 Yep, and then now we see attendees coming in. Cool, so we'll kind of give it a few minutes as the attendees join. So as you all know, we're on Zoom webinar. So some attendees will be joining us directly on the Zoom webinar and some folks will be watching from either our cultural website or Facebook or HowlRound. So yeah, let's give it a few minutes. So hello to those who are joining or watching. We're just giving it a few minutes, probably a minute or two for folks to hop on and then we will get started. In the meantime, feel free to leave in the chat if you have any thoughts or questions that you want the panelists to address and we will try to get to them. And back to floating torso existence in virtual space. I think we can slowly get started in slow motion since folks can also hop in the middle and rewind and play with time and figure all of that out. So welcome everyone, thank you for being here to all the panelists and all the attendees and all the folks watching now or later. This is a conversation on being apart, being together. Hosted by Kaltrop. Kaltrop is a global art and technology community that was born out of collaboration between La Mama Experimental Theater Club and Soul Institute of the Arts. We have all kinds of programming, residencies, events, developmental processes of all sorts at the intersection of our technology and activism and we are really excited to host this conversation today that brings together art leaders and community organizers based in LA and New York who are working in so many different wonderful ways with art, art and tech and community initiatives. So today's conversation will center around how different collectives and initiatives have been devising new grassroots engagement strategies during this time of remote connection, whether it is in conjunction with innovative technology or activating some sort of other means of interaction. One of the questions is also the panelists will discuss also how they envision sustaining these initiatives or adapting their approaches in the long term. So without further ado, I know that we have so many exciting folks in the room and I am really looking forward to getting to know about all their work. So we'll just jump into introductions. I am Scarlett. I'm the programs and projects manager here at Culture Hub and we'll just kind of start from one of the panelists and go through and everyone will give a short introduction to kind of who they are and what they are working on. Any brave volunteer who would like to go first? Hi, I'm Tamala Woodard. I'm broadcasting from Lenape-Monze Territories press presence and the future. And also just want to acknowledge that using materials that are mind and confiscated from all over this Turtle Island and give thanks to the native communities who have cared, took all of this land for us. I am sitting in a yellow chair. I'm wearing a striped shirt and a yellow hat in a room with checkerboard floors and windows in my background. I'm a director person, really a facilitator of processes. I'm also an artistic director of a theater in New York City called Working Theater that tells the stories for and about and with working people. My practice, my medium is heavily cited, site specific or site impacted. And my relationship to audiences, high level of participation built into the event. And I am working towards making my practice and my ethos a high level of accessibility that's designed from concept. And got to begin to put those things together in a digital piece called American Dreams that just finished its run. That was a collaboration between essentially 15 organizations across the country asking us to think about putting aside the idea of competing for audiences and coming together as a collective to represent this entire country and local conversations made public around immigration and around voting access. And it was a game show. The audience voted over the course of five rounds. The winner was unique to that audience every single night. And I hope what it did was spark conversations about who are we to choose and also we are the people who choose and what is the responsibility that we have as citizens of this country to be caretakers of this idea that we've put forth in the very faulty constitution. But it's a pretty good idea if we actually try our hardest to begin to think about what equality really means, what the rights and privileges of investing in each body on this land as valuable and human in equally valuable and equally human. Thank you so much, Tamela. Who would like to go next? I can go. So I'm Mad and for folks who are blind or low vision, I'm white and I have tired eyes and glasses and a foe hoc that I made myself. And I work and I'm on the Hope Welladina land currently, but thanks, Dave. But I work with an organization called Power Plant, which is in the Lenafe land or Bushwick. And basically Power Plant's mission is to bridge the digital divide. What we do in its physicality is we have a computer lab. So we offer Wi-Fi computers, just a space for folks in the neighborhood to come by, kids come after school and they play Roblox, they get homework help. But we also connect emerging artists with a community of learners who want to share in their skills. And as the pandemic hit and we move more online, we've been really focused on collaborating with mission aligned organizations across the country to leverage our collective networks and offer a lot of the creative technology classes and digital literacy initiatives that are often hoarded in big cities and provide that with a larger community of teens like all over. But one way we have been working within the pandemic is when the protests started, we started collaborating with High Grilling Press and opening our doors as a sanctuary space for protesters and gathering donations, carting that out to protests. And then it's kind of evolved into a facilitative space where community members, neighbors, organizations use the space to distribute basic needs for the community. We have a fridge and a pantry and a lender book, take a book and that's all work that people have wanted to do with us. And it's been a way that we've been able to kind of like deepen our roots physically and also in tandem with like seeing our interdependence with mission-aligned organizations across the country. But I feel like Tehhee would do an awesome job at explaining further. Thank you, Matt. And if you don't mind, maybe we can move on to Tehhee. Yeah, hi. So my name is Tehhee. I use data and pronoun. And I'm currently on a occupied line of pay land or beside part of Brooklyn. But so I'm also the co-founder of Hyperlink Press. We are Zing and Curatorial Collective inspired by South Korean lesbian utopia project called LBCD that was active from early 2000 to 2003. So before pandemic, we were mostly focused on publication, art book and Zing scene and but a lot of our works, like all of our individual member works with archive of like queer resistance and community in South Korea and also like us as, cause all five of our member are Korean-American diaspora. So we're just like navigating what does it mean to create community and create the continuing the legacy of mutual aid that's not by necessarily tied to blood and kinship but like actually taking care of our chosen family. So beginning like around May, I reached out to Maddie cause that was a month where New York City started enacting curfew to prevent like further protest, Black Lives Matter protests. So I reached out to a few art non-profit or like art spaces that's like not in use or like just like asking them to open up during the curfew hours and like give people access to as a sanctuary space. And yeah, Maddie was who's part of a power plant actually responded and we are also friends so it started out as like us like gathering resources for our community and like within our friend group and people would care about each other but this collaboration has been very interesting because at the time Maddie was in Ohio and I was the only one who was based in Brooklyn or gear power plant. And so like gathering resources and also like redistributing them to protesters and also like other spaces that needs like PPE kit and just food and like how it actually like wrenched out towards like community fridge and also just like a spot for people to gather that I saw that was like very heartwarming to like see and I feel very honored to like create a space or partake in that. So yeah. Thank you so much. Can't wait to hear more about all of your wonderful work that you're doing. Maybe we can move to another pair of collaborators that we have here today. There's actually two more pairs. Maybe let's go to Alice, Alice and Sarah and virtual care lab. Cool. Yeah, I can start. So my name is Alice Yuan Zhang. I am a Chinese American immigrant. I am a digital artist as well as a community programming organizer and I really enjoy bringing in a playful approach and interactive approach to my work whether it is my own work that is dealing with some more nuanced social political issues. I recently came out with a project, roughly I'm for lost plants on the climate collapse as well as recognizing, acknowledging and experiencing finding a more intimate relationship with local ecology here in Los Angeles on Tonga land, Tonga Chumash in Kishland and as well as other projects that such as inner species speed dating through culture hub as part of my residency this 2020 to 21 year. And so personally, I'm really interested in finding that playful approach as a sort of Trojan horse to bring in more nuance, to bring in more interest and as well as empathy and practicing that together in decentralized and collaborative generative ways. And then, yeah, virtual care labs. Sarah and I started earlier this year. Sarah, I'll let you introduce yourself and maybe we can together talk about virtual care lab. Thanks, Alice. Hi, everyone. I'm Sarah Swadis. I am in Los Angeles. I'm an artist and also an organizer. I largely make independently sound and film work that is usually about like the environment or memory and history and cultural recollections and things. I would say that Alice has the playful ethos and my ethos is I really like to bring in the feeling of what did I just experience? So both in my individual work and hopefully in virtual care lab, I think that's something we've created as well. I also organize programs with non-profit Zocalo Public Square also very question themed. And with virtual care lab, like Alice said, we started this idea back in March when the pandemic lockdowns first hit in California which is where we both live, but really almost immediately wanted to make this accessible beyond a single place. So many we have, we are very open to people who can just, it's open to join and collaborate with us. We have ongoing project groups comprised of people from around the world in various different countries. And we basically mix up public gatherings on community proposed themes. So people basically submit ideas to us for things that they'd like to do with a community online. It can be anything from poetry gatherings. We are doing something exciting, upcoming, exploring queer death practices and traditions we've had, gosh, it's really hard to even cover it all. We've had experimental online movement, performances, like it's all over the place. And we also have an online community where people can meet each other and find other folks to work with. So we really like to bring different ideas together and connect people to actually generate things. Alice, what do you want to say? Yeah, all that. And I feel that it's been just really fruitful seeing it evolve into, to hold its own warmth in a way which feels really special given that digital space and community is often co-opted. Digital space is often feels exclusionary more than inclusionary and feels risky and scary and where there's a lot of things that are taking your attention or co-opting it for something else and putting a price tag on things. And so it feels like a space that has captured some of the warmth and ingenuity that we're excited about and the spirit for experimenting together. And so yeah, excited to chat more about that also starting to write notes and I'm already very excited to maybe cross pollinate as we keep talking about GEOs. What does it mean to have people coming in from different places and that versus physical tangible material, something we talk about a lot is like, what does it mean to just have screen time? What is screen fatigue and how do we deal with that? But we still have to be here. And so all that and excited to chat more about that, chat more about letter writing, communication, to perform some communication is something that we play a lot with. So yeah. Thank you, Alice and Sarah. Alice is one of our resident artists this year and so is Jasmine who's on the call as well. Shall we go to Jasmine? Perhaps. Sure. Hi, I'm Jasmine. I go by she they hormones pronouns and I am a performing artist, a healer and a transformative justice facilitator. So a lot of my work is in the intersection of healing and social justice related art practice and how we can investigate and explore and play with each other to be able to deepen our own practice professionally and personally in community building. So creating spaces before that were physical now that are virtual where we can really uplift and amplify our ability to be agents of change within the ways that we're dismantling our own internalized oppression and the way that we're looking at and evaluating power and privilege out in the systems that we're existing in and how we can work to live in a world that's in a way of harm reduction. And that is in really being with ourselves in these different positionalities and knowing how we operate in those different spaces and what it is that we can shift within the communities that we exist in. So so much of what this most recent chapter has been is like, how can we create these intimate spaces while being virtual and still be exciting and be refreshing and be fun while knowing that there are limitations that we're working within and there's also so many more possibilities within those limitations that we might have not thought of before. So it's been really exciting and also I think that with the play shops and workshops I was doing before the pandemic there's a certain kind of energy that we can have with each other when we're in the same space that I found now you can cultivate in different ways. And so thinking about like just transforming our relationship to space and to experiences and to the ways that our interpersonal connections play out in the macrocosm of society has really been where my work has been lately. Thank you so much, Jasmine. And lastly but not least, leastly, last but not least we have Ella and Christopher who with IO were part of our residency program last year together as the artist collective anti-customs enforcement. Cool, yeah, thanks. My name is Christopher Horlitz. I'm a researcher and curator based in Berlin. I'm wearing a white sweater, got some plans in the back. And we three IO, I can send the, Ella has driven I actually met in New York and we're also there last year when we started this residency. And what we've been doing is essentially researching the intersection of the digitizing of borders and artistic practice. So that means it's different questions. First of all, like how are artists specifically affected by borders but also what views do artists have on borders and border technology specifically in their work but also what are speculative responses to current changes in border technologies that we can come up with like new maps, new forms of collaboration, working across borders. And what we did in our residency was essentially host a series or two events slash salons with different people and which kind of added up on interviews that we've been doing with people, with artists all over the world, virtually obviously, getting their testimonies on their experiences on this while we're working on a manifesto. And it's been really interesting because like in the midst of this project essentially the pandemic hit and we were working on an installation to connect all these dots that we're thinking about which never manifested because we just couldn't work together anymore because now we're also spread across three different countries but we've been working on this for two years which is really intense but we just finished giving a class in New York a seminar on this which was open to different participants and I think Ella's gonna talk about that a lot more but it was a really interesting ride because the class we gave just ended up being so much involved in our thinking process because of the structures that we're working in. Yeah. Cool, thanks Chris. My name's Ella. I am currently based in Stockholm, Sweden which have originally been occupied by satmy people and are now, or yeah, so. And I lived in New York because I've studied anthropology and I've been thinking through aesthetics and disability justice questions. I've also had a movement practice and so I've really been missing movement in this virtual world and connecting with bodies in that sense. And I think that was really nice when this class started that we were able to think through these questions collectively. We had a lot of feelings around what was going on that we needed to process and it was really nice to see how we could do that together as a class which originally normally is quite hierarchical. So we were thinking through hierarchies in the classroom and if the digital space could allow for more non-hierarchical engagements. And that has also led to questions around care and community building. And yeah, we're really excited to be here and excited to hear more about your work. Thank you so much. And actually we have one more panelist who is not synchronously joining us, Yoyo Lin who is also one of our resident artists this year but I will play a short video from her so we can watch and get to know her that way. Hi, my name is Media Artist. I'm gonna be sharing a little bit about what I'm doing at Culture Hub and beyond one sec. Great, I think my screen is being shared. So yeah, I wanted to talk a little bit about my practice and how it ties into all of the topics that we'll be covering today. So this is a spread from my personal resilience journal. On the left are notes and on the right is a circular data visualization. So for the resilience journal, I've been tracking seven dimensions of how my illness presents itself in daily life. If you read from outside of the circle to in, it goes from felted, which is the chronic pain, the physical and psychological pain, logistical issues, body image, social pressures, doctor visits, future visions and past memories and traumas. And I've been doing this as a way for me to better understand the process of having chronic illness and also from a physical standpoint, very much tracking my symptoms but also thinking about the different ways that we don't allow ourselves to hold space for it. I grew up in a community that often would and talk about illness or talk about trauma or pain. So thinking about like, how do we build language and how do we build collective knowledge on spaces that revolve around chronic illness and disability? So yeah, this was the March 2020 visualization, which was when COVID hit New York City. And I've just been thinking a lot more about how, like what are the forms in which disabled folks, chronically ill folks have been living prior to COVID and ways that are distributed and also thinking about ways that we've been thinking about time. I think our idea of time has been very much distorted these days in a way that will probably never be the same. So often I think about how in chronically ill bodies, we often experience time in a very different sense as well. So I've been thinking about making a web-based version of the resilience journal as a way for me to more publicly, I guess, perform. This data tracking experience and also this tracking of illness and thinking about ways of creating a live archive or a living archive of chronic illness data is a big part of this project. And I also wanted to talk a little bit about the Crip Nightlife gatherings that we've been hosting, Kevin Gatkin, Amy Himmry, among others. We've been hosting a variety of different Zoom parties with DJs, performers, and yeah, just like all kinds of folks. Yeah, and thinking about the ways that the internet has always been a space for intimacy and has always been a space for gathering for a lot of disabled folks. And yeah, we've been having just like huge parties and turnouts and there'll be audio describers, people who do ASL interpretation and access doulas, just making sure everyone can access the party space. And yeah, just thinking about how in so many different kinds of like nightlife experiences, oftentimes they're very inaccessible and kind of cause more harm for marginalized bodies. So just thinking about, yeah, like how do we make a space where we can party and also feel seen and meet each other and have fun is a big question that we've been trying to answer. And I've also been doing different performances in the Zoom space, thinking about the desktop as a stage and thinking about the different ways in which we can engage with our bodies and also digital spaces simultaneously. And yeah, considering ways of like building in rituals and building in sacred movements within the digital space. And also thinking about how the glitch is inherently a disability aesthetic. I've also been working on a series of movement workshops and a big part of this space has been thinking about, you know, what our bodies that are allowed to dance and what are ways that we can dismantle our notions of rigor and dismantle our notions of skill within the dance space. And so rotations was born. I co-founded this with my friend, Kalenna Kakey Brown who is a New Zealand disabled dancer. And together we've been doing a series of workshops all on Zoom, done by eight different practitioners, all disabled or chronically ill and figuring out ways of being together in virtual space. And this was a exercise that Anna Giechan held at our last workshop where we looked at the mouth as a choreographic site and thinking about how lip reading is also a form of dance. And yes, thank you so much. You can reach me here. That was Yoyo Lin and hopefully we can all connect with her in the future. Thank you so much everyone for introducing yourselves and thank you also for the land of acknowledgements. I personally am in Los Angeles or east of Los Angeles on Tongva and Kishland. So I think we're ready to move on to the next chapter of our conversation, which is an open conversation forum. And as I typed in the chat, please feel free to chat in some questions and thoughts in the chat, whether you're watching on the culture of watch page, Facebook, HowlRound or inside of this webinar with us, please feel free to write thoughts and we will get to it in the second part of this conversation. So I'm curious to hear about what has been some of the most exciting or most challenging parts about working in a distributed way. It seems like some of you all have started to answer this question already, but what has been the highlight and what has been the most discouraging aspect? And feel free to chime in and we can kind of organically let the conversation flow. I feel like I can start with just one highlight that was really nice with teaching it. So this class was held up Parsons. And because it was online, we could collaborate with Afro-Tectopia and other institutions that wouldn't otherwise be granted access to the new school, which is a very privileged institution. And so that for me was a very clear way that the digital can allow us to work around these institutions. Which I think is so emblematic of the whole process because at the new school, you literally you can't physically access the room. Like you won't get into that school. And with that, it's just, you can just send around the link and everybody can go. And I think that's what I meant earlier on when I was saying like this class came to be so much part of the thinking process where our distribution around the world affects students being all over and their individual experiences with COVID but also with borders was so valuable. Yeah, that's definitely been something that's super exciting is opening up these opportunities to folks outside of big cities because like one, moving to a big city, like if you're moving from a small town, it's like you gotta save up for security and putting your first and last down and just like moving to a space that's so much more expensive than the smaller areas or maybe you're a young kid, we do a lot of classes with teens and it's some of the workshops that we've done, it's like, oh, all right, here's this like 13 year old in North Carolina, like just logging in and then like making connections with other folks in the room like maybe somebody's from North Carolina but they moved and then it allows for like some spontaneity that maybe you get IRL if you're like going to the grocery store and you run into somebody but it allows you to like expand past what you would have like initially imagined possible. And that's something that I'd like to see grow in the future, it's like a lot especially with art and tech spaces, I feel like they're really centralized to like the big cities and in Appalachian, Ohio, it's like hard to get wifi, like they don't even build the networks to get wifi. So starting to think about how we can distribute this kind of practice where you're starting to think more critically and creatively with technology begins with sharing the work of like artists in that medium with young people and older folks who might be scared of technology like coming from small towns, I think. I would love to hop onto that in terms of spontaneity and welcoming some of that and for Virtual Care Lab do you mind if I screen share real quick to show visual aid? Okay, so this is Virtual Care Lab's website and one of the things that we have been finding really interesting to explore is a collective project called Portals. And so this is something that is sometimes reminiscent of like early internet days when everything was pure and innocent and fun only. And it's a way that I would imagine just it's well, it's beyond the synchronous gatherings that we also do. And there's something very light and easy about this as CRISPR and Ella had mentioned earlier about how you just, it's one click and then you find it and you're like, oh, this is cool. And you click around and for example, in your world of texts we often come back to you and every day there's like something new or every couple of days. So we go on here and this, so our friend, Lee Tussman who helps out with baby castles actually told us about your world of texts and I think it goes way back. Folks have used it for a long time before and it's just like different areas that people will grow themselves. And sometimes it does feel like gardening. So speaking of gardening, I'll show you some flowers here and you keep going and it's a space that people take up and is responsive to, so allies for racial justice here we can be unfathomable. You're able to create the reality you want and the reality you're in and then there's poop right there. And so it's just like, it's very interesting because it's just, it feels like there are no walls, there are no bars and you kind of go for it. And so far we've been going with the goodwill of the scale of this project which is still small and so there's kind of an interesting energy where it will, we're not moderating really like it kind of just becomes its own thing. This came out from a gathering that we did with folks based on this poem where people came up with various visuals from their own environments to photos and then we incorporated this into a website into one of the portals. And so now it becomes this assemblage that you can also play with from the what was gathered, the artifacts that were gathered from that event we had. There's some other things here real quick that I'll show and how long does today feel like? That's also something that is really interesting. We struggle with time zones a lot. We try to accommodate for everyone but then we kind of stuck on just mornings only for Pacific time events, but for something like this there's no such thing as time zones and there is speaking of time and the feeling of time. This is a question that we, Sarah and I had asked at the very beginning of the pandemic and it just becomes this little log that people will chime in on and leave initial. So we kind of know who they are, but kind of not. And yeah, I just wanted to show that real quick as some of the ways that we've been thinking about distributed connection and experimenting with that and having these be open portals, channels to continue to play with communication through. I also wanted to jump in too and say, Mad, what you were talking about with this sort of, I think it can often seem very prosaic or overly logistical to say like, well, people have difficult internet connections but that's probably been the only real, you sort of asked us what was discouraging and I was like, nothing has been discouraging. Like I love all of the people who have joined us and given like sent their ideas to share with people but like one issue we have encountered is the technology thing and the time zone thing. Like Alice mentioned. And so specifically with technology because we made the choice to put our online community on Discord, which is actually like a really great platform for communicating in the way that we wanted to promote which was like basically open to sharing ideas, open to like creating very access, like open findable link sharing stuff. So, you know, in a Zoom meeting, it feels like a meeting and all your links go away when you close it and nobody ever does anything with the chats when you save them. So like there's that, we wanted to get away from that feeling of like suddenly being in a world where everything is a meeting and everything being productivity focused and work focused, really trying to undo that and creating a space where people could share ideas and collaborate but the caveat to that is that it's like another platform that people have to learn to use. And for many of the people who have sent us great ideas, they aren't maybe that comfortable or used to using Discord as a way to communicate. So you can see it looks a lot like Slack. Thanks for sharing it, Alice. Yeah. And, you know, I think some people maybe aren't the type to really invest a lot of like learning into a new technology platform thing. And that's just tricky, but I think the way that it's also expanded us too is we, you know, we don't do everything on Discord. We have a lot of Zoom gatherings. We have these portals for people to come into and share. And so there's a lot of ways to engage with the ideas that we're creating. And I think it provokes people to think a lot about the context in which we're sharing things, what you're sort of asking for when you post something and where and like how the ideas that maybe get tested and discussed in this community can then be put into an online portal. And if I can highlight one more thing, it's this one that Alice is scrolling through, which is that we have a working group within our Discord that's formed there just from discussions about community activism and mutual aid, things like that. And we ended up connected with an immigration lawyer through the organization we're associated with Navel. And with her guidance, we actually have been building an online portal where we basically post these rap lyrics and poetry created by one of the clients who is currently incarcerated at the Alanto Detention Center and is facing deportation. And we've created this online website where people can then read these things that he's never had the opportunity to share with the world but desperately wants to and then write responses back. And so we actually have a trade going where we relay the responses back to him, usually through mail or by phone because that's the only possibility. And then he actually writes a lot of things in response to the responses. So it's very inspiring to him. And so we're like constantly thinking, I guess, about how to reach people in places that we don't necessarily think of as worthy of being reached. And this has been really inspiring, I think both to Jose Miguel, but also to the people working on it as well. And it creates this really lovely trade where everybody in here is equal in a way. And I think for me, one of the most inspiring things about working in the distributed way is that the people working on this project have met each other completely through our Discord channel and live in radically different places in the country and in Los Angeles, which means you never see them and yet have created something together that then expands, it's just brought a lot of other people too with the interest in this specific issue into our little community. And it's kind of a really lovely rich garden in there. Yeah, maybe jumping on this too. So like witnessing this like network of like community building and like creating this platform for communication and support has been like exciting part, but also like trying to like figuring out a way to be actually safe for everybody was also like a challenge, definitely. So I guess like the main question, main two question I had in terms of like organizing a power plant as a space was first like in terms of physical space, like how do we like maintain like social distance between volunteers and like people who are coming by to PPE kit? And the second was like, okay, like in case of like escalating situation, like for instance like police comes to our space and asks for access like what will be our, like what will we do? And also like what information will we provide to actual information that could help the people who will come to us. So in terms of social distance, so like we have volunteered who reached out to us and we mostly communicate like via signal and telegram and that we also been following a lot of like protests, like community, like that shares information and like follows through radio about the update day to day so like we, whenever we have volunteers who would like to mend the space and also would like to coordinate and distribute the resource we have to the like for instance, Abolition Park or to actually like protest site that we will like in charge of like connecting them and also like prepare the kit so that it can be ready to be picked up and making sure that try to like keep social distance in terms of like we would have one volunteer at a time as a shift but like it's like strangely, we had like all, we had a meeting virtually altogether and it was strange like, oh my God, you're that person like who comes in that day and then I will also go to space time to time not during my shift just to like check in and then we were like, oh you're, so this is another person who was actually taking care of the space and yeah, it was like actually exciting to see people in person but nonetheless, there is like an unspoken like or like digital presence that we are all like there and updating our data or like the counting the materials we have and like preparing them and I guess like the second, I guess interesting distributing information that kind of goes with first question too, I guess but around May and June like people are printing a lot of independent independently about information like pro bono, lawyers to reach out to or like the instruction in terms of like these are the instruction on how to like wash off the tear gas and just like distributing in the neighborhood in terms that if you see someone, like if you see your friend getting arrested by police like these are the numbers that you can reach out to and also being connected to other organization was like, I don't know, it was like kind of like heartwarming to be honest. It's like some of them I actually never met in person but like we will like talk like either like Zoom or like Telegraph or like Signal but like I feel like it just, it was like kind of like heartwarming moment for me in a way, yeah. Just to drop in another kind of prompt I think, and this has been already addressed a little bit but really curious about what are some kind of high tech innovative technology strategies that you've been using and or also the more kind of analog or DIY strategies. I think at culture we're kind of always working with the cutting edge strategy and that can I always feel so complicated towards that, you know it's like when do we kind of acknowledge that we're kind of it's a shiny thing. So we're attracted, I'm attracted to shiny like new technology but also I'm very much of my practice personally is grounded in kind of very hands-on DIY practices. This year for Colab, which is our kind of summer summer educational program for high school students exploring art and technology. It's first time we're doing it virtually and it was interesting because part one of the modules was actually yoga, doing yoga and it was kind of modules online that you can take. But it was interesting to kind of imagine this art and tech summer camp incubator but instead of just focusing, we wanted to make sure that most people or more people, more students can access things like you don't have to have final cut on your computer to be able to like take this camp. You can actually like learn about more hybrid or accessible ways of being creative. So that's very much been on our minds. So yeah, I'm curious about some innovative tech driven strategies of engagement and kind of more grassroots DIY non-technology I guess solutions. I'd love to speak to this. I feel like what has been really fun during this time and insightful is working with Culture Hub in this residency to create this innovative virtual space that's merging like modern technology with the ancient technology of our body, of our body's wisdom and my mindfulness practice in that realm of my world. And so how we can be in this space that is not like a Zoom. So it doesn't have that feeling of we're in another meeting again or we're just seeing each other's faces and also be able to get tuned into our bodies and into our bodily awareness and move through different games, different exercises, different forms of creative expression and theatricality and also be able to engage in these critical discussions that are talking about the social issues that are important to us and that we're melding and fusing all of these different ways of existing with one another. So it's not one-dimensional. It's multi-dimensional in so many different facets. It's multi-faceted. So yeah, when I'm thinking about what role innovative technology plays, I'm like, how can we continue to live embodied in our practice? So we're not just robots, but also be open and receptive to the ways that we can work with technology so that it doesn't become something that is so much at a distance of who we are. And so with the 2D space that I'm working on with Culture Hub with Julian, which is coming along incredibly, how can it replicate what would be a room? So you can actually feel like you're in a room rather than having the squares and be able to move, I could call it a vidtar. It's a little video that is your face and it's your whole body that can be fit in that vidtar. And you can move in this space like you would in a room. So there's this relationship to body and space that's on the screen that's as close as what we can conceive of right now would be in a black box, say. Yeah. Yeah, I think this is something that we've also been thinking through so much, especially the question that I feel like that came up already. How are you able to create a community without ever having met? Because I feel like before or usually we've gotten used to working online with people that we know. But this thing of working online with people that you've never seen is so much more difficult because you're getting a sense of each other is so difficult. Maybe I can also share my screen real quick. How do I, there we go. Am I doing that? Yes, OK, this is actually something else. Because in the class that we've been giving recently, we also had this question of how do we get a sense of a group, first of all, while just being flat screens and how do we how do we interact with each other? And we, for example, have this final exhibition that's in this Mozilla Hub space. And everyone has the little avatar that's walking around the space. And you can have people had their presentations in the space. So you can see this is one student's piece of art. And we were all standing there. And we this is like a little roundup off the off the class layered into that you can walk through. And I think it's it's it's so difficult because many of these things are so gimmicky very fast. You know, you like so, especially what Jasmine was just saying to like, how do how does it really create meaning? How does it really not only feel like we're using a technology that basically replicates something, but also means like take transports that meaning into the space. And I think I think it's so interesting to hear what you're doing right now. And I'd really love to see the results of that. Because for us, this was like a start of that conversation, which worked surprisingly well though. Thank you, Christopher. So Jasmine's workshops play shops will be open for participation in the upcoming months. So anyone who's watching and everyone who's here, you're absolutely invited to come be a participant in this space that we're creating collaboratively. Also, Christopher, in your slides, I caught a glimpse of slime mold, which I find to be a very powerful metaphor always in thinking about mutual aid structures or working this in a distributed way. I've been just really thinking about the idea of the rhizomatic a lot and how that can, the wisdom of plans can teach us about how to connect. And I'll just say that as a person that's working, like theater is the tool that I'm using, that I work in a very nostalgic environment where people are missing things that they are used to in a very particular way and they're missing how they would gather to go to the plushy red seats and sit down in the dark, which was never a thing that I really enjoyed the plushy red seats or sitting in the dark. And so really working with an idea in mind that folks consider the event of theater of live performance in a very particular way and that I needed to help migrate the idea of liveness in a really particular way, like help folks find their sort of like lily pads to jump off of from like, this is not theater because it's happening there and I'm still at my house, you know? And to be like, but what's the value of liveness and what's the value of congregating as a found community and that the community is found each night that we gather and that we don't need the actual four walls of a building in order to be a community with each other. But what we probably need is to find a way to feel each other's presence in the space. And so a lot of the theater making that was happening online excluded the audience as a presence. You were asked to essentially sit in the dark, which was with your screen off and be anonymous and just be a spectator and not in a participant. And so, you know, I think the way that I was working or the way that I work in general is actually the new, like it's not digital at all because we're actually used to this thing. Like we're, it's like, I call it grandma, like we just do grandma. It's like, I'm like, come on, keep your cameras on, keep your mics open, you're here. And guess what? We get to see each other and it doesn't matter if like the performance is interrupted because actually liveness is about interruption. That's actually what liveness is about. And so inviting people to the chaos of liveness back to that in a way, you know, this space was becoming colonized like so fast. It's like, as soon as everybody had to move online, it was like, I claim this and I claim this. And just sort of decolonizing the space again and being like, no, no, no, nobody owns this. Like you click on, click off. You can come, you can go. The only thing we, and you can drink your tea and you can go away and go get your sandwich. You can eat your sandwich, you can, whatever, do the thing. This is a space like your liveness is what's actually the most beautiful thing about this gathering and your ability to see other people, you know, for us not to hide behind our screen to pretend like we're listening. It's like, it doesn't matter. Like you can turn your screen on and also walk away. That's okay. And, you know, and to train or invite the actors and our playwright into the fact that people listen in many different ways that they absorb, that they participate. The fact that they arrive, that they showed up is the only ask that we have. And when they're ready to go, that they're able to go. And so just really inviting folks to relax a little bit about how the idea, the exchange of liveness and performance is, it can exist in this way. I'm fighting on that so much. Jasmine, you too. One sentence because that really sparked something in me of this importance of dismantling the hierarchy that exists in the spaces that we were in physical that I think really allows in virtual spaces because we are all on one level to some degree when it comes to what we're seeing and that the level of engagement that having like every participant be able to see each other at the same time is something that feels distinct to the hierarchy that exists in a lot of the spaces where everyone is facing one person who's at the front or when there's an audience or when there's performers. Like how we're performing for each other and with each other is, I think it's so distinct in this time in being able to witness and be witness like never before. Yeah, I was gonna real quick chime in when you said, Tamila, is it Tamila? Tamila, like Pamela. Tamila, sorry about that. Tamila. When you said that you are creating and finding community every night and through each particular event and through a moment, I love that that really resonates I think with Virtual Care Lab and someone in Virtual Care Lab had recently said, we practice being in community. Like what is community? What is a community? Like we are practicing now in lab hour which we have every Sunday, 2 p.m. Pacific time if anyone wants to jump in in lab hour and all of our other things, it's like we're even just like a comment to someone's idea that was like two months back talking about green hosting or whatever. It is that it is practicing being in community and feeling that. And I feel that that's how I sense and articulate like the sort of warmth that that digital community has about like through Virtual Care Lab. That's super cool. Alice, I was also gonna mention lab hour too just because I think it's like weirdly our like lowest tech and most deceptively not that exciting sounding kind of thing. Like we literally just meet up at 2 p.m. on Sundays on Discord and it's open to anyone. You pop in the voice channel and you like meet people but actually like just holding that space open every week. And I think it's like, I think it's literally been every single week since we started this. It's I think shown people since we are really young and everything's kind of happening in this crazy way. I think it shows people that they can just trust us to stick around and show up and gives people a place to show up and bring themselves and ask the questions. You maybe just like wouldn't ask tomorrow what do you think about them twice somehow? Like and it's been a really fruitful place that ends up kind of feeling like a real physical space the way that you could go to an open studio way back when in your local dance place or whatever or find a happy hour or something. And it's been I think really essential even though in some way it isn't necessarily the main thing that we're trying to create. Awesome. I've been finding it really empowering to kind of, I keep thinking like, oh, I can like be in bed and like participate in a virtual event or watch something and I can kind of offer my terms of presence in a more kind of way that feels truthful to my lifestyle or a way that kind of works with my body in the world. So I've been finding that empowering. So I've been, what you're all saying is super resonant. So we have some questions that I would love to kind of turn our attention to for this last little bit of time we have together. Oh, someone says, what's the name of this event Sarah just described? So lab hour and you can visit virtualcarelab.com. There was a question earlier, let me scroll up. Yes, how do you raise funding for your distributed online programs? Has there been any challenges or was there a good method that works well? Any takers? One thing we did, so PowerPlan did a weekend of programming for teens where we collaborated with a bunch of different organizations. And typically as a nonprofit, we raise funds through grant making and memberships, but it's been a hard year. So we wanted to do this specific program. So what we did was like our board had some connections and we just kind of like tapped everyone we knew who like can donate like $100, $500 and then like if one of our board got a grant from Snapchat or whatever she would donate that. And so it was like very specific in project-based and we pretty much just reached out to like anyone we knew who would want to donate. Program-based is very like grassroots, not really attached to anyone. And also like what we've noticed is that like as we've opened up the space in this time for the community, like when it comes to funding or like throwing a few dollars into our PayPal account or just donating people are a lot more willing to do it because we're really trying to like commune with the, like our doors are open. Like this space is not for us or necessarily our agenda at this moment. It's just like having space in New York is really hard. And it's like a two-pronged thing because it's like if you're trying to raise funds for a program put together a pretty deck and like reach out to anyone with, I don't know, deep pockets, I don't know. But otherwise like raising funds for the sanctuary space was like relatively easy just on Instagram, people wanting to just donate or like raise money on their own through their own Instagram and then go to like Costco and then just get a bunch of supplies and bring them to this space. Yeah, I can jump on and like maybe add more what Mehdi explained in the beginning. So yeah, like in the beginning, we were just like, okay, we need this like materials and like this fund like pretty soon. So we mostly spread word in our social media in our own circle. And maybe to give a little bit more context in the beginning of the year, I was part of our Bridgewood Tennis Association. And like in the Tennis Union, we had a mutual aid like geared for pandemic and like especially food, funding geared for food and delivering food for immunocompromised people and families. So like these are all fun that was like donated like through GoFundMe, but also they kept the donation all transparent on the like shared Google Excel file. So it can like show where the money is going and being used. So like, so in the beginning, we just like straight up ask people like if you can like throw in something or have like extra like mask or like PPE kit just direct us in our way. And we basically, once we get the funding or materials, we'll just update it on live. And yeah, that was like kind of like DIY moment of like tech, but like, I see people are very eager to like contribute in some way. Cause like I think there was like a physical limitation for many people and like running a huge grocery or like having a car access. That's already like a huge contribution actually. And out of nowhere, there was like a one time we got, I got a call from one of the grocery delivery service saying, hey, like, are you the person? We have this like boxes of like food and water right now. Where are you? I'm just like, what? I had to run and like pick it up. But yeah, so I seen like this type of like, cause like I, it first started out as my immediate community, but it kind of like went through the grapevine and kind of spread it out. So yeah. I just want to bounce back under the question of like how, how to fund projects that do, do like us essentially also like not really having or like just floating in space, which is I think such a, such a new challenge, you know, especially when as we're talking about early on, you start working with people that are not in the same city that you've never seen that do not have the same just like city backgrounds. And I think it's really hard. It's a very big challenge. And we've like started looking into grants as well, but there's only so and so many that do not require you to have a place. And we've, cause I'm just so interested in the question because we're thinking about it right now. We have this project that we really want to do and culture hub kind of kind of got us up and running. And now we're like, okay. So, and we feel this urge to do offline events or like to manifest somewhere, just to be able to say that we belong into a certain city to tap into a grant, which I think is okay because we're really interested in that too, but it's also absurd in the sense that we could also just do it online, but no, you know, like all the grants are locally tied. And I think I just want to bookmark that as in like, what do we do about that? Like how do we create new forms of funds? I don't know, by ourselves. I mean, we could fundraise money, but obviously I think it's, it depends on how much you need and how much time you have got on your hand to do all the fundraising. Yeah. Well, thank you for this question, which I think is so pressing. I think there's also an acknowledgement that people have shifting financial-like positions and that I think that's useful in, that's useful to keep in mind and to allow folks to respond based on their financial position at any given moment. And grants are awesome, but this particular country that we live in is, you know, it is actually not a supportive environment. And so we really do have to count on each other and to shape some ways for each of us to respond to the ask with whatever little or whatever much we have and to also be invited as a community to bring friends along. And so I think that we can be in a barter system with each other and to invite that barter system into say, like, this is a space that is available and we can be accessed at any given moment. The moment that you roll through from your space to my space or through this portal, that you can acknowledge what your support level can be and that we can hold you as a community. And if that level is zero, like just if we're talking about dollars, the level is zero, that's so cool because tomorrow it may be $100. And that knowing that that level of shifting financial access is okay, but to have us be responsible and responsive, I think, Tahit, this is like you're saying, like somebody can send over like, you know, pallets of water one day, so somebody, so 200 people can take one water. And that if we just remind each other that actually it's just up to us, like it's simply just up to us. And we should take care of each other in whatever way we can at whatever moment, knowing our circumstances absolutely shift and they will shift from month to month, from year to year. I completely think that's so beautifully said and it's something that resonates because it's essentially how we operate at Virtual Care Lab, I mean, just, you know, we're totally volunteer. Everything we do is like, you know, we accept donations through registering on with friends, but it's not required for anything. None of the, I mean, nothing you've participated in require is paying for it. The caveat is we don't have funds to say like, oh, if you know, you propose a gathering and we'll pay you $200 to do it, right? So, you know, we can't do that. People can donate things if they wish to hosts of gatherings, right? That's a thing and people are pretty used to it. And from that, we also have a small, like we basically make I think enough money from people randomly donating things to like pay for our URL and our Zoom account and things like that. But otherwise, like we're, I think one thing that we've had a lot of discussions about and that we haven't solved yet is that like, yeah, you know, it's really nice to pay people. We'd like to do that. Some people don't necessarily want it. For some people, it's not necessarily a motivator. And also it creates divisions between people because it always then becomes this question of, like there's another layer to the question of investment and worth. So if somebody submits an idea to us, we have to say, is that worth what we would pay people? We want things to be equal, right? So then like, we're not gonna say, well, you get, it's very, there's all of these questions of division that come in. I think when you start trying to do that, and one thing that is at our core is that we are really open to anybody to come in and be a kind of a playground or a sandbox. And so there's upsides and downsides to that. One thing I will say as an upside is I think, you know, people know that's the deal. There's not like competition or something and everybody is just doing stuff because they care about it. And they know that their work matters because it's created out of that care. And that feels really important. I wish we had lots of money to give to everybody, but we really mean everybody. Yeah, just real quick. One of our community members, Christy Mitchell, we were having an actual, like sometimes we take over a lab hour and we turn it into, it's kind of like a ruby for requirement. And we had one lab hour, that was about money. And as we're growing up as virtual care lab, how does everyone think about money? What does everyone wish for? To, you know, how do we want to even think, you know, like what is our philosophy on that? And something that came up from Christy was, you know, let's work with abundance mentality. Let's like, let's think about, you know, how to prioritize exchanges that are non-monetary. Let's prioritize giving instead of taking. Like let's not have this space where everyone is coming in for transactions. And, you know, but then also that's, you know, it's something that we're very aware of time is also, you know, limited depending on your monetary situation that is also like very fundamentally a thing. And so, you know, how do we expect people to be able to access a space and to access programming, to access, you know, let's say it's free. How do you access it? If you're so busy trying to make money to, you know, stay alive, right? Which is so real. And so it's very much, yeah, something that we continue thinking about in terms of, you know, what we're able to and, you know, collectively able to do for each other in various ways to make sure that people are able to at least be here. I think that, oh, sorry, you go. Oh, are you sure? Okay. I just wanted to say like one model that I think is really inspiring for like spaces or collectives or nonprofits that like need to pay rent or like get the basics covered is a group called Alternative Roots based in the South. And they have like, they really rely on like the interdependence of all of these small organizations or nonprofits, collectives, and they, it's like members-based. And then I think like the central organization does the work of like grant making and development. And then they like redistribute those funds because as like a nonprofit, you're kind of inherently in this like industrial complex of nonprofits where like you get a grant and you have to kind of like shift your programming for that grant. But if you wanna make like political statements, it's probably best not to become a nonprofit because that could sacrifice your space or being eligible for many grants. So I think that at the end of the day, it's so important to collectivize and to not put yourself in a competitive environment. Like you're all competing for the same grant. You need to like separate yourself as a super unique entity. Like you're doing it better or more special with more impact. And instead like trying to figure out ways where you can work collectively. And at Power Plant, like we typically do things volunteer-based, but for this like one specific program that we were connecting with other people, we really wanted to like fundraise to redistribute because if you're a teaching artist or you're trying to like make a living with your practice, just like getting paid is helpful. And I wish that we could all get free money to do these amazing things. But yeah, it's just super hard. I was just gonna acknowledge also that what Sarah and Alice like helped me sort of like sort in my brain, which is volunteerism is a privilege. Like not everybody has the possibility to volunteer and that a part of the sort of sliding scale idea, which is people pay a sliding scale in order to access something. But also that folks can opt out of being paid in order to make that pay available for artists who cannot opt out. And that the ecology of our environment as makers is then more democratic because then the folks who actually need to be paid for their work can be paid and the people who don't need at this moment to be paid for their work are literally making that possible for other folks and that we actually, like we should do that for again, we should do that for each other. And it's up to us to actually say, I don't actually need to be paid for this moment. So you can put that over there and this check can actually be more than the unemployment that someone needs in order to still, and so we're like all trying to gain the system. But if we stop looking at the system, how can we liberate ourselves from the system? And that's something we can begin to think about as a larger society. Thank you everyone. We just have a few more minutes, but that kind of segues beautifully into any last questions, any revelations you wanna kind of bookmark that you had during this conversation. And also how do you plan on sustaining and or adapting approaches that you're working on right now for the future? I think that talk about something that helps us that we're trying to do to be sustainable is one, how basically have more people than currently actually work on organizing things happening at virtual care lab and leading different groups and allowing that to kind of be independent. I think when we first started, Alice and I were really guiding like 95% of that and we've just opened that up as the things that we have done with people and as the community we've started together has I think started to gain a little bit of an understanding of what it is and people sort of know what is I guess appropriate what are the things that you would want to try out with virtual care labs. So it's easier to do that just as we've existed for a little bit longer. And then the other thing is that we're just trying to do more meetups and gatherings and groups that recur so that people can gain practice doing it that we just have a little bit less input effort in terms of time towards like developing the whole like way we're gonna describe it online and all of the really boring like posting it online kinds of tasks just like reducing that but also just I mean that has the side effect or probably the main effect actually of just creating like this recurring space where people can really get to know each other and start to open up what they're interested in exploring with a new group of people. Yeah, that's been a really fun thing to work with with each host that brings us an idea and needs programming support as we asked to want to do this once to want to do it multiple times and it's interesting because underlying that very simple question is you're kind of running to complete different experiments because if you're doing something multiple times we have field trips, which is field trips around the internet and internet communities happening Saturday, the Jose Miguel portal that we just talked about earlier with the rapper and poet and currently incarcerated immigrant Jose Miguel that is a continuous project that is asynchronous as well as we have sessions going on we have one tomorrow where Jose Miguel is actually personally gonna be patched in from behind bars to be able to chat about his work and to meet people to share his work and like that is kind of as we talk about like with gardening, with this being a sort of like virtual garden of ideas and experiments, it's like those moments that are really exciting to see, okay what is like, why have something be sustainable? And then you have it go for a couple weeks and a couple months and then you look back and it's like, look at all of this that is going on, look at what we've learned and we're still doing it and there's new people coming in and there's some people who are helping out at the beginning who happened a little bit last time now and are bouncing out and it's just like it feels like that's kind of the, yeah it's a fruitful dynamic overall. I think too, it just, there's more ways for people to engage, I think a lot of times we've asked people, do you wanna do this once? Do you wanna do it multiple times? And they'll say, maybe let's try it once and we'll find out and then they find out they do wanna do it again or maybe it was only once for them or they wanna do something different and then we just, the way that people participate is very all over the place as well. So we're very open to, I mean just different personality types, I guess in that some people really like having that discord community space where they can post links and like have responses from people and there's these like ongoing threads of conversation and they get a lot out of that and then other people really like the feeling of being able to pop in and see what's up here and maybe dip in and go away for a while and then come check back and have like an unpredictable and kind of eclectic and exciting experience whatever is happening. So there's just different ways for it to happen. Matt and I were actually talking up about this a little bit before but I guess like the sanctuary space at Power Plant I think will be like continuing for a really long haul because I guess like what our priority will be just maintaining at like with locals that this is spot where if you need water or like food or like if you need free mask you can just come and get it and just like casually walk in and like if you need free wifi or like if you quickly need to use computer or print something you can just come in and yeah and I feel like it's just kind of amazing not amazing but just like really noticing like the limit of like everyday technology like since especially earlier when libraries were closed and the people are really looking for free not free but like just like at least like printing station that's available and also I guess like another possibility that we wanna like have it ongoing is like maybe a spot for collaboration. Last month we did a collaboration with Plants for People and it's a volunteer group where they pick up trash and like do neighborhood cleanup and trade for plants so a lot of the volunteers can like get a free plants that has been donated and so yeah we did like a cute like right outside of power plant spot we had small book fair and Narcan training and also like a site and a tight workshop where people can just like come and like clean up and also like just like do like social distance gathering so that was quite lovely and then I feel like that kind of gave us idea like what does it mean to have a space in the time of pandemic and then also winter because like they're saying the summertime it was possible for two people to have gathering outside so I feel like moving forward will be organize our inactivists who are looking for space and physical space in particular to gather safely and power plant does have that so yeah. And yeah and also just like continuing to expand online and like as we like deepen our work in on like Evergreen and Putnam trying to figure out ways to still collaborate with folks all over and think about like asynchronous ways to learn and how to get teens to turn on their camera when there's a class because I think that would be really great but yeah. We're right at the end of our time but does is there anything else that anyone wanted to kind of contribute into the ether that we currently share before we end? I think I just wanted to think about like unexpected connections and collaborations and we've been because we've been thinking a lot about visas and passports and like connecting with artist communities that don't have these privileged passports or visas who originally were excluded from the spaces that we are in and yet still are even if we're in the digital space. So how can we create for me sustainability is about creating those unexpected connections and really trying to reach out to communities and thinking about us as a global community. And I think that's easier said than done actually. That's something that we're thinking through. Thank you so much everyone all the panelists for the super inspiring and rejuvenating conversation very thought provoking. I hope we can all stay connected. I'm sure the folks watching, I'm sure they may think about this conversation and have more questions and they can find you and find the work that you do online. And I hope our paths cross again soon. You can follow culture hub at culture hub underscore org on Instagram and Twitter. We will continue to kind of have more conversations, more kind of rhizomatic gatherings, interweaving different perspectives. So this is definitely a step in the direction that we are continuing to grow in. You can also visit culture hub dot org which is our website to stay up to date. And till next time, I think we're at the end of it. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. So good to chat with everyone. Yeah, I got so many notes you all are so inspiring. I was like, Yes, it would be super cool to do some interspersing and visiting different communities. I think that would be super cool. Our field trips host in space would be really open to that. If folks want to come by, we would love to come go and visit. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I definitely want to come to one of your lab hours.