 So thank you. I wanted to welcome you all here, and especially those who may be live streaming, viewing us on the live stream, to the session two of the Digital Plus performance convening at the Festival of Live Digital Art, Fulda, or Fulde, if you will. Fulda, ah, if you like better, which is what I like. For those of us who are just joining us, we are inside the lobby of the Isabel Bader Performing Art Center, which is located on the traditional territories of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples in what is now known as Kingston, Ontario, Canada. So this session is about the use of mixed reality work in live performance. And we are talking about that today with some colleagues who are joining us via Zoom from the Prague Quadrennial. And you can see those folks here on our screen today. I'm going to. There's a lot of three of us. And we can hear you. Do you want to say something? This is the traditional greeting when using Zoom, which is like, can you hear me? I just want to say that it's not just three of us sitting here. We are in a room. And what do you mean, kind of room? So we've got a small gathering of people here as well. When you properly passed us, I will explain the state of our room. Well, I'm happy to properly pass it over to you, Ian Garrett, who is our lead contact here and our collaborator with Toaster Lab. Ian, tell us about where you are right now. What's going on? So we're at the Prague Quadrennial, which happens every four years in Prague. We are within a project called the Light Spot, which is a series of conversations around technology used for stage design. I started as a lighting primary project, but we've been integrating more media into it. Light Spot is contained within 360 or 36Q or 360Q, depending on who you ask, which is a large project that is taken over a hockey arena, which maybe, if we can go wild a little bit later, we can show you a little bit of that space. It has a number of immersive projects in it designed for a sound VR, lighting, et cetera. Me describing it while you're looking at the walls in this room are not going to do justice. As it's a former hockey arena, the room that we're in right now is a changing room that has been repurposed for this series of conversations that we have. It's nearly a full conference dedicated to both these conversations and the ones from the North American cluster at the PQM. The Prague Quadrennial celebrates performance design and space. Every four years, there's about 70 participating countries that showcase both professional and emerging work in an exhibition and the number of out programs that look at various ways of approaching sonography and performance design. And there's a huge media component about it that's added this time. So yes, we also have no AC. The AC went out in our building, so there's a little bit of fan music back now, too. But that's how Prague works. It's 35 degrees outside. I'm sorry about the AC. We just wanted to connect with you. It was very fast. We're kind of having, I don't know about anyone else in the room, but I feel like we're having the opposite problem where I'm feeling actually a little over AC'd. But we won't dwell on that. I want to talk about our objective for this session, which is to share experiences, discuss challenges, and imagine what might be possible when it comes to integrating mixed reality into live performance. And so our time today has three sections. First, we're going to kick off the spirit of conversation that we want to cultivate, which is one that embraces experimentation and the inherent risks of experimentation. And we're going to share with you the problem that we are working on, and we worked on all of yesterday, which was to livestream some 360 videos. So that's the first thing we'll talk about. Then we're going to hear case studies or conversation starters from artists in both cities to hear what they're working on, what's exciting about that. And last, we're going to attempt to have a conversation between our two cities, between our room here in Kingston and Ian's room in Prague and see if we can get transnational conversation running. I just need one more set of hands. And I also just want to mention that this, like so many of our conversations here at Fulda, is an experiment. We haven't done this before. And so this is my first time facilitating a conversation over distance between two cities. And things might go wrong. And speaking of things that might go wrong, that takes us right into our sharing our experiences from yesterday. And Ian, I wonder if you want to describe what we were working on yesterday. Yes. So what we wanted to do, we've been working a lot around mixed reality and integrating VR with live performance to try and showcase how the capabilities of that is some of the opportunities for that. One of our goals with this session was to do a bi-directional VR linkup in which we would stream an immersive view of each place into the other place. We put a lot of effort into making sure we had adequate bandwidth, the appropriate equipment, and enough knowledge to know how to do it. And then we're extremely afforded for a number of different reasons, which come up every so often, so that we're continuing to work on that, so that hopefully by the end of both events, which culminate this weekend, that we'll be able to make that sort of linkup or continue to work on that. Our goal was to be able to show you a 3D view and show you everybody in the room at the same time streaming through VR headset, and likewise, coming in the direction, not to get too tucked into it, because everybody sort of threw as much energy into it as I think was humanly possible. We were here up until the point in which we were getting pushed out of the space last night trying to solve this. There are a variety of issues of trying to integrate technology like that, trying to get that amount of data going from place to place, connecting to the appropriate stream. At some point, I think we've determined last night that between a YouTube policy change and their persnickety streaming settings, that they decided that today they didn't like us. In other spaces, we've gotten it to work without an issue. So we wanted to proceed anyway to have this conversation about 360 streaming VR content and how that gets integrated in the various ways, even though that we didn't have that, because that's the experimental nature of integrating technology into our practice is that oftentimes it doesn't work, and we figure it out. Maybe on our end, I could pass the mic over to Sophie who was troubleshooting, attempting to set up the 360 camera to just go into detail about some of the roadblocks that we encountered. And before I do, Ian, I just want to say that the papers on your laptop are in... We can hear them when they move against the microphone, or something. Sophie! Thanks, Adrienne. So yeah, to go very briefly into the persnickety details of what we were up against yesterday, we were working with a Yee 360 camera, which has recently released a camera that is set up to live stream, and there's an interface through the camera that you connect to through your phone to make that happen. In order to connect to the Wi-Fi here, there wasn't an opportunity to use a username password, so we couldn't use the university's Wi-Fi connection. So we set up our own router, and then we're working through our own Wi-Fi connection. And then we're still coming up against roadblocks when we were trying to launch the live stream itself. And Ian proposed that perhaps it's a new policy that YouTube introduced, that you need to have 1,000 plus subscribers to live stream from a phone. And because the camera is linked through a phone, we were up against, so we thought that might be the possibility. And then I worked with Martin at the end of the day, because from the National Arts Center, because they have 4,000 subscribers to their YouTube channel to try to launch the live stream through their YouTube channel, and we were still up against roadblocks. So I have the camera, I have two Oculus. Throughout the festival, I'm gonna aim at lunch breaks to sort of give it a try again. And if anyone has ideas about how to troubleshoot or has experience working with the Yi camera or doing live stream in 360, I'm happy to, I'd love to learn from you, and I'm happy to give it a try again. And if Ian's able to get it set up on his end, we have the Oculus headsets and can look at what's going on in Prague from here. So if we're able to make the connection in either direction, hopefully we will before the end of the festival, and I'll be continuing to work on that. And if I can add just a bit of detail, one of the reasons we have the Yi camera is usually it's our backup camera for doing live streams. So. Maybe it's not the best backup camera. Apparently, it's a good backup camera, it's not a good first choice. Because hopefully you never have to use the backup. Okay, well, I think that we're gonna move into our next section of our conversation, which is the conversation starters and I'm gonna hand that over to you Ian. Yeah, so we have two people here, they're the people that you can see with me. I've got Dr. Andrew Sampre. We talked about this yesterday. I've known Andrew Sampre. Sampre. The funny part about it is that Andrew and I have worked together for years now and this has come up with a number of that. Cause whenever I think about how it's spelled in, I'm getting it wrong. And Beth Cates, who many I think in the room know. We've asked each on both sides to talk a little bit about the work that they're doing. So I'm gonna ask over to Andrew to start that over and we'll do, we'll pass it back and forth between our two locations. Okay, hi everybody, hi Canada, hi room. So let's see. So my name is again, is Andrew Sampre. Let's see, I'm a researcher in digital sonography and technologies for stage performance. I work mostly at a school in Western Switzerland called La Manufacture. And then I also am a co-founder of a research lab, a private research lab called Place Lab where we build technologies for geolocative, data visualization and that sort of thing. And then lastly, I'm the head of engineering for Toaster Lab, which is an organization I work on with Ian. And in that context, we develop technologies further for augmented reality performance. So that's me, I don't know if you want me to go further now. Yeah, would you talk a little bit about what the themes that creates geolocative mixed reality performance? Yeah, sure. So there's a couple of different things here. There's kind of, started to talk about this a little bit earlier, but there's a technological component and then there's kind of the social performance component and I'm super interested in both of these. So in the context of my research, I'm mostly interested in what does it mean to do this at all? What does it actually mean to have a performance that's mediated across different time but also space? What does it mean to time shift storytelling, change the sequences of things? And how is the audience different now than it used to be, what are the expectations? So there's a whole bag of questions which I hope you can talk about that I'm actually super interested in. And then in the context, especially at the Toaster Lab stuff, there's a bunch of technical problems that I think we're all familiar with, which is how do you actually build systems and how do you actually create a geolocative AR experience? And one of the problems that we've identified is that the expectation of both the audience and the people who produce it is generally higher than the tools that are available. So it's like, I really wanna do this thing because I've seen it on my phone. I don't really have the expertise and so I kind of settle for halfway. And so concretely what we're trying to do at Toaster Lab, I mean we have specific projects but kind of the broader picture that I'm interested in on the engineering standpoint is to try to create a set of tools which are more broadly available that will let us raise that foundation so that we can all collectively go from how do I do this thing to was that an interesting one or not? So we kind of move the experience up a bit. So we're working on that and we have again some specific projects that we can talk about but we're trying to really build out an infrastructure so you can accelerate this process so that we can see a whole lot more of these in the world. Can you talk a little bit about one of those around one of the projects that we're working on right now? Can you talk a little bit about where we are in the middle of what the project now known as Trail-off? Trail-off project, I feel like I want to get into it but I'm not going to do that. We actually have the director of this project sitting in the room. I'm not going to put it on the spot but I am now on the spot because I have to talk very nicely about this project. It's actually a lovely project. So the Trail-off project is for the Philadelphia Park Commission, sorry, Pennsylvania Environmental Council. Thank you. And it's a project where it was a jury selection of hunters who have written stories for specific trails which are in Philadelphia. So on one level the idea is that it's essentially an audio tour that you'll go and you can listen to a tour as you walk the trail but I think that we're all super interested in injecting that with a lot more subtle and not so subtle interesting changes. So it's a lot more than sort of just the podcast. The stories themselves for example are not, they're not your typical kind of trail narrative. I don't want to speak for any of the authors but they're all very different in wonderful ways. And then the structure is also something that we're working on now but we're trying to work on giving the authors to write and adapt their stories to the structure of the trail as someone might walk it. But we have all sorts of interesting questions about different types of mobility and how people are able to traverse the trails. What does it mean to be finished? For example, if you don't feel capable of being on a trail, what does it mean to revisit the trail? So there's a whole bag of super fascinating storytelling questions that we're encountering. And again, I'm splitting this two ways. So then there's also technical problems which are technical issues that we have to figure out which is okay, we've got the story, they've got some audio components which are voice but we also have sound. We also have perhaps music, we've got some ambient music, we've got cues, we've got the app to build. So how do we mix all of these pieces together? So that gets a little bit sort of what I was talking about earlier about the infrastructure. So we're also trying to build out a kind of offering infrastructure because this project itself is distributed. I'm based in Switzerland, Eons in Canada. The project is in Philadelphia. The authors are from most of the Netherlands, Philadelphia region. So the trails, sorry I'm repeating you I think the mic is here. So the trails are in Philadelphia. So we have a distributed team as well. So we've got a lot kind of, I'm super excited about it. It's definitely a project where we're kind of inventing it literally as we go. So we're like, oh yeah, we need that. Which is actually again a lot of what I do. I generally sit, it's like a weird kind of position. I really like what you're talking about. It's something like that but I also code at the same time. So it's like, I call it code development but it's like I literally sit with people who are developing the project and try to build the tools as we go. Thank you. Yeah. Who joins us from Kingston? Our first speaker here in Kingston is Dada Jain and I'm gonna ask Dada to introduce herself and tell us about your work. You have about 10 minutes. Hi, I'm Dada Jain. I work with the University of Waterloo at the Games Institute and I'm a research associate. And what I do as a research associate, essentially I started making projects with them, making interactives and we started talking about virtual reality and that moved into me basically talking to everybody that I could who works in virtual reality around the world going to festivals and building a network internationally of creators and industry people and researchers and that's been the first phase that we've done and now what we're moving into now is building collaborations and I have two roles essentially. One of them is generally designing collaborations and working with researchers and creatives and industry to figure out what are the intersection points, how can we find a way of working that actually genuinely gives you something that you're really interested in that is a problem for you. So a lot of that is finding out who's in the network and then assembling in very kind of specific and tailored ways projects. My, now I can walk, that's nice. So basically I do this work of talking to people and finding out what they're interested in and I think personally that sort of underlines all the work I do. I also have a production company where I'm the creative director, it's called Velvet Icons and we're a new media production company. We work across forms, we're developing a web series, we're looking at co-producing a VR piece and what brings together all my different work is really being interested in individuals and what they're genuinely interested in. I have this kind of deep personal aversion to people doing something that doesn't matter to them and I think that drives everything. So what I try to do when I'm developing the research projects is say okay, what is actually going to be useful and interesting and that you can explore maybe in a way if you're working with the university that you can't explore when you have a very strict production timeline or a very strict product timeline. So what we can do is we can kind of talk about these problems that go a little bit deeper, that are a little bit maybe more open-ended or less directly for one specific project because what we can't do is develop research projects that go really quickly. We have much slower timelines at the university so that means we can open up these problems, set up conversations and then develop projects where you're exploring them in kind of more careful and measured ways. So the way that I think about designing a project then is I find out who's involved or who should be involved and then I figure out really carefully what do they actually want from this, what kind of research output is important and then I try to design the project so it's almost built to different research outputs, different ways of engaging are built into a production timeline and I find that's an important way to work because I have, again, it's almost a personal aversion to people coming in and saying let's do something but then they agree to it but they're not talking about the same thing so it ends up being not quite what anybody wants. That's like the thing I hate most in the world. And so that's one of the ways that I'm working at the Games and Shoot and the other way is my specific interest is coming from a writing and filmmaking background. I'm very interested in storytelling so I come to VR and my initial interest in VR is how do you tell stories? Like how does it become a medium where creators are communicating through it to the audience? And so I really like to work with, I am here actually working on the Thousand Island Playhouse Residency and working with a playwright, Nick, who's over there, to kind of think through, okay, how do you as a creator want to think in this form? I think that one of the opportunities and interesting things in VR is or I specifically am working in 360, but any new medium is, if you're coming from a form where you're familiar with it, you've grown up with theater, you've grown up with film, then you understand really how, say, a close-up works at an intuitive level. You have that connection, you have that understanding. You can almost figure out how, without even thinking of that step of translating from I want people to feel this way about this character to a close-up. You just naturally visualize it. And I think there's a few steps when you're working in a new medium to take what it is you're imagining people feeling about this character or in this scene into how do you stage that and thinking about it. So I like to work very systematically but from that very personal perspective with people. And so that goes to working with, I've done a few workshops working with playwrights, specifically thinking about, okay, how do we translate the way that you think into 360 space if it's not familiar to you? And also doing some more kind of concentrated, we're developing some more concentrated specific studies on thinking about the grammar of the medium. So the way that you have continuity in film and that allows you to create an illusion of continuous space, how do you direct attention, what are the tools, what are the things and sort of thinking about systematizing that and approaches to explaining that that can make it clear and can make it more easily accessible to actually work in that form. I would say that's awesome. Thank you. Thank you. So Ian, that's our first speaker over here, over back to you. So this is gonna be one of our technical challenges is that because of the test with sound before, Beth joining us from another instance of our chat, of our Zoom link. So I'm gonna turn it over to Beth Pates and we're going to make sure that we don't create some intense feedback in the room. Take it away back. Okay, this also means that I can, as Ian said, go rogue and I can, at a point later in the conversation, take you into the blue hour and show you the magic that's happening in the other part of the Hockey Arena where it used to be called. And we're linking up this because apparently my voice doesn't work through other microphones, which is weird. So I'm Beth Pates. I know a lot of you in that room, which is really exciting. And I was there with a lot of you last year and now I'm here sweating in Prague. I am a lighting set mixed reality and media designer based in Calgary and Toronto and Blythe. And I've been doing this for a long time. I was an early adopter of a lot of digital technologies and I'm right now in the middle of a master's degree at the University of Calgary where I'm working in drama and computer science and I'm looking at emerging technologies. So augmented reality or AR, virtual reality would be our machine learning, natural language processing, artificial intelligence of different kinds and what I like to call carbon reality or the stuff that we're made of. And I'm looking at the ways that those things intersect with performance and performance design and performance creation. And I'm also looking at it from the perspective as a digital dramaturge, to something that I've been working to define over the last few years. And that is, it's looking at the digital dramaturgy, the dramaturgy of the digital, the content, the method of delivery. I think even the dramaturgy of code would be something very interesting to think about and how it fits in then to the dramaturgy of performance and the lead creator of the major digital strategy fund that is going to be announced more formally and more publicly with four new play development centers, which is then about in a similar way to the previous speaker, looking with playwrights, particularly with dramaturges and looking at the digital and dramaturgy and expanding the vocabulary, opening up the vocabulary for people who work in more traditional ways and how can we share all of the knowledge that as we earlier called ourselves in our offline conversations, the unicorns that we've been connecting from different places, the people looking at performance and these emerging technologies, which is different than the gaming world, but bringing all that knowledge from the gaming world and seeing what does it mean? What does it mean as the technology changes on a weekly basis? You talked about your... I'm going to talk loudly so we can hear you on your headset so I don't have to switch between. You talked a little bit about the creative side. Could you talk just a little bit about Barry the Wren? So Barry the Wren, which is a really interesting lineage. It's a project that I started at the University of Calgary. It was a collaboration with the drama department and the evolutionary swarm lab, which is the computer science lab that I'm a part of at the University working under Christian Jacobs, our professor and Neil Christensen, who's a student in the computer science side. And I created this project that's turned into my thesis project but is continuing to have a life beyond it. And it was actually for those of you who are Ontarians, particularly you'll know the Donnelly story and a couple of years ago, Paul Thompson and Gil Garrett and I created a play about Robert Donnelly and in that story, I discovered a woman whose voice had basically been erased from history. And I brought this woman into one particular fact of her having exhumed her Donnelly husband's bones and encased them in a steel casket and yet was completely absent from the history. I brought that into the computer science lab and I said, let's look at this. And Neil, who is concerned about ideas of reality and breaking reality and what does reality mean anymore? And I worked with an actor and using photogrammetry, which is the creation of 3D digital objects by photographing carbon rail objects, using photogrammetry, virtual reality, augmented reality, pass-through cameras and live performance created a piece where a one-on-one performance piece where Annie got to finally tell her story directly to you and where we really played with the idea of the overused presence idea. So the presence of a human in a virtual world with you in a space that she wasn't present with you in the virtual space, she was present with you in the carbon space, but you couldn't see her. And the ways that that gave us access to empathy and emotion and intimacy that we were playing with and different ways of experiencing object too through both the virtual object and real objects and playing with perception and playing with how far into storytelling could we get? What story did these objects hold and how could we use all of these really intimate methods of technology? How could we make the technology intimate and real? I'm gonna mute myself, okay? All right, good. All right, thank you, Matt. Adrian, I'm gonna turn it back to you for that side of the link up. Thank you, Ian. Our last speaker here in Kingston is Janani Balasubramanian, and I'm gonna hand you the mic and I'm gonna get you to follow me out here. Cool. Hi, my name is Janani Balasubramanian. I was asked to tell you a little bit about my work and some of the questions that I'm thinking about in relation to it and in relation to augmented, virtual, mixed, whatever word we're using now, reality. So what I do, I'm a writer, I make games, and I'm a performance creator based out in New York City and I'm in residence at the Public Theater as well as the Department of Astrophysics at the Museum of Natural History. So a lot of my work is based in really deep collaboration with who I consider the coolest scientists in the world, my astrophysicist friends at the Museum and in a couple other parts of the United States. So what I try to do is use old fashioned storytelling as well as games and play in concert with different kinds of new media, whatever makes sense with whatever story we're trying to tell from the universe. So I use augmented virtual reality whenever it's appropriate, whenever it makes sense to help bring the poetry and drama and the stories that are happening in the universe around us into the hands and minds of more audiences. So to invite people into the story of science and into the story of theater and to performance in a way also, especially for audiences who have not seen themselves as part of the story of science or theater. Astrophysics in particular is this really rigorous discipline, right? To be an astrophysicist, to be a modern astrophysicist, you have to be a mathematician and a physicist and a computer scientist and a data scientist and crucially also a storyteller and because it's ultimately the entire discipline of astrophysics is built on creating new and interesting ways of seeing, right? So they're taking what I consider an impossibly small amount of data. I think the equivalent to you would be like if I gave you a lock of hair but told you nothing about it and then asked you to write a biography of the person that that hair came from. That is what astrophysicists are doing with the amount of data that they're able to gather from the universe through different kinds of telescopes. So there's a very human, exciting storytelling component to the work that they do and I am passionate about bringing that side of it to more audiences, especially people who have not had access to maybe the mathematics and physics that is required to go through the rigor of everyday astrophysics. So one medium that I work in for a number of different projects is audio augmented reality. So I build projects where audience members gather in large and small spaces, some projects large, some projects more intimate. They're offered headphones and through the headphones they're given narrative instruction and music and through that they are animating the story of something one of my astrophysicist buddies is researching, right? Some really contemporary data research in astronomy. We tend to focus on celestial objects that are unfamiliar to most people or celestial phenomena that we're just, you know, figuring out that most people don't know about that we as humanity collectively barely know about. And what I try to create are these experiences where people are able to embody these celestial phenomena. So even without, again, going through all the mathematical rigor of it, you have attained some embodiment of the physics itself. And in doing so also opened up new kinds of social questions and new questions related to your own lives and the lives of the people around you, new metaphorical spaces that we can access by telling different kinds of stories about the sky and the universe. I think I'm constantly inspired by how science itself as a discipline like theater also, but really science itself requires many different kinds of scientists to be in the room to excavate different kinds of science. I take a lot of heart in the fact that the scientists that I'm working with are looking at objects that are literally invisible to our eyes that exist in wavelengths outside of the optical and are also thinking about movements of collective systems. And so for me, those are exciting metaphorical spaces to explore as a storyteller. So I have three questions that are emerging for me in my work overall, and then specifically in these kinds of audio AR pieces. So one is how to, I think relevant to some things other folks have been talking about how to both in a technological sense and in a dramaturgical sense, make those experiences responsive to audience movement, gesture, and collective movement. So again, we can actually faithfully embody what's happening in the sky, but it happens as an organic process. And you don't have to tell people every step of the way, now you're this and now you're a star in a co-moving group, but rather you kind of experience as something that happens all around you. A second question that I have is again, both a tech and a dramaturgical question is how to make immersive experiences more broadly, but specifically the kinds of audio AR work that I focus on. Adaptive and accessible to disabled audience members and to help that happen from the get go so that accessibility doesn't become a matter of maybe slapping super titles on a piece or having interpretation after the fact, but becomes part and parcel of our compositional practice and kind of an interesting place to work from rather than something that we consider a roadblock to look at after we've made the whole dang thing. A third question that I'm thinking about, which I also want to use to talk about a specific project is how to by combining these kinds of works that have storytelling references from multiple fields. For me, that's theater, astrophysics, and also literature. How we can make works that live kind of like chameleons, like artistic chameleons, can live in theater contexts, can also live in educational contexts, can also live outside in somebody's backyard and can also live inside a science museum, a science center. So to that, and one project that I have been working on with an astrophysicist collaborator is a piece called The Gift. So I'm working with Dr. Natalie Guznell, who's a stellar astrophysicist at Colorado College, and she researches the really special and intriguing lives of blue straggler stars. So I'm gonna tell you a little bit about blue straggler stars. So I know you can't see the stars right now, except the sun, which is also a star. The stars have not gone away just because the blue sky is up. It's just when the sun is up, it dominates everything else around us. So the curtain has been pulled in a way, right? The sun is pulling our theater curtain for us. So if you were in a night sky, just imagine the night sky for a second. About half the dots that you see there, about half those stars you see are actually pairs of stars, are actually binary systems, right? But because they're so far away from us, our eyes can't resolve them optically as two different stars, which to me is a very exciting story in and of itself, right? But half of the things out there are actually both a star and its companion. They might be different in scale. One might be bigger, larger. One might be one kind of star. One might be another. But there's these binary systems that are working very closely together, that are often born together and co-move through the universe. So what Natalie does is a kind of storytelling, a forensics, an excavation of a particular kind of story, of a particular kind of star that I find really witchy and fascinating. So what she looks at are these blue stragglers, which are stars that are bluer, hotter, and appear younger than they actually are. And one pathway through, yeah, interesting. Same here. So one pathway through which these blue stragglers are created is through the process of mass transfer. So some binary star systems are so close to one another that they actually move mass from one to the other. And so she looks at a blue straggler that is sitting alongside a white dwarf, which, as she says, is something like the stellar equivalent of a lump of coal. And she says, what happened there? And that's the story that together we're animating through this piece. So the story of what happened there is that these stars were very close together. What has become the white dwarf used to be actually a red giant star, which is a phase that many stars enter towards the end of their lives. And they're kind of puffed up and red and giant. And that star through kind of this gravitational tipping that happens, starts sending its mass over to its friend. That process of the mass transfer happens over tens of millions of years, but if a star lived in your lifetime, it would happen in about five minutes. So imagine if your whole body was somehow transferred from you to your friend in about five minutes. That's what happens. That's what happens to these two companions. So then that donor star becomes a white dwarf and is just sitting there essentially having lost everything. And the other star becomes a blue straggler, which has this infusion of mass and becomes bluer, hotter, and is kind of living its life fast and hard because it's burning its fuel up really quickly. So we wanted to create a piece to animate these really fascinating, beautiful, lively stories. And I think undo some of the ways that stars have been dominated, the story of stars and what happens in the universe has been dominated by kind of very masculine and warlike understanding of what outer space is. And there are a lot of other ways to understand outer space too. And so we through a process of kind of iteration, like we came together, we made one piece that was just kind of a movement game. It was really fun. It's really fun developing astronomical work in a city that has an open sky, which we do not have access to in New York City. So I try to get out of there because we have too much light pollution when we make these projects. Then the two of us came and played around in some studios in New York City for a while and we made something that was kind of like half art, half science game, that was fun. And then we thought to ourselves, okay, but we wanna make something that actually is integrating these forms, these fields, these disciplines. And so we came up with this piece called The Gift where the form we're using is melds, basically a lot of my favorite things because I grew up as a nerdy, lonely child. And to me, the first type of augmented reality that I experienced was reading, was literature, right? My own imagination. That to me is an augmentation of reality. And so we have this form where people are offered a book as well as audio. And so the reading becomes an at once kind of private as well as social experience. And so they're asked to do things to move through space, to interact with the book, the space, and one another. And in doing so, bring to life the story of this star and its companion. And hopefully build some other little companionships along the way. So that piece is in process right now. I think our next stage is figuring out what are, again, some of the kind of interesting dramaturgical things that can happen with the interactions between audience members and the technology we're using to employ it in concert with these very old fashioned, simple techniques of theater. So I think in the spirit of our community agreements, I'm just gonna say that's the end of what I have to say. Thank you. So now we're going to move into some responses and questions now. And we're going to start with a question. It's gonna be a little bit like a game of tennis. That's how we envision it. So we have a bunch of balls in the air and then Prague is gonna hit something over here and then we're gonna respond with an answer. And then, so maybe what I'll do is I would like to ask Gada and Janani to bring your chairs up here and then that'll reduce our travel time. And Ian, I'm gonna ask you to start our volley, our question and answer volley. Yeah, and I'm actually grateful that you brought both of the artists together because that's sort of this question I want to open up to both of you. We had a conversation before the session earlier today, we're six hours ahead. So we had a bit of time to chat earlier with a number of other collaborators as well, working and interested in this intersection of technology and live performance both within what we do and outside of it. So we expand to practices. And a big topic that came up is what are the frameworks in which that work is able to happen? A lot of us, but not all of us, are tied to universities in different ways. We find funding in different ways, we attach to institutions in different ways. And I'm curious how, and you both talked about a multitude of ways in which your work gets created. And so the question there is, if you can sort of talk a little bit about the challenges of working within effectively a discipline that doesn't necessarily have a clear delineation. We're talking about performance, we're talking about astronomy, we're talking about AI, we're talking about computer science, talking about being very fluid between these areas. And I wanted to ask you about how you experience that fluidity in executing your projects. So you mean in the structuring of the projects or in actually working through the projects or both? Yeah, well, the initial question is the structuring of the projects and how that works together. You talked a little bit about it, but then also how that impacts ultimately the work that is generated out of that. I guess the biggest way that I think that impacts what I do is I try to think about that a lot at the beginning of a project and be very clear about how the different people are going to be thinking. Like I think there's a sort of initial framing stage where I would not just think about what are the things that are going to be done, but who are the people that are going to do them and what languages are they using, how are they going to, and so it's almost like a get to know you period where I'm trying to find out what do I need to know about their domain to actually be able to speak and I do sometimes a kind of translation role. I think it's a lot in designing, for me, my approach is very much in working with individuals and then spending a lot of time at the beginning figuring out what is the specific structure of this project and what do we want from it? I think that one of the things that I'm very interested in is visualizing an end that has multiple outcomes that are personalized. I think the relationship between what is interesting to people and how do you actually have a process where people are actually getting to engage with the thing that is interesting to them as opposed to a sort of morphed version of it is probably the most interesting piece of that for me. So I think there's the language, there's how are people going to communicate at what points in the structure of the project are they going to be able to communicating and these are all design questions, essentially. Is that, I feel like I missed something key in your question, though. I don't think so. I mean, yeah, no, I think that's excellent, thank you. I think for me, the most valuable way to think about structuring these collaborations is thinking about, actually is a metaphor that also, again, comes to me from astronomy. So a way that a lot of celestial objects stars in otherwise form is in these molecular gas clouds where something triggers some action and the gas eventually accretes into various types of celestial objects in these gas clouds that are also called stellar nurseries, you know, these birthing grounds for these new objects. So for me, what that means is I have really appreciated being able to spend a great deal of time with the people that I collaborate with, not always working on a project. So when I hang out with my astronomy research group in New York, I go to the meetings, I hang out with them, I spend time with them one on one, not always with a project goal. Sometimes we're working on something specific, but to me that time of building fluency and ease with each other's practices, vocabularies, what my scientists friends are thinking about on a day-to-day basis that is just about their own lives. Also, the cycles that their work goes through, the roadblocks that they're hitting, that stuff to me has been just as valuable as the time that I have spent maybe just hearing one of them talk or reading one of their new papers. One of my frustrations in how a lot of art science collaborations are imagined, maybe institutionally, is people think that if we hang out for a couple hours that something cool will come of it. And I actually think we need so much more time together because without it, that's what leads to bad science and art and bad science metaphors, especially in art. But when we have the time together, there's some really wonderful things that open up. Like for me, it has been a great opportunity to learn from scientific research practices for my own work. I've also really enjoyed seeing members of my research group in New York get excited about their own creative impulses and access those in events that we've put together or co-created in different spaces. So I guess part of structuring the collaboration, structuring collaborations across fields for me is thinking about that balance of informal and formal work and also times that you hang out without working. Thank you. I have a question for us. I do have a question for you. It's like you were reading the same script or something. I know. I stopped wrestling at all. I can't help but think when I'm listening, because I think I'm maybe the only person in the six of us who's not affiliated with a university unless you wanna call it the University of Mom. So I can't help but thinking, I have two young kids, four and six years old, and I spend a lot of time thinking about their development and how do I share large ideas with them in a way that they can understand, right? So I always thinking about my audience when I'm talking about, I don't know, why is the sky blue? That classic question or what are those things in the women's washroom that you pay 25 cents for, which is always a fun exclamation to do. But when I was listening to you speak today, I was thinking who are the audiences for your works, Beth and Andrew, and how are they, are you seeing patterns in terms of the socioeconomic, maybe socioeconomics of demographics of where those audiences are coming from and do those audience patterns match where you imagine or where you want or desire your work to be landing? Cause I can't help thinking about who gets access to the technology and the equipment and the work and who doesn't. And so I guess that's the question behind my question and what are the strategies that you're using or the thinking that you're using to broaden that reach? Just a little question. Let's go ahead, you wanna jump in first? Okay, yeah. Okay, there we go. I was actually just telling Andrew a story about this, so we, Neil and I co-creator for the run, we did a sort of table presentation of the project at the computer science showcase at the university a couple of months ago, where we just had the pictures and then it was us trying to give our life, it's the elevator pitch, but it's the elevator if it was in the Empire State Building because the project's so complicated, but we were talking to a group of young people. I would sort of loosely say like 18 to 22 and we're talking about a story, there's an old story in history and when we sort of went through everything, one of the guys turned green and he said, oh my God, I would totally pay to see that. And that was a really interesting experience of like, okay, so we're making something that young people wanna engage with. We got the same feedback from the pretty, like it was pretty homogenous demographic and when we actually performed the piece, but I would say too, there's a democratization of the technology coming and so it will be more accessible. It got more accessible a couple of weeks ago, it's gonna get more and more accessible. And I think it was part of using university resources too to sort of bring the projects out into the wider world where they're being subsidized by multiple different places. And that's where these relationships and these living with scientists and working with different places starts to become really valuable, I think for the wider population. And it's gonna start really small, like I was talking to someone the other day, but like how do we do this for a larger audience? And it's gonna start piecemeal, it's gonna start thinking about doing it in different ways. It's part of our audience actually in an Oculus and part of the audience is it's only 10 people should get to see it, but we find a way to subsidize it. There are also companies like Unreal that are offering giant mega grants to think about this technology in a different way. So I don't have an answer, it's a huge question. It's definitely a problem as I sit here with a thousand dollar phone and know that not everybody has access to that. But we're also seeing it get more affordable. So hopefully that keeps going. Oh, right, okay, we're gonna hand over. I mean, this is a big topic that we've talked about on our project, so. Yeah, so I mean I adore this question and it's also all I can really offer is some more trouble, I guess. Getting to tell a story is an incredibly privileged position no matter where you're at. Being the person who's on the stage who has the mic and who gets the speakers is an incredible weight. And I think when we're working with technology, especially we have to be super careful about what it is that we're amplifying, especially because a lot of what we talk about when we talk about technology comes out of a particular development cycle which doesn't observe any real ethics honestly. But I mean it's sort of like it's the spearheaded front of a capitalist system that just produces what sells really well. And then we pretend often that it's neutral and we can use it as grounds for storytelling but it's not neutral on the slightest. So there's so much here. I mean there's so much here to unpack about where we stand and what we get to use and what we amplify. And I think just being really careful about that is incredibly important. I mean for me personally one of the things that's both part of the problem but also I think a little glimmer of the solution. I'm 42-ish, I guess I'm sure you're getting know what I am. I'm 42. I'm generation X. I grew up on the internet. This is the point of the story. I literally grew up on the internet, right? So as a nerdy child myself, this was before anybody knew what the web was because it didn't exist. It was before the internet was a thing. It was like you're a computer nerd. And that meant that you didn't go outside and you didn't have many friends. But the thing was that I had a lot of friends. I had a lot of international friends. I had a lot of people who were discussing some really interesting stuff that I wasn't seeing in other places. And I know that this is true for a generation of folks and continues to be true for marginalized communities. I mean mainstream as well. But if you look at what is working in social networking, right? You're seeing amazing things happening in the queer community. You're seeing amazing things happening in Black communities. It's not perfect. But my question now is where do we take this? So this is really like very deeply personal struggle for me. Again I grew up on the internet. I worked for a long time in social media research for a big tech company. And the myth that we all had was that this was gonna be this great democratizing force. And that's not political momentum that we find ourselves in at all. But as storytellers, can we counter that? Can we amplify additional stories, other stories? Can we bring different voices to the table? And I have to believe that we can. Otherwise I wouldn't be involved in arts or theater. There has to be a way to do that. So yeah, I mean there's a few projects that I have in mind. Thank you. I don't know, I'm just gonna kinda, so this is the part where we're gonna start the questions rolling. So I have a follow up question cause to take advantage of my privilege of holding the mic, which is you talked about who you invite to the table and being mindful about that. So if you have projects where you're doing that, I'd love to hear examples of who you're inviting to the table and how that's addressing these questions. Can you talk about that? Do you want me to talk about that? No, I'm using the talk about groundwork. You want me to talk about groundwork, so okay. Andrew is deferring to me, because we've been working on a project for a while called Groundworks, which is in collaboration primarily with a dance company called Dancing Earth, which is run by Rulon, talking to who is essentially a pan-indigenous dance company. So there's a lot of different populations that come in there. The genesis of that project from their side is that there have been a number of collaborators that are working primarily in Northern California, a number of collaborators from local indigenous communities who have been contributing to the work and it was let's spend a year turning that around. So it was a give back period. So part of that meant spending lots of time embedded with a number of communities surrounding the San Francisco Bay Area. They had already intended to do that project when because we were developing things and Rulon is also known in ecological performance circles and that's where a lot of my practice has been and work has been. I reached out saying we have this work in which we are looking at doing a lots of site environmental work. Is it something that's interesting to you? And as it turned out that a number of our collaborators were saying like what we really want to do is instead of bringing things onto stages where we're bringing things in, we want to see how we can bring people out to the places where we are. But as sort of a highlight of this question of access, there is one of the communities that we're working with is the Point Arena Manchester Band of Promo-Indians and their reservation is calling it large is generous. A few thousand people, the reservation itself is a few hundred people, but it is the largest like big town infrastructure near the Manchester cable station, which is where the internet comes from Japan to come to North America and it's where Hawaii connects. So you have this cable station that is the connection of the backbone and then you've got a community that up until half a decade ago didn't have consistent broadband to access themselves. The area is still really underserved and part of that is like there's not a lot of market demand and a lot of it switched to mobile and you sort of have to drive half an hour to get to a proper signal. And so in working with this community there's a lot of those questions in building the application that we're now building. We've been developing content that's an immersive content, video, audio, other things that are experienced that end up being geolocated but then the question then becomes like the priority for who can access this is that community. So if we don't have strong Wi-Fi signals if we don't even have 4G service out there how do we deliver what our very data hungry experience is and how do we work with technology that is otherwise expensive becoming more affordable? But then the big technical question that we've been battling across a number of different projects is how do we make things accessible with the devices that people have? How do we meet people where they are with the experiences so that we can have this dialogue as opposed to making it something that is locked off to somebody who can afford a new headset, someone who can afford to refresh their phone every two or three years and all those different factors that sort of in a version of mainstream is an expectation that you will have something relatively current. So that's sort of one example about how that's manifolds and that's manifesting in okay this code needs to run across different platforms that's more difficult to develop than developing off of one developing something for this apple would be easier. Trying to make it as web oriented as possible trying to keep the data minimized all those different infrastructural questions become implicit and then start to shape the work as well you start to change the shape of the work because of the person who you want to access and it can't for simple technical reasons you're doing something wrong. Thank you. Do we want to open it up to questions from our room now. I think maybe I've asked our artists here on this end to listen carefully as our colleagues are speaking. Do you have any questions for our friends in Prague or vice versa, Prague to Kingston about the work that was I'm scanning the room. You're scanning the room where the brains are melting. They are melting at this towards the end of our but we have one over here. We're going to take advantage of the limits of our technology. My questions for sort of all the presenters and it's kind of a technical one. If someone was interested in getting into starting to work with or experiment with this new media is there equipment or technical resources that you would recommend accessing I guess. Do we want to start over here for someone starting to work in like VR and AR do you mean in mixed reality is there are their equipment or resources that you would recommend that they start with. Wait for it. Yeah. What sounds specific experience basically in all this in general like what I guess one of your tools that you're using and then if you know of other tools that would be more accessible at the level without higher funding that would be something. I guess my answer would be it really depends on what your interest is. If you are interested in 360 storytelling I would say getting a very simple 360 camera and playing with it with people in the space is a really good place to start. If you're interested in virtual spaces like it really depends on what you're interested in doing and what like just starting working in Unreal or Unity is a great place for people for some people but it I would say actually starting with figuring out why you're interested in the technology and what you would like to do with it and then finding your most basic way to take you to the thing that you're genuinely interested in would be the thing I would start with because if you start with a technology that is actually not going to apply to where your interest is then it's going to not help you at all you'll end up playing with a small camera but your real interest is in sound or how directional sound works and that's going to just take you further and further away. I'm going to offer something and this is a plug that's only going to work for people on this side but in about 20 minutes there's a workshop that just culminated here that was about doing a couple of days of using introductory tools such as some basic 360 like easy to use cameras even those and working with them are things that you can orient with your phone a lot of the thinking around it actually becomes much more it's more about wrapping your head about what that content is actually doing many of the tools outside of like specialized cameras or perhaps specialized mics are actually then end up being the same so in this workshop they were just doing like the video editing tools that we were using to edit 360 content at this point are the same ones that anybody would be using to do other content and because of the way that these things have been stored especially on the consumer level of those types of files that you could actually pretty much use anything and now YouTube and Vimeo have gotten smart about how to distribute those so for one of the projects that we've been doing that we launched on one thing because it was something that we didn't want someone to have to download something it's all web-based it's geo-located but then it just exploits bouncing over to YouTube which builds a lot of like ability to explore into the phone there's a little bit of navigational tricks in there but you'd be surprised what's there from a sound perspective I might turn it this way and I will say as it's moving as the mic is moving over there that because we do have that workshop in about 20 minutes we have about five minutes left in our room Hi I'm Bobby, sound designer from New York so there's a few I've been kind of jumping on this question of like affordable entry points especially 360 audio or 3D audio Zoom makes a really cheap recorder now I think it's H2N that can do I think it has four capsules and it can capture kind of simple ambisonic sound which kind of means sound in multiple directions also there's a if anyone programs in Max which you have to have a max license there's a really fantastic software suite called SPAT made at Earcam that for a long time cost money and about a month ago they finally decided just make it free so it's a free tool that allows you to really advance spatial audio mixing it's SPAT SPAT and that's kind of what a lot of the really fancy stuff is based on so it's kind of a great way to get started on that and hopefully I think at some point maybe there'll be a pure data version there's also other free tools super colliders and open source audio script based software that can also do spatial audio so I think you know there's a lot of communities doing spatial audio and that's kind of blowing up right now because of VR and AR so it's kind of a great time but I would say get a max license and start missing if not that then pure data thank you before we lose our connection with can I respond really quickly or is there time for me no I was just going to pass it over to you we have got one comment here before we lose you in Prague hi this is Whit McLaughlin hello Adrian it's nice seeing you across time and space I have a very quick response to where to start I'm really beguiled by the the emphasis on metaphor that you brought to your conversation media just delivers metaphor one time we were doing a project that we thought was going to be very sophisticated and our sponsors made us think down and down and down to flip phones if it couldn't go through a cellular phone we weren't going to do it and it made us essentialize our content and we actually delivered a more interesting metaphoric media based content through cellular phones than we would have if we had gone through smartphones whether we had gone into sophisticated software development and so I just want to emphasize that metaphor is what media is all about thanks thank you I love that we're all just nodding we um there's a there's a including the the proliferation of using the phrase carbon reality suppose that any other or metaphor for real space the other thing that's come up a lot is the idea of affect over effects and that's that's that's where we're sort of like landing on our t-shirt phrase on the side so in am I right in understanding that that you want out of that room or that you have to go to another workshop oh we are we are scheduled to be out of this room well I if I remember the script correctly I was going to give you the last word here you just took it away by talking after I said affects over you oh sorry that was amazing last words affect over very effective it was so effective I didn't notice it happened I want to thank you both I want to thank all three of the three of you who are on our screen right now but also the wider circle that's in the room with you down there in that hot hot hot room in Prague for joining us and for for doing this experiment with us as well as thanking our guests here we can continue our conversation a little bit more if there are still questions in our room I'm talking to the computer and I would also offer like I'll throw my contact information up on the slot which I know is being used as the primary platform and I'm sure our colleagues will too because why not check another platform but I'm happy to engage with anybody as we delve into this murky murky world yes see thank you so this is the part of the script where Ian's supposed to say I'm going to end the zoom now we just kept just keep stepping over each other's lines no I know I know so this is the part where we're going to end the zoom now thanks from this side as well for working through our our sweaty hockey dreams here at the PQ well that was fun we have some time left we have about 10 minutes left we can certainly wrap up early if we want to but I wonder if there are questions inside the space for Janani or Gada will you say your name again yes what is that Gana okay I'm curious about this idea of industry artist collaboration and the idea of people enjoying their work together and I'm curious if you could just talk more about what those frictions might be that you're specifically trying to get at or address in terms of those relationships I'm sure you mean the frictions in people working together or just like what how do you specifically industry an industry artist collaboration so usually there's a research element involved in what I do because it's with the university but so one of the things that happens when people when industry and researchers and sometimes with artists come together is that you have specific things that you researchers tend to have very specific things they're interested in and that they're working on and industry often will have very like clear problems and this is true also with artists they have a specific I feel like artists are most likely to get lost in this process because they're often the ones that aren't anchored to some institutional structure but you get these this sort of we need to research this piece and you have something that's vaguely relevant and there's some kind of monetized structure that gives you an incentive to work together so you sort of make up a compromise where it's like well we'll work on this thing and then we can actually sort of make something and it really depends on the the structure we try to do different research so sometimes when it's industry it will be actually like bringing a student on to work on a project that is basically paid for four months and then that has a very clear structure it's more the kind of longer collaborations where you're building a project that's co-funded by different groups and then you end up having these conversations where you sort of use the same words and assume you're talking about the same things but you actually the researchers really want to work on these specific problems and the industry maybe has a specific set of things they need to happen right now and so I think when you rush those conversations you don't get to you get to maybe a compromised interest or a thing that can be like this is within our research group so we can make something happen or with on the side with artists you build something that is basically coming out of your initial conversations so you have an initial conversation where people are saying okay well we're interested in recently we're starting a project in collaboration with a group at Concordia and there's a lot of interest in accessibility of VR and then there's some interest in specific sound questions and I think there can be an inclination to immediately sort of put those things together into a project and then shape it around what people initially said instead of kind of taking the time to say okay well what is it specifically about accessibility and how can that be built or what stages in the project is that a relevant question and how can we kind of open up explore that question a little bit deeper and what we can do with that question and then see how that links to this other piece so some of it is keeping questions separate and keeping people's interests separate for a while and letting them actually kind of develop and get clear and I think this goes to what you're saying about actually spending time to figure out what we want to do and where the value is going to be rather than saying things and then because and I don't know if this is true in other places but I feel like in Canada we do a lot of agreeing where we go to meetings and then we all agree and we've really had a good meeting because we've agreed to everything but we've agreed to a bunch of stuff that we don't necessarily like we did it for the sake of agreeing and I think that's a really bad place to start a project it's better to get our agreeing out of the way then figure out what we actually want to do and then design the project from there so really like build out that sort of process does that answer your question? Yeah Hi, I'm Wojtek happy to be here with you all as a VR producer I have this issue of project management and most of my team have different visions of the project and we start from something completely different than the project in the end and do you have any specific tools for like in the creative process so that everybody is on the same page? Yes, I would say so structuring the project so that you know people's responsibility really well and but starting from a point where you find out what people actually want to be doing and then give them and what are they going to be really good at doing what are they bringing to the project and structuring the project so that it lets them do the things that are important and valuable to them and structuring the project around complimentary still sets is really helpful but then also I think that it's useful to know what vision in what places has authority in the project so for example and it's different depending on the project if you're working if I'm working on a piece and I'm consulting with a director then I'm going to respect that that director's vision in a certain way and I think that knowing sort of getting like there's a sort of investment in in it's not necessarily an authority structure but in a we understand that this person is doing this sort of bringing the pieces together and trusting in that is really valuable and that's partly creating a story that actually has a space for the things that the different people on the team are doing and I think it's really important to do that initial piece of finding out what are the other what are the individual people going to bring to the project and what is it what matters to them so that the person or people that are responsible for for bringing those pieces together can constantly reflect back the individual contribution so it's kind of like a start is that make sense it's there yeah hi my question is for Jenani um is that how I is that how you Jenani your name is sorry Jenani Jenani my name is my name is Alex I was so fascinated with your presentation and I'm I just wonder if you could speak a little bit more about the way that the public engages with your work and if um how they engage is part of your artistic process uh you mean when people come to experience a work what it actually looks and feels like sorry I couldn't hear the what so when people actually experience a work how what it looks and feels like is that what you're getting at yeah and you know what the technologies you use and yes and is it a collective experience is it a solo experience and and whether or not that is something that you make part of your artistic decision making yeah totally I have a number of different kinds of projects right now that live in different ways in terms of whether they're collective or large-scale small-scale or individual experiences so it's a yes to all of those things and that becomes part of how the project is mapped and and developed and created I think when we were talking before about you know what technologies one might need access to to start working on a new media project for me actually I try to test things out as much as possible in the cheap way both in terms of money and time investment before going to the expensive way both because it's harder to you know turn the boat around once you've put in the heavy capital and time investment on our project and then you also get to just make a lot of versions of the thing so I'm getting at kind of the what technologies we use right so for prototypes for tests of things it might be as simple as asking people to bring their own phones or sticking a Bluetooth speaker in the middle of the room and no that's not going to get us the crispest audio that we're ever going to use but it'll get at the some of the questions that we're maybe trying to test if we're going to make like a beautiful handmade object eventually we'll make something out of kind of posted notes and string first so that to me is also a technology that we use to to test stuff in terms of implementing some of these audio pieces we I've worked with radio headphones that do broadcast historically for some pieces right now I'm in the process of developing new software that can work with the what is up and coming in augmented reality audio to deploy the pieces but I think a question that's on my mind that was also echoed across this is how to make a piece that maybe or how to develop that in a way that there may be A, B and C versions in terms of cost so that if there are institutions that are able to underwrite the cost of kind of the Rolls Royce version of the piece fantastic and that can happen what are also other modes of implementing the piece for communities and places that are not going to have that kind of budget so that there are ways of scaling the cost up and down while still retaining the artistic heart of the piece in terms of what it actually looks like so some of my works is people gather in a public space whether that's indoors or outdoors depending on the piece they're in a couple pieces they're offered headphones and and everybody is wearing a set and they're listening to things that offer them things to do kind of mini games to play narrative that they experience and original music and the ways they move through the space the way they interact with the audio with one another and kind of the macro patterns that are created by their interactions each convey something like they this relationship between the person and the audio is one relationship the interactions between small groups of people is one relationship and then the macro pattern is another relationship which it is actually kind of faithful to how the physics works too right the way that this objects and particles are moving follows that pattern that there are simple rules that govern the small and large scales so that's what I'm thinking about when I develop the pieces thank you so much thank you Janani thank you Gada thank you all of you here in the room before I leave there's a couple announcements first of all I wanted to say that it is quite cold in here and we've got I know we're all shivering so we are working on that to see if we can make a change in the temperature settings in this side of this room that is happening there's also the electric company theater VR works that's that there are still slots available if you want to catch that check it out you can find the spaces in the Slack channel and sign up at Mariah is your contact there and then I wondered if Jamie is around there you are I was blinded by my own presence yeah so we have a few folks who we didn't get introduced this morning and I want to just make space for that to happen hi everyone I'm Jax I'm the communications manager at HowlRound it's really great to be here I'm also really excited about embodiment and so I'm curious about how technology can aid embodiment I'm very tired right now and I think it's important to have this conversation because it's happening whether we're in it or not and so it's better that we're in it next we're gonna have Stokely so Dylan if you can be on that camera great no pressure hi my name is Stokely I use the pronouns they and them I'm the associate producer at HowlRound to answer some of the earlier questions I'm really excited right now about the brilliance and resilience of queer and trans people of color so I haven't think about us in these conversations and one word was world-making and last but not least I'm gonna I got over here to oh Dylan's got it great I'm not gonna run Dylan hello my name is Dylan Luegas my pronouns are he and him I am the newish fellow of HowlRound so I was invited and said yes because I had to but I'm actually like really excited because digital and performance is something that I am always interested in creating within my own work as an actor director and writer and it is still kind of new to me because I do a lot of like DIY stuff so it's like what can you do what was the other question I think of integration and accessibility so yeah great thank you and is there anyone else at this point who hasn't had the opportunity to introduce themselves to the room I'd love to make that space now please make yourself known ah yes behind you hi hi I'm Jill Kiley whoa sorry hi I'm Jill Kiley I'm with the National Arts Center thanks thank you so our our team is sneakily setting up lunch over to my left at the bar at the bar space there and we're taking an hour for lunch this space is available for us to hang out in as well as this lovely outdoor space and the grass thank you everybody so far for the morning