 It's a show, just like a view, it's used for everyone. Doesn't have anything to do with that. Yeah, it's a show, it's done for everyone. Everybody to the Martinie Siegel Theater Center, my name is Frank Henschkern, I'm the director of this center, and this is now in the middle of our season, November has started, that's still a beautiful. And we have an evening tonight, which I think is of real significance. It's a field that needs attention, Hans-Tis Lehmann said theater is a house and has many, many rooms. This is an addition, in a way, to the big house of theater in the last 2,000 years, when we look back, starting from Greek theater. We are now entering the digital world of the second digital revolution, and the kind of age of a kind of romantic relationship to the very early internet, and these spaces, my space, and things are slowly over. And we have to engage with what we called tonight the virtual reality, the cyborgs, and the newer science. We have the honor to have with us tonight three emerging, or so primarily practicing artists, they're from Lithuania, they are from Montreal, and they are from here in New York City, and they will share their work, their ideas, their visions, and I hopefully will point us towards fields, we do not know, we haven't walked on, the map is still being drawn, so they are explorers, and they will let us know about the mechanics. It's a, I think, a truly significant development. Ron Scher, a French philosopher, said whenever traditional theater forms come together, there was no new technology, very new technology, something happens, the art advances, and I think in theater performance, and the digital realm we all live in now, and there are dramatic changes, we talked about in the afternoon, like the year 2026, is, people say there's a world will be completely different that from the one we live in now, and we are a little bit late, we just live in the moment, but artists do look forward, they anticipate the future, and what we hear tonight are messages, in a way, from the future, and that from the back very often we also honor our great theater artists from the past, and this is significant, and the artists work in the moment, but this is something we are very proud of, to have Dr. Gora Paraset, Dominique Leclerc, and La June McMillan here with us tonight, and they also, as the first time, for some of them to be here at the Seville Center, so it's additionally something that makes us very happy. We do bridge academia in professional theater, international, and American theater, so this is right at the center of what we are doing, and we hope you'll all learn a lot from them, and I want to thank you also for taking the time to come out on a Monday evening, and to listen to what our artists have to say. The format will be three talks, 15 minutes around each, then we will have a discussion here, and you will then talk and join with us right away, and followed by reception. If you do have a cell phone, just take it out for a moment, I do the same, let's make sure it's off. One of the times for just demonstration, I push the button, I put it on on, and then of course I got a call, but I hope it won't happen again. So we're gonna start the evening right now, and I'm gonna ask Jin to join us, she just flew in yesterday from Lithuania. Friday. Friday, it's just for this event, and we thank the Lithuanian government and also your own support to make this happen, so I'm gonna read shortly, her bio is in here, but Dr. Gora Parasit, Lithuania, is a female theater performance and film director, lecturer, methodologist, set designer, and a member of WIF, Women in Film, USA. Her conceptual aesthetic interests lie in the depths of the net, the act of browsing in itself as an infinite cognitive journey of collecting, and identifying audio-visual experiences by which one learns about the world. Through which they recreate a sense of self and collective identity. Her work is best illustrated by the performances films such as Electric Dreams, she did an Israel Psyco in Lithuania, Lab Psyco in Los Angeles, Self-Less Rome, and many others were cognitive, Digital Science and Faking, becomes a tool for creativity in continuous performative acts. Thank you so much. So we are live streaming this, I would like also to welcome our audience members in HAL round and that's also why we use the microphones for the others, but also later on when we talk and so welcome to our viewers. Good evening again, it's a big pleasure to be here. Thank you Frank for a great introduction. So I will not keep you very long with all long introductions, but I say that I will probably read a lot because for me it's easier to communicate, kind of go for the process of my thoughts. And this is my first presentations of this neuroscience and cognitive science. Are you using it in collaborative processes with the PhD practices? Sorry if I'm not this one. Oh, yeah, I should be closer. Okay, this is the first time I used videos in PDF format. It doesn't work very well, but okay. So I work in the name of Dr. Goraaparizid and Goraaparizid is existing mountain far away in Kamchatka situated on Atlas of Island known by Russian as Ostrov Atlas of Island and in Japanese as Areido. Areido is the highest volcano and also the northernmost island in Kareel Islands. There are two hills on this island. One of them is called Gorao Soboya, mountain special and the other one is called Goraaparizid. And it's me. Here you go. This is this. Okay, so today I will go through all my work, not all the part of my work for the more newer science applied teaching processes. So in my work I play straining at the interface between teaching, research and directing. It is a primary instrument of the results that will be displayed in the screen here today. So by linking a number exercises to cognitive neuroscience, my idea is to stimulate the actor's reflection on their practice, performative self, the active scientist. So here in the image we see a picture of staging tuk-tuk on amnesis which being staged in 2015 in Art Biennale, Lithuania. And stage was purely inspired by the science direct consciousness and cognition magazine article, remembering and imagining the role of the self. Article suggests that life narrative structures are used to organize future events as well as the memories. This study investigated whether temporal clustering of autobiographical memories around periods of a self development would also cure when imagining future events associated with the self. So for this performance we tweaked this task a little bit and participants completed an autobiographical tasks in future thinking tasks as sounds and images. In both tasks, memories and future events were queued using participant-generated identity statements. For example, I'm a mother, I'm a student. That was our performance script which later Ron gained an aesthetical features according to the talks and research. So although research was a little bit more exposed, acting was on the second side and actors were kind of complaining, noted that there's not too much acting, we just exposing the research. Then that was interesting point to start talking about where cognition science come into the performance theatrical arts. There were parts where participants could not remember moments from their past or would not have imagined the future. So we placed and designed the brain as a core character in those white places. I could not resist just to remind ourselves that the brain has a very powerful organization effect of the self. So this is a video of the performance. In teaching we address the question for the kind of the first time in our practices of active training and how they exchange with cognitive neuron science could help better understand acting profession. So in neuro-psychological terms it may concern the processes of action planning, post-drug control, decision-making and body scheme. So one of the toughest prejudices considering the actor as someone who has a very good kind of skill imitating reality. So this is an image from selfless performance that is being staged in 2016. And stage acting is not merely acting on the stage but it's a kind of acting that is supposed to constantly keep, feed and rule the attention of the spectator. So it has to be visually pleasing. There is this kind of rule that you have to do. So a practical example can maybe be to make this concept clearer if an actor has to drink a glass on a stage. Every motor act he is going to activate, grabbing the glass, bringing the glass to his mouth, swallowing the water, put the glass on the table will be aimed at performing the act of drinking glass of the water. But although the action is factually the same and follows the same series of motor acts and it is performed at the same time, it will be different since the actor is here supposed to stimulate the spectator's attention. The same action has at once two different aims. This gives rise to so-called double intention or dilated intention of the actor that broadens from the performed action out to the audience. We can reasonably suppose that's such a broadening of the intention concerns at peculiar neuromotor dimensions. So these double-dilated intentions directly are represented in the performance's love. Here the actors have to recreate many sports stills, images directly, and by repeating it again and again they gain another logic on the top, selfless. So even in a solo play the performer may, for example, perceive actions from audiences as well as his or her own actions in his or her peripheral vision as well as his or her imaginary projections. A more common illustration of such intention mechanism can be noticed when we learn to drive a car, when we learn how to drive only experience, hours spent driving allow us to free our attention, talk to the, you know, someone who's next to you, look at the landscape or sing aloud while driving. Some tasks have been integrated to another level that is pre-conscious. So through practice we are creating a body scheme that is adapted to driving. The same in the performance, we're adapting a body scheme that is consistently made out of the images. Here the actress is recreating, she's actually, is recreating one image still from the tennis game still. But at the same time, not only she's recreating tennis image still, she has her logic. She also cares about the camera angle. She has many, many moments. And I think this really represents the stillness at the same time, very complicated neuromotor dimensions. What's happening in her mind at the moment. The same with the opera that I directed last year. I applied the same methods to opera singers to recreate many images. And so at the same time they had to sing their parts. And I think for them that was easier to execute because they have this dimensional thinking because they are used to learn the musical text. They used to learn to sing, then apply the acting on the top. So once the new body scheme is created, the subject can add some new constraints in order to continue this process of fragmentation and reconstruction of the in deeper level. That is why, as we said, a good exercise allows to continue a sharpening its constraints further. The actor must reach a new pre-reflective control, which unlike everyday pre-reflective control has to allow his intention to broaden out to the spectator so that the actor can play with him, surprise him, listen to his breath, feel his level of attention. In so doing, he can make every performance a unique experience as authentic complex relationship instead of a mere automatic repetition of a series of acts. So later on we're gonna see my performance of Psycho and Electric Dreams, which has, they exercise works, they precisely show exercises on the process of fragmentation and reconstruction. So the actor training exercise are based on applying constraints to the simple action of mimicking the movies. Going to deeper level of detail means also learning the engaged entire body in the every action. This is because an act is required not only to reproduce a sustainable intention but also to have an unusual control of his whole body during the performance. This is not true, it's just the other side of the card, but he doesn't know that I love him. So she gets me of me knowing what's happening to me. You just killed it for the fun of an A. Dreams kind of help you really in life, really, because they give you clues of the future, but very hard to clue. If we don't have dreams, we wouldn't be able to notify our minds into wonderful things or horrible things. While we're sleeping, we can do that while we're awake, but the question is, can we do that while we're sleeping? Yes, if we do. Right now, we're inside the computer program. What are you doing? You're not going to be able to do that. No, you're not. You have not the ambition to do that. This is not the policy of the science officer. Don't you realize the truth? So here are a couple of the performances, and I wanted to show a few of them in a row just to represent the methods. It's very resultative work, but behind that we have lots of kind of rehearsal space. If you have questions after that, you just come and ask or ask after later. I will definitely share. I have 15 minutes, so I wanted to show a little bit more of the kind of visual part of it. So concluding my presentation, moment, see, that's when we apply a video on PDF. It doesn't really perfectly work. Sorry. Okay, so it's one of my latest works, actually executing the idea of stillness but having this dimensional thinking inside of the actors and of the brain processes. So concluding my presentation, I want just to kind of erase the problem why I'm working on this and why I'm kind of comparing and working in the multiple dimensions with the cognitive sciences and theoretical arts. So I think the biggest problem is that among substantially increased interactions between cognitive neuroscience and the performing arts, numerous conferences and seminars worldwide, are the core elements of performance practice, such as performers learning and creative processes where rarely investigated. In this sense, I believe that cognitive neuroscience can contribute towards a deep appreciation of ongoing training besides rehearsals and it is important for creativity in the performance. At the same time, the performing arts may contribute towards a more holistic approach in research, in human condition. And it goes, it may go towards some kind of embodied methodology when considering creative practices. And I call it massive research opportunities. So I'm doing it and I will continue doing. And recently we started to execute a number of kind of more sculptural processes and performances. So this one over, it's called pipe dreaming. And we recording kind of a brain activity of the performance inside of the latex vacuum with a VR augmented reality. And it's still on the process. I hope next time I will be able to tell you more about it. So actually, this is a hockey team, the girls hockey team inside. So that's where we applied it over. So that's it. Sorry. I'm going to point out that the board is the best young opera director in the filming and follow-up. And it's most probably over the Baltic states, the most original one where our colleagues won the Vienna's Biennale for a work. And you heard it on each group of each group. So very significant impulses coming from the region. And now we have with us Dominique Leclerc. She's an author, co-stage director and actress in post-humans. Humans first produced 2017 in Montreal, a l'Espace Libre, where it was presented again in 2019. Then toured across Quebec with the Cafour International de Theater de Québec and the Festival of International New Drama, FIND at the Chaubune in Berlin. Post-humans was a 2018 finalist of the Michel Trombley Award, which honors the best text transposed on stage. A very significant recognition in Canada and in the world of theater and the play is published by the Ston-Meme Editors. And I also would like to thank at the moment Emmanuel Serra, who helped us to bring her over, introduced us to her work and so thank you. Dominique. Hi, really happy to be here. Thanks for the invitation. So last year, while trying to get rid of some objects, I found a little notebook I was using back in 2002 in which I had written, I want to mix documentary and fiction. I was 21 years old. I was finishing theater school. And then it took me 11 years to find the topic that would make me devote myself, body and soul to it for years. In 2013, I heard about the transmanist movement for the first time. So one of the challenges I always face with this theme is that I never know if people I'm talking to have a big knowledge of the topic or not. So my feeling today is that most of the people here do have heard or read about it. But just to make sure I leave nobody behind, I'll give a short definition. Even if it's really a delicate to shortly define this group because the show is all about bringing nuances. So to sum it up, transmanism is a movement gaining popularity around the world through various groups, private companies including Google, Alphabet, especially with their division, Verily and Calico, the true university researchers and more and more political parties around the world. Transmanists refuse and want to overcome suffering, illness, aging and death. They work to improve and expand. Somebody's laughing, it's good. They want to improve and expand human capabilities by coupling the human body with NBIC technologies, nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science. Some of them, not all of them now believe that in 2029, we will enter the era of the singularity, a period during which humanity will experience changes that are so far reaching and profound that it will no longer be possible to distinguish between man and machine. So I became really obsessed by it. In 2013, the debate around enhancing the body with technology was totally on existing in the public sphere in Canada. Even if it rises critical ethical issues that are overturning our very notion of human nature. So as it really does concern everybody, as this team may be intimidating for some people at first glance, I created POST Human to demystify this urgent societal debate to create a unique space where the audience and the performance can meet and be confronted with hopes, the desires, paradox and fears that are driving us to rethink and modify human nature. So to sum it up, POST Human is a documentary, auto-fictional and performative theatrical production that transposes on stage a narrative of five years of research and encounters with people at the heart of the cyborg and transhumanist movement. Throughout my research, I realized that I can personally more easily measure my personal ethics when I meet people face to face. When I just read about it, it's really easy to condemn these augmentative utopias. But by discussing with people from these movement, I found out that the personal motivation of transhumanists are deeply human, sensitive. They join us all and that is what troubles me the most. What if I would offer you the possibility to stop suffering, being sick, avoid dying? What if I would offer you the possibility to stop your aging process? 20 years ago, all of this wouldn't have touched me, but as I am aging, I see myself more and more tempted by these hopes. When people are healthy, super easy to oppose to transhumanism, that's egoistic, unrealistic, crazy, that's bullshit. But usually when they're suffering and a solution, humans just take it. So during four years, I hardly searched the most efficient and sensitive angle to talk about this. At first, I was totally trying to avoid talking about me, but the more I dig into this really complex world, the more it became clear to me that the only way to make it universal was to go really personal. So I scripted myself a story for the play, but also a story that would have an impact on my reality. So I staged my personal need of augmentation. I'm diabetic type one since 14 years now, so my longevity and my quality of life are closely dependent on the technological evolution of pharmaceutical devices that are available in the market. So after 10 years of feeling imprisoned with this very obsolete, expensive, and inefficient device to measure my blood sugar level, I started to search for alternatives. In 2015, Google X-Lab was working on a lens that could measure blood sugar level in tears. But as it is out of question for me to give away my health data to Google, I started to look through scale inventors among the cyborg and bio-acking community, hoping to find someone that could create something interesting and independent for me. I started to attend a cyborg group in Berlin. I discovered creators, makers that implant tools in their bodies to create and augment senses or abilities. These were my first real contacts with people really blurring the lines between curative and enhancement medicine. First meeting with them, I was just totally lost. So when does the cyborg starts? With your glasses, a telescope, a contraceptive pill, which is not creative, a pacemaker, an air fight chip, my phone, in which I transfer a lot of capacities now. We're probably all cyborgs. So by following this group, I also met transhumanists, people fighting for radical life extension, wishing to overcome their biology, take control on our evolution. Isn't it what we're doing all the time? Also, people comparing my body to a meat sac, which means that there's no connection between brain and the body to them. So am I just a meat sac? So from my glucose meter to the air fight chip, I implanted in my hand, I come back to this later, to cryonics and brain upload to the cloud. I explore various augmentation utopias on stage to measure my limits, the public limits, but also the limit of my life partner, Dennis, that is playing his own role on stage with me, and who is my technical director right now? Dennis is a journalist. As the witness to my discoveries since many years, his reactions and reflections on all of this have evolved too, and I documented these changes. So when I came back from my first cyborg meeting in Berlin, and I told him that somebody just offered me a non-creative implant, this was his reaction. He had to find something of which I've never thought of. In that moment, when he said it to me, I feel not good with it, but that's what's happening. Sometimes when you get to know stuff like this, constantly. And then a couple of months later, we both participated to the first international cyborg congress that took place in Dusseldorf. After we assisted to a couple of implant parties, I asked them a second time. So Dennis's presence on stage with me allows to explore the vicissitudes of a couple trying to agree on their respective limits in the here and now, but also on what they expect of the future. Will we manage to agree on shared augmentations? And what if one of us refuses to accept the debt of the other? How far are we willing to go? Alongside our narrative, Post-Humain explores and tests the audience's desires and limit. So just before the show starts, spectators are invited to visit on stage our exhibition space. They're immediately in contact with texts, objects, and videos that launch them freely into our topic. They're also invited to answer four questions. Which part of your body would you want to change or improve? Which sense would you develop or improve? They write down their answers and leave it in the exhibition space. We later used their answers in the show to bring the transmitter's desires closer to the public ones. So we can meet somewhere in the middle in the gray zone. All along the show, other questions appear on screen to punctuate the stages of the story. So this is the very first question of the show. So I think most of the people in the venue would say no. So this is just before I start with my own narrative. And later, will you accept the consequences of aging? What was your biggest loss? These questions are addressed to maintain a constant link with the audience so they can, alongside Dennis and I, work through our years of thinking about these issues, a period marked by constantly changing opinions. And as a symbol of these constant shifts of opinions, in 2017, at the FTL Festival in Montreal, as a performance, Dennis and I implanted the airfied chip on stage in our hands. The performance was presented twice. The first evening was my implant. The second evening was Dennis's implant. In our timeline of four years, the airfied implant is just one day, the day we both agree on the same augmentation. We wanted to bring the attention on the fact that airfied chip is the first technology that gets in the body that is not curative, and it's the moment to reflect on it. We wanted to talk about it. Now, two years later, our chip is already really vintage. The capacity of it are already improved and will keep going with time. And we surely hope that no company or governments will force people to chip themselves. We did it because we were free and because that was our free will. Instead of programming our chips to open lights, doors, or computers, like most users do, we decided to store our wedding certificates in these chips. So we both have our Canadian and German wedding certificate and a Polaroid picture of both of us. We wanted to treat this gesture as a digital wedding to bring a poetic touch to something that might appear really disgusting to the majority of the population, except in Sweden. It's really popular right now. So let's go back to Post-Humain, the main show. So Dennis and I are playing our story, but we're also joined on stage by two actors that helped us to build that narrative. They sometimes add information, play some characters. Sometimes we see videos of these characters I met or they can share their opinions also. The video conception was designed by the artist Push One Stuff and it sometimes interacts with the body of the performance. So there's a real encounter between the body and the machine on stage. Maybe we'll look at a little scene. This is to measure our brain waves in real time. We're acting like this. So he says he's always more calm than me. So he says that when we were in a conference together, he bought me a little Christmas gift. It's an intelligent vibrator that reacts to his voice. So I ask him if it's a good idea if this data of me is in the cloud. So that's one of my favorite books, Stefan's Bike Book. So he reads the text to see how much pleasure I have. So he gives me a second gift and it's a connected glucose meter. So I don't really get it. He wants to receive an alert in case something's going wrong with me which I don't really get. So we get it. I get mad and the brain waves just explode. So the thing we're the most proud of, I would say, is that we have welcomed a very diverse audience and that was the main goal. All generations, teens, elders, adults, specialists and neophytes of science united. So I'm actually working on a second show on the same topic but I'm trying to go in another complete other form. As Peter Drucker said, the best way to predict the future is to create it. So that's what I'm trying to do. Thanks for your great attention. Thank you Dominique for sharing. Also very personal stories and it's quite an interesting work for the stage and on stage. Now we welcome LaJune McMillan who's a New York City based, new media artist, creative technologist creating art that integrates performance, virtual reality and physical computing to question our current forms of communication. LaJune has the opportunity to show and speak about her work at Pioneer's work, about their work at Pioneer's work, National Creative Tech Week and art and code suite reality. Thank you. Oh, okay. Cool. Yeah, my name is LaJune and I am a new media artist working at the intersection of performance and technology. I've worked on many different projects including motion capture technology as well as extended reality which is an umbrella term for virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality. I started this work during my time at NYU Tandon School of Engineering as part of their integrated digital media program. And so while I was there, I was able to basically just explore all different types of technology which just has been a really like expansive experience for me as a person as well as an artist. And so once I left school, I realized that my access to the spaces that I had just been introduced to was vastly limited. And so I decided that instead of just being sad about it that I would start to build spaces for myself and for my community and for people who were interested in joining that as well. So that brings me to my project and it's called the Black Movement Project and it's an online database of black character based models as well as motion capture data from black performance artists. And essentially motion capture is taking data from people and it allows you to apply that data to 3D characters as well as just like anything in the 3D world. And the reason why I'm creating this space is because there are existing motion capture libraries and character libraries as well. However, they lack diversity within the movements as well as with the characters that are presented there as well. So this is one of the motion capture libraries and this is actually like a character that I created in DAZ, which is a 3D character building software. And so just for an example for you, like this is basically the movement that they have on there for hip hop dancing. And as you can see, this is not hip hop dancing. So it's like a weird like shimmy. And so just thinking about the ways in which culture is diluted depending on who is in control of building that space. But then during, so I actually started this work as part of a residency at Ibeam, which is an art and technology center in Brooklyn. And during my first month of the residency, there were lawsuits for Fortnite. And Fortnite is a video game made by Epic Games and essentially Epic Games stole a bunch of dances from different black performance artists. And what's really problematic about this is that they not only took the dances, but they did not compensate any of the people that they took the dances from and they changed the names of the dances in the game as well. So right here on the screen, there is a dance of the Milly Rock, but they changed the dance name to the Swipe It. And so I realized that I needed to take a step back with my project because it provided me an opportunity to create a space where I was potentially protecting a black performance artist. And so I decided to really try to think about how I could do that. And so I began to think about all of these questions. And the first one was how do we combat the exploitation, erasure, and dilution of black culture? And I think that this is a very important question because within this digital space, this is one space where black culture is exploited. However, black culture has been exploited since the beginning of time. And so what does it mean to finally take a stance against that and say, no, this is our culture, this is important to us, and how can we as a community build spaces where we're finally getting compensated and finally getting compensated fairly and credited fairly for the work that we do? And then how can we build stories where our stories, how can we build spaces where our stories are safe, understood, and celebrated? So yeah, just how do we begin to create new platforms where we're just making sure that we are celebrating our culture? And that basically transformed my entire project into a library. So I decided to start moving away from just the tool itself and I began to dive into what it could mean for this space to be a library, both online and also in the physical space. And so it expanded into a library for activists, performers, and artists to create diverse extended reality projects, but also a space for research of how and why we move in an archive of our existence. And this project is really inspired by Catherine Dunham and Catherine Dunham was an anthropologist, a teacher, a dancer, a choreographer, an activist, and she was just so many things. And she actually, I would credit her with the first person, as the first person who created the Black Movement Project because she actually, in the 1930s, traveled throughout the Caribbean, basically documenting different cultures through writings and as well as video. And this is from her field work in Martinique in 1936. And so, but the really beautiful part about her work is that she also used that to basically inspire and dig deeper into her own performances because she was a dancer as well. And so that said, the Black Movement Project seeks not only to catalog movement, but to build community through performances, workshops, conversations and tool building. And so for the performance, basically it incorporates a narrative component to be seen as both a live performance and as well as a virtual reality performance. And basically it shows how Black Movement has been used as the tool of preservation of culture, as well as a vehicle of self evolution. So what happens during these performances is that when people come to them, I actually have done interviews with each performer and recorded them. And through each interview recording, I actually worked with different sound engineers. In this case, Nala was one of them and then Jeremiah Johnson was another one. And we basically worked to integrate these interviews to be sort of snippets in and out of the soundscapes. So when you come to the performance, you're not only watching the performers perform, but you're learning about them as people. And I think that that's really important because even in the previous motion capture libraries, one of the, another problematic thing about them is that they try to remove the movements from the performers, which I find just to be wrong. I think that you can't just have somebody's movements in a library, but then call them subjects. You actually have to have their names there and tell their stories because if people were to actually use them for their own projects, it's really important that they know who's in the suit, that they know where they got the data from and that we're properly cataloging that as well. And so for this first performance, I worked with two dancers. One is Nala Duma and he is a student at the Clive David School at NYU. And the other performer is Rinaldo Maurice, who is actually a dancer with Alvin Ailey. So that was really exciting to sort of have a performance as well, showing like a bridge of like transition between like how movement evolves. Yeah. And so for this performance, I use the Perception Neuron suit, which is a standalone motion capture suit, as well as Unreal Engine, which is a gaming engine which allows you to build video games. It's actually the same platform that Fortnite was built with. And basically, I use the suit to send the movement data to Unreal in real time. And then from there, I basically create these 3D environments based off the interviews that I have with them as well. And now I'm just gonna show you a video snippet of like the first performance. That's not it. There we go. And then, and now I've been working on actually like taking the data from that performance and creating both a 2D and virtual reality performance. So I'll show you a snippet of that. And this is Nala. So it's the same music, but just like a three minute snippet. So yeah, I'm still working on that though. So that should be done. Like within like the next month or so. Yeah, but then from there, after the first performance, I realized that I needed to actually do this work myself. And so I have a background in figure skating and I realized that I needed to work on rediscovering and redefining my own movement journey. And so midway through my residency, I actually like ended up going to Minneapolis for a month and joining an all African American figure skating company. And what was really cool about that experience was that within the company, we were basically diving into 17th century social dance. And the particular social dance that we were working with was a ring shout. And so that was really a transformative experience for me because it really made me think about and really like dive into the work of what it means to redefine a space and what it means to like really understand what space means. And so from there, I developed a workshop series called Understanding, Transforming, and Preserving Black Movement in Digital Spaces. And basically in that workshop, I basically brought together, in the first one, I brought together 15 people of color to basically take them through the process of taking motion capture, applying it to characters that they created, and then taking that and putting it into a digital space. But what is special about this workshop is that we are also critiquing the tools as we work with them. So a lot of these tools have inherent biases placed within them. And one of, an example of that would be that there are a lot of character building softwares out there where the base body is a white, able-bodied, thin character. And so what does it mean to have, to build this discussion to say like, how do we build within these parameters, but how do we begin to challenge those spaces as well and challenge what the base body is? Because this is software, right, where the base body is, but we can also see the base body in so many other different places within society. But then it also, I also began a series of conversations bringing people from different industries together. And I actually hosted this at Ibeam two weeks ago. And so I brought Amy Meredith Cox and Yusef Cole. And Amy Meredith Cox is a dancer and a dance anthropologist and a professor at Yale. And Yusef Cole is a writer and animator. And he writes about video games as they relate to culture, class, and race. And so it was really important to bring them together because I just wanted to see how these different conversations can blossom and also what black movement meant to them because that's really helpful for me in what I'm trying to do with building this space. And so I just wanted to leave you with, the Black Movement Project is a movement. It's a movement to celebrate ourselves. It's a movement to protect ourselves, to really think about what it means for our bodies to be in spaces and also what it means for us to challenge society and societal norms and to basically just think about how we can do a lot of different projects in ethical ways. So yeah, thanks. Wow, thank you, El-Lajundi. So I would like to ask our panelists to come on forward. And yeah, so that is just very, very impressive. The range and the complexity, also the diversity of the work. And all of you, I think each one of you we could have spent an evening or a day with workshops. So thank you for condensing it in such a short way. But I think it communicates of a world that's out there in theater performance and the digital realm that is of true significance. And this is the beginning of research. Maybe first a question to Dr. Gora Parasit as a question. So your scientific research is, as you said, you're the base of how you direct or how you deal with actors. So you said you were trained as a young actor just with a tiny spoke of Stanislavski. That was it, was the only thing that was allowed. We were not allowed to read anything else. But right away, so this is not really how one should approach artwork, but you know, you go to conferences, you go to, you engage with scientists. How did your experience or what you learned really influences your work on stage? How you direct, how you conceive your artwork? What is the difference having gone and having engaged with neuroscience? And how does it influence your work on stage? It's because I have an acting experience. I have a bachelor's in acting and I acted in a theater, in the National Theater in Lithuania in Vilnius, capital of Lithuania. And I know what it is, this proscenium theater, what it is in main roles, like second roles, roles. So using neuroscience brings me as a personality into the, into the standard. Me as myself, I am interesting on the stage. The way I think, I can really expose my research, the way I see things, the way I combine objects. And that is very exciting and it's new for me. Although the theater that I was forced to study otherwise chose to study and it was wrong. I think it just spins in its own circle and it doesn't go really very far. Did I answer the question? Yeah, so you have a fascinating way that scientific research in neuroscience is your inspiration to direct. And the work we saw on the latex work, the silent operas or spoke this, as they call it, a la Japonese, you know, that people, we speak dialogues that come from the screen. For your work, it is that you got nominated for the Playwriting Award. Do you feel it's the right category? Is that, you know, do you feel it is able to, you're able to communicate what you want to share, how you want to let people know about this work? Is the play the form? Yeah, the play was published, but I don't know what is the difference between being in contact in the real meeting. I'm also working on a documentary film that will retrace the first quest, but also the second play I'm working on. And I wonder how it will be without being face to face. I think the way, it was so easier for me to get it, to understand people when I met them, and that's why I think people really have this feeling of, whoa, I discovered a whole new world, and it's because we were, we met you. There's no fourth wall, so it's really like a meeting, and we also do some tests with the public at some points with their phones, and so I don't know about, like, in the book it's described. So at this moment, people in the public have to switch phones with somebody they don't know, and we make them believe that they have to keep the phone of somebody they don't know until the end of the show, just so they can feel that they're letting a part of them. So if you read it, and if you experiment it, of course it's not the same thing. So it's interesting, maybe the book medium can bring something else that I can't measure, but I'm sure of the richness of meeting, especially in this team, it's more and more hard to concentrate two hours on something. We still have this theater, like now you read an article and they say, if you read this, yeah, it will last three minutes, can you do it? But still, in theater we have this capacity of being focused on one theme, and I think it's gonna be more and more rare in time with reading, with a movie, you can just get out of there, but I think that getting from A to Z and just without any cut is more efficient because it's built like little stairs. Temporality, I have articles where they say T-L-T-R, which means too long to read, people text it back, I just can't, but theater does that, and I think this is quite a big hope that theater actually will research and will come bigger. I mean, it was sort of very impressive that your brain, your thinking moved objects so that your brain waves really animated. And something we spoke about earlier that musicians now will be able to think perhaps speech and then be minor will be played. That's your brain activity will control the object of the world you live in without touching, without movements. It's fascinating what is awaiting for us, and what we do not know enough. Lejeune, for you as a question, do you feel that the work you are creating, the black movement projects and the commerce, do you feel that it's connected to the theater and performance world, or do you say this is a completely different field? Would you ever think of doing a play or creating a temporality in space? Yeah, so honestly, when I'm thinking about black movement, I'm looking at all of the different ways that we move, and so that definitely incorporates theater. I have, actually with my project, I started with dance because I felt like it was the easiest entry point for me. However, I do plan on expanding from there to gesture, to sports, to theater, to instruments and music, and all of these different, because we've moved in so many different ways, and so for me, I'm just planning on different ways to categorize and also archive all of that into a library space, so yeah. So your idea is more like an archive, a library, instead of having a result or a product on a stage in the duration of performance, maybe for both of you to think about what one could be done vice versa. Maybe before we go soon to audience questions, how do you react to what is fascinating to your colleagues' work and some questions you ask or comments you would like to make about your presentations you saw? We talked with you in the morning, I really loved everything, that this personal story that is very close and you get really attached and then you get into the fair together with you and I really wanted, I had this inspiration, so if I listen and something is really interesting for me, my brain is overloaded with the images. I even get sweaty sometimes, and like my hands and I have to really stop this, you know. So when you were talking and giving your speech, I was seeing the images of the theatrical performances, kind of the lighting shows and so on and so forth. So this kind of fair projected into the images, so maybe we can collaborate on some particular things later. That would be great. And I love the music so much, very of this three minute video that you did, incredible. Yeah, and I'm really looking forward of the theatrical performance and then this is, don't leave it just for the library. I mean, this is a great, great part of the dance. This problem that you're raising with the dance. I did really love it, yeah. I have a question, but I just wanted to see that. Comment here. I have a feeling, I'm seeing the very beginning of something that can go in many, many ways, like you're touching something so socially important and I think, I hope you'll get some like, because we were talking, you said like, I'm doing stuff by myself, but I'm sure you'll get a big team to help you to push that really, really far. And it was really aesthetically super interesting and socially so important, so that's great. And today we had time to talk a little bit more and I was so impressed because she was telling me that she was alone to do all these things. I could not believe it. Like all the costume, the latex work, the lightening, the set, it's hard work. Like we need teams girls. That's what I realized, like I can't believe you do it alone and you too, and I'm not alone, I have a good partner, but yeah, we need the support. Partners, yes, but there is this kind of institutional, non-institutional way of being an artist, and considering these ideas being as a grounded idea as well, they're not being supported by whatever, like a big theater or academia. It's always a conny feeling, getting yourself into it, experimenting, dragging all these actors together with you. I always have this fear, I'm experimenting on this memory thing and I don't know if they're gonna like it, if they're gonna go with me together. So it's always a risk, so we have to establish this to be more less risky and more grounded together. And Leshne, if I can put you on this, but what came to your mind when you saw the level of presentations? Yeah, so I think that for like your presentation, what I really loved was the stillness in some of the video work that you had. At first, when I first came and I like was watching your slides in the beginning, I thought that they were actually like statues, like I didn't know that they were people, and I was just like, well, like the level of just like training and expression that they had to have and like endure and like have to go through was just like mind-blowing for me. And like also just like all of the expressions that they made like throughout the performances, like they were just mind-blowing and really gorgeous. And like, and the makeup is just, yeah, everything's flawless, so good. And yeah, and I think that like with your work, I was really like interested in it because I've been looking a lot into like the transhumanist movement. I don't actually know like where I stand with it, mainly because with transhumanism, it's always like the people at the top or the people who have the most access to that sorts, to those sorts of that space. And so I really like that, like the ways in which you're diving into this like subject. And yeah, I think that it's like really great, yeah. Yeah, maybe we open it up and right away and maybe Michael let's put the lights on the audience so we can see each other. And we're gonna give you the microphone. If you have questions or also a comment, it doesn't have to be a question or maybe we have an answer also. So we will have the microphone May, our next generation fellow here, she's here from Lebanon Beirut, a Fulbright scholar, and we'll bring the microphone around. So maybe introduce yourself very shortly, your name and maybe what you do and then have a question or make a comment. So we have a dialogue and we could be a bit even more light on the audience, but here's the first question. My name's Phil Bychman, I teach literature, right. Just a question for Dominique. Well, I was very interested and even fascinated by your exposé, but it also made me very uncomfortable. But also thinking about your stake in it too. And my stake too, in a way, because I wouldn't be alive, I might be alive, but maybe it wouldn't be kicking like at you if it wasn't for medical intervention. So, first of all, the augmented thing. I get the specter of eugenics and a master race. Then I was the one to laugh when you mentioned that overcoming death. Now let's see, how about the planet can barely tolerate the population we have and it can't. And then even if we could overcome death and we were machines, wouldn't it be monopolized by a small group who would then dominate the rest of us? In other words, the visions of Orwell and Huxley for the future were that it would turn into a totalitarian direction. Now, you seem to have a blind confidence in it's being progressive, but I think it's more likely to be. Yeah, first of all, she is raising these questions and she's making us aware, you know, it's not the proponent, they are open things, but please do answer. It's all about asking questions. I met some progressive people, I met libertarians, I met people that have all kinds of thoughts on how are we gonna deal as a society with these augmentations, because for now you can see that it is not fair already. I learned two weeks ago, I didn't know. I'm lucky to live in Canada as a diabetic person. I learned two weeks ago that in the States some people take a bus to go to Canada to buy insulin or in Mexico, I couldn't believe it. So what am I in the United States? I'm not doing theater. I'm working for my meds, and this frightens me. And at the end of post humane, I just address the question like, okay, I look in the future, am I more free than the beginning of my quest? I don't know. And I cannot say for now how it is going to develop. And transhumanists would always bring you on the fact that, oh, these technologies, we're working to make it available for people. So who can I believe? I don't know. Some groups, I don't trust them. Some groups I do trust that it comes from the heart, but it is so, it is too hard now because we have a step in there. It is dangerous to just push it away and don't address these questions. And your worries are totally legitimate. And especially in the States, you have a transmenace party. So be interested, ask them questions. They just elected a new president who seemed, he was a Democrat before. We'll see what he's doing. But their goal is, I think, depending on every individual. So the only thing I'm trying to do is that we talk about it. Because we, yes, we need medicine. And when I say that transmenace want to prolong life like radical life extension, where's the line between your doctor that is trying to radical life, your extension, and these people, I don't know. But I can tell you that, yes, for the United States, it's even more important that you talk about these things because I know that it's a mess with ancient companies. And I'm sorry, but I don't know what I would do here. So yes, it's really important to, and eugenics, I wouldn't, yes, there's a risk, but I would be a little bit careful with this. So I'm just trying to, for the second show, especially address the political and philosophical question and still talk about this without trying to put people just in one group. Because it is like feminism. Do they all agree? Some of them, they say, she's super extreme. She's not enough. It's as complex as other movements, even religious movements. I think this is why theater performance is a great way to look at it from different sides and represent without giving fully answers. But other comments, thoughts, answers, yeah? My name's Henry Kaiser. I design and manage XR productions for Verizon Media and Yahoo News. Having been working in the XR space for a couple of years now, I know that I've brought in a lot of collaborators from the arts and things who've never necessarily explored these futurist ideas or these futurist technologies in their own field, for the first time they're engaging in these spaces. And I wanna ask each of you, as you've brought in collaborators, artists who've never been thinking about the issues or the technologies that you wanted to prime them to engage with you on, how do you initially broach those topics in order to effectively collaborate with people who are very new to a space that you are looking to pursue? The question is, okay. Well, for me, I do it in a lot of different ways. I really like to start everything with like a phone conversation or like meeting in person. And I think that even in the ways in which I teach the workshops, I try to make everything very not intimidating. And you know, like, so within the workshops, the way that I approach like teaching people who have never seen extended reality tools before, I sort of just like say, hey, like here are a lot of just, they're just tools. You know, like these are just different types of tools. They're just different types of technologies. You know, don't get, you know, super frustrated if you don't understand how to use them right now in today. You know, we're gonna go through a lot of things. And you know, really what the important part of this is, is to really just like raise questions and to, you know, basically just know that this is an introduction. I was actually talking about this earlier today, how like I go to a lot of tech workshops and sometimes the instructor will just like throw a bunch of just like stuff at you. And it's very, it's very intimidating. It's very like, you know, not inviting even though, you know, you think a workshop space is supposed to be inviting and supposed to be like, you know, introducing you to something new. And so I think that it just comes to like, you know, even with the conversations, like for me talking with a dance anthropologist and a writer slash animator, like those are people who, you know, like for instance, Amy, like she didn't really know anything about like extended reality. And this is her first time even having a conversation about it. But for me, I thought that it was just important to like, you know, still get, you know, the conversation from her because she knows so much about fieldwork and anthropology and which is something that I don't know about. So I think that it's really just like, you know, highlighting just like what people know and just like finding worth in all of the different things that people bring to the table. And yeah, because there's so many things that people know that are worthy to the space that should be there and letting them know that it's important for them to continue, you know, knowing what they know and just like find this as an addition to their knowledge and not as like the end all be all is very important. For me, to do everything very carefully step by step, I approach neuroscience, cognition sciences, through synesthesia field firstly, studying master's degree. We map with the students, London Metro map, according to lexical, gestatious synesthesia modes, we were working with a synesthetic association in London. And we just, you know, what is lexical, gestatious synesthesia when you hear the sound and then your brain provokes immediately the taste of something and it's genuine, it's not that you get with the associative memory. So we invited a genuine lexical, gestatious synesthesia to map these things, to map London tube map and give them for each name of the Metro station to give the lexical, gestatious synesthetic notion on it. So I think the Cadillacircus was like a smoked salmon or something like that. So gradually I grew up to the understanding of what I want to do in my field and it's actually based on lots of research, eating lots of material that I can actually carefully give it to the actors. The 2017 I was a part of the Brain on Art Conference in Valencia, organized by Houston University. And for me it was, I was scared to go there because I thought as a theater practitioner, as a director, I would not be able to say anything. But it's a matter of your homework. So what I did instead of going to the part of Zivni, in the evening I read every single article of every single doctor who did a speech in the conference, just to know the terms of what they're speaking and the science is such a easy thing. It's much easier to understand and make a conversation rather than with the artist next to you because there's such a mystery all the time. You need to guess what the actor thing, there's so much psychology and the science is a pure data. So that's where we proposed with the GTAC lab, they do these hackathons and there was one of the hackathon, Austrian lab GTAC hackathon during the conference. We were controlling the little ball called sphero with the brain waves or the lights or the eyes that react to the lights. And I put a bit of dramaturgy on the top, so we were solving loneliness. So that little sphero was my friend. And my boyfriend who lived far away and that's the way we communicated. And we wanted as a most eruptive prototype for this model, the EEG system. But so and then after the conference I felt a little bit more confident I gained more contacts with the Houston University, GTAC lab in Austria, another lab in San Francisco and they really want to engage on work and they're very careful. So now we're adapting some EEG systems on the stage with the actors, which before I thought it's a bit on the question of ethics, whether I can do that. So with the knowledge and care. And then the art comes next, whatever we do with aesthetics, how the actors react, what we do with the data, you know, and what kind of themes and problems we solve with that because with all these methods, structures, schemes, we can really talk about so many things. And that's the driven kind of a basis of my work at the moment, a part of the solistetical visuals, you know, then collaborations which are the artists, composers, dramaturgs, dramaturgs, costume design, so on and so forth, so yeah. Thank you. I'm not sure I got the question. Sometimes I struggle with English that just happened when you talk. Would you repeat it, please? It's the way we work with people in science, you want to know. When you're preparing to approach a collaborator as another actor that you're bringing into production that you're designing, how do you mentally prime them to work with you on something that they've never thought about before? Oh my God, we had so many discussions. We could have not rehearsed at all and just talk. So that was the hard part with the actors. And I was always like bringing data and then we were getting in other stuff and then oh let's get back to the scene because we were totally getting lost. But also at first when the play was created we were working with this girl you saw that was starting the ESG. It was surprising because she didn't talk the whole process and in the end I just asked okay cause the last question is how far are you willing to go? So it was the only time the performers could really say what they're willing to do. And we were pretty surprised because she said well I'm bouncing with my computer. I'm a creative person but I'm even more creative with him because we can go so much further and I'm looking forward to have an iPhone in the head cause I'm fed up with this and that's like oh my God okay. We have somebody that is closer than we thought to all these things. So it was just like super rich and sometimes they were lost, they were changing their minds, we were just paradox all the time. So it was really nice to discuss but on the other side people I was studying how do you arrive in the conversation? What is she doing there? At first my first meeting with Cyborg and Berlin like I had the magic card of the disease and then you have the magic card of the artist but when I was saying like well I'm doing research for a play but I'm looking an alternative for my glucose meter. Okay so it came with time, they didn't really get it at the beginning but there's one really important character in the play I always talk about and he's a great man, he's the founder of the group, the cyber group in Berlin, he's called Enno Par and he has a cochlear implant and so he would be deaf but now he has two computers related to his brain and he's a programmer so he wants to open it, he wants to be able to play with the computers he has in his own head and the company that produced his cochlear implant said, we own your earring. So I had so much love for his quest and at first he didn't really get what I was doing at theater play in Montreal but more and more he was getting involved and when we did the play in Berlin he played his own role, he was on stage with us, he appeared and the actor was playing him the whole way but in the end we were showing a video but he came and he did his play also in Quebec so it was really nice, a nice exchange. So now he's, yeah we keep in close contact and I think he realized that what he thought was just like it's a play in Montreal and the other, okay it has an impact, people discuss about it and we're clearly doing the same thing but with different means. Maybe two more questions, one here and then. So my name is Xiao Xiong Lin, I'm doing a neuroscience PhD at the moment so I'm really interested in how do you collaborate or get involved with science, scientists, how can we get involved? How does he get involved with you guys? It's by reading and bibliography in the end there's like names of the people who are working in the field usually after the article, so I always check who's doing what after I really like the re-article and then I follow them online and I see what they do if I can get in touch and so on and so forth but I think this Brain On Art Conference is great, it opened me lots and lots of doors the way I understand the art and I feel the necessity of the artists to come into this field quite broadly, so yeah. Do you also mean how can you meet them? So you just write an email, right? I always come up with that. We can talk in a few minutes. I have a reception, so this is what also these evenings are for but yeah, it's very easy and that's the end of it. Have you, in any three of you, like a scientist on the team? Yeah, I'm always emailing, asking questions before I start to even to work with activists even though it's not so how to say you can't not see it in the results so much, it's not so obvious this work behind but I'm very careful of what I do, always make this massive research, it's crazy. So these two or three people, actors have involved in the process, I always very careful before I go into the rehearsal space. So I always emailing, if I can't meet people in person because of the distance, I always email and ask and they're usually very approachable as far as I got there, so yeah. Last question, comment. For Ashley. Ashley, is your name, huh? No, what's your name? Ashley, your name. Why is your name? I'm the worst person with names, I'm sorry. This DAS, you can buy, you can buy figures on DAS on this platform, really, platform, all right? This DAS. DAZ. DAZ, you can buy this, I think. Yeah, DAS is a free character building software that you can use and they have different packs that you can buy and also packs that are free. But I think you can also buy a figure from someone who created it, isn't it, that platform also? Yes. You can pay the creator for this. Will you, do you think about putting your creations on there, one day, whatever platform this is, to buy them by the name you name them? Do you think about this? I thought about it, I think that first, before I think about selling anything though, I just want to talk to like lawyers. That's what has been my next question, like who has the copyright then? The dancer, you, the creator. So here's the thing, and I'll go back to the Fortnite example. Those lawsuits were dropped because the movements weren't considered choreography under copyright law. And so that said, it's like going to be very difficult to basically protect the dances using, I guess, the law. So I've been thinking about, in brainstorming, different ways, and if any of you have different ideas of how to do that, let's talk. But yeah, I think that one of the things that I'm really passionate about, and I think that's going to be very difficult, is finding ways to actually protect the data once I have it. Right now, it's just like with me, like I just have everything, and I've been using it to work on my own projects. But I think it's going to be a lot of conversations with the people who, a lot of my collaborators in learning how they, I guess, like view the value of their, I guess, the monetary value of their movements. And I think that that would actually be part of determining how much it would cost. Yeah, so it's just a huge, there's just so many different conversations from there that I just started having. So, yeah. Yeah, I think it does create new exciting things, new problems who owns what, a ensemble work where the big workshop unrights the performer, but people get to get who owns what, the digital work. So, it's something very new and we learned a lot. I think it's inspiring. We hope you will follow us. We will follow your work and we have a follow-up event, maybe one day symposium or a conference also to focus even more on it. It was a fascinating insight for us who do not know enough. But I think the point of all of you, and especially you, is very valid. We need to talk about this. It needs to be out there. We need to be aware. You also said so much is hidden right now in labs from Google and anywhere. We do not know what is going on. We should know and we don't, what already is happening. So, this is a contribution to the theater always has a help to find out what's real, what's not real. And I think the question was of cyborgs and other digital existence of avatars and other is old questions like a corneille in l'illusion or others to ask who, what is, who are we? Where do we come from? What's real? What is not real? So, it's a fantastic contribution. Thank you. And really thank you from all the way from from Montreal and I also said from you going on the subway. We never know in New York what is happening. You know, so it's a big challenge. Sometimes it's more insecure. So thank you. And again, thank you for coming. Hope you will join us for a little drink and you can talk to them. Thank you. Thank you.