 Sphere, yes, we're gathering today here on, what day is it? Saturday, October 10. It is quarter after 12. I'm so happy that we have everybody here. Whoop whoop, can I get a round of applause for the final day of PXR 2020. Yeah, I love me and those hand emojis. Perfect. All right, welcome to our product ownership workshop. First, I'd like to say, but that PXR 2020 is brought to you by a single thread theater company and electric company here in thanks to our community partners toaster lab and Langara center for the entertainment arts, and with the funding support of the PXR council for the arts digital strategies fund. I would like to acknowledge that I am speaking to you today live from the stolen territories of the Coast Salish people here in Vancouver BC. They are the homes of the Muscovites, Squamish and the Slewa tooth and I would like to acknowledge especially on a day such as a Thanksgiving weekend that I am very privileged to be where I am with the technology that I have to be gathered with you all here. Bring it around to the moment that we're in. For those of you who attended the workshop last weekend, you learned how to utilize the cohort programming on your mobile devices to create interactive works. We will now hear from that exact same team on how to organize and develop your own practices when mixing technologies and mediums. Take it away. Thanks so much. The first thing I'm going to ask everybody to do is to meet us over on the green circle. Join. All right, one of my goals for today is because we're here in VR together to as part of this session just make just experiment a bit with social conversational dynamics and VR. The first question is, can everybody hear me? Awesome. I love one of my favorite things from sessions so far in VR has been the degree of interuptability because I am a person who tends to like over talk. And so it's very, very useful if people are able to interrupt me. I wanted to make sure. Great. Yes, the right track, but for this to for this to be a thing we have to be close enough that we can all hear each other without using the amplify, you know, raise your hand to speak model. So I'm going to try that but if at any point you find that you can't hear me. Please let me know and we can switch over to, you know, loud speaker amplifying mode, which it feels like should just come on automatically if I do this with my hands, but there's a feature for later. The first thing I wanted to do is a little physical grounding in the space. So I would like us all to come on to the circle. You might be close with other people will see how that feels. I know it's weird during COVID times come on to the circle and face the monolith. And we're just going to do a little salutation to the monolith that best and her team and her participants put together for us. So we're going to start facing the monolith. Take a look around make sure you've got enough space in your real physical space. Arms together. Lean a bit to the right. Lean a bit to the left. Now, as your arms come down, just gently let your head tilt forward. And at some point this will cause your body to spin around weirdly. Okay, just give it a moment to let your neck relax because you've been using it really hard holding up this VR headset. Drop your controllers shake out your fingers a little bit shake out your hands a little bit I'm just going to turn around so I can see what this looks like because I was curious. Great if you're on to in 2D, then you can absolutely do all of this. You just we just won't see you do it. Okay, bring it back up overhead. Alright, take a breath in and a breath out. The next thing we're going to do is repeat that, but we're going to finish up lying on the ground, because that's pretty much how 2020 is feeling so far that's my postural response to 2020. So, we'll bring our arms up and we'll roll down our spine and come to a position where you can see the large black rectangle over our heads. Alright, can I ask Aiden or Alex to hit the go on that. Aiden or Alex. Okay. Alright, I'm being insured to keep talking so one thing I was really curious about from a product from a product ownership point of view, a lot of things don't get done. So, often my first response when I'm in a new technical environment or using a new piece of software is to hunt for the edges. What didn't get done, what did not implement should. And it's a bit of a way to sort of understand something by seeing where it starts to break, which is a principle that I use a lot. I'm probably going to suggest come back to video if it's going to take a lot longer. Give me 30 seconds, 30 seconds. Alright. Let's finish off our physical warm up with a little hand and wrist work. So the first thing we'll try is just figure eights. This is still holding your controllers. Great. And let's try some offering hands. That's going to sweep in from the side. Come up to the center sweep in the side. Come up to the center. Great. Okay, it looks like we're getting a second video. All good. Can you are you able to move that Jacob switch one. The new one that I just thrown up there. I got it. Okay. So find somewhere where you can see this. I'm Jacob and I'm a creative technologist. I grew up backstage. My first career was as a ballet dancer and choreographer. I've been coding since I was seven and over the last couple years I created apps in collaboration with some really interesting theater and dance artists. cohort is a way to take the capabilities we've created together and make them available to more creators. The cohort development team is made up of myself, Luke Garwood, Amanda Baker, can you do a cohort? You can load sound, video and images into a custom app. You can borrow devices from us and load that app onto them for your show. Or you can use your own devices. Or you can submit it to the app store and have your audience download it. You can trigger playback of sound and video on cue either from our admin website on a laptop or phone or directly from QLab. You can also cue text to appear and trigger device vibrations. What can you do with this? Well, we can have a quick look at what some of our partner companies have done. It's not a box theater use cohort to create a documentary theater piece called Overseer where storytellers share their stories in the neighborhoods with audiences. Cohort to enhance their theater piece Cafe Sarajevo using 3D 360 video to immerse audiences in locations for its Balkans. Peggy Baker Dance Projects use cohort to guide participants of all abilities and let them feel what it's like to invent and enjoy movement together. There's also a few capabilities that have been used by our partner companies but aren't quite ready for public release yet. Adelhag Dance Projects use push notifications and text cues to guide audiences around a huge indoor-outdoor site in their workload X to create an augmented reality public installation and to offer closed captioning for deaf and hard of hearing audience members. I work jacqueries to cue augmented reality scenes of overlay projection-style graphics and video onto a live performer. Cohort is open source and free for anyone to use. In addition to production uses in theaters and sites of its big works, it's really helpful for quickly testing out ideas and making prototypes. If you're interested in learning more, you can check out cohort.rocks or email us at cohortrocks at gmail.com. Thanks to our partner companies, to the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Strategy Fund, and to Heidi Strauss and Rachel Adelhag. Now, if you're on the ground, just take a good 10 count to get up and work through that in a very deliberate way because your space is a bit strange right now. So we're going to slowly move back to our feet, make sure we're not going to smash into anything in our space, and we're going to reconvene on the green circle. It seems like we have a few more people joining us now, so I will repeat what I said earlier, which is just I'm testing this out without amplification. So that we can see if it's possible to keep a conversational flow going, if at any point, so that means we have to stay pretty close. If at any point you can't hear me, just say so, let me know and we'll switch to amplifying and raising hands. All right. The other thing I just want to mention is that if you see me do weird movement like this, it is me checking my notes, which I will do occasionally as we go. So welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. And if you see me doing this, the same reason. Okay, we're going to kick this off. That video provided a bit of context and background on cohort and what we do and what we're up to. Personally, I'm Jacob in case you missed that. My colleague Amanda Baker is here from cohort right over there. And we're going to be talking about product ownership. My practice as an artist is grounded in movement, media and code. I grew up as a ballet dancer, started programming as a kid, started making movies as a teenager. And so that's kind of the territory that I play in. With cohort, I'm in more of a technical facilitator role. Sometimes I get called a technological dramaturg. And I really enjoy helping other artists figure out how to accomplish things that they want to do technically. So before we talk about how cohort has conceived of and organized our product ownership roles, it's probably a good idea just to talk about what sort of a traditional model of product ownership looks like in the tech industry. And really, sorry, notes again. Wow, this is very awkward. Okay. An experience I had as a live stream director, which I spent a couple years doing mostly with dance on screen. I started to conceive of my role as a director as being the final person who was responsible to the audience for what we are for the experience we're offering them. And that I think is the best way I can explain or an additional idea of product ownership in tech. The person who really should always have the user first in their head. There's a lot of balancing different priorities, of course, but I think that that's a reasonable working definition of a product owner is the person who bears final responsibility for the experience of being offered. In Techland, that sort of role evolved out of the gradual failure of project owners. And the breakdown there is that product owners kind of sense of continuity. They have a sense of, hey, our users have been with us for five years for 10 years. We need to make sure that we are still maintaining a consistent story for them. And so project based work tends to fall apart as organizations grow and get bigger. It gets a lot harder unless you give them the exact same type of projects repeatedly, which would be sort of a case in a large international theater company. It's organized on a project basis, but the projects themselves fall into very consistent slots and very consistent formats. And so you can really apply organizational templates. What does each show need? Okay, great. We can reuse that paperwork in those functions across all the shows. But as companies grow and as teams grow, and as we know from, you know, people who make ventures work, our work doesn't really fall into consistent templates. Okay, I'm going to try, nice, Aiden. I just got a note that my audio is getting a bit glitchy, so I'm going to try turning on amplification. That doesn't work. Hello, probably I'm now much too loud. Please keep telling me if my audio gets glitchy again, Aiden, and I will move closer to my wifi router. Parallel name. Yeah, so our work tends to not fall into easy templates or easy repeatable patterns. And so product ownership emerges in those environments as a way to establish lines of responsibility and also as a way to coordinate the activities of multiple teams. Product owner in tech will tend to have a team or teams that they are essentially responsible for. And will work really closely with the customer or the user or the client. Basically, however, that word gets changed a lot as we move between disciplines, audience, player, participant, attendee. So that's kind of a, oh, and then the last thing I'll mention, which many of you are probably familiar with is that the standard model of technical development is, and software development is iterative development. And so the idea is that you are periodically taking a chance, taking a moment and an opportunity to continue evolving your processes as you are doing this. Okay, I'm getting a message made and that I am really breaking up. And so I'm just going to go ahead and move closer to my router and be right back. I apologize sincerely for this. What I might actually do if everyone can still hear me for a second is set up our first me not talking exclusively activity. So I would love for you to, Amanda, I'm going to ask you to time keep for this. We're going to do an exercise called one, two, four, all. We're going to take a minute and I'd like you to think for yourself about an experience you had, pardon me, checking those notes again. I'd like you to think about an experience you had good or bad, where you worked with someone with technical skills or language or experience that you didn't have. Is that question clear, that prompt clear for everyone? Okay, great. So I'd like you to take a minute on your own to think about a specific occasion, again, good or bad. Hopefully I'll be back by then, but if I'm not, what I'd love for you to do is grab a partner and share those experiences and we'll take a minute or two minutes for that. After that, Amanda will let you know the time and please gather in groups of four around one of these cylindrical cocktail tables and have a short discussion amongst that group of four about those experiences. I'm going to be right back in a moment. Is the ask clear? All right, let's give it a shot. You're right back. I mean, that's actually a good example. Actually, you know, that makes me think of as my dad. I was actually starting to think that any short work that I work with people whose skills I don't understand, but not necessarily with the technical ones. Yeah, I find a lot of directors do kind of steers. Oh, sure. Anytime I've talked about fantasy systems where like technology is I'm trying to figure out actually basically think of the matrix, you know, that scene where, you know, they go to the Oracle and they bend the spoon and he says, oh, it's not the spoon that's bending the universe around me. I was just talking about the matrix to my daughter is my wife. They could follow that. Yeah, well, I follow the technology and go back in and check it out. So I feel right. Actually, I really want to watch it. It's just a constant reminder that I don't know what I'm doing. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Yes. Yes. I try my best. I really do. But I just kind of throw it his way. Yeah. I was trying to consider how you do it. It looks like somebody ended up with a partner, but it looks like also I think we're on to send people for tables. I did not have the power and I don't know how to. Hello, friends, you are now at time. Please make your way towards your cocktail tables to discover more about each other. Thanks so much. What color do you think? Oh, all right. So we can move this conversation a little bit. Blue. Yeah. Yeah. Dude Law. Dude Law is the answer. Dude Law. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think David Cronenberg is the director writer, isn't he? Well, I'm not sure. It was a leap for me to remember a name for that. Which film was that? Existence. Oh, it's a watercolor VR movie about the launch of the VR system. And it's really good. It's really ridiculous. Yeah. Nice. Yeah, I think I'm more like Marisa. I don't really know much. And just figuring out how to get to this conference was plenty of things to do for me in terms of technology, I think. But I feel like at my organization right now we're doing, we are going to be working with Cole Hart to experiment on augmented reality and ASL interpretation. And so, cool. Thankfully, there are experts who are in the positive way. They ended up being really, really condescending about helping them. And we're kind of like, well, I'll do it for you. You don't really need to know how to do it in the future. So that was not a great experience. And that's something that I've had in the past experience with as well. Sometimes people just kind of, um, yeah, they don't, they don't share it in an open way. That, that sucks. That sucks. Yeah. Yeah. I was sharing, I had a positive experience where I was filming a big musical number once for my web series. I'd never done anything that big or ambitious before. The biggest crew I'd ever worked with, I was directing. And my cinematographer, like he has way more experience on set than I do. And so like, I was just so great to have him there because he was able, he kind of had that sage advice to be like, oh, you know, here's the thing that's going to be a problem. You know, think about this, think about that. And it was just, he would, he never stepped on my toes, which he was very respectful of that, which I'm very different from your experience, I'm afraid. But yeah, and so like I really, it was turned into being one of the best on set. Hello friends. It is time now to return to the big green circle. Thank you for chatting. Please return to the big green circle. I don't want to talk about it. Okay. I don't know which other. All right. I'd love to ask a couple of people to share something interesting that you heard someone else say in your group and you can summarize, or sort of be, it can be as small as you want. You can have a volunteer first. Nobody heard anything interesting in the last conversation. Great. Whoever said that go. Okay, sure. So I was hearing Jenny's story. And she, her story, she shared, it was a major pet peeve of mine. And that happened to her very unfortunately, where she was in a project where she was wanting to learn a new skill set for the three modeling she was doing. But unfortunately, the person they went to for advice, basically just kind of did it for them and didn't really like educate them. They were just like, here, you know, in a condescending way. And I just, I hate seeing that. And so I'm very sorry Jenny had that experience. That's, that's what I got pet peeve of mine. That's actually fabulous. I would love to take a minute and dive into that just a bit. Okay, cool. So, I was talking with Archana Rajan, who's also on our team at cohort. And she works in quality assurance. So it's her job when I write code to figure out or to try and break it. And we have a lot of fun in that role. I met and I have a similar working relationship. And she described this mentality sometimes from developers as essentially like a chuck it over the wall mentality. Which is a bit like, hey, I have my, my area of responsibility. It's very firmly defined. And I'm going to do my bit and then throw it over to the next person and not really like that's it. That's good for me. I'm good. And I've had this experience. I don't tend to have this experience as a developer. I certainly had this experience with developers or with other developers. And one of the, one of the things that Archana I talked about were how do we, how do we get from these behaviors to talk about values that can help us, you know, like, not just tell, not just tell it a collaborator or developer that what they're doing isn't working. But how do we have conversations that we can try and be on the same ground and understand each other's values. And one of the values that felt like a really useful thing to talk about in this case was stewardship. And by that I mean it's the opposite of I'm going to build my thing and throw it over the wall to the next person whose job it is to work on. Stewardship means that all of us on a project have a responsibility that that project needs to be able to keep going. Even if we, I mean, in theater we talk about the bus sector, but building the capacity of a team to be meaningful work on a project is all of our jobs. And so a way to a potential way that might be useful to talk to developers is to say, do you really want this to just stop? Do you really want this to be something that only you can work on? That felt like an interesting value to talk about. So a couple of specific tactics around that, around that value and that sort of type of conflict might be questions like when you're talking to developers, whether they're already on your team or you're already in collaboration with them or whether you're hiring. Looking for people who are excited to find a shared language. In theater, that's what we do in theater, dance, create indie games, I'm pointing at. But in these small creative project teams, that's a big part of it. So we need to choose the people we work with and help the people we work with build skills around finding shared language. Another thing is that as a developer, I conceive of my job to include education. And that's mutual to include learning. I do have a bit of a compulsive in love of learning from everyone around me and also educating everyone around me. And it's taken a long time to understand the socialization of that in the sense that the intent can be very different from the impact. And I've worked with a lot of developers who came into the industry with that same mindset of like, I'm going to share all the knowledge I can all the time I can. And then start to understand that that means that has implications in terms of how much space they take up in a group, in terms of how much space they take up in a conversation or a room. And it's really hard for any of us to find that balance. So opening up those conversations can be a really useful. The last thing I would encourage as far as looking when you're looking for developers or if you're thinking about already working on how to help them become a collaborator is that oh, and great. Right. Our my developer include excited to learn things that are outside of my discipline. And that is really fundamental. So, I think it's really awkward to work with a technologist who doesn't have that trait on a creative project. I've just never really worked very well. And if you talk to Andrew Semperi, I think he and I had some conversations about that and came to the same conclusion. That's the chuck it over the wall pathology. Yes. Just to say also that that's incredibly common in theater, right for any of us have worked anywhere remotely close to industrial mainstream theater. You know, first the playwright, you know, or probably first the commissioner, then the, you know, that we we work the mainstream of theater works in an incredibly waterfall hierarchical chuck it over the wall framework. And, and so it's not only when we're dealing with the technologists, but also when we're dealing with the artistic directors and technical directors and production managers and, and, you know, harbor center. Right. We have to deal with those shitheads, or we don't write or we use other spaces, but like that that exists in our field also deeply. Yes, and I have actually run into it as much there. What is interesting to me is always that line where when you're building something like I feel like the people who are in this environment here are probably people who bias towards making different things rather than making versions of things that are working in formats that are really well understood and well explored and well articulated. And so I think that's always going to be to some extent the case when you're when you're working in formats. And when you're working with organizations that are designed around old formats. I think personally the experience that I've had have mostly come down to having an internal an internal patron at the organization. And so that those are some of those experiences with Harvard front with the National Ballet. If you have an internal patron or champion of project that you're trying to bring. That's really useful. And a warning sign is if you get assigned an internal patron who does not have any power authority or responsibility within the organization, they are not going to be able to help you. And so that would be the caveat that I would add to that. I would love to ask to throw it back open and see what else what other interesting things did you hear other talk about during this conversation. We're joking about how you think technology and as it's known is limited and that everything has its own technology. So joking about spoons and the matrix that spoons are a form of technology. Absolutely. My favorite expression of that is technology is what we call things that don't work properly yet. Paper is a fabulous technology that's really well understood and we know what it can do and how it works and how to pass it around. And so I think that's really good thing to keep in mind. Other other interesting things from our conversation earlier. It's not really something that I heard more kind of like a question actually to you. It seems to me that big part of the conflict which might arise in the example that was brought up before but also in the context of what you're talking about is the difference between the process of doing something versus actually just realization of a product. So in traditional well defined sort of theater. It's often a product oriented thing because there's a clear script. There is clear delineated tasks or roles to greater or lesser extent for individuals to do. But it sounds to me like what you are talking about and the way that you're approaching your conversation about development is more like devising in theater where it's actually the process and outcome are sort of. Part of the same thing and it's not. And even when you get to outcomes it's more like this is how far we got this is it's endless versions of betas some better betas. Is that never done you just stop at a certain point. Right. That's a really good observation and a question. I think that. There's an extent to which because software is a technology and that we don't know all about it yet and it doesn't work perfectly yet. When we're making more making software even if it's in service of something even if I'm building a way for. A show to you know like broadcast push notifications during a show. When we're making software we're generally making something that hasn't been made before. And so to an extent every software project has that. That difficulty of the process and product become merged. So one thing I wanted to talk a little bit about is the idea of scope. Because that's a that's sort of how in technology land these discussions that focused and how we can decide how to spend the time that we have. So. Can just ask can somebody give me a an attempt at a working definition of scope as you would understand it in your own practice don't worry. I just want to get someone other than me. Throw an idea in there. If I say if I say the project scope. What that means I'm going to I'm going to volunteer somebody. All right. Milton. Tell me a bit about what you think of when I say so. Voluntary. Okay. So scope as in what are the for this reaches of what is intended for the project. For this reaches of what is intended for the project. Now I would love to just point out this is so important in software. If you take a look around. How far do you think the great floor that we are standing on goes on. I don't know. Effectively probably for ever ish. So. So it becomes really, really important because when you're working with software a lot of things are unbounded by default. And so having been able to the team to talk about what we are and are not going to do becomes really important. These are a couple of sort of bullet points that I found really useful to keep in mind when when discussing scope. The first thing is when you're talking to a technologist or to a program or somebody with skills that you don't have and who you are relying on. A really, really important thing is that you not explain the solution that you want. A really, really important thing is that you explain the problem. That is your first opportunity to get this person, this technologist or this developer actually excited mentally and emotionally about solving this. And that's the energy that I think helps a lot. So one thing is always talk about the problem and not the solution first. Solutions are things that you can come up with together and attack together. And so I think it's that's the first really valuable thing you can do. That question. I'm really enjoying being with actually everyone. Another another thing and has kind of become a common or something more common thing to in the culture is the idea of. What is the minimum? What is the smallest thing you can do? What is the smallest piece of your concept that you can break off and tackle first? And that's sometimes talked about in terms of minimum viable product or MVP. Thank you, Aiden. And the idea with an MVP is that you have to start somewhere. You're first, if you are working iteratively, your first few, whether it's the first few weeks of development or your first few days in rehearsal. Let's say I'm going to a device theater process over the last year. Over the last two or three years, I think I've been in four substantial device theater processes as a technologist. That that idea is partly about lowering expectations. You're in a device process. You really expected to get a lot of finished work done in the first two, three days. And then spend time in the process. Yeah, so that first that that first time together is better focused on learning about each other on. And talking about developing shared language, learning from each other about, you know, how we work together. And so breaking off a very small slice of sexual functionality. So if it were this world, the minimum viable product is basically a floor so that we don't fall through into the infinite depths. That's enough for us to do everything we've done today, except for the, you know, having nice little coffee tables and being around. So that's a really useful tactic when you're approaching a technological project. There's two more things I'd like to mention when we talk about scope. Thinking in stories. If I say the word user story, put up your hand if that's a word you have heard, a term you have heard. All right. Okay. David in the blue sweatshirt. Can you tell me context that you heard user story. Or that you've encountered it. Sorry. Okay, no. I, I've heard it in generally in terms of of like a narrative framework for like game mechanics. Awesome. Okay. Yes. So just in case anybody didn't quite hear that in the context of a narrative framework around game mechanics. And so for me, a user story is, is a way to start getting really granular without getting really technical. And the mad live structure that I tend to use is as a blank, I want to blank so that I can blank. And so what we get in there is a subject. So like the person, the role, the person, the type of user wants to be able to do something. We get what they want to be able to do. And we get what that enables or why that's important to them. There's a ton of information in a very in one sentence. And you can compose larger, larger arcs for a user by, by arranging those stories. I would love to do a simple example of this. Based on your experience in space VR during this conference. What is something you would like to be able to do that you have found yourself unable to do. Well, everybody wants to fly. Hey, okay, I want to be able to fly. Who is saying this? It's Chris. Sorry. What's your, what's, how do you describe your role in all space VR? A new user. A new user, great. A new lead. So as a new user, I want to be able to fly so that or because. Can you, can you give me the because of the why on that? I don't know because it's human nature. It's, it's great. That's fine. That's good. That's enough. It does not need to be a long, long. Thanks. So as a new user in all space VR, I want to be able to fly because it's exciting. That is something that. Knowledge is on a team that you X people on a team that. Spatial designers on a team, everybody can actually understand that it gives them a person to anchor that to or a type of person to anchor that to. It gives them clear sense of what in the life. I've just been notified by a that that is time. And this is the end of our workshop. I, and I know that there are other things happening and people have to go to I'm going to stick around in the world for a little bit. People want to chat and catch up. I do want to say a big thank you for joining us for this. And yeah, if you want to stick around for me, that's great if you have things to get to no problem. Thank you so much for coming today and joining us. Thanks Jacob. Thanks Jacob. Thank you very much. Wonderful. Have you tried any other like bases, like all the area. Not really. Not really. I've only gone to rec room, which is a bit more like when you can like play games with friends. Yeah, I mean, It's not hugely different. Other than Like, it has more features for interaction for Like, like games you play with friends in a regular right room. But, you know, you can still talk. You can still kind of Yeah, yeah. Sounds good. I'd like to see I'd like to check that out because I've got a kind of That I discovered who I think plays with VR. So maybe we can meet up. Yeah, I enjoyed it. You prefer. Okay. I'll check it out. And then those things over there. Yeah. Oh, I was trying to interact with them earlier and I couldn't. Yeah, they do look like the world. Yeah. Everyone, welcome. Welcome to day four. Just going to say a few things before we get started. Thank you for your patience. As as you might know, PXR 2020 is brought to you by single threat theater company and the electric company theater. We'd like to thank toaster lab and will get a center for the entertainment arts. We'd also like to gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Strategy Fund. We'd also like to acknowledge that we've organized this event primarily on the traditional and stolen territories of the Coast Salish peoples in Vancouver, B.C. And I'm talking to you today from Kingston, Ontario, the traditional hunting grounds of the Hoda, the Salish Nabi peoples. Tonight, today, how are practitioners approaching the creative process for new content in XR performance? Is there a common language shared with other creative industries in the medium? What is the dramaturgical processes in XR? How do you create and innovate? Justin Garrett, one of the great minds from team toaster lab is here to leave this conversation further. Let's give her a round of emojis, everybody. Thank you very much. guys. It's so beautiful. It's like we're underwater except there's hands. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you guys so much for joining us today. We are super thrilled to have this conversation. We're going to try something slightly more interactive and just hold tight for a sec. And we'll explain that more in a second. First of all, I'm Justine Garrett. I'm a producer from Toaster Lab and a co-founder. My specialty is in producing and writing for immersive and extended reality experiences. Toaster Lab creates place-based extended reality experiences. So my morning was going to a park in Toronto with my two little kids and running around and doing 360 video and hiding from the camera. So complete opposite of this morning is now. But I'm thrilled because it's all part of my own continuum of creative process. I would love to introduce our amazing panel. Today we have five people. Immediately here is Megan Byrne who is on our wonderful Toaster Lab Mixed Reality Performance Atelier Advisory Board. But I'll let her introduce herself. Oh, Tanzi, Megan Byrne-Nasika-san, Apatowaka-Sisan, Hamilton, Ontario-Nuchin. Hi, I'm Megan Byrne. I am Apatowaka-Sisan or Ontario-Métis. And I am born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario, the traditional lands of the six nations. And I am a video game designer. And also I recently, after the last two years, I was working as the digital and interactive coordinator for Imagine Native, which is the world's largest indigenous film media, like screen-based media film festival. And so I was the one who masterminded and created the individual space. And we did a lot of work to help create more spaces where indigenous people can create VR or AR or anything that, you know, but in a way that they want to do it, not necessarily in a way that requires them to perform their indigeneity in a particular way. So that's me. Thanks so much, Megan. Thank you, Megan. And then this wonderful mohawk gentleman here is Michael Wheeler. And he's going to introduce himself. Hi, everyone. I am Michael Wheeler. I'm the director of artistic research at Spider-Web Show Performance and a co-curator of Folda, which stands for the Festival of Live Digital Art. And my experience in VR mostly comes from us just trying to figure out how theater makers are using it right now. At Folda, we presented a couple of VR pieces, including Violette, you might have seen here earlier today. And we've done a couple workshops, including with the Games Institute at the University of Waterloo and how playwrights can get involved. And so, I don't know, I do a lot of work with online live digital work, but I feel like I'm still learning some of the basics of the VR, and I'm really happy to be here learning more. Thank you. Conrad Sly, right over here, right here in the hoodie with the purple purple outfit. Conrad, you want to introduce yourself? Yeah. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Hi, I'm Conrad. I'm based out of Vancouver, British Columbia. My background is in doing architectural visualizations for virtual reality tours. But I've broken away from doing that, and recently I've been working with Renaissance Opera on doing a version of Orpheus in virtual reality. And we did a lot of real-time motion capture and stuff like that. So, it's been really fun. But thank you for having me. Amazing. Anand, would you like to introduce yourself over here? Yay. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. Hi, I'm Anand Rajaram. I'm in Tagarundo. This is the traditional territory of the Honoshone, the Anishinaabe, the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Huron and the Wendat. I work primarily, I'm a theater person primarily, but I've been doing a lot of experimentation and creating content in augmented reality. Virtual reality is relatively new, but there is a project I'm currently in residence at the Theatre Center in Toronto, developing a kind of an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure kind of game in a platform. We've been using Mozilla Hubs, but we're probably gonna migrate to something else. But that's what I'm currently working on. Thanks. Fantastic. Thanks for having me. So good. Jacob Zimmer, right over here, beautiful nails and hands. Oh, thank you. I'm Jacob Zimmer. I'm on the territory of the Kwanlin Dunn in the Tonkwachin Council in Yukon Territory, which is home of 14 First Nations with 11 self-governing agreements. I'm the Artistic Director of Nikai Theatre. Up here is my job and also to say thanks to Yukonsrupt and the makespace here in town, which is probably one of four locations that has the internet capacity to reliably do this work. We are compelled to make theater that can only be made here, which of course is a thing that goes that can translate anywhere and including into these spaces. I've been a fan of augmented reality since Glasses and The Walkman. I continue to be mostly interested in augmented reality and mixed reality interactions of human bodies with phones that then can actually see each other also in space. We're developing a conceptual piece that at least at the moment is a game for a mixed reality with technology that doesn't quite exist yet in the phones. Thank you so much. And then Alex. Okay, great. I have some exciting news. We have so many people here that there's a second shard that Alex is talking from and also here too. Alex? Hello. Hi, everyone. Hi. Coming to you live from shard too. My name is Alex Doe. I'm with Singit for a Theatre Company. I'm on the territory of the Coast Salish Peoples right now and yeah, I'm really interested in immersive theater and I've recently come out here to Vancouver to study game design and VR creation. I just want to say thanks, everyone, for coming and doing this crazy thing over the last two weekends. It's been so awesome to have you here. Yeah, that's me. Great. So we, because we do have, thanks, Alex. Thanks everybody. So this is our amazing group that assembled here. First question that I want to ask everyone is what has been your biggest failure in the creative process of making extended reality? What was like, whoa, embarrassment. Now you get to share it out loud with everyone here before we break into smaller groups. Anyone want to start? I can start. Yeah, let's go for it. Sure. Yeah, Conrad? I was doing my master's degree at the Center for Digital Media. One of the projects I was put on was working with a waterslide company who wanted to explore the potential of doing a virtual reality waterslide experience. Wow. But like the challenge that we had to solve was tracking a headset over a great distance. And at the time of doing this there wasn't really a mobile device, or there was just one mobile device capable of doing this, which was the Lenovo Tango phone. So we obtained one of these and we were able to do it. But my God, user testing this thing I did it hundreds of times. And I think my equilibrium was shot for a couple of weeks after doing that. But it's just kind of one of the situations where waterslides are awesome already. And we were just kind of scratching our heads as to why would you need virtual reality in a waterslide? So there's just constantly that question in the back of our minds. And I don't know if it was a failure because we were able to achieve what we did. But I don't think I would, like the potential for like an eye injury just seems very high. That's amazing. Does anyone else, like that's pretty spectacular. I really love hearing that. Anyone else have anything? Yeah, I know, right? I wish mine was a, yeah. Go ahead, Jacob. I don't know. It's an extended technology thing, but just all the problems of testing, having tested a one off performance and having it work perfectly in an empty room that relies heavily on Bluetooth and wireless. And then of course it doesn't work with an audience because all of right, like it's just one of those like, oh, right that that ability to do a dress rehearsal doesn't include having a hundred phones using Bluetooth and wireless. Wonderful. And it actually being in a conference where you can't tell people to take their phones off. Of course, naturally. So because we have such a great group, I am actually going to encourage everyone to split up next for our next portion and just to keep it wild and interesting for our panelists. Two of you are going to go to the other shard. So you're going to fall in the end right here in the green top. Okay. Are there two volunteers that would like to go away? Oh, that seems intense. Yeah. Jacob and me. Okay. But wait, wait, wait, before you go, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. Before you go, I have to ask you a question that you're actually going to discuss. So Jacob, I'm going to like take my headset off, wake up my computer. Yeah, go for it. What were you going to say, Alex? I was going to say panelists, make sure you turn off your megaphones. Otherwise, all we're going to hear is you talking. Yeah, yeah. Don't do that. Okay. So Jacob, my question for you as we break up into smaller groups is what is the commonality for you between other media that you've worked in and the XR creation process? Can you handle it? Sure. In differences. Good. Okay. And then Megan, before you go, like, how do you create? Are you alone? Do you collaborate? What's the process been like right now? Especially in the last months, what's your creative process been like? Like, well, physically and yeah, a lot of crying. I mean, like, that's why we're here, right? We're not crying alone anymore. That's like the XR 2020. Don't cry alone. So don't cry alone. Okay. So that's what Megan will be chatting with. So bye. Bye. We'll see you soon. Have fun in the other shard. Okay, you're going to follow Liam in the other shard. Okay, great. And then now what's going to happen is that with the rest of the folks that are here, what I would love to do is have you follow the three remaining panelists. Conrad is going to hang out right here in this area. And Michael Wheeler is going to go on the other side here. There's a snowy area. If you like to chat with Michael Wheeler for the next few minutes, you can go out there and Adnan, you are going to go out the front door, right? Okay. Yes, that's right. Okay, great. So what I would love it to do you to do is if you would like to follow Michael Wheeler, please go out this side door and follow him for a chat. Conrad will be right here and Adnan will be right here. And then I have to ask you a question. Okay, before you go, this is the big, big part of it. Hold on. Okay. So Conrad, how do you find creating a timeline for this work? Do you use a specific process like timeline process like related to software or is it more fluid or do you have hard stops, those sorts of things? Like how do you create a timeline for getting this work done? Seem good? You got it? Yeah, you're good. Okay. So Conrad will be chatting about it here. And then I have a question for Michael Wheeler. To you, what's the dramaturgical process for you in supporting people in working in XR? For spider web show. And then Adnan, where do great ideas come from? What do you think is like a great or the idea for creating an XR? Okay, great. Got it. Okay, great. So I'm going to go, you guys have a few minutes to enjoy and then we'll call you back for the conversation. So Adnan, again, is going out the front door here. Michael is going to the snowy area and Conrad will stay right here. Okay, I'm going to head out this way. Race, yeah. I'm going to move very slowly to the snowy area. Cool. I think probably over here might be a good way to chat. And there's also a couple of firecrackers over here, which we should probably check out. Beth, what are you up to? How do you know how to fly in this world? I thought you weren't allowed to fly in this world. I didn't throw the snowball. That wasn't me. Nothing. I'm just going to jump down. Can everybody hear me? Is it okay? Give me a thumbs up or something. Great. So I think the question was, what is the dramaturgical process? It's my web show, isn't it? I'm less interested in talking about more maybe just generally about digital dramaturgy, especially Beth too. I bet this is a digital dramaturgy. And so I hear that turn around a lot. I guess maybe I'll start off the conversation by saying dramaturgically, what we've kind of started to understand, it's a better web show, is that we copy like a software development model based around alpha, beta, go. And so those of you not familiar with that kind of most apps now when you're being developed or in alpha when they're kind of doing internal testing and then data when they're tested against an actual kind of set of people. And when an app is ready to launch, it's go, it's in a go stage. And so the only way that we've adapted that is to, I just wanted to see it very much, is we've changed the word golden to go for us. So I guess apps when they launch are golden and at a golden level they go when they go. And so the way that we've been curating the festival that we often program is twice. And so you'll see a work in alpha or beta and unfinished work. And then we'll come again in the second year as I go as I finish work. And so we're asking audiences to do in that capacity is understand themselves as being more complicit in the creative process and the feedback that creators get kind of actual feedback and just generally how it went for the creators feeds into the creative process, I think of digital things. And I should say that those works that we have programmed in two years in a row, but almost exclusively those are the ones that have been picked up by other presenters. And so we're feeling that it's a strong model because we're seeing those works that are pulled to twice that presenters have been ready to trust them and pay money for them down the road. So that's my opening game, but maybe I'll throw it at that since we're talking about dramaturgy and your digital dramaturgy. Any philosophies on what that means? Um, um, guess. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? We can hear you. Great. Okay. Okay. Good. Oh, now everyone's looking at me. I'm going to stand up. Yeah. Anyone else in this world? No one else can talk? Really? No. I think you can talk. I think you can talk as long as you're unmuted. Yeah. Okay. Great. Now I can hear you. Okay. Great. Awesome. Um, philosophies. Yes. I think a lot of the philosophy comes around a broad spectrum in deep understanding amongst all creators too about these tools. So that it's not a hierarchical or a dictatorship of like, this is what we're going to do with these tools or someone turning to me and saying, this is what we're going to do with these tools, that there is a deep exchange of knowledge and an understanding of how the tools work. Not that you have to get into the code, but and with that comes time. And I think giving it, which is what's so interesting about the folder example is the time given to this work because because so many of the forms are so new, I think time is a big part of that philosophy and actually letting it be and and figuring it out as you go and then letting it exist and sort of continue to exist in that way. I think that's pretty key. Yeah. An experimentation like the philosophy, like it's not a philosophy, but it's just a way, but this idea of experimentation and letting us have that time to to be able to figure out what it all means, right, on all the all the different aspects of what digital dramaturgy is, which is a developing thread of dramaturgy. Something that I feel like Jacob kind of hinted at in his introduction is that this work, because interactivity is almost necessarily big and not just a VR, but almost almost all kind of digital works. You can feel like you have something that you've made this really cool, but then since people start interacting with it, it gets broken really quickly or different things happen in ways that you never expected. And so I feel that's kind of a way that it's like fundamentally different than creating a piece of theater for a physical audience where you can kind of create the show and it's going to be the show when you present it. You obviously the energy from the audience changes and you get that feedback, but you can still kind of repeat it every night, whereas that's not necessarily the case once you start involving interactivity. And so there's like a testing of interactivity that's kind of required. Yeah, true spirit, true spirit. Yeah, well it just kind of makes me think of the essence of art and art practice and that as soon as you make a work, whatever that is, it's up to the interpretation, the interpretation and the way it exists is always going to be in the person who perceives it. So it's always going to be out of the hands of the creator as soon as it's being perceived by anyone else. Whereas like within interactive, more interactive works like digital, that's like pushed even further. It's a philosophy on dramaturgy and what it means in all these kind of weird XR cases here. I mean one thing that I, you know, something I didn't mention in my bio is I also teach at a university and so I teach these things to young people and one thing that I find that I'm really training them on is how to do feedback. Like that if we're going to work in this iterative development model, the space between the iterations is as good as the feedback that you get. So like for example, this year in my class, I just started right away doing an online digital project because I was particularly interested in the project that I wanted to make something really quickly and get used to giving feedback and start to understand what good feedback is and what helpful feedback because that's that that thing that iterative development requires is the feedback. Does anyone have any philosophies on like how to evaluate a digital work when it goes out there? Maybe what you learned from it Right. Rather than. Can you hear me? Yeah. I know it's hard sometimes. Yeah, I was thinking, especially in relation to students, you know, the intent is one thing, but you know, there's there's failure and there's success, but but what did you learn from it and, you know, I'm thinking that that would be a good indicator for students, especially, I mean, for all of us really, because, you know, what I try to tell them is is a failure is fine in my class and it's kind of fail fast philosophy, which is kind of in the tech entrepreneurial and way of doing things right now. Like what I try to encourage them is like to deal with their projects, not with a pilot project where they would plan it forever and then eventually like deal their project to try to, you know, do a minimum viable product prototype right away, test it against reality and get feedback that way as opposed to kind of being really precious and building it kind of over a period of time. I found that to be more successful. Brian, you built a digital thing. What's your philosophy then as you try to test that? You just had a show this summer that was all digital. Yeah, it wasn't, I mean, it wasn't like any AR or FxR stuff, but it was all through Zoom, highly interactive through Zoom. I guess if we're talking about like dramaturgy of feedback, as an artist, I think when Michael, you talk about the minimum viable product, iterating stuff and even Raven, when you're talking about like when we become hyper interactive, you can really only make one change at a time. If anyone like is on the sourdough bread hype, you know, you want to make one change to that recipe before understanding, you know, you can't you can't make five because you're you kind of don't know like what it will do if you if you think like, oh, well, no one's participating or no one's participating in the way we want to. It really, I think in terms of participatory work, which when translates online is about like, how do you get people to engage in a way that you think would be more effective than, you know, how they're originally doing it as you're going through, you know, alpha, beta, blah, blah, blah. And so can I ask you, Brian, like very specifically, so when you had your show, how did you do a dress rehearsal? Oh, my God. I had a large team. So we would have to rehearse for each other. So what you end up getting is like, you don't, as you rehearse, you don't get to do the full show. Because, you know, there are 11 performers, but only, you know, like, four of them could we could do without them just having to completely imagine what the audience would be doing. That way, you know, each of them at least have one other person that they can react to. The dress rehearsals are really weird. They're always like, so, so very difficult to do without an audience, which when we did in person was a lot easier, because we could have, we could get invite people in and do those tests, but online it was a little bit harder, just in terms of, like, time management, to get people to come. Yeah. It's tough. It's, it's tough. One thing that I've noticed is, it was going to go in a different, well, I think part of what strikes me in particular, like, I do a lot of theater production as a playwright and a director and a producer, a festival artistic director. And it really strikes me that this medium brings with it a tremendous new aesthetic, dramaturgical opportunity and burden that I do think that everything, you know, when we have actors on a stage, we've been talking for decades now about the text of an actor's body, right? And that different actors bodies bring inherently in them a text. And we, as an audience are seeing both the character and that performers, the performer's body and the text that accompanies that body. And we make our meaning from the collision of our world and all those worlds. And in this space, I find that there's a whole new aesthetic burden. I use that word, not necessarily negatively, I think a burden can also strengthen us. But the idea that everything that we have as creators, a high degree of control over what everyone looks like, how everyone moves about what everyone's face and bodies and all of those pieces are shaped like what they sound like, and break down to the trees and shapes of these houses, these kind of, you know, beautiful Swiss Alps houses, right? Like all of the stuff heavily embedded in the text. And we, whoever creates the space has control over those texts to a degree and presumably over the next... Hi, sorry to interrupt everybody. About five more minutes of chatting and then we'll come back together. It's just a really interesting channel. Yeah, there's definitely a lot of God mode kind of things going on that are like ethical pitfalls. Did anybody kind of discovered themselves being moved around that way? Like they felt kind of uncomfortable by being just a key on in a world where you can be shuffled around? Well, I think because I don't code, a lot of things are already created and they didn't, they weren't created by me. So whoever created them had a particular bias or a particular set of, I don't know, values and it's all encoded into the world. It's encoded into how your avatar looks. It's encoded into the choices that you have, you know? So there's a, yeah, it's kind of a world that's really almost predetermined. You have choices, but they're kind of, there's a limited choice set of choices. Yeah, you know, I feel really weird about the fact that I chose what I look like right now, which is not what I look like at all in reality. And then I showed up here and I realized that most people actually look like, find out how they look. And obviously my style really changed. You really, your queens has really changed you. Yeah. But I appreciate the opportunity to kind of look different because, you know, I probably teaching at queens, this would be a weird look, but, but, you know, here I thought it was fine. But then Clayton put a bunch of selfies up and my partner saw them on Facebook and she was like, this is very weird. Everyone looks like themselves, but you, what are you doing here? So that's interesting. And this is, Camila, it sort of goes, it was a similar thing was raised, Raven, at the talk that you were at yesterday about that. And, and, and I know from people who, like I have a VR artist friend who builds avatars and she went looking for, she's a black VR designer and she went looking for black hair and couldn't find it. And so she ended up having to do that labor herself, right? And then she crowdsourced it. And now there's like this wicked library, but it's, it's that change. Totally, I'll hook you up with it. It's, it's awesome. But it's those pieces, right? It's getting, it's getting women into tech. It's getting, it's diversifying the text so that, yes, the code is, is diverse itself because it's hard when you are only dealing with dropdown menus. How diverse can you make the trees? How do you, yeah, like it's, yeah, it's, it's a big problem in our bodies, you know, it's, it's an embodied experience to a certain extent, but then again, you know, there's only particular bodies that are allowed into the space. Yeah, I was just going to say that, you know, I do, I do remember experiences here better than I remember a zoom call. Everyone, I'm just going to say please try to make your way back to your, to our shards main area where we begin the discussion. So it should be near the completely disgustingly messed up tables. Yeah, you guys are like in business here. Yeah, you, you win. You win the discussion here. She's still, she's still amplified. Oh, she's not taught. She wasn't talking to us. No. Oh, I mean, the way I went to, I'm just sitting on this call. Turning around. Thanks. We, that's why I want everyone to have their meeting to be ours so they can remember their meeting. No, but he's right. Shall we go back? Yeah. See, this is where I wish you could walk and talk. Totally. Like, can I zoom here? Let's see if I match your speed. I can kind of talk with you while we walk. Is that even possible? This is like a little bit nauseating when I keep going, I keep like running into you and Brian. Now I'm like, what? Yeah. Brian, how did you show yourself just moved yesterday? It's way, it's way better than the jerky thing. Oh, now I'm in Camille's eyes. I just randomly befriended them and then found myself in the audience, which is great. Awesome. We're all getting together here. Hey everybody, thanks for coming back. What I'd love now is to hear back from the individual groups. I'm not sure how we're going to hear from the other shard if there's someone over there. No. Anyone, Wheeler? Okay. We'll move on. So we had Adnan's, Conrad's, and Michael's groups. And if there's someone who wanted to share from the group with Michael Wheeler talking about dramaturgical processes, that would be great. You know, I thought we would nominate someone, but I guess I forgot about the technical challenge of that only I can amplify my voice from this group. So I guess I will report from us. We were talking about dramaturgy. I think some of the things that we talked about was the design being more key to digital exploration so that you can test. Yeah, I can hear you guys talk. We can't hear. Oh, maybe I'm not on air though. Also, haha. Are you on air, Michael? Yes. So everyone should hear me. Can you raise your hand or emoji if you can hear Michael talking? Okay, great. Thank you. Okay. Yeah, you're good now. Cool. So we talked a bit about kind of iterative design, failing fast, like trying to find ways to get user feedback in this kind of world. Like if you can create something and Jacob hinted at this in his opening remarks, but until you tested it on an audience that's different. Beth brought up in terms of digital dramaturgy, like a lot of hierarchical process where people are working together to kind of come up with shared ideas and values to the creative process. And we talked a little bit just about like the choices that you can't make in this world that like fundamentally or any world, like when you enter a virtual space, a lot of the choices are made for you in a way that they're not negotiating that as well and kind of making sure that the tools are there to represent kind of anyone in any perspective that they might have. That's me. Awesome. Conrad, I heard there was a lively discussion in your group about different flavor. You know, it's actually a lot of the same topics we covered. Was it? Yeah, like, you know, failing fast, iterative, in terms of managing timelines of production, but also I think one of the most important points that we sort of came to was to, you know, find an early point of relation with regards to, you know, if you're approaching doing a virtual reality production of some other kind of production, like let's say opera, for example, having Debbie bring forward what the production cycle for a typical opera is from the outset, it helps us more, like the rest of the team background was quite technical in terms of our understanding of game design and producing game experiences. So having her bring forward this like opera production timeline for us to understand and relate to, it really helped demystify the process for her and we were able to find a language to navigate the timeline and to make sure that she understood problems that could arise on the constraints as as Wheeler mentioned about working in virtual reality. There are a lot of constraints, right? Well, a lot more than real world. It's just it's very interesting how similar our discussions ended up being. Yeah. Thank you so much. Megan, did you end up having any time to chat with your group? Yeah, well, I mean, a little we kind of just like went around the circle. I got really lost. So that's, shards. We mostly have to talk about how, you know, a lot of us have been alone, even though we are working in groups, how because of COVID, we went from being like near people to just sort of having to be there's a lot of basements. A lot of us are in basements. That was happening. Yeah, it was like, I just kind of echoed a lot of the stuff that I kind of was going through. But yeah, I feel like I wish we kind of had more time because I really wanted to start going into like, why are we, why are we working alone anyways? Because when you're working in VR, oftentimes you're not literally collaborating together for majority of the development process, each sitting at a booth, kind of working on your own thing and sharing what you've done. Whereas like with theater, you sometimes you need like a multiple hands just to put something together. So that's something I've always been thinking about lately with VR is just like we've lost a lot of the hands on, but we're still building like these giant sets and stuff like even this space like this would have been like one person just doing it by themselves. So are we losing it? That is what happened. Thank you so much. Jacob, did you want to chat about your group? Sure, I was also got a little lost in the shards and it's been chatted a lot or blathered a bit. I talked about play being the similar process, the thing that is similar to being creative process. One is coming basically from clown and these are objects and so you pick up every object and you do 8,000 things with it and every object is good for doing 8,000 things, none of which the designer is meant. And so I sort of approach that here as well that, you know, this gives me more joy than the, you know, we're not in the same room but the fact that I can put my hand inside a light means I want to play with that and figure out things. We talked also about, you know, my perception that this stuff is quite hard, the interaction of this is quite hard. I'm certainly aware of the difference between my creative practice up here in the Yukon of zero cases and not very good internet and how that is actually that is more and more growing the disconnect between myself and southern folks in good and bad ways. I don't have the pressure of not being able to go outside. We can do shows around fireplaces and we have not, you know, those things are more viable but that creative sense of play is the same. I think the opportunity in VR to me to play off site is really one of the exciting things. So can I use this? I can't play with giant it's harder to play with giant puppets in an abandoned strip mine in real space but maybe I can build that space in VR and do the playing in VR and then once we're doing the show in the mine site we know how long how big the giant puppet needs to be to read at a distance because we've done sort of perspectival stuff in VR and that's really exciting to me as a maker who wants to work in places that are hard to get to. Great that makes so much sense and also like I'm just wild with jealousy like what are friends in person? And what's very weird is like we get to like we do have you know the because of the mining world we have a huge amount of photogrammetry and data scans of the entire territory right we have a huge amount of data of the land many of it controlled by Canadian companies who have huge human rights violations and both here and in South America so that complicates it. I speak to you from the gold core educational room. Yeah so that's all the entanglement that is the north and huge amounts of government funding and we're just here to prove that we don't but also with really bad internet. You're doing great now Anna I heard you had a far reaching discussion over in your corner. Massive exposure to that is not the common sense already and so a lot of my creation work has been for both audience and other performers and I'm collaborating with all collaborators. I'm quite interested in fastening by how much more I can be living this. You're a tiny bit garbled for me I'm not sure for other people but I think I got the gist of what you were saying a little bit. There are there other questions yeah I'm going to come over here oh hop hop did you have a question over here no okay sorry that's kind of aggressive so anyone have a question for the panel any hands up no okay so my my question my final question for the group here oh yeah oh yeah hi go for it I'm amplifying you shall I wait or can I start no yeah I go for it talk talk okay yeah I wanted to ask about how you negotiate intention for peace and as well as with technical stuff in mind um are they talking how do you create with that intention and then yeah also another of what kind of audience there is how different the audience is in a technical space are they amplified I'm trying to amplify um them next to me is that working go to the shard oh my go to the shard okay sorry sorry about that yeah again okay if you can tell me tell me the question I'll try to repeat it as best I can okay so um how as creators do you start with a project and its intentions and how is it affected by the interactivity of technology and audience okay so how as creators do you start with an intention and how is it impacted by um the technology and audience like that right is there more yeah okay that's about it that was that was the question okay great so what was that how do you start with an intention and then like for a piece and then how is that impacted impacted by both the technology that you're using and the audience or it feels like an essay you have two minutes yeah Michael go for it if you have any answer go for it I do I do think that kind of that question speaks to a way that like all the performing arts are shifting not just like XR performing art whereas like we're shifting out of like what I would call like an auteur model of arts production where you have like a genius at the top of a pyramid whose vision and then kind of spreads through all the different departments that are below that kind of utter at the top of the pyramid and that all of this work is becoming much more collaborative much more consensus based and so um like what your vision is is less important than like what the collective's vision is and then also um the interactivity that empowers each participant that have a different experience which might not be anything that any of the artists have envisioned and so it's like a really big letting go of intention I love that yeah Megan did you want to say something oh uh yeah I don't know how to undo that uh I guess also oh there goes uh there you go yeah I guess also to that um one of the big things that like when I was doing game design uh and UX and UI design was that uh the big thing about like ideas are okay this is going to sound harsh but like ideas are worthless but it's the execution of that idea that gives it the idea its value and so I have working in so many different fields like edumication and edutainment and that kind of thing is like you get a lot of people who are like the big idea I have these huge ideas but then there's no plan for execution or there's a refusal to sort of like give over that plant that idea to the group in order to actually like execute it in any kind of way and so I'm actually I am seeing that kind of shift away but also like in the Indigenous spaces there's a lot of like VR that's being given just like the filmmakers and they're having a hard time of like transitioning their skill set and I think that has mostly to do with like the vision of the the screen so like a VR like the screen is all around you essentially even though it's technically just in front of you where like with a film it's it's in a fixed location and you're always like got a look at that point so I think also there's a bit of a shift in that people are coming with preconceived visions of how the screen should function moving into VR and having a hard time translating that idea into the 360. Does that make sense? Okay, yeah. Anna and did you want to add to that? Yeah, I also, the way I interpreted the question that you asked is do you start with an institution that you have a problem that you want to and then figure out how to achieve music and technology and for me, rather than being able to embody my lack of experience in the technology, I'm starting with the thing that I know. My intentionality is necessarily bound to my knowledge of what technology is. Before I learned about how it functions, more I can expand my idea. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, no, you're just super garbled. I'm so sorry. Sometimes it actually takes like leaving and coming back, but we are actually at time and I hate to end on that note, but I also want to, so I want to end a note on a complete gratitude for our panelists and for the group here for being so open and having such a great and far reaching conversation. And hopefully this will lay some groundwork for a more collaborative dare I say feminist approach to creation in XR. Thank you. And thank you very much, Justine. Can we give her some clicks for conducting this brave experiment? She was the chief person in the lab for sure. Thank you so much, Justine. Thank you. Everyone, take 10 minutes and then the final, the final future note is where you came in. It's a giant glowing portal where the basketball net used to be in central. So in about 10 minutes, take a break, get some water, and then we're going to get started for our final event. Thank you very much. We're going to get started. Thanks so much for joining us for our final presentation, our what we were calling our future note, not an end note, but a future note. And I wanted to just start off by saying that PXR 2020 has been brought to you by Single Thread Theater Company and Electric Company Theater. We want to thank our community partners, Toaster Lab and the Center for Entertainment Arts, and especially the funding support of the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Strategy Fund. We'd like to acknowledge that we've organized this event primarily on the traditional ancestral and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples, the Squamish, the Sailbootooth, and the Musqueam nations. And now it is my great joy, honor, pleasure to introduce to you someone that I have met entirely through VR. And I think for me, like when I think of like what's been the benefit of all this, well, it was getting to meet this awesome person, Casey Coyson. Casey is an installation and sound artist, and he is going to speak to us about his process of learning to sculpt in VR and how he has integrated digital tools into his practice. So Casey, take it away, my friend, let's give him a round of applause. Thank you, Masichou. Yeah, this is great to be able to do a talk somewhat in person. This is my first virtual reality artist talk, and I'd be lying if I said the nervousness still wasn't coming through, but it kind of is. So yeah, it's a great opportunity, and it's been great getting to know Alex and Aiden and Clayton and the other organizers of this event, because I feel it's a very forward-moving sort of way to still be developed in the arts and theater world. So my name is Casey Coyson. I'm a Tlicho Dene interdisciplinary artist from Yellowknife Northwest Territories. I'm currently living in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where I'm navigating my way through a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Manitoba, which is weird, you know, just as is everything these days. But I'm going to take you through some of my earlier work, kind of like a brief history of all of my artwork leading up until now, and kind of the segue into VR from my installation work. So this is a piece called it's an audio map basically of the Kamloops area, where I did my Bachelor of Fine Arts at Thompson Rivers University. And what is happening here, it's an amalgamation of found objects and earth materials that have microphones and speakers built into the installation itself behind the big sort of piece there in the left of center behind that is a bunch of effect pedals like a distortion delay and a preamp that sends the input from the mics to the speakers so that people have a sort of interaction with the installation sculpture itself. You'll see in the bottom left hand corner there it's plugged into the wall which which kind of powers everything. This was the first time that I created a installation with earth materials indoors, so it was the first time that I realized that that scent and smell was starting to become a part of my artwork because you can actually smell the materials when you're in the space. This is my pride and joy and the dragon that I've been chasing ever since I created it. It's called the mode of ascension and it was my fourth year Bachelor of Fine Arts work. This is a log that is about eight feet high by two and a half feet in circumference diameter and it's hollowed out three quarters of the way through and how I acquired this log was that there was a pine beetle infestation which happened within the southern interior of BC and half of the trees on campus were cut down. Alex, are you megafoned right now? I'm getting feedback. Check, check. That fixed it. Awesome. See a pine beetle infestation rolled through and half the trees on campus were cut down and this piece was just brought to the sculpture studio and I assumed it was someone I asked around. It was no one, so took liberty of taking it and creating something of it. So began the process of hollowing it out. It took quite a long time and I almost broke my wrists in the process because of the reciprocator saw and drill and crowbar that I was using to do it and I was acquiring earth materials from all over Kamloops in order to create this upside down nest kind of feel and the audio which is present within this installation is meant to reflect the harmony and the chaos of the universe. Can I play it from there? Nice. Way back. Not sure how loud the audio is on this but it gives you an idea as to more of the feeling of it, all the installations that I do have walkthrough videos. So the main inspiration for this installation is straight out of the movie Alien where Ripley and the Child come across the room that's housing the Xenomorph Queen and it's kind of asserting its dominance, taking over the space and making it its own. So that's always been a very inspirational movie to me and I wanted to make something like that. So that is basically where the root of the inspiration came from for this installation in particular. The dimensions are 50 feet long by 25 feet wide and I created a 15 foot makeshift ceiling out of aircraft cable and earth materials there. So the work that I'm working on right now within my MFA is basically the second iteration of this project where instead of one big log I'm going to have at least five that will kind of pick up people's proximity to the logs and they'll resonate their own sort of soundtrack and visuals and that's currently a work in progress that will hopefully be completed by May of 2021 which is hopefully when we'll have our grad but due to COVID some things have been kind of pushed already and stretched back so we'll see what happens but we're kind of just going with the flow there. That's a little tidbit of that. Okay in 2017 I was asked to take part in the insurgents resurgence exhibition at the Winnipeg Art Gallery which at the time was the biggest exhibit hosting Indigenous artists in Canada. It took up about 10,000 square feet of the gallery pretty much all of the third floor and parts of the first and second floor as well and for this installation I harvested a bunch of driftwood from the Red River and the Asiniboine rivers that flow through Winnipeg and this installation was, it's called Gone but Not Forgotten and it is meant to pay tribute and to celebrate the lives of people that have been found within those rivers and to address the ongoing MIWG crisis within Canada and it was an honour to take part in this massive exhibit alongside people that I've idolized since my like first and second year of my BFA and it was just an amazing experience and I couldn't be happier with the result and that sort of thing. When the exhibition was coming down there was a tour that was given to elders and chiefs from throughout the Manitoba area and one of the chiefs requested that when the installation be taken down that the wood could be used to burn in ceremony and they asked me if that was okay and I felt like that's the perfect way for these materials to return to the earth so that was definitely an honour to have and for the materials to go back to the earth because when I don't fabricate the materials with any sort of paint or any sort of chemicals then they return to the earth in some way and I think this would be a good time to go to the next video. Okay this is a piece called Residential Values and I created this in 2016 I believe and this I call it a performance painting and it's me taking about 300 to 400 shots of painted pucks onto a canvas that cycle between black white and red black white and red and it's my my favourite colour scheme but it's also a very violent colour scheme but in addition to that it's a colour scheme that's that's present in many indigenous cultures not only in Canada but throughout the world and this piece is to address at the at the heart of it racism in sport but also my father's experience within residential school and playing hockey there as well as my experience as an aspiring hockey player in in southern Alberta where I faced a lot of racism it was like the first time that I'd ever experienced it having moved from white horse down to down to left bridge. So it's to address the effects of residential school the intergenerational effects of residential school within Canada and also that correlation between racism and sport and fight for equal rights for everyone. So all of these videos that I'm playing are hosted on my youtube channel if you take time to go through to meet your leisure you're more than welcome to. Okay I'm just going to hint on a little bit of graphic design. Graphic design is something that kind of started my digital journey and arts journey so I've done work for numerous clients this is one of the ones I'm most proud of which is an advertisement that I did a segment of an advertisement that I did for the city of Yellowknife where I created this vectorized tp in Adobe Illustrator incorporated the text and the version and that sort of thing. I had the honor of working on a video game it was the first video game that I that I helped out with called Thunderbird Strike. The lead creator was the NCA and she asked me to do the music and the sound effects and also the narration for the video game and ever since I was a kid I've always wanted to do like voices for cartoons and stuff like that so it was an opportunity for me to do some voice acting so I went with this kind of like a wrestler kind of indigenous kind of angle on things and came up with the voice for Thunderbird Strike so I was to create a bunch of different assets for that and it was it was a lot of fun to work on and it was about two years of development very limited budget but it was it was more so the concept of the thing because the video game is about a legendary Thunderbird who was basically destroying the oil and gas industry with their lightning eyes and ripping out pipeline from the ground with the claws and that sort of thing so as soon as she pitched the idea to me is like I'm totally and I don't care what I get paid blah blah blah and it was submitted to the imaginative film and media arts festival in 2017 and it won best digital media of the of that year which was an amazing opportunity however two weeks later there was a article that was released by Fox News basically labeling us as eco-terrorists and that was a whole thing which was I don't know it was it was very interesting there was a lot of paranoia coming from me as well it's like am I going to be blacklisted from flights like can I not fly anywhere blah blah blah and I I really sympathize with Elizabeth because being the natural being the lead she naturally took a lot of the primary heat from all that from big oil and all that sort of thing but regardless I am very proud of my my work on this game and I really like to have the opportunity to do it again um okay so before I get into some of the VR stuff I'll play the rest of these videos okay so I'm also a a audio artist and a musician one of my aliases for more of my harder kind of sounding electronic work is naga and with this music video which I created myself I collaborated with Tanya Snow who is a in-vit throat singer from Yellowknife this work was shown at the 2018 um imaginative festival I believe it was a lot of fun to work on not only this song but but the video as well and Tanya allowed me to experiment with her voice and her throat singing a little bit so there's some instances within the the song and composition where doing a bunch of octaves and kind of crazy cuts and that sort of thing and utilizing some some stock footage of nature and animals and that sort of thing to to bring the whole concept together I haven't really played much music or live music from 20 or February 2019 to February 2020 just so that I could focus on my artwork so this was the last music video that I made but in the future when I released my whole LP there'll be more videos and compositions that kind of come out of that I have a free EP as naga to download off of Bandcamp and that's available within or accessible within my website there's a link for that at the end there so what everyone is here for I assume is to hear about some of the VR stuff so I will be completely honest the main reason why I got into VR was because of the video game Super Hot razor hand if you've ever played Super Hot before help people awesome right on okay so yeah that was the whole reason why I got into VR in the first place and so I played about 100 to 200 hours of Super Hot and the person or the organization Western Arctic Moving Pictures who lent me the VR headset and gaming laptop at the time they wanted to push me to do more so they influenced me to start working with tilt brush and I was kind of surprised as to how quickly I picked it up because within my journey as an artist before going to do my BFA at Thompson Rivers University I really want to be able to draw and paint really well but I just I'm not good at it like it was something that I really pushed for but I had to accept that it wasn't my strong point however when I started to paint and draw in tilt brush something just clicked and I knew that it was all about that Z axis to be able to look around the strokes and the brushes that you're making and to really render something that you can get a better idea for shape and form and that sort of thing so this idea came from a actual installation idea that I wanted to do where I would put a whole bunch of spruce bells that cover an entire city intersection in Yellowknife and I was thinking about this it was going to be a gorilla installation that sort of thing but the more I thought about it I realized that it could possibly be an installation that could like I could get charged for it like you know I started thinking like if someone was driving across this and it messes with their vehicle I could maybe be charged with tampering with a motor vehicle or something like that so I just decided to do it in VR and took it one step further and created a TP within an intersection kind of like this this reclamation sort of idea and project as well and this is a piece that I created called Raven Gods and when I started in VR I automatically started to be inspired by and create artworks that were about the legends of not only indigeneity as a whole but the legends of the Northwest territories and to us Ravens in Yellowknife and Northwest territories are very sacred animals so I was going for this like council of shadowy figures kind of thing inspired by Clone High I don't know if any of you have seen that cartoon but that was one of the inspirations that came from this and they're kind of just like watching over us and kind of just making sure that we respect the land in each other and that sort of and it was one of the first pieces that I did where I really pushed that scale element of virtual reality because in Yellowknife there's not a lot of spaces that you could rent to actually do physical large-scale work so one of the things that was really attractive to me about VR is that you can create something gigantic within a six-foot space in your home so as a large-scale artist I really enjoyed that sort of process so this was kind of the idea I had to to really push that for myself and in continuing with the aesthetic of making northern animals and whatnot this piece actually came from a dream that I had while I was spending the night at my mom's cabin which is about 30 to 40 minutes outside of Yellowknife I had this dream that a pack of five wolves appeared around my mom's cabin like I woke up I was still in my dream but I woke up and I heard this howling so I went out to her barbecue pit basically fire pit on the edge of her land where you could see all the way across the lake and across the lake there were these five wolves kind of standing there and the one in the middle their back was on fire and from this this vast distance I could feel that heat somehow and I could see their eyes and when I had that kind of connection with them they all kind of ran over to kind of like the north side of the lake and then when I woke up my mom asked me if I'd heard any wolves and I was like well I had a dream about some wolves and she said that there was a pack of wolves that appeared around the cabin last night and the the cabin across the road for my mom's cabin they just had a litter of puppies a couple days previously so unfortunately the wolves killed the mother the father and two of the puppies and there was two puppies remaining and my mom adopted one of the puppies as her own so it was a very serendipitous kind of surreal experience to have that but I also felt obligated to kind of create something that would be there as like a memory for for I guess that instance and one of the legends of the northeast territories is the giant beavers that used to roam the north and occupy the lakes and legend has it that these giant beavers would kill people who are trying to cross the the lakes in their their birch bark canoes so I want to make something that was a an intro to kind of that idea I know this beaver looks really happy and that sort of thing but in the future that'll change because we want to implement it into this VR experience that we're creating called when I was a KFC visions which is like a virtual reality 360 experience of all of the the legends of the northeast territories we have more so in the southern sort of areas of the npt we have a lot of bison who occupy a lot of the woods but also the roads and sometimes they just won't move like if you're driving there's six or seven bison on the road and there's like no no you go when we say you go you know so um I want to kind of create something like that as well um and so I'm getting a bit of feedback again so this is implemented into our um that might be alex could you oh there we go never mind um so this is implemented into our experience as well as we call it the gatekeeper um this bison and it's kind of an introduction to the experience itself okay right on um so this work is called migration 24 91 um and these are a bunch of caribou and what this work is all about is um kind of a look into the future uh because as is right now that that occupy the northwest territories and um the concept behind this is that in the year 24 91 which is um a thousand years um after the north america uh north america was colonized that in the future up in the northeast territories that there's going to be so many diamond mines within the the land and structures up there that caribou won't be able to migrate properly to their breeding grounds because they're already having a really hard time their their migration patterns are getting disrupted and it's always fluctuating every year so my thought is that in the year 24 91 one way that the caribou can migrate is by way of a giant portal um so that they can migrate safely they can go to the breeding grounds and feeding grounds and come back and everyone's happy and it's sort of a instance to like save the caribou um i'll save that one for later uh actually no i'll save that one right now because i am almost done okay so this was my first uh vr commission that i created um and it's called with the ancestors this was created for the urban society of Aboriginal youth that's their logo there on the back of the um the shawl and the regalia and it's two fancy dancers and an adult and a youth and this really uh communicates like the empowerment of women and girls but also the transference of knowledge and technique by way of dancing um so i wanted to make it a beautiful piece and something that really honored the people in Alberta the regalia is inspired by blackfoot designs and with the concept of your dancing with the ancestors so an ancestor ancestors up in the sky kind of watching over them and watching over the powwow the arbor is inspired by the Kamloopa powwow grounds in Kamloops DC um yeah so that is a kind of general ideas to where i've been where i'm coming from and where i'm currently at and where i plan to go in the future a lot of these vr creations are kind of like sketches that will hopefully develop into something bigger other collaborative ideas and that sort of thing um if you want to follow me on any sort of social media these are all my links um i honestly am not on twitter like at all i i find it this is just me but i find it to be a very toxic kind of platform so i generally just kind of stay away from it but i'm mostly avidly on on instagram and facebook and those are my websites um i show a lot of works in progress because i really enjoy seeing other people's works in progress um and how a project kind of comes from conceptual conceptualization to fruition um so i really like to put that out there as well um so yeah thank you must say chill i appreciate ruin coming out and all the hearts and claps and that sort of thing i gotta take a picture of that that's great yeah that's amazing thank you kasey that was that was awesome do you want to take a question or two or absolutely yeah yeah okay any any questions for kasey let's see if i can monitor oh i'm gonna allow hand raises it's it's tricky because the white the the snow makes it so that it's hard to see this but if you kind of like tilt your gaze up to the sky a bit you'll be able to see you can raise your hand um in the bottom right hand uh corner oh okay we have a question we have a question from raven raven i'm gonna put you on air okay raven go ahead uh hey i wanted to hear about how uh you decided where the four sacred directions would be in the space in in this space here in masha world yeah i saw your tobacco ties and wanted to ask you about your process of siding within a digital virtual space what the four directions would be um yeah so um that was kind of one of the original ideas for for this world in this project and how to kind of tie it all together um was to create these tobacco ties um in a utilized blender to make them with with uh physics and and uh collision and that sort of thing um and allocating the medicine wheel concept of of that um so the red white black and yellow um and then distributing them distributing them in the the world itself um so i basically made the models and and handed it over to alex with the kind of general kind of concept i don't know exactly how specific they are in terms of like where north southwest and east is because i honestly don't know within this within this world um and i'm not sure if it if it really matters too much but uh that's sort of how that idea came about awesome any other questions that was a good one i think that's everyone okay all right uh so people have found the fireworks i i i do want to um maybe let's give her another round of applause for kasey and then i think i will uh i i just have a few things i'd like to say just to thank a few people but uh round of applause for kasey kasey thanks so much for taking the time to do this and it was so great to hear about your journey with this uh this all these cool new tools absolutely my pleasure so um yes and feel free to shoot off some fireworks as they do this uh yeah grab grab a firework fire them off this is this is the end of pxr 2020 um i want to thank our our core team uh ian and justine garrett from toaster lab uh jesse and clayton from electric company uh amanda baker christin cloey david liam and adan on the single thread side uh this has been a really long journey we've been working at this for uh some of us more than six months so it's been a long long haul i want to thank our partners starting with electric company uh who this came out of an introduction uh from jiv perosram at rumble who recommended that clayton and i meet up and uh clayton just like was willing to meet with me which i think is so important that um i don't know people who are more established and leaders uh take that time to do that and and clayton has really believed in this project from day one and trusted single thread with a lot um and we've worked really hard to try to live up to the trust that electric has put in to us um i want to thank toaster lab uh for their help with outreach with streaming with planning i want to thank cohort for contributing uh their staff their time to helping us with workshops i want to thank outside the march vancouver br c e a and the colch for their support and engagement i want to thank our steering committee uh who have helped guide this event and have been fantastic at advising our decision making uh clayton ian melissa liam beth milton griffin and evo thank you guys for for guiding us on this journey um i want to single out beth kates who has been an absolutely incredible collaborator on this project and has offered me so much great advice and uh i know that many of you are here through your connection to beth and that really speaks to the work that she has done to build up this this xr community thank you to our volunteers in purple for your help getting us oriented in the space we appreciate all the time that you have uh you've given to us and finally uh this entire thing would not have been possible without the canada council digital strategy fund so thank you canada council for supporting our knowledge growth and exploration of the xr medium and also your willingness to support our pivot to virtual reality uh when i phoned you up and i was like uh can we do this and you were like yeah absolutely and i hope uh you're you're happy with the outcome so uh we're going to send out a feedback survey to all of you uh in which we hope you'll take the time to fill that out as we figure out how to do this better uh next time around we would like to do this again next year and we are actively planning uh pxr 2021 and if you are interested in collaborating with us next year please let us know please come and find myself Liam or Clayton and uh let's talk about how we can do this again next year all right i have nothing else to say let's fire up some fireworks and uh have a good time thank you all so much for taking the time to do this it's been amazing