 Tyon Ng-Chan is a Hamilton-based writer, researcher, and media artist. She's worked in experimental cinema, photography, poetry, and processes of mapping. And her current projects explore object-oriented storytelling. And she is a founding member of the Hamilton Perambulatory Unit, which she's going to talk about, I think, a little bit, right? Yeah, a little bit. And which is an artist research collective that creates performative walking events. And she also teaches in the Department of Media Art at York University. So, Tyon. Thank you. Hi, everyone. These have been really great panels. Thank you for organizing. It's been like just a day of learning. So, yeah. So, we're talking about research creation. What heck is research creation? Most of you know what that is with them? It's a funding category. It's a funding category. Yeah, totally a funding category. Broadly, a lot of the effort has been put into sort of like defining, right? Like what is research creation? How is it used? What are the methodologies? So, personally, what I do is my technique is basically making place out of non-place, right? So, very... Yeah, there we go. Thanks. So, non-place is the idea that more and more of the world has no distinguishing features that make it a place, right? And these are like malls, strip malls, the highway, transit, airports. And so, how do we make place, right? Which is often, you know, stories, memories, narrative, experience, right? These are all place-making things. So, what I do with the Hamilton Prambulatory Unit, or HPU, as we call ourselves if you don't want to say the super long name, is we give walking events and mapping events. So, a lot of our things are participatory and relational, right? So, we use all these methodologies. So, a lot of this is where the research comes in, right? So, we're bringing in a lot of theories and literature from social science. It's very interdisciplinary. So, we have social science, geography, cartography, ethnography, auto-ethnography. What else is up there? Psycho-geography, right? Is, you know, basically just using the body as a sensing tool to move through space, documenting these things, and then, of course, having to share our results, right? So, this is all part of the research elements when we're working in a university, right? We're researching, and how do we do that in creative methods? So, the actual research is creative. It's performative workshops which make relations, that's part of the art part of it, is making relationships to place as well as between people. And there's a lot of, like, mobile media apps as well that help you do this. So, some of these are like Drift, Dervive, Serendipider, Indeterminate Hikes. These are all, some of them don't exist anymore, because as we know, part of the research process is based on grants, and once the grant ends, what happens, right? The work disappears. So, documentation is like a really necessary part of this. But a lot of these apps are helping you to move through space and get lost, right? Because how can we get lost these days? Everybody has GPS on their phones and maps. So, getting lost is like a large part of this. So, what we do as HPU is we help you move through space and sense the space around us. And this can be in form of our strata walk, which is one of our methodologies. And that is looking at all the different layers that make up place. And the layers can be infinite. It can be anything, right? These are some of our suggestions, like sign strata. So, as you move through, you look through texts, and you identify what texts, systems, those texts belong to. For instance, street signs, graffiti can be like interventionist or poetic text, colonial text. I love that on UBC here, you have many different languages on the signs, and that's like highlighting, you know, the different social aspects and historical aspects of place. You know, architectural strata, inanimate strata, electrical strata, like where does the electricity come from? Shiny strata, you know, what are the shiny things? Attraction strata, which refers back to the situationists who walked, you know, according to what repels and attracts you. Audio strata, tactile strata, you know, so these can go on. We have more. Story strata, right? What kind of stories can be told about a place? Cinematic strata, right? So, what images are overlaid on a place that we can find through movies? Rhythm strata, that's a nod to only the fevs, rhythm analysis, so what kinds of rhythms can you find in a place? So, this is like a framework of how do you approach placemaking, which is like a large part of our research. And so, these are some of the maps that have come up through some of the walks that we have held as the HPU. For instance, this is the animal strata. So, looking at all the animals. So, as we're walking around in a group, generally each person has a different strata because it's really hard to focus, right, on more than two strata at a time, really. This is graffiti strata. So, somebody went and documented all the graffiti that they saw on this block around the AGH, that's the Art Gallery of Hamilton, where we had this walk. This is a color, I think, color strata. This is leaves tree strata. There's another one. Trees are very popular. And this is, I think it's Wi-Fi strata, you know, so when you look on your phone and you see all the different Wi-FIs that pop up, and so somebody had actually mapped those on this trip. So, this is the research part, and this is part of the dissemination. So, I work very interdisciplinary, right? So, I am in cinema, media arts. I also do, you know, these relational walks, which are kind of performative. And also, some of my work is in visual arts. So, the gallery space, the white box. And so, some of this research goes into an interactive video sculptural installation that I did. And this is the table that you can see. This is at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, part of the show called Hamilton Now Object. And this is what it looks like up close. So, and this is another one, another iteration at Waterloo. And I think this is in Windsor, right? So, it's site-specific, everywhere that it's shown. You know, I have to reconfigure the map and the sculptural elements. The sculptural elements are made out of plaster poured into food object containers. So, it's on this kitchen table, so it invokes like the mundane and the everyday. And does this autoplay? Click on it? Click on it with what? Click ahead. Oh, there you go. So, basically, this is one of the dissemination methodologies of this research, which is it's interactive as you see. And it's the idea of what is a city when you first approach it? It's a blank space, right? There's nothing because we don't know anything about it. And then the first layer that we find is generally Google Maps, right? So, when we interact with the table, this is the Google Map layer. But there's different layers, and the higher you go, the more personal the layers become. So, there's another second layer, which is images of the place. And then the third layer incorporates some of these stratum maps that we're done as part of the workshop. And you have to go really far up like this to access that layer and it incorporates all the different stratum maps from the participants. And I think that's my time. I've gone a little bit over. But this is also some of the publications because I feel that if you don't write about it, if you don't disseminate it and document it, it might as well not have existed, right? Because it doesn't impact things unless you write and document about it. So, these are some of the documentation of some of the stratum mapping methodologies and other methodologies that we've worked with as HPU and my own personal work as well. That's it. Okay. I'd love to introduce... Do you want me to stay here? Yeah, hop up. Pick your favorite stool. Dr. Claudia Krebs, if you would join us on the days. She's a professor of teaching in the UBC Department of Cellular and Physical Sciences. She teaches gross anatomy and neuroanatomy and she's also a scholar in medical education research in particular the use of technology in the classroom. And she works to make the biology of the brain more accessible to students and people around the world and is the celebrated creator of some incredibly cool viral videos, something like that, that explain neuroanatomy. She also created the hollow brain, which is an AR teaching tool for neuroanatomy and instruction. So, welcome, Claudia. And then Conrad. Conrad's lie. He can make a 3D model of anything you can think of. So, Conrad, do you want to come up to the stage, too? Oh, it's a different guy. I was like, it's the guy on the hat. It was like, do you have representation? I am so sorry. I was like, it's that guy. It's the guy with the hat towards the back and there's like five of you. So, thanks. Thanks, guys, for the hat. Hey, Conrad. How's it going? I'm Justine. It's super nice to meet you. Who's that guy? Get out of here. He's a 3D artist and texture specialist. And you have a master in digital media from UBC, right? Here. Whatever. I'm just kidding, you know. So, we created a stage on here. I really am not a school fan, but I'm going to do it for everyone. Hey, how's it going? So, we're talking about the research creation process. What comes first? Like a walk through research or trying to solve a problem? What do you think, Claudia? I think the first thing is trying to solve a problem. If you don't have a problem, you need to solve them. What are you doing? Right? Yeah. And so, in my group, which is The Hive, which is our sort of biomedical visualization and communication space, we go from a problem and then look at possible technological solutions to address that, especially for education. So, as you mentioned, I teach neuroanatomy. And there's this phenomenon worldwide called neurophobia, so that's the sort of unexplainable fear of the brain or the fear of learning about the brain. And it is sort of a pandemic among all medical students. And so, how do you approach that? So, what Kendra was talking about, like nobody being literate about the climate crisis, it really resonated with me because we live in a complete science communication crisis. And so, I saw it in the classroom with students kind of blocking all information about the brain, and the only solution to overcome that at first was just sort of partnering with artists to find an approach, so we started with video, and then branching out into emerging technologies to find more engagement with our students so that we can really see what will work to get them to acquire the knowledge and then use it. And then we take the next step, which is, so you've created something cool, like maybe the hollow brain, and the question is, well, does it work? Does anybody learn with this? Or is it just kind of cool? And I guess the same thing for other projects would be you did this wonderful thing, but does anybody change their carbon behavior now? Right? So, you always want to close that loop. What has the impact been in so that we studied that? Fascinating. Thank you. Conrad, solving a problem or a walk through the research? For me, for the past two years, it's been like all research. Okay. I've had to essentially work as a one-man CGI pipeline in the previous company I worked for. So, just like finding inspiration in learning about and mastering the technology that is constantly evolving with patches and new additions and keeping track of that stuff. So, researching that and then getting to a level of understanding with it to be able to map a path towards using it creatively and finding the problem that that tool and that specific tool, a specific thing can help, you know, speak to those problems. And that's sort of what I explored doing my undergraduate degree at Emily Carr when I was approaching these technologies semi-naively and just trying to figure out what I could do with something that was so complex from a technological standpoint. Cool. Diane? So walking, yeah. We definitely walk through the research. But it's kind of an iterative, co-constitutive problem in that we start in a place with walking, we analyze the place but from there, you know, sets of problems always emerge and then we think about how do we address that. And the problems tend to be around what we call the spatial imaginary. And this really does resonate, again, like with the climate crisis, you know, constructing that imaginary, that narrative. And this is a lot of our research as well. How do you construct a spatial imaginary that has political power or political will? Right? And part of this is, you know, how do we change how people think about place? A lot of our work right now is with decolonization. How do we decolonize place? How do we indigenize place? And a lot of this is having to do with mapping. Right? So that goes, it's a very circular kind of problem. So, Claudia, like a signature, obviously, aspect of the discipline of medicine is fundamental research, research-based and evidence-based work. What evidence or research did you use to realize that, ah, VR, AR is the right tool for me to use to approach neuroanatomy instruction? Well, it's interesting because I think the field for how to explore that is changing. And a lot of my colleagues sort of in the biomedical field, they're very used to sort of a two cohort crossover, double-blind, controlled, whatever kind of study. And that doesn't really work for this type of research. So we do more behavioral research by looking at how do people interact with it, do the number of interactions, influence how they do on a test, and those types of things. So we borrow a lot from psychology. We borrow a methodology from the arts, et cetera. And really from software design processes. So we do a lot of user interface and user experience testing, which goes into the research on how to design these things. And then for the impact on learning, it's a lot of things because there's, well, did you do better on the test? So that's an easy one to do. So you just kind of either compare your intervention cohort with like the 50 years that came before and look at, have you made a difference? Or you do the two cohort study or those types of things. But oftentimes you don't see a big effect because my students, being medical students, they're highly selected, they're really bright. I always say you put them in a dark room with a bunch of books, they'll figure it out. They will learn despite of what we do. So kind of finding big differences is often difficult. So then there's the question of, well, do you like the brain better now? When you see a patient with a neurological deficit, do you run for the hills and kind of just scream, neurologist, please, somebody help, I can't deal with this. Or do you now have an approach? And can you now do the first screening so that we can then move on to the next method or the next level of health care? So it's really, I guess, multifactorial how you approach that research. And it's interesting because in order to get published in my field, you very much need to have your two cohort crossover, whatever. If you don't have a p-value, then it's already failed. And so kind of changing the culture there, that the research approaches in this environment can be a little bit different. It's sort of an evolving conversation. I can imagine that it could be a lively and spirited faculty to faculty or even journal. It's between journals and reviewers. You have no p-value in the cycle, OK? But we made a brain. Conrad, can you talk about something where iterative research, one-man pipeline, what was something where you're like, well, my background has failed me and I have not achieved the goal that I wanted, but have you been able to recycle any of those experiences and further work that you've done? It's just been success all the way. No, it hasn't. Because when it comes to... The past two years of my work have been simulating architectural environments and there's just so many variables that go towards producing a photo-realistic result that you're often confronted time and time again with something that just looks wrong to us and then you have to figure out why. And so why does the carpet look like a piece of cardboard when it's supposed to be a carpet or something, right? Or when you're animating something and simulating animation, the uncanny value. We're so easy, we're so good at detecting inaccuracies and these things. So iteration is a big thing, being able to do it quickly. It's a really big thing. Working in real time with game engines and in VR and these kinds of tools can help you make iterations a lot more rapidly and sort of understand those problems that can occur. Yeah. What was probably the biggest failure I had? I think I was trying to simulate just like a cup of coffee and it just ended up looking like Jell-O. I mean, kind of yummy, right? Like coffee Jell-O? Steaming Jell-O. So I had to look, I had to research the diffraction of the disease of coffee and why the fall-offs of how to get it to look more realistic. But, yeah. Tyen, you have such a wonderfully research and theory-informed practice with the Hamilton Paramilitary Unit. Does that fly, like within the discipline, with the Cinnamon Media Arts? Are people open to that or is it more like intuitive, on the set, kind of work and experience or is it somewhere on a continuum? Actually, we work a lot outside of academia, like in art gallery spaces or artist-run center spaces. And we don't get, you know, we don't get so theory-heavy in those scenarios. This is more like when I'm at a conference. So it's like a different context. At a conference, I'll pull up Lefeb and, you know, just tell him, go, yeah, these are some of the theorists we're working with. In general, though, we will not be so theory-heavy. Are there questions for our panel? Yes. So the question I have is, as part of research creation, what are some of the ways that you're actually recording and sharing your research creation? In your own field and then beyond your field. Can I look at the guy with the ball cap? Yeah. I just saw on a blog that, you know, has been collecting dust for a little while, but just my own personal repository of notes. And my research, you know, has predominantly just been laser-focused in understanding the hardware and the platforms on which to produce creative works with others. But in terms of, like, theoretical and conceptual research, I don't often document it. I just kind of let it sit in my head and see where it leads me. What kind of projects can come out of it by just kind of metagnatically existing in my head? That's just... I don't use Instagram, social media much. It's just kind of my own personal blog and diaries and stuff. We have to keep a bit of an institutional memory because we have a big multidisciplinary team with turnover, students and everything. So we need to have a method of documenting our successes and our failures so that we don't repeat the failures. Hopefully we do, but, you know, we try our best not to. So everything between sort of our GitHub repository to just documenting in a Word document how to, you know, what the process is and then best practices and whatnot. And then for the academic side, well, we publish it in academic journals when the reviewers accept that we have no feedback. I'm looking at you, reviewer number two. Oh, my God, I hate that one. Yeah, I know. That guy. That guy. Yeah, we try and do all of it, right? We have a website where we have all our events, but we have a blog too that is a little bit dusty because it's so much admin work, right? It's a long-time job. Yeah, it's to document everything and you have to write it up. So we just don't get around to it. So I looked at our website the other day and I was like, oh, we were in Tokyo last year and we don't have that on. Yeah, it's a big deal. So it's tough. It's tough. It's money. It's like resource. And as you were saying, sometimes you have the grant to support someone to do that documentation and work with you while you're just speaking off the top of my head here. No context. So you sometimes you do have those people that can do those helpful documentation roles while you're, you know, I think wearing, like we're going back to hats, but wearing all the hats at once is a lot of pressure to be sort of in the creation intuitive mode but at the same time being like, I'm going to write all of this down so that I can share it for the ages. And also, what's a great idea? What's a garbage idea? And like, you know, do I need to be writing everything down all the time? Yeah. That kind of thing. It is helpful. Helpful to have all the notes. I know. So you can go, okay, these are the garbage ideas that you remember what they are so you don't do them again. Right. And, you know, and just like video photography, like always try to get someone to, you know, photograph things when we're on our walks. We document, we try to document all of our maps, you know, now they're like in a folder somewhere on my desk. Like, okay, I have to like scan them sometimes. So again, the backlog of documentation. Yeah. Yeah. And then the publication, right? Which also takes a lot of time. So I'm working on something now, like an essay that we did on a walk that we did in 2018, right? It's only going through the review process and that like second review process now. So it's hard to be up to date when the process is taking so long. So true. Yeah. Yeah. There are other questions? What, what do you think, I mean, we've talked a lot about failures, but what do you think is like your signature success that you're hoping to build upon for the next project? Like what are you, what's in the pipeline for a research that right now, research creation right now? I thought you were going to say, what's your signature failure? Yeah. My signature failure. God, my real staker is up here. Jesus. Now, what are you hopeful about? What's next, like what's, what's in the mix in terms of research creation at the moment? We're trying to create something for remote access to education. So what we are dealing with here in British Columbia is a really big province with people who want to receive medical or health professional education in all corners of the province. But if you're not in Vancouver, you don't have access to some physical things. Right. Like you don't have access to an anatomy lab or to the pathology collection at ETH. And so what we're doing now is digitizing that in terms of 3D photogrammetry scans and creating an environment where you can access that from anywhere. And so now also we have that as a working prototype and now the next step is to create a fully sort of immersive teaching environment there so that you can go into this place and study those specimens and you know, have a virtual professor kind of ask you questions and then you'll have to start answering them and interacting with it so that you can simulate the physical lab space but you can do it in a remote area. So we're hoping to get that going by the fall because we're in a little bit of pressure midwifery education is going to be offering sort of a rural cohort who can do their education in their remote communities without having to come to Vancouver so hopefully we'll be able to offer them. Are you ready to do that? Yeah. No pressure, it's just the next generation. No big deal. No big deal. It's fine, it's fine. What about you? I'm working right now with my friend Debbie Wong who owns an opera company. She was very interested in exploring sort of new media the cross-section of like VR and opera and so we're working on a little prototype that explores that and doing motion capture for the performances of the opera singers and mapping those to digital characters and creating a version of Barfius in that way and we've explored using VR technology in a lot of different ways so doing the storyboarding for the prototype I used VR to paint the storyboards and yeah but there's so many things to learn there too especially regarding the development of convincing and performance light assets for a mobile VR platform which is very challenging to approach using like the Oculus Quest for example or the Oculus Go these are accessible VR headsets because VR technology is still so you need a substantial investment to get into it in a deep way and it's very inaccessible in some ways so how can we approach creatively driving a viable opera which is already a niche but VR is like a turbo niche so it's interesting I'm not sure how far we'll go with it but it's been really fun so moving forward so a lot of our work is like these relational workshops that create an audience and this experience together and so what I want to do next is get into dome VR because the VR experience is such a solitary experience we used to get headset on so we're like what if we make it a dome and we can actually have VR experiences as groups and what would that be to have this whole bringing the audience back into the VR and that coalesces with our place and space research because often a dome is transporting you into another place so we can use a lot of 360 in that as well but I don't have a workflow for that yet that's the next step a bunch of projectors and I don't know what else some spherical cameras maybe it's happening right here I think I saw a question in the back was there still one, Jacob? I guess in that question so being the person from the north I'll say digital divide like how in this question of low bandwidth or talking about remote places I mean the monthly bandwidth allowance is burnt through in a sort of quick run through the PS4 download process it's a very different reality of what's usable and what's fast and what's good enough and also what you can assume a user has let alone owns but has used before and how much in this crossover from gaming which I understand why economically they don't think about like 30,000 people in the Yukon is not a market but how is that being thought about when you're developing like kind of high bandwidth or questions of fidelity you raised a sort of fidelity question and is there an interest in low fidelity for high distribution trade-offs? Yeah I think absolutely you have to make certain compromises and concessions in that way to reach out a larger audience for sure and preparing to do that is very vital to succeeding and doing right so knowing exactly just as a detail what is the polygon budget for an Oculus Quest how many Oculus Quest exist in Canada and then seeing where you can go from there The other thing is really an investment in infrastructure and that's I think beyond what we as the creators can do but for example when the medical program at UBC expanded to the northern medical program and the island medical program initially infrastructure actual fiber optic pathways were put in the ground between Vancouver and Prince George so that we could have real-time video conferencing at the cohort in Prince George that was a government investment in infrastructure because there was a need for that and I think if we are able to offer high quality education in the virtual or technology enhanced environment and there's a political will for it then those same fiber optic lines can be brought all the way up into the Yukon to for example educate midwives in the Yukon so that people who are giving birth in the Yukon can actually do that there right I mean there's yeah and especially for talking about things like indigenous communities and all of that the barriers for coming to Vancouver for health education are much higher if we can keep people in their home communities and give them the same quality of education this is I mean it's a political decision at that point are you going to invest in that So like I'm curious like is discovering where the political will lies there's a lot of looking and prodding and figuring out where the government or the Canada council or whatever is interested in putting funds as always I mean to go back to the climate crisis are you going to invest in more pipelines and tar sands development or are you going to invest in a future of a knowledge society and support that type of infrastructure I mean these are the people we elect right that we have to so activism is so important to poke and prod where we get where that infrastructure goes yeah and you might succeed in your poke you gotta do it poke away poke away well thank you to our panel thank you so much I think Aisha is going to do a quick quick pic quick pic well they're taking a photo I'm going to take all of them I've got the the lectern mic, the handheld mic and and a lava just in case they can't hear me in the back here we are yeah not done yet we wanted to say thank you again to the folks here at UBC for hosting us Patrick in particular Patrick Grazotti that is we're lousy with Patrick's here which is just wonderful yeah and especially to the Canada Council for the Arts for their support for the digital strategy fund the line is to have these conversations where we can rack up all the things that we don't know and all the things that are challenges we are going to transition the space a little bit open it up from this presentational format say goodbye to our friends at a distance we have a few different demonstrations that we've put out here and have the makers in the room to be able to have those conversations as well and like I said before we'll also be able to include some of that on the documentation of the event so this will eventually get archived through HowlRound it will get archived through the toaster website as well and then for all we'll have a set of links to all the projects so there's anything that you heard about today that you didn't see enough of or you'd like to see more of then you'll have the ability to do that toasterlive.com slash atelier has a archive an ongoing archive of the entire two-year cycle of this project so you can also find all the things from Toronto there a couple of those projects came up today yeah before we break to that are there any general questions then we will say thank you and goodbye to those at home and thank you to our group here for coming thanks everybody okay we're gonna yeah here in the room there's that are gonna get set up with