually some rules that we have, some best practices, some methodologies, or some things that are to avoid when you're trying to actually reach out to an audience through a screen? Well, I'll just say one really short, specific one, not to bogart the microphone. But the other day we were doing a really large performance, one of the largest performances we did with the Soul Institute of the Arts. We beamed six musicians into perform, six musicians, eight singers, and two dancers. In our small studio here that beamed into a production that was happening at the school that involved 200 artists at the school. And I was linked through, and I'd never actually used it before, it's called Kakaotalk, but it's a very commonly chat application and call application that's used in Korea, and I guess also other places for international chatting and calls and stuff. And it was interesting because in the dress rehearsal, I was wearing that as a calm, and I was on calm with the director of the show, Andrea Pucciotto, who's also from Italy, from Spoleto, but that is teaching at the school currently. And he was calling the show and telling us, okay, get ready, this is what's going on. And so that night I said, well, it would be amazing if actually we were all on calm. Like if me and Jesse and the main technician there and the director, if we were all on just one group calm. And so Kakaotalk doesn't do that. So then we tried to move off of that platform and we tried to do Google multi-call. And then I was finding that it was cutting out and I couldn't hear and it was getting too frustrating. And so we went back to Kakao. So the thing that when it comes around to practice was that realization and an advanced realization that we needed to be on calm in order to understand what was happening in the other space, that it was a very slow to come to that realization. It seems very obvious now that you just are not gonna get it through the screens. And no matter what, I mean, you have to have a secondary layer of conversation that's going. I think Anna wants to say something. This is Anna Hammond. She's our managing director here at Culture. Hi, I'm Anna Hammond. I'm the managing director here. And every time we do one of these, I come up with some metaphor and then I beat it to death. So I'll try not to do that. But what Billy was just describing reminded me a little bit of the stage manager calling the cues. You know, that when you're the technician, you really need to make this the performance space. And it has to have the sacredness of the stage that that has for sort of more traditional quote unquote analog performance. So what he was talking about was I think a really good point, which is how do you structure the methodology in a way because the performance space is still a technological invention. It's still it's still mediated. So how do you structure this experience so that you have the quote unquote stage manager in the booth, you have the people in the wings who are making the magic happen and maintain the sacredness of the screen space to be a true performance arena? That's my question for anybody who cares to answer it. Solve it all, right now. I would like to say something about some. Well, for first question is, I think everybody here is agree about our great desire for the connection. We are actually addicted to the feedback and we need this feedback. And for me, because I moved to live in Spain 14 years ago, I felt really alone. I knew nobody and I had a chat to talk with my friend and I start with one question. This is possible that people that don't know each other when they connect can talk with another language that is not words, you know? And we tried the first interaction among Chile, Sweden and Spain and Spain was the first experiment. After that, well, the result was that, in fact, the artists connect and many things happen. And for me, it was so stronger because there is something more than technology. There is something that is the emotional connection. After that, we decided to build a network to have more stable contact with other artists. And we define four lines to advance. And the most important was to make workshop to train people in this kind of practice. We tried trying the people, but in fact, we are learning with them. But the most exciting part of my work is that as director of intact, I tried to link situation, link person, link environment and looking for a global concert. But the last thing that I would like to say about this is all the time it's a human problem. Even if we have the highest technology, the problem is the most of the time is to be in the same page, to have the same desire, the same challenger. And it is why we are proposing since long time ago to have a stable connection, to make it fluid and try to live in the net, to learn and never disconnect because you are far because you are sleeping. We propose a continuous flux of data because we need to learn to live in the net. And it's the only way that's new histories, new tells arise in this new dimension where we are here, there and in several places at the same time. This kind of interaction can produce things that never happened before because the media is, all the time is the condition of the message. Something that I love about your work, Sarah, is that you are as much of a performer and a theater practitioner as you are a media artist, right? The media artist is not exactly the same thing as a theater person. And that's kind of one of the things that Culture Hub struggles with just inherently in our practice. You're kind of getting into that right there because when you talk about having the network always on, it's kind of exposing the cables, you're exposing the wires, you're becoming very naked in front of the camera. I mean, your life is out there a little bit. And that's very much the spirit of the media arts where you just kind of let everything out. There's no big divide between the stage and the technician booth. It's kind of parts of the same thing a lot of the ways. Or rather, they're both a part of the show. I find that can be very true when you're trying to do a network show, is that when you stop trying to create the artifice and just sort of let the chatter and the cables and just don't worry about the illusion so much. It's kind of a, Brecht might be the first, you know, sort of a forerunner of telematic arts because you just kind of have to just be honest about it. There's no way of really trying to fake the illusion as much. Does anybody feel this tension between theater and media arts? This is something that I feel like, culture has to deal with a lot because we often put those two characters in the room together and they just don't have the same point of view. Can I say something else? I think it's interesting to think about the media. What is the real meaning of telepresence? Normally, we are linked telepresence to telecommunications. It is because it is why maybe the great companies like Cisco or this kind of Telefonica are making an appropriation of the term to say that telepresence is audio and video and at least telecommunication, but it's not exact. If we analyze the word, it's composed by two components, tele, that's mean far and present that is here and now. So the word involves a contradiction. And we are working in this dialectic of you are far but you are here, okay? But you, for example, a voice by telephone is telepresence here, but not necessarily telepresence is telecommunication. Telepresence is telecommunication. It's more the utopia of to make present something that is distant. This phenomenon can be fire, wind or any other phenomenon, not really associated to the better value communication. So if we discuss at the beginning about the basis and the meaning of the vocabulary that we are using, I think we are going to avoid a lot of misunderstand about the tension of media and theater. I would like that somebody else talk about theater because I am new in this kind of field even if in fact start from performance way because we have only audio and video, no, we don't use it robotics, for example. So the natural way was using the body, you know, but I would like to give the word to somebody else. Quickly just to explain to anybody viewing this online. If you should probably go check out some of Sarah's art to understand some of her points of view. She has a lot of things where she's like blowing out a candle in her place and then all the candles blow out in a venue hundreds of miles away. That's the kind of thing that she's talking about here just to clarify for anybody. Or the opposite, yeah, lighting a match and all of a sudden everything's on fire, yeah. Jason, in your experience as a theater technician, right? And that is someone who's going to be, you've been working with us on all kinds of different shows. You've seen this practice grow out of Culture Hub. When you're working at contact, you're not just working with theater, you're working with lots of different disciplines. Is there some group of artists or some discipline, some point of view that seems most naturally, that seem to have the instinct for this kind of work, that seem to already know what to do with the screen and with the microphone and can already overcome distance? I think that kind of splits into a number of different issues really. One is that over here in England, we have a very particular split in terms of the way that live performance happens, which is that, whoa, that's noisy. There's a bit of performance happening right now. Everyone hear that? That was just me. The noise is in my head. In theater terms, about 80% of the, I would guess, of performance in the UK is basically theater, which would be musical theater or traditional theater. It's all the thing we've been talking about, the sort of thing where you have a stage prompt, the sort of thing where you have a number of technicians in the wings and you have actors who will come on and say words and be lit, and you might have background noises. And it seems to me that a lot of the time that we create telematic art, it's a very easy framing to just drop into, to become, to say, well, okay, let's make something that's theatrical. Let's say we make some theater that uses the network. So it may have performers in different locations. It may have an audio visual stream, but basically we're using the same general theatrical techniques, which also has its own problems. For example, the one that we continually, here I guess we're just going to pick on one example here, is the fact that the projection screen isn't the camera. So when performers look at each other, you know what I'm looking at you now, I'm not looking at you. I'm lucky I haven't got a small screen if I was using my phone, it'd be an even smaller screen and the camera would be even closer. But we see all these things in science fiction movies where someone points at a wall and suddenly it becomes a holodeck. We have nothing like that. We have the only way we can do that is by putting a camera somewhere close to a screen. Anyway, that's within that practice. Within the notion of performance, people I would say in the UK who work in performance as Justine from theater, they're very quick to understand and to deal with technology. In all its myriad forms. In fact, just before we started here, I was in the middle of a pervasive gaming system which involves me sending, receiving texts, hearing voice communications, getting emails going to websites and basically burrowing down a kind of Alice rabbit hive. That's occurring over multiple different formats in both real time and in delayed time. So on the one side, you have the idea of collapsing new technology, telematics into recreating theater, but with some technology. On the other side, you have performance which is about, in many cases, I think it would be more about saying, what on earth can we do with all this stuff? And of course, we're gonna leave the wires open because of course, we want you to know that that's how we're doing it. We want you to know that it's Skype, not for it to be some sort of mysterious thing or if it isn't the Skype, it's gonna be all of, that's an expensive bit of technology over there. But then over here, we're doing exactly the same thing with just a laptop. I do have a couple of other quick questions to go back to some of the points that we raised earlier. One was that when we did graphic ships at Fascinate, the Skype was out of band communications and that was absolutely invaluable. But I did use 12 gigabytes of data, which I was lucky I had unlimited data plan on that day, but that would have cost me quite a lot of money, if I hadn't. I did want to talk, just a touch on what Pablo said before about how you involve the audience. It was an awful lot of chat about how you involve the audience. But mainly, I think that's a question that's, you could ask that of any theater performance. And without, you know, do you clap? Do you boo? But to actually, you know, most theater involves the audience as a single homogeneous object. A lot of performance doesn't. And a lot of performance in, say you create a telematic performance that is streams to multiple different devices, a phone or a tablet or something, and people can interact there. You know, that's just a different way of doing things. And you get everybody as an audience member, but how do they feel each other? So I suppose, I think that's, whilst it was almost flippant at the beginning, was actually the most complicated thing because we don't really know how to involve the audience anyway. So doing it through technology is an additional kind of layer of that. I've just got to totally agree with Sarah more than anything about the fact that it's all really about human connection. That's the most rule down to it. That is the simplicity of what we're doing. Seeing if that connection is possible using these media. I mean, I'm looking at this, I can see you moving slightly, things are jerky, things aren't quite right. And yeah, I still know you're humans, probably because Pablo's got his little grin on there. He's like, oh yeah, that's true, that's true. He is looking down, making notes, I think, I don't know. Jesse jerks about a little bit. Like, oh yeah, that's true. Well, you know that these little tiny pixels on the screen are actually human beings. Yeah, that's what I mean. And also just Sarah, there's the idea of really sort of naming of telepresence and bringing that back to the fore and taking it out of the world of Cisco and other companies is such a vital important thing to do. We get to find it too easily by basically marketing departments of big corporations and we should probably avoid doing that. I just wanted to respond quickly to that thought because I'd never really thought about this before but because you're always looking for this idea of like what does doing this within the context of this medium actually add, right? So it's taking away all of this data, it's creating all of this limitations which I think is one of the things that adds ultimately this idea that I think it's why we are all drawn to it is that it's so hard in a way and that it's so limited and it's trying to finesse around all of the glitches and the troubles. But that idea that these glitchy pixels on a screen, you understand are a person and thus you can sort of have a emotional response to that as you would a human being I think is interesting and it made me think of puppetry and the idea that how in some ways you can endow more emotional feeling towards inanimate object that's being puppeteered than you can to a live performer. It's like an animal, there's something because it is so it's helpless, it makes you feel more for it I think. And so I'm wondering if there's a way that we can use this medium in that way where we can get more bang for a buck or more emotion out of the fact that it is this distance. And I mean that completely outside of the idea because long since it's gone, I mean Namjoon Paik was doing this stuff already in the late 70s, early 80s, so it's not the newness of it that should be, it shouldn't be a gimmick, it should really be why is this important and what can we get out of it, of the medium. I know my favorite restriction. Can I just add a quick, go ahead, yeah. Yeah, I just had a quick point in terms of where we are with technology. If I was to parallel it with something else in theater such as light. So I think if you look at theater has gone from candles to gas lamps to arc lamps to incandescent lamps to spotlights to vary lights to fully computer controlled stage lighting, LED lighting, we're kind of at the arc lamp phase in where we are with using it technology. We're just kind of saying, oh, look, there's some technology here that can make, do a different type of theater and pull audiences in. And so of course we're experimenting. So I think there's so much more, other people will develop technology for other purposes and we'll be able to adapt that and use that and get stuff that's off the shelf and probably not surprising, my background is as a system integrator. So I see this as the technologies as a system integration task. You find new technologies that are stable that are available cheaply because they've been developed for something else and then you bolt them together and then you work with all those other people like set designers and theatrical people and it's the combination of those that then creates new mediums and new formats of performance and bringing people together and new opportunities. But we're at a very early stage. Ian, as someone who... I really like the... Sorry. Go ahead, Jason. I was gonna say, I like the timeline of that, Ian, but at the end of the day, all of those things basically provide light of slightly different types. Whereas they're basically a nature of the two-way remote system. The very many different things. I mean, I'm very interested in action at a distance, very much interested in the match, flame idea that was talked about earlier. Those sort of things, which I think... This is not so much about where we're at the candle, perhaps. Maybe we are at the candle. Maybe before this, there was no candle. As someone that uses a lot of candles and burns their fingers a lot. Something I really wanna know, this is one of my big questions. We only have like 10 minutes left, so I really wanna ask it. What do we need to get this job done better? Like what's missing? Not just gear, of course, but also methodologies, practices, what's the big missing, like some of the big missing elements out there? And where are we going with this? Like when we are talking about the end point or the end game or our big goals with this discipline, what do you guys daydreaming about? So like, where do you wanna go and how are you getting, how do you think we need to get there? So from my perspective, of course, I do a lot of technology. So I think one of the missing things in here is an actual technology that works. I mean, we are using basically something like this system, which basically assumes that I have a camera and I look at the camera and then you see me. And actually we are using that for doing performing arts for God's sake. It just doesn't make any sense. So I think that the full new technology that actually takes into account the requirements. So as you guys were saying, right, we are just starting and we need a full dialogue with the artists, with the people who is doing this, who is actually making this happen in order to understand what are the requirements, what are the things that they are needed? I was very interested actually of what everything you guys were saying about puppeteering, about robotics, about how you visualize things or not, about the problems that you are having in your daily productions. I really like, for example, when we had the Tempest, I noticed all that layer of complexity that was added to everything. So in which you really needed mechanisms to, so at the performance level, you really needed some people that they were communicating and that they had much more than just the typical things that you will do in the theater. So I love from Jason, when he was mentioning that how difficult it is for the actor to actually look at the other actor in the other location. So there are just so many things that they need to happen in there at the technological level, that that's of course an essential first step. And then what I would hope is that new productions are coming. So the moment in which we are creating technology that it actually allows for doing new things, then I'm sure the new productions are coming. I will hope, of course, that the writers as well, they do and develop new ideas. I'm a scientist writer, so for me, the end point is writing a paper and get it accepted. That's basically my end point. But if I can help you guys in actually developing something new that actually connect people, then I will be even happier, right? Okay, maybe, well, I would like to recover some words from Gili that previously you said, whole emotion, you can feel when you know that there is another person very far for you in this moment. And maybe this, this is the so good point now, maybe actually because it's more or less new, it's equal, so it's a lucky to have these possibilities. But in theater, I think according to you, you worry is what you were talking before. I feel that the people from theater and some directors that came to us to talk about to make a piece for theater in telepresence, they have the same difficulties. It means, for example, the fact to repeat every night the same piece and make it in real time. So if we have to assume the fact that it's emotion, this emotion is because it's unique, because it's a precious moment and so fragile that it's possible nothing happened one night. And what you can do, you say, okay, you give back the money to everybody and say, okay, the show cannot must go on. So we are using media that's involved the idea of fragility, complexity, and theater is looking for the stability. So this is the conflict when we are talking about presence, we are talking about the economy of the presence. And if we experiment and experiment, we are not trying to arrive to the stabilization of the presence, we want to move, maybe because we are a little anarchist project, we are not looking for the final stability. We are trying to move the network in a recursive way, where you define the another stage, depending on your movement and move, so I'm moving you at the same time. So nobody can to be staying place, everybody is moving. So this kind of exercise in network can to, it's difficult to reproduce every night like the first night. I suppose in theater every time is different but we are taking very high risk and we need to assume that it is happening and it's a real time, it's fragile and we are proposing our next piece of work and I finish with this. Directly to talk about the connection, it's mean. For example, we made a big ship 15 meters long in media La Prada and something failed, okay? And when the performance was finished, we thought after, why we didn't talk, okay, and make a performance in relationship with the media. It's mean, for example, I am the captain of this ship, this boat and say, okay, Montreal, what happened with Montreal, we are missing Montreal, we reconnect everybody in your place and make about the media, the performance too, involved in the history, what is in fact is happening in real life and real time maybe this is the little difference about our challengers or respect to the theater and but if we can contribute in theater to make it possible and create another fantasies, real fantasies, I'm here too. Yeah, I'd like to pick up on that. We'll start with what are your goals and I think that's what Sarah has initiated there was the fact that we shouldn't be looking at a theater model of a show that repeats itself every night forever. We already have the Mousetrap in the UK, does that, probably other shows that go on that as long. What we, what many performance companies in the UK and I'm sure everywhere else, but as I said before, it's a big dichotomy between theater and performance in the UK. Performance companies and other practitioners of things like clowning and such, they embrace the flock, they embrace failure, they embrace that moment when things fall apart and what we don't do with this sort of work is exactly that. We don't have enough of it, we don't do enough of it so we just basically try to plan it before. When we talk about technological fixes for these sort of things, it reminds me of the old joke when someone comes in and says to his team of coding people, he says, you lot start coding, I'll go and ask them what they want. And that's what we do, we try and figure out a way to fix problems so we don't really know what they are, because in fact what we should be doing is we should be sticking all of us, all of our technological brains, all of our artistic brains in a room or in a series of rooms around the world and go make stuff. And break stuff and get it wrong and through that process, we'll find out how we can get it right. I do. I do. Yay. Okay, just a good light at something to Jason, is before you was asking who involved the audience. I think in this kind of practices is interesting involved the people when they have the information enough about what we are doing, where is every part, because what is the difference in some pre-recorded video and real, if you made it experiment to say somebody is real time or is video, the people say. So involved the people is, for me is that they enter the construction of the piece. And it is when they really feel in an immersive experiment, anthropological experiments, aesthetic, et cetera. For me, one of the mistake is present in media. I'm not talking about theater, in media is the people arriving in the installation and not too much. And after they tell, okay, we were in real time and by satellite, it's okay. But maybe it's better, the people have the information and give this information because finally the cognition is a cognition problem too. And if you give a paper a role to the audience with some device or just to make a, they participate in the construction of the history, I think it is a way, was one of our solutions during this year. And the people enjoy more, I think. It's a huge amount, sorry. It's a huge solution, but for us has been okay. But theater for me is a big, it's a huge thing. I was thinking there's an awful lot of companies that have made things that involve either people speaking to video or leaving small messages or basically the artwork is participatory in crowdsourced. And usually by using some foreign technology to leave some trace and then to hear another trace of different participants who have taken that journey. And making a kind of really immersive telematic performance with some kind of legacy or interest. Or it's about presence, but it's also about agency. It's about knowing that you've been there or knowing that that person over there on that screen is there. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, I think it's also about a process too. I mean, I think that the fact that things are happening in this process, I mean, when I look back to Ellen Stewart's work and how she brought people of many different disciplines, many different cultural backgrounds, just brought a very diverse mix of people together to make something. And in the process of doing that, right? Sure, sometimes you have a successful production, and then the audience benefits from that as something that they can view. Or participate in, but then also it's about that process and how that's advancing the world and how we're learning about each other because we're coming from different perspective, different places. And so I mean, I think that's a core of the practice and how you develop an audience that is a part of that. That is, that has, you know, that they're invested in this whole idea. And so it means that the spaces, these actual real physical spaces need to have, the practice needs to be developed, right? So that we can work synchronously and asynchronously so that you can work on the dramaturgy, the writing, and I use that, the idea of writing very loosely because it could be completely movement, it could be robotics, whatever, but it still needs a context, a compelling framework by which us to engage, you know, or the distribution, there's so many things that we're already over, but so many things, you know, we were worried that we weren't gonna fill the 45 minutes. What are we gonna talk about? But, you know, I feel like we could have a series of these conversations and go into very, very specific areas. I mean, the new technologies like WebGL, this idea that people at home could actually manipulate and use their graphic cards to change or depth sensing cameras. So when I'm watching the performance of Prospero from home, I can actually stand right and look up Prospero's nostrils, you know, I mean, those types of things. It's very shocking to me that no one tonight has even mentioned the phrase video game. It's just kind of like, for me, that's an elephant in the road. I said pervasive theater. Excuse me? I said pervasive theater, that was close. Close, real close, real close, we almost got there. Well, I'm basically gonna say that we're at the time that we've said that we would stop at, but I think we should leave the channel open and if there's some other conversations or other comments and things that need to be said, then we should allow that to happen. But we'll feel now that we're just in a room together, the formality is gone, and we can just chat with one another for a little bit before we say good morning and good night to some of you. I don't know if everyone pointed out earlier, but three of us are at half past midnight. You don't look it. Bring a beer in them. Yay. So Jesse's gonna stop the stream. So we're gonna say goodbye to anyone that's watching out there.