 And then the next step is Mike Sugerman. Mike's the title of Mike's thesis is playing it by year improvisation and music live streaming during COVID-19. And I'm going to turn it back over to TL. Great. Thanks. I'm really excited. Unlike Diego, who I first met in class, really I got to meet Mike and have come to know him and really appreciate his work because of his thesis work. And it's, I'm really excited for you all to hear it. As someone myself who's done stuff in live streaming, I have learned so much from Mike. And I love how he has just extended and kind of brought some new insights into the space. And can I just say too, I just have to give huge high fives, not just to Diego and Mike, but to all of the thesis students for just doing this amidst the pandemic. I mean, of course I saw Diego and Mike deal with it in a very up close way, but I think they've, they've both and all of you have done a tremendous job dealing, dealing with this. So, and Mike's, Mike's topic, as you will see is just talk about seizing, seizing the moment. So really looking forward to hearing Mike share this all with you. Great. Can everyone see that. Yeah, getting gnaws from William. Okay, TL, thank you for a really thoughtful introduction and thank you everyone who has been watching these presentations all day and is sticking around. So today I will be presenting my thesis playing it by ear improvisation and music live streaming during code 19. I want to start with a quote. Our ticket is to get ourselves together as a body. They got this thing set up in a certain way, but can't control us because we have the music, and that's what they're after. But if that's not a good reason for organizing, I don't know what it is. Mu Hall Richard Abrams said this on May 29 1965 at an early meeting of what would become the association for the advancement of creative musicians. This quote comes from George E. Lewis's book, a power stronger than itself, the definitive history of the long running internationally influential free jazz organization. The context here is economic collapse. Black people on the south side of Chicago were bearing the brunt of deindustrialization and the city government disinvesting in their communities, leaving those black communities to crumble. Jazz clubs there were vanishing in the mid 60s. And ones that still operated were interested in outmoded versions of the genre. Like Abrams, I will be talking about music about control about the disenfranchisement of some people because of their bodies about what happens when people organize in a body. And much like Abrams, I will be talking about improvising in crisis. His hard words from over 50 years ago, but they might not sound out of place for a musician to save them today. I'm speaking to you from a room where I have spent much of the last year in a room where I conducted all of the interviews for this project, where I did most of the writing, where I play music and video games on wind, where I have felt at times, stir crazy, depressed, resigned to make the most of this 90 square foot office. So how much of the past year I've spent sitting in this chair. It's easy to forget how much has actually happened in that time, and how truly strange it was at the beginning. Today, I present to you my research on improvising music live streaming, something that developed rapidly and comprehensively when COVID rapidly and comprehensively changed our lives. I'm going to start this talk by taking us back to the beginning of the pandemic in March of 2020, when everything was fresh and scary and terribly confusing. I called this thesis playing it by ear, since that's what we were all doing in those early days, trying to improvise a new way of life. Be those small things like stocking up at the supermarket to minimize trips to monumentally difficult tasks, like learning how to juggle childcare and a new work from home lifestyle. Suddenly grad school one remote. My professors had to improvise classes that would work over zoom and I had to improvise completing coursework and starting this thesis without access to a library or any of the spaces I relied on to get out of the house and into the zone. I have spent all of my adult life participating in local music scenes as a musician organizer journalist, and most importantly as a fan. It has been devastating to live the past year without access to the friends and inspiration I get from chosen parties. But right at the outset of the pandemic, people started broadcasting musical performance on the live stream platform, which there was a great massive live streams that were happening quickly. They were a real lifelong, not just for myself and my friends but for musicians and nightlife workers who are supported by mutual efforts propped up before any talk of stimulus checks or expanded unemployment were even a whisper. Not only were all of these live streams welcome but they were often fun. You could see acts who never tore through your city while chatting with your friends, all in your absolutely most insane sweatpants. The thing about live streams is the vibes are always hiding. It was a nice contrast to well, everything else. The question animating this thesis was how did this widespread music live from practice is spread so quickly at the beginning of the pandemic. And how did things change during the uprising last spring and summer spread by George Boyd's murder. I learned what I argue is that music communities creating a structure through improvisation, working to adapt existing community and organizing structures. They improvised a new virtual way of doing things they used to do offline. This works because improvisation needs structure and they had old structures and in person scenes, yet it also reflects a wider scale lack of structure where they have to scramble to put together a new way of life and look after them when the bottom fell out at the beginning of the pandemic. When that structure exists, it can foster wild creativity and create safety for bodies who bear the brunt of intolerance and structural violence. Yet, when that structure to support improvisation does not exist for charity remains, putting vulnerable people in danger. The ongoing move hall Richard Abrams organization structure. That's what creates the conditions for people improvising to product. To make this point, I will be talking about three things platforms improvisation and community. In that platform section, I will talk about which a live sharing platform owned by Amazon where performers broadcast in real time and the audience converses with each other in the chat and often donates money. As my advisor on this project TL Taylor chronicles in her book, watch me play, to which has traditionally been used to broadcast people playing video games. There are some really an important, really interesting and important things to understand about what happens when people broadcast musical performance instead. In the following section on improvisation I show how improvisation is not just a style of new school performance but a social plan. This will help us understand the moment when these live sharing practices pivoted from fundraising for mutual aid efforts for local community to fundraising for bail funds and specific black community members. That pivot beds the discussion about community, which will be the final section of this talk, what is community, who is part of the given community, who is excluded, and how are they excluded. What happens to improvising communities when they have external structure, and what happens when they do not. But before all this let me give you a better idea of how I conducted my research. My study examined a diverse range of people and events, I observed dozens of live streams and interviewed 11 participants. Those participants range in age from their mid 20s early 40s and span white people and people of color straight and queer people and both cis gender and transfer. I should clarify to help you follow along during this presentation that I see dynamized the people and programs involved with the interview portion of the study and use the real names of people and programs that I observed, but did not interview. The people I interviewed were involved with a wide range of events. There were long running parties put together in the video game Minecraft that were re broadcast on which to reach a broader audience. There were small scale experimental music and DJ streams that were intended as gathering places for geographically specific scenes and groups of friends physically isolated from one another. There was a nightly experimental music and jazz series booked by a national coalition of venues and organizers which I refer to several times in this talk as jazz on the grill. Improvisatory music relies on feedback the performer receives be that from on stage collaborators or from the audience. All of the music I studied here was there for improvisatory music. We all have some idea of how this works in the jazz combo, but the same dynamic applies to DJs to who often choose records depending on their response from the room and how they want to guide the party. These music scenes orbit around the so called underground organizing themselves in improvisatory DIY practices developed in the punk and rave scenes of the 1980s and 1990s. And therefore these communities tend to exist outside of the commercial life music industry. The idea of live streaming came from that commercial life music industry during the pandemic, ranging from the popular versus series featuring hip hop and R&B stars on Instagram live to ticketed concerts on proprietary platforms. But I focus on Twitch, because that is where music live streaming was most prolific, thanks in large part to the scenes and communities that adopted the platform as a substitute for their in person events. In my research, I was driving down notes and obsessively collecting visual material advertising these events, such as the flyers you see here, often shared on social media. Part of what I learned during the study came from organizing live streams on my own website, but most came from participating in others. Sometimes I participate in chats, and sometimes like I imagine so many on the other side of the screen. So I sat back in a daze and looked at the music wash over me. Since Twitch is the key platform in my study, we need to understand how the platform influence what I said. To encounter Twitch, let's encounter Twitch right now, the same way you might encounter it if you logged on for a live stream. The screenshot comes courtesy of our department's very own Philip Tan, who has been DJing on Twitch regularly for over a year now. I actually invited Philip to watch this talk, but he is live on Twitch right at this moment. As you can see, Twitch is a pretty crowded interface, but there are a few talents. Live video takes up most of the space on the screen. And we'll see some overlays on the video here. Philip is using a second camera to show the records he's playing and has added a personalized logo and information about where to follow him on social media. Some streams will overlay a Venmo handle where audience members can donate or animated kiffs to make things more playful. Philip, like so many live streamers, is using software called OBS, short for Open Broadcasting Studio, to compile the visuals for a stream, combine the audio from his turntables with the video from his cameras, and broadcast that all to Twitch. On the left, this is what Philip sees on his broadcasts. On the right, what you see when watching it. On the screen, all the way to the right of this diagram, you will see the live chat. This is where audience members hype up the performer and talk to each other, communicating in both text and emoji. Behind the scenes, there is a human moderator moderating the chat, as well as software algorithm, sorry, algorithmic software that automatically filters out offensive language and hate speech. There are just a handful of important elements for streams and platform, which was often narrated by us to me during interviews as this intricate weave of technical processes and technologies. And those were usually narratives about things going terribly wrong. When I interviewed organizers of Jazz on the Grill, they described their first ever stream to me, initially broadcast on YouTube Live. Early on the night, the stream arbitrarily stopped during a DJ set, and those behind the scenes can only guess why. One organizer of the series, Elvin Foster, recounted that the team figured YouTube recognized copyright material, which he told me quote, tipped off the channel or something like that. Could have been that we never figured it out though. It could have also been trolls reporting. You can click report. A live stream could just get shut down by one report. You don't know. The organizers of Jazz on the Grill decided to create a Twitch account in the middle of that concert, and they were able to move the performers in the audience to Twitch and run the rest of that stream without any issues with copyright or trolls. But that was not the last of the technical issues. Later in the stream, one solo instrumental improviser struggled to figure out how to get for audio to broadcast through OBS. This anecdote shows how live streaming music is in part a practice that relies on several technologies working, shall we say, in concert, each of which can bring their own technical issues. Television broadcast broadband networks, digital signal processing algorithmic rule enforcement, just to name a few. But saying that live streaming is just technologies and concert is only half the story. I argue that live streaming fuses communication practices with communication technologies. To understand how Twitch works as a concert space, we should get a detailed understanding of exactly what communication practices and communication technologies are at play, both online and offline. I will illustrate this with Twitch, but I assure you that none of these are specific to in person or virtual spaces. For example, live streaming operators, the invitation the organizer of sense the performer and the logistical juggling sorting out the schedule, the report between the performer and the audience, the conversation among the audience, the exchange of money between audience and organizer, and then between the organizer and the performer, not to mention the communication between nodes of the dispersed network of servers and computers. I agree that last part sounds specific to a virtual concert, but keep in mind that much event promotion for in person shows relies on social media platforms. All of that communication and technology stews together and contributes to what we might call a vibe Bruno Latour would invite us to think of the technologies and those relationships as agents as actors, albeit non human ones. This is a co constitutive relationship between humans and non human actors. Could we consider music, one of these non humans to consider one origin story of music live stream told to me by Arlo Bohan, a longtime music live streamer who helped organize the club for sandwich parties and the video game Minecraft, which ran for several years Arlo has been involved with live streaming since the mid 2000s and described what the technical landscape looks like in the early audio only days before platforms. He had to use shout cast servers to broadcast audio and IRC chats for live discussion among the audience. So the discourse among the audience was mediated and circumscribed by the specific assortment of non humans or technologies used to make that stream work. Yes, it took a lot of labor to run a live stream in the days before Twitch, but it also takes a lot of labor now. I learned this when I spent well over an hour on the phone with a performer I booked for one of my own live stream concerts. I walked him through some arduous troubleshooting process so he could successfully broadcast his field recordings to Twitch. I experienced a peculiar kind of intimacy with the performer clicking to the same and he's remotely trying to put myself in his shoes to debug his system. Sometimes you really feel just how much interpersonal human relationships undergird what we otherwise think of as media and technological phenomena. And of course, we have bizarrely intimate encounters with faceless powerful corporations to again, Twitch is owned by Amazon. Amazon also owns and operates several different marketplaces where people sell things that were not produced by Amazon. So granola and cheese at Whole Foods, gig labor on Mechanical Turk, and on its own namesake market, fashion accessories, innovative hygienic equipment and fine literature. Should we understand Twitch as yet another marketplace that Amazon operates? And if so, what is it selling? Perhaps the product is what TL Taylor calls transformative play, the alchemical media object of broadcasters creativity and labor, the audience as participation, and in the case of both video games and DJ music, intellectual property, whose rebroadcast rights belongs to no one involved. In exchange for offering customers that transformative play, Twitch gets advertising revenue and a cut of all pay subscriptions to channels on the platform. Twitch in exchange provided structure that improvisers could adapt to. So on that note, let's talk about improvisation. On Twitch, the improvising performer can't receive the same type of feedback that they do during in person shows. This is a conundrum, since their art form relies on cues from collaborators can react with the audience. I'll return to this slide from earlier in the presentation. This is a still firm of performance by Woody, an experimental dance music producer based in Pittsburgh. Let's take Woody's point of view. You can tell by the camera angle that they are broadcasting using the camera on their mobile phone, perhaps prop up against the wall. You can see in the bottom right hand corner of that live video that they are using their laptop to DJ, and likely the DJing software fills that laptop's entire screen. Woody, in all likelihood, cannot see the chat, where the crowd is effusive. Unable to receive that feedback from the audience, Woody perhaps does not feel like the set is much different than just practicing at home. During interviews, I would regularly ask musicians what this experience is like for them. Reactions ran the gamut. On the other hand, there was the jazz on the grill organizer Elvin, himself an experimental musician and jazz drummer. He found the experience of playing a solo synthesizer set on live stream lonely and to moralize it, especially when compared to a set he played in a duo with a close friend a few weeks earlier. On the other hand, there was some tape, a DJ who developed a sense of their relationship with a remote audience. Elvin understood that there are unique responsibilities that a DJ has been playing to the audience and puts together sets based on what those individuals listening environments and mental states might be like in isolation. I view these two responses as basically opposite ends of the spectrum, yet they both reflect the ways that musicians are entangled in social relations. The anthropologist of music and improvising musician, Georgina born provides a useful framework for understanding those entanglements, which she refers to as four planes of social mediation in music. Let me illustrate it using a photograph from 1980 of a band Georgina born played in the feminist improvising group. In the first plane, music mediates relationships between musicians playing together. Music mediates the interaction between musician and audience electing to form an ad hoc community attending that concert. In the third plane, music mediates the musicians interaction with broader social relations like race or class. In this case, the feminist improvising group, a group of gay women was often confronting patriarchy and heteronormativity with their music. In the fourth plane, music mediates the institutional context for their performance, such as if they're performing in a state sponsored jazz space or if they're performing in a grungy punk squad. These planes do not simply disappear because music goes virtual on Twitch. Take the case of the biosphere three series that I studied whose organizers are a queer married couple that will teach in the stream. When I asked them what it was like DJing without an audience present, Izzy expressed the freedom he enjoyed of being able to have access to his entire record collection and try anything without having to worry about playing to the rhythm. But Kimia expressed missing the rapport with the support of audience that empowered her to take risks. Kimia described to me how her ideal setting was the camping festival in Washington State called Gays Hate Techville, where a large group of queer people gather to enjoy music and celebrate each other's company, and how DJing on the live stream could never replace the thrill and dynamic of playing in that context. And even though the biosphere three organizers felt physically separated from their familiar social mediations, they still developed new ones. When the protests spurred by George Floyd's murder broke out, they found ways to utilize the second plane of elective community mediations to make sense of the larger larger cultural forces they were navigating. Fundraising on their streams shifted to supporting black trans friends who are in financial need during COVID and do some employment, and they made the decision to continue to run their streams as a way of providing support for friends who are participating in the racial justice protests. In these instances, we can see examples of structure being propped up during improvisation that facilitates improvisation. In Kimia's example, she feels that the structure of a festival for queer techno lovers supports her exploration and empowers her to take risks while improvising. Yet, clearly the practice of live streaming on Twitch gave both her and Izzy a structure to support their friends and community members when a new crisis emerged a few months into the pandemic. So let's return to New Hall Richard Abrams. Both Izzy and Kimia are describing exactly what Abrams was talking about in 1965. Musicians need solidarity and structure to improvise successfully. I believe there's a foresight to this. That a lack of structure makes improvisation fundamentally risky. I have been using the word community a lot. Sometimes to refer to community members, sometimes to refer to a music community, sometimes to refer to a kind of community ethic. One question that emerged both in my own study and in music at large during this early pandemic period was the question of what exactly is community and who is considered part of it. In terms of music, one way to understand community is the way that Georgina Bourne suggests in her four planes of mediation. It is the people who elect to gather around a certain kind of music or a concert. Yet that paradigm might not be full enough. Let's consider George Floyd. Shortly after his murder, various music publications and users on Twitter began circulating the revelation that George Floyd wrapped as big for it in Houston's fertile turn of the millennium hip hop scene, even making an album with one of the city's most storied and beloved producers DJs crew. The music team realized that George Floyd was one of us. What people didn't really talk about though was that George Floyd also worked as a security guard at Latin night clubs Minneapolis that often hosted techno parties. During my interview with the DJ son Tate, we talked a lot about the struggles black people experienced in the dance music community. So when son mentioned that they sometimes work as a security guard at techno shows. I asked how they felt about this biographical parallel to George Floyd. So you have this situation where you got this person who was doing security at dance music parties. But is anybody looping that back around in the community to make sure that the people that are protecting you are protected themselves. And then in that case, if you're just using that to guard your party, but nobody's looking out for that. Even though we're supposed to be this universal loving dance music scene that's inclusive. What are we really doing. Let's return to this four planes diagram from earlier, but modified. What might it look like as something with walls as something with the door. Here, the musicians audience and institution are inside. You can picture someone standing at the door checking IDs, keeping the piece both outside and in from the outside. What we're left with is those broader social relations. And then we'll keep this slide up as we consider how communities and individuals make decisions about who is outside and who is inside. So let's return one last time to jazz on the grill. That stream actually grew up grew out of an in person series called plateaus at a Midwestern non-profit arts space. A donor and regular member of that space developed mobility issues and could no longer attend shows there. So organizers of plateaus started live streaming that show every week for the express purpose of giving that one community member access. Organizers had experienced with live streaming, they were able to so quickly get the jazz on the grill series off the ground on Twitch when the pandemic started. Yet, improvising and adapting does not necessarily equate to creating spaces for all who may want to participate. One night on jazz on the grill, a performer used a video effects that resemble the strobe light. An audience member going by the username gray alien express concern about the strobing, given their sensitivity as an epileptic. Another audience member discounted the concern writing in the chat. This is noise music. It's dangerous. The audience that they were disappointed to hear that kind of dismissal since that exact cavalier attitude tends to keep them away from in person shows where organizers often ignore that strobe lights could put a danger. Live streams gray alien explained were safer precisely because they themselves had control over the environment and it turned their risks, but seeing this attitude in the chat still made them feel unwelcome. The participants in the chat quickly came to gray alien side denouncing the ableism on display and expressing their support for gray alien and shortly after that flippant member apologized for his insensitivity. In some sense, it was a matter of luck that everything worked out as well as it did that the community shared the right set of ethics and swiftly acted on them to protect a vulnerable person. But what would have happened absent of that response. This moment was a demonstration that even though anyone with a fast enough internet connection can access any Twitch stream, they may not feel welcomed by the community they find there. These streams may be open to the public, and they may be community spaces, but that does not mean that they are de facto safe for all who want to participate. I ask us to consider the times that we got lucky in spaces were safe, and the times that we did not consider the case of the DIY venue ghost ship in Oakland that claimed 36 lives when it caught fire in 2016. In Oakland, a real estate crisis had created a situation where it was difficult for a legal art community art spaces to take hold, creating a vacuum for illegal spaces like ghost ship to fill. The venues organizers were negligent and operated the venue in a profoundly hazardous reckless way. When it burned down, it took human life and much of the energy of the music scene with it. It is a sobering reminder that improvisation can create something surprisingly robust and can support people and communities in need, but that support is only as secure as the structures of the improvisation occurs within. I will end this talk by asking that we consider how we might build real structure for improvisation, something in the vein of what we call Richard Abrams and the association for advancement of creative musicians built a half century ago that continues to this day. This is a picture of the ACM from a 50th anniversary performance a few years ago. I hope that if I shown you a problem today. It's only because I'm showing you the flip side of something quite inspiring and beautiful real support systems, often created by groups propped up alone by a love of music and one another. These are imperfect support systems has all are. So maybe you and I don't have good answers for how we can get public arts funding into our cities to support nonprofit community spaces that provide a safe place for scenes together and thrive. But maybe we can walk, we can walk away from this talk today, looking around us to see how people improvise, how they do it willingly and passionately together. And what we might do to the world around us to help those people to help ourselves develop something better and safer, where improvising is not just something we do in a frenzy, when the bottom falls out. Thank you. Great. Thank you, Mike. We're open for questions. Okay, there's the, oh, Ethan, yes, and then there's also a question that's come up in chat. Go ahead, Ethan. Thanks. Hey Mike congratulations on the presentation it's wonderful to watch all these ideas come together in synthesis. I think that acknowledgement that you know your your thesis itself has been an improvisation and that we're all in the midst of that active improvising is a really important piece of context for all of this in this whole process I've been challenging you to identify more clearly who it was that you were studying what what were these specific live stream practices. I think I finally get it in this presentation and I think at the end of the day. You're really reflecting more than anything on improvisation, both in the musical stance and also in the sense of constructing the sort of social and cultural structures. And how people to come together on these sort of four planes. I love that this has sort of progressed from sort of an analysis of how twitch was going to be used in the space through to these very complicated conversations like what does it mean for George Floyd to be one of us how are we sort of constructing the space for us, who gets to be outside who gets to be inside. I love this idea that improvisation can can lead to incredible resilience but but in a way that can also be tremendously dangerous, if left in the sort of space of things along the lines of go ship. I'm wondering, you know, as we find ourselves sort of coming to what may be a different phrase in the pandemic. How do you see this process of these online spaces at improvisation with them changing do you think this is going to remain. The eternal corner and live performance becomes more possible. Do you think that in the same way that jazz on the grill sort of became an online space out of necessity that that will end up staying. And do you have a sense for how the sort of resilience and creativity that's been expressed in these online spaces might come into play when we sort of return to what you might think of as the normal precarity of being involved with the business of making and sharing music. Yeah, so that's a bunch of big questions I think I can probably also answer Doug Kaplan's question in the chat while getting at that. I think that's a simple one. Where is this going to go. I mean I think that you know I just want to clarify and make it very clear I really studied like three three and a half months of this thing happening and it was right at the beginning of the pandemic through maybe a few weeks or month into the big summer. And I think that as I was interviewing people later in the summer and the fall and doing all my research, you know kind of feel like sense that I was getting people loved it they were like I get to see this music. I get to have my friends. People don't drink and they like being in spaces where they could see music without drinking some people don't like staying up late some people don't like talking over the music I mean it was just positive. Honestly, I think there's a lot of streaming still happening and I think there's a lot of streaming not happening. I think, as with so many things during the pandemic, we started to burn out on a little bit. So, I was very bullish maybe like you know six months ago when I was really thinking that the stuff thoroughly for the first time, and these days I don't know. I mean I think that it will continue to some extent and I think especially after COVID people will live stream shows that are happening in person because it's a way to get extra people to see it's a good thing people like it. And I think the other thing that we're going to continue to see is kind of this trend towards again TL I keep referring to what TL Taylor describes in her book watch me play which is something similar to what video gamers to where it's you know kind of like individuals kind of spontaneously hopping on the stream, a place their friends can hang out they develop their own followings. I am not sure if we're going to continue really seeing it's kind of like community level live streams as much. I think there are places where it happens already so the jam band scene is an interesting one. In another version of this is I would talk about fish, who, you know they basically live stream every single show on their tour and people have made a big practice out of getting together with their friends in the same room to watch a live stream hang out, but also to kind of watch these live streams and chat about them other ways. I mean, it's a little hard to say but one thing that I do feel pretty confidently about is in terms of the improvisation thing I mean, I didn't talk about it much here but I think, especially DJs there's a risk that all this disappears from Twitch, kind of more or less within the next year or the next couple years if which decides start cracking down on IP, which they're starting to do video games. You know, I mean, I guess the DJing thing is an interesting one because you know, the party a ghost ship where there is a fire that was a dance party through DJs. I'm talking about a situation where people might get booted from which because the nature of their art form is that they're using in theory copyright material, right, or if it's whatever IP regime got used to shut in the international death. So I don't really know. And all I can really say is I, I hope, and I think there's a way to do it, but I hope that as we emerge from this moment people realize that it's community that helped keep music together. And they really start to think about what they can do to stabilize communities, because the model is going for a long time of individual changes. I don't think that's actually what supports robust communities and safety and improvisation approval. Sorry, that was a long answer. Thanks there's a question also in in chat from Eric Gordon. Thanks for this wonderful talk you've given me a lot to think about. I'm trying to understand how central improvisation is to the formation of community. Is there any kind of change or play that provides the connective tissue, or the communicative capacity for communities to form. Eric, thank you for asking that play I think that's a good question because I think yeah absolutely there's always like a playfulness to people coming together around music right I mean no one's doing it because they have a solid duty to go to a show or a party. It's not a hard time tracing causality here, but what I can say is that I think improvisation is a way of expressing that community. And I think if you want to look at the way people get together with me and improvisation is a good way to do it. You know so obviously things that might form a community city could be anything from, or around music could be anything from a long tradition of that music in the city to, frankly, gentrification bringing in a lot of people who find a sheet placed open art space, and other people can use transit to get there and it actually undoes a lot of help contributes to the undoing of a lot of communities already in the neighborhood. Right and in a way those might both be improvisatory practices. So I have a hard time saying that improvisation is the root of it but we can kind of think about how improvisation guides things how it expresses how these things form and all of that questions. I'll just jump in there for a second and just a to congratulate you on this as as a work of improvising in the face of rapid change as in addition to the to the work itself and I wanted to ask you about. You know when you ask the question what is community, you come back to an idea of a kind of collective care, right, kind of structure of collective care. When I think in some of our first conversations we were talking about specific music scenes, right and I'm thinking about how those two are not the same, right that that within specific music scenes there are all that they're there have always been ways in which that care is not completely shared and ways in which communities of care form within larger scenes, right. And so I just wanted to ask you, you know if you could reflect upon that that difference since since those two are not quite synonymous but you're talking about certain kinds of communities that arise within larger kind of fandoms or scenes. Yeah, I think that's a really good point and I think you tapped into something important which is that it's really hard to think of the kind of care community paradigm as something that exists outside of other paradigms and music which are kind of based around the economy or career or stuff like that. And oftentimes they exist in the same genres in the same cities amongst the same groups of people kind of intention with each other. And maybe the best way to answer that question is by talking about something I cut from the presentation, which appears my thesis, which are all these stories I got from queer people about situations where they were excluded from their local community scene, either outright because of discrimination people wouldn't book them, which is kind of wild because they were both DJs dance music comes out of the black gay Chicago community in the 80s. Right. But on the other hand, it's, they also get excluded by fact of facing harassment when they go to a club or when they go to some show and you know you could say okay maybe a bar that's seeking to make money has a little harassment, right, even if they depend on a certain group of people and kind of community to frequent it for a certain party, but I think that you can look at the kind of care component as something that sometimes happens at those parties because of people who go to them and I think about when I lived in Chicago there was an effort to start collecting, you know, if I'm in hygiene products at one of the night clubs to distribute with the most population. But then there's also the situations where people forced out of those kinds of more commercial spaces because of the things I was just talking about start to form their own care communities and kind of a DIY sense so I was talking to them like I don't go to clubs as much anymore. I play them but I don't really enjoy it because people always remark on my body doesn't trans but as a response to that I went and I started DIY party around every week for years and it was a wonderful haven for people like me and my friends. And for what it's worth, I didn't even realize that there was a club scene in the city where this person was telling me about I've only ever heard of that DIY party. And in some sense when I think of that city I think of that DIY party. So there's a relationship there that I don't know I guess one since you call it kind of like dialectic. Yeah, but it's fascinating thing to think about. Thanks. And just any, any other questions out there. I think we may have come to the end of the day. Let's, let's give Mike a round of applause. And this has been a really, really impressive set of presentations today. And this is, you know, this day is why I love CMS. You know, you see, you see all of this come together all this brilliance, originality, pushing the field. And I just want to congratulate all of you who presented today. And thank all of you who came to participate and to, to watch the presentations. Again, thank you. Thank you all. And we will see you all soon in one, one place or another.