 Welcome to the Culture Hub Belgrade convening day two. I'm Maddie Barber-Bakleman and I am here in Serbia with a bunch of fellow artists and thinkers and creators and performers and tonight. We are doing a... Okay, yeah, so we relate. Sorry about that if you're joining us online. Sorry about that if you're joining us in Zoom. The people in the room know that we're moving forward. So tonight we're going to have two performances that are going to happen. One here in this room after I'm done speaking and the next one will happen in New York in the Culture Hub Studio at 47 Great Jones Street. And then we will have a long table discussion which will have both participants in our room here at UK Pero Broad in Belgrade in Culture Hub New York and online in our Zoom room from around the world. So... And we'll also play a video for you that Billy just told me to announce. So let's go to this first performance. We have Shana Davis and Maria Kuvacina. So here we go. Our show for the first time ever. How are you feeling today? How's things? What's up? How do you feel now? Changes? How about now? How do you feel, Shana? Will you ever tell me? We're going to have a performance from Culture Hub New York by Tiri Kananaruk who is a past resident artist at Culture Hub and Sebastian Morales. And together they are Mora Kana. So we're ready to go. All right. So Tiri and Sebastian. Here we go. That was Tiri Kananaruk and Sebastian Morales. Yeah, let's give them a hand in Serbia. Live from the micro world. Next, before we have our long table discussion with participants in this room and on Zoom, we have one more pre-recorded performance or video to play for you called Avalon by Anastasia Vorobyova. So let us go. Hi, we're here in Serbia. This is our street. Billy is showing you our street in Serbia. And cool. So we are on Zoom with some folks. And maybe we can just start by introducing different people on Zoom. So tonight it's a long table conversation. And the long table conversation is an unmoderated discussion. It's a format that was originated by Lois Weaver of Split Riches. And in a long table conversation, there is no moderation. A host may assist you, like saying pass the potatoes. But this is a free flowing conversation. Ideally we would all be in one room together, but this is a hybrid world. And tonight we're talking about the sort of subject theme of this convening overall, which is solidarity, digital strategies for creative resilience. And tonight specifically we've brought people together who have been experimenting with a lot of different ways of collaborating throughout the pandemic. Yesterday we were talking a little bit more about this, like, well, we were talking about a lot of things, but we're talking more about the downtown variety style of collaborating. And the folks that are in this room have been exploring different platforms. And so I think first I want to maybe, let's see, we got Andrea. We are like three me's here. First I would love to toss it over to Andrea to maybe introduce yourself and sort of welcome us and maybe kick us off with some questions or thoughts or whatever you've been thinking about lately. Andrea, me. Yeah, you. And yeah, it's also like, what time is it there, by the way, also? Now it's 2.50 a.m. So it's still early. And hello everybody. I'm really happy to visit you again from Seoul, Korea. I am a part of Culture Hub and I help in the relation with Europe. And I am in Korea where I teach at the Seoul Institute of the Arts in the Performing Art School. And well, I participated also the other night and I don't know if this question now fits in the context of the situation, but I was curious to know more about the people that were in Serbia, in Belgrade in particular, all the guys that you have there. So if during this evening there is some time that we can see them more and hear their voices, that would be really great. Sounds stellar. Just a note about where we are, where we're at. We've been working together since like 10 a.m. this morning. So a few people might have stepped out to have a cigarette, but we've got some folks in the room here. And yeah, we'll get them all in here chatting. Okay, so I think let's officially begin the long table. I'm going to read from my menu of long table etiquette and then we'll begin the timer. So this is a performance of a dinner table conversation. Anyone seated at the table is a guest performer, including on Zoom. Talk is the only course. No one will moderate you, but a host may assist you. It is a democracy. To participate, simply take an empty seat at the table. If the table is full, you can request a seat. If you leave the table, you can come back again and again. Feel free to write your comments on the tablecloth. There can be silence. There might be awkwardness. There could always be laughter. There is an end, but no conclusion. And with that, I'll let anybody kick us off who wants to. And introduce yourself as we go. Hey, this is Billy. You can't see me because I'm operating the camera, but yeah, that's me. But I just want to say also that I think everyone, everyone that's here, especially in the Zoom call, has been doing some sort of work during the pandemic online. And so it would be really wonderful to hear about that work and to hear about some of the positive discoveries, you know, where you feel that there is room to lean more into the online space, you know, in particular, I know there are some folks that have been working from La Mama across a lot of different regions, working with refugees. I see Aiden out there who's been developing a new 3D platform, browser-based platform. You know, Thierry and Seb, you guys have been producing online stuff, Iris, out in cultural ballet. You know, Asher, I see you over there as well. And great to see you. Thanks for joining. And I know that HyphenHub has been doing some interesting work and working with some artists that have been thinking about these things. So I think, you know, it can be really informal, just telling us a little bit about what's been going on and to help us percolate the conversation. I'm Olivia. And one of the things I do is create an online synthesizer called HYDRA. And there's also... I've been doing this for the past three years, and there's this online community around the world of people who use it. And it's been... Since I started making it three years ago, and then people started using it all over the world, I started just meeting them online and never meeting them in person. And so in some ways, the community around HYDRA is an online first community. But then that, for me, has turned sometimes into in-person relationships. And I think during the pandemic, I have really leaned a lot less into my own artistic practice in terms of my own performative practice and a lot more into a practice of kind of creating some sort of online spaces and meetups for that community and just kind of encouraging people to write their own functions to add on to the thing. And even just the code itself, I've seen people just meet each other between Indonesia and Peru just because one person write a function and someone else use that function. And people from graphic design or from theater. And for me, I've been, especially during the pandemic, I guess just much more inspired by figuring out the ways that I can create spaces even in sort of a DIY sense for people to meet and share whatever they're doing. So that's my short introduction to myself. Does that collaboration work? Like someone, sorry, writes part of something and then how do collaborators have to ask for permission or is there a dialogue outside of the actual code itself? And how does that community foster? That's a really good and sometimes complicated question also as those of you who are in the workshop today saw kind of there's a lot of sketches online and a lot of people share what they make online but then sometimes people kind of copy other people's code and change it a little bit. And it's something that I think is inherent to almost all digital technology in some way. A lot of times you're copying something that someone else does and I don't have all the answers in terms of like when if you use something that someone else does when it's kind of just taking what they've done or when it's like this remix thing but the more I think within HYDRA it's creating kind of a community of people who can all contribute to sharing knowledge around what they're doing. And especially with that I've been really a fan of kind of asynchronous forms of collaboration so not this video chat where you all have to join the same time but this like oh I made this one thing I shared it online someone else uses it somewhere else and then through that those people meet each other and actually in the code people leave comments a lot and it's something that we've kind of perpetuated a little bit is when you write a piece of code in the comments say Olivia wrote this piece of code and then someone else will even I've seen people perform live and in their code they say like this piece of code from so and so this piece of code from so and so and I think sometimes that's a form of collaboration that wouldn't exist in a physical space but in this online space it's like oh we're all building this thing together and we don't know exactly where it will go but people take it in different directions. I mean I feel like I relate this sort of to dance right like Sean I feel like whoever you've trained with like there's certain movement vocabularies or styles that have come from different teachers or lineages and those all sort of like live in each dance or differently but yeah you can't like footnote it necessarily in a dance but but it's like a similar sort of concept it feels. Hi I'm Maratou I'm in Athens at the moment can you hear me okay yeah good so I was I feel like I'm part of a group of creators in the virtual world and the two of them are here Oni and Sara and third one is Yolanda Markapulu we created together a piece online with refugees maybe they can say a bit more about it later I would just like to put a question do cables have a heartbeat and just to echo a bit what I just heard that during the pandemic I have found it very interesting to see how how the way that people work online and mainly in the developers world there is this whole ethics of comments and peer to peer that is very interesting now with performing arts going online I'm finding it very interesting that we are getting a lot of infiltration of this kind of logic so what's the colleague just described is very interesting that in performing arts I find sometimes in theater or dance there is a different hierarchy and different dynamics when it comes to production and it's very interesting to borrow a lot from people who work with digital with coding where the community is really really open when it comes to intellectual property so for me this has been super interesting how as people creating performance let's say I will quote it like a product like how do you sign, how do you co-create how does this space, how does this virtual space create also a different power dynamic in terms of how do we bring ideas together and I think it's a very interesting journey I'm finding that right now we are getting a lot of new interesting hybrids that are being informed by this type of working online where for example with Oni and Sara we've never met in flesh and we've been working together for a while and just to take it back to the heartbeat there's a lot of love that comes from this work even though we've never been in the same rehearsal space so yeah just sharing that as a neutral and it's very hot in Athens by the way Hi I don't know I'm from New York, I'm in Colombia originally but I run Hype and Hub which is an arts and technology organization focusing on emerging tech and we're a strong focus on performance like performance but also on exhibitions and first of all I want to thank Billy for inviting me to be part of this I love Billy and it's just we've done some great collaborations in La Mama and Cultural Hub we created our first launch of our festival their vision to the future which is a kind of a more elaborate type of performance that we do usually are our salons where the salons are more like a laboratory laboratory to explore new forms of technologies performances and all kind of stuff I want to say hello to Olivia last time I saw Olivia was in Bogota and she just so I was very happy to see her here so I just want to say the pandemic was pretty interesting for us because since I do a lot of art salons which are kind of the the way to sustain the community the whole community of artist-creators created tech people cultural producers, curators, etc and we do the salons and it becomes a family and everybody just presents their works you get criticism or you meet people in a very horizontal structure a non-hierarchical and from there many things spread out you know partnerships all over the world exhibitions and many many projects but so this year because of the closures we got invited to participate in a lot of international festivals even art fairs but everything went online virtually so we usually go there physically you know I go with a group of people that I invite and we do all the performance installations but this year it was all digital so we created actually a content that was made for digital sphere instead of trying to just present things that were done physically and show them online so we focus a lot on social VR and it was so artists that were working on Mozilla Hub and also other platforms that some other people are developing especially from Berkeley University of California Berkeley so there have been like two platforms that they are developing for artistic practices that mostly focus on performance so I invited all these people to talk about the whole process and show what Mozilla Hub is and with one particular artist from New York Claudia Hart who is a pioneer in new media she started working with VR since the early 90s with Claudia for example we developed a theatrical piece for Mozilla Hub which was very very interesting and it came out of her exhibition because of COVID so she created this Mozilla Hub installation of the exhibition and I invited to see it and I just told her she said what do you think of it and I said well you know I come from the world of performance so what about if we do some type of performance within this space to activate it and bring people to it and we started developing this thing and we decided to create something out of the spoken word inviting people that were not necessarily from the art world but who were like from the writing world poets or other people who writes other types of books and taking essays from there that will dialogue with the exhibition and it was the exhibition was about the book The Prince and the 15 hundreds so it was a political thing so it was very interesting because everybody who we invited to participate in clear pieces they mentioned were not coming from the digital world they were not artists they were not you know in the traditional way they had an avatar that they selected and they had to be like very responsive and active and it was so it was quite interesting the result and I think like you know social VR was I mean I'm also a newbie in social VR but I got deeper and deeper as a way to really expand and connect with people in a meeting room with people from all over the world in a very fun way so that was kind of my experiences that I say for the moment Hi I'm Aidan I'm here in Brooklyn New York and I just have a couple thoughts about what you all have said so far which is that one of the things that occurs to me is that so much of the the actual so much of the actual work is not the work that ends up on stage whatever form that stage takes but is the work of the sharing of code of the work that happens in the rehearsal room even if that's a Zoom room and of the work that happens in social VR space and I think a lot of what I've been trying to work on this year sort of starts with that understanding that understanding that what we're trying to achieve is more than put something on stage and have people watch it which something like a broadcast of performance does quite well but is a little bit more difficult to build a space where a certain type of conversation can happen and I think that's why this long table format is interesting I hadn't heard of it before before I read the description today and I think that's why finding whatever it is really interesting for performance to be about more than the performance itself about everything around it my approach to that this year has been to has been sort of a literal take on what a theater space provides in terms of creating a 3D space online where people can connect using a webcam so it's sort of a literal take on what it's like to be in a shared physical space but in the virtual space but I think beyond that there are just so many different ways as we're hearing to to get at that spirit of sharing more than just 60 minutes on stage but sharing everything before everything after all the conversations around it Hi my name is Thierry Kananurak I'm Sebastian Morellis I was a resident at Khajohap 2019-2020 which I developed the performance piece and it has to be it's like right before a pandemic and then we have to move everything online and with the help of Khajohap and Life Lab it's made it possible which beyond make the performance possible it's also something that I never thought before for example like this right now we have a performance at SoBeer and we can perform, collaborate with a lot of people who not live together so that one thing that I think is the new perspective for me and besides doing my own performance I also collaborate with my partner having Morakana and we also have I also have another collective called Nuom Collective which we have a performer in China and we made it possible with the technology and I guess this is something that we think a lot during the pandemic that without the technology we might not be visible which it comes to this piece the idea of like we've been isolated yeah I think part of this piece started in the early days of the pandemic where we were really I guess stuck in one place and our experience of the world really got abstracted to what you could see between paints of glasses, between screens and networks so this piece was very relevant at the time we were thinking of how we cannot exist without being mediated through technology and all our experience of reality was at the time very much mediated through technology between cameras and lenses and light so we were playing it with a sense of scale in many I guess ways, some literals and we were abstract yeah we were looking at the drop of water and it's like wow so many activity inside there we've been isolated in the white box but inside that white box like so many people doing so many things like some people teaching some people on life life to make a performant possible, some people doing dancing and then with that like wifi and screen and like make things visible, same thing with the light and creation in just like one centimeter drop of water. Hi everybody I don't even know how to come into the conversation. Hi I'm Ani and I just was working with Sara and Erato on this piece that Culture Hub helped us present and everything that all these ideas that people are throwing together now I am not a spokesperson for the technological wonders that you are all involved in, I don't know what you're talking about when you say that you're sharing code I don't know what social VR is but what I was, sorry but what I was thinking was that we just did this piece where we were working with relocated individuals some of whom are living in Athens now some of whom are living in Italy and some who are stuck on the Tijuana border in the United States trying to get into the United States and so not only was this a group of individuals who were meeting because there was the technology available but these are individuals who probably will no matter what the COVID situation is they will never meet because they will probably never again in their lifetimes be in a position to be able to travel their legal status may never be established in the places where they are so they were meeting it was pretty amazing it was sort of a human value for what could happen online but I was also thinking of another thing which was, and I heard it from Olivia and I heard it from Amy as well that we are particularly if we come from the theater world we're used to working on something to present a product such and such a date you are presenting your product and then that's what it is but often really the most vital part of what it sounds like everybody is doing and certainly what we were doing was the process the process was so rich and it was so amazing but it also it brought up this thing what is the role of the audience because it's not 100% satisfactory to be watching the process from the outside looking in do we eradicate the audience do we and certainly we tried to find a way to involve the audience we didn't figure it out but I mean we were thinking is it possible so that's a question kind of a redefinition of performance as far as I can see if I can add to that I think the very interesting part was that on one hand is what you're saying that what is the audience where is the audience and what are they doing when they're watching if they're in their kitchen and watching five minutes or if they're actually involved so I think the involvement of the audience is a great shift in online work and I think the other part that was really exciting was that we were working with these people with bad connections, they were using their phones so some of them were not so we were using Zoom as an environment and it was very interesting that they had a very partial experience of what our shared space was because you can only see four people at the time they had their cues but they also had to switch on their cameras switch it off, they were actually doing a big part of the technical side as well and that definitely also shifts the role of the performer as well like what does the performer do they're actually setting, I remember discussing at some point that it's almost like trying to go up a staircase and you're building the stairs as you go up so for them it was really quite a challenge they did an amazing job one of them was in the first piece was outdoors walking on the streets with his mask on and doing everything with his phone so yeah definitely quite an interesting way of shifting the roles and trying some other ways than the usual audience you know I feel like something's brewing for Andrea well thank you for calling me I'm thinking because I share the same questions and so I'm trying to shift my point of view and thinking of myself as an audience when I'm watching something online and I'm going to say that sometimes I get bored quickly I skim through things especially if it was already done and I'm watching a pre-recorded version so that is like a sort of interaction in a way with the artwork already in a simple way where I can choose what I see but what I found most exciting is that it happened that I watched performances I was driving my car in traffic so I put the phone in front of my dashboard and I'm driving and I'm watching a performance and I found that quite interesting of course during this Covid time there has been so much that we have been overwhelmed by all of it but these have also pushed a lot to try to find new structures new dramaturgies, new ideas to share work online here in Soul Arts I've been able to participate in several projects for the past few years some pre-Covid and some after Covid and just before Covid started together with another director who's based in Italy but he's originally from the United States we thought that it's a very simple and obvious observation but our lives are already happening online for several years now maybe people that are leaving away from their homes or from their families or from their friends they experience that more like expats or nomads or refugees but a lot of our attempt to reconnect to the people that we care and a lot of these also emotional exchanges and dealing with crisis over distance and it just happened online and so it is inevitable that this platform becomes part of the creative work of artists because it's in our lives and so that was one of the considerations that stimulated us to research real stories about people that try to overcome the distance creatively and there are stories of filmmakers that created films that won Cannes Festival or a writer that wrote a book through WhatsApp messages that won prestigious award in Australia as well as stories of people that got lost on their way to Europe but it's true this aspect of life online and so this dimension is an extension of our physical space and it's a place that we inhabit so and lately with Aidan I was able to accompany a group of students to work in this 3D space because there was a new wave of COVID and we had to move our classes online completely so we asked Aidan to support us in this process and it is interesting the fact that spaces like this can become synchronous and asynchronous spaces for creation you can put your work there and then someone else can see it another time or you can meet there and it's not always easy, there is always technical issues but without any doubt there are some forms that are developing and maybe things cannot last 2 hours or 1 hour and a half maybe things can be much shorter like my talk, you should cut me also but there is something that we are maybe here for the word works, we are really researching something new and somehow I think somebody was making the example of building the stairs while you're going up that's always been what experimental theater people did but the La Mama troupe was working with Andre Serban on the Greek trilogy they probably didn't really know how the stairs was going to be and they found it step by step sorry? I was looking at her while saying it well that's true but just from my memory 100 years ago we didn't know what we were making but we were working towards we had a long time to do it but we were working towards a product but I was actually when we were watching the piece your partner, Carrie, I'm sorry I suddenly was thinking about when people were writing forgive me but this is history but when people were starting to experiment with electronic music in the 60s and the Mogue synthesizer was just coming out and the people were creating music and putting it out there as music and there were pieces that went on endlessly and really challenged people's ears and it was also at that time about the process of it like what was the technological process and what does it mean for somebody to be sitting for 48 hours hearing maybe three notes being played in all these challenges but I think that there's something about this time now and what people are creating and the collaboration that's going on that feels very reminiscent of those waves of experimentation I think actually the collaboration is one of those things that is really exciting about this time because I know artists that had a lot of people they went to other places more like to be alone but they continued working online and actually opened the opportunity for them to work with other people from different parts of the world that they were now working with and it worked pretty well it's like when people just had physical presence and you never thought that remote was possible so now even though we had the opportunity to go back physically you know that also you could do some work remotely and maybe you could just go to the office twice a week and so definitely there have been some really great things about the pandemia, putting aside all the bad things that happened but it really went in a different way we are already kind of the internet all these different things are already kind of becoming an extension of our senses almost like another sense that we have and because we have been so glued to the screens and all these things our five senses have been kind of being shrunk because we don't read it as long as much we are not in touch with so many physical things and whatever and I think like these pandemia for some people it was great to stop, hard stop surfing on the very speedy wave where we travel and finally excuse to stop get out and think about what we are doing many people got to do that and it's pretty you know after the original shock where we were all kind of we don't know what's happening then you kind of wake up and say okay if I want to eat tomatoes tomorrow I better put the seeds now because otherwise I won't be able to eat it not tomorrow but in a few weeks so that's kind of what I see that some of these things that we do now we are going to go back to some type of normalcy but do I want these things to go back exactly the same way probably not and there were many things that were not working well and also especially for many people that are not that are in more disadvantages than we have you know many of us are very privileged in many ways so you make us also realize that not everybody has the same advantages that we have and it's just how to become more inclusive and at the same time that is you know exploring the different the new sense that we are trying to add to our bodies and to our minds in a way which is these duality y'all my timer just went off which is one of the cardinal rules of the long table we have a strict timer and that the conversation ends it may not conclude but it ends and I think we are going to follow Lois' rules tonight but on the table nobody said anything though they were they have a lot of drawings here lots of questions show what Lindsay drew Lindsay drew herself, Lindsay has questions yeah okay so we are going to end this live stream and then we are going to keep this zoom on for a moment in case we want to have a couple more greetings between us okay okay so thanks for bearing with us tonight day two you know what I mean tomorrow we are going to be even more crazed because we are going to be sharing a bunch of work that is hot off the press as of the past few days so join us if you really for the work of the Serbian participants that's what you'll want to tune into you can watch it on your car Andrea that'll do, no Ani doesn't want him to do that I'm not using the car much I use a scooter I have a phone holder on the scooter oh my god very cyborgian okay thank you from the live stream audience we will see you tomorrow night thank you