 People that I know We also have we're we're live streaming the entire event In a partnership between a lot of the resources here at York So thanks to the crew at LTS and also it's going out through howl round So that it reaches Fairly far and people did this is meant to be a sort of when we envisioned these Symposiums they were meant to be sort of casual conversations updating on the projects and because there was so much interest in this one This space that we that we went for was this large space Which is exciting that there's that much interest in and these sort of things coming together But it's also meant to be casual so though it is in a formal theatrical space Feel free to come and go you can't bring coffee and food into the venue here But we have ample coffee breaks. It's meant to be a leisurely day for conversation and things like that. I did want to start out with with our with our land acknowledgement and Add a little bit of detail actually to it as well. So We do recognize that There are many nations that have long-standing relationships with the territories and areas in which the York campus sits This this area has been under the care of the Anshabae the Haudenosaunee Confederacy the Heron Wendat and the Metis And is currently home to lots of indigenous people This isn't a necessarily a historical statement We acknowledge the the current treaty holders the Mississauga's of the Credit First Nation I wanted to add a little bit of detail to us. I know that when I hear these land acknowledgments I also like a little bit of support. So I put a map up on up on the screen I'm gonna make a plug for an excellent resource if you're ever wondering Whose land you're on for native-earth.ca. That was a wonderful mobile app, which You'll perhaps understand One of the reasons that I'm a big fan of it once we get through a number of the projects here I'm very interested in space and geography But looking at that it's also a great online resource This is a map of the GTA But also you can see how these these traditional territories sort of overlap in this in this area here and we can You can that's a little bit small there, but you can see Where these these traditional nations have overlapped in Stewarding the land around here and also where the where the treaties are so if you're ever interested in knowing Whose land you're on it's an excellent resource. It's community developed and it's ever changing as it has more More detail in it, but taking a look at the the traditional territories and the treaties is interesting I did also want to make a couple of plugs for for some local indigenous Artists and events that are coming up just in the next month with side of Chuck is having its 32nd iteration It's a festival of new and developing work that that's put on by Native Earth it was I keep saying a saying native land and I keep reversing the two of them But native earth that's gonna be coming up later in the month I also wanted to make a specific plug on Friday, November 22nd And he's they're also gonna be in the two-spirit cabaret But Dakota Alicantra Camacho Because one of the projects that we're gonna be looking at today groundworks is sort of related to another dancing earth creations project called between Underground and Skyworld and they're in the cast for that as well. So I thought that that was a nice way to making the connection there also, there's a initiative that's been started that that has a bit of an academic home here at York called the climate change theater action and I Co-direct that with a collaborator name on Chantal Billidow and there's a number of indigenous playwrights that are contributing work to that and part of the festival also be reading specifically those plays in there and Then I also wanted to plug later in the month. We're going to here at York There will be a symposium on indigenous environmental justice that will be here So if you're interested in getting more involved with a number of these issues and Connecting to the land in that way. There's a number of opportunities there that are coming up just in the in this month And if you're especially a very with second check, I'll see you there That being said, I wanted to welcome Joel on up to the stage to talk a little bit about what sensorium is we've been each of these symposia is going to be connected with a University where we've got some partners there or are local to various projects that we're working on and we've been really fortunate to have This relationship with some sorghum. So I'll turn it over to you Joel Hi, Ronan I have a little kind of it's not really a speech but just some brief notes that I like to share actually My name is Joel on I'm an assistant professor in computational arts here at school of the arts media performance and design and I'm also the interim director for sense for sensorium Which is our faculty research unit in digital art and technology and on behalf of sensorium and its executive committee As well as the associate director in research I would like to thank in and Justin and tostelab for inviting us to be partners in this event and also to In initiating such a wonderful series of events that will provide I'll faculty and students exposure to the processes and innovations in artistic practices around mixed reality So some of the brief thoughts that I had right around mixed reality As an ecologist by training. I think of mixed reality in somewhat a different way as one might today Indeed an ecology of any given environment already consists of multiple realities mixed And mashed together in a field of interactions and energy transfers Multiple species coexist and evolve together and into each other Responding and communicating with the environments as they do And where these are most importantly explored are At the liminal zones between ecosystems these edges where organisms move fluently freely adapting to the behavioral and semiotic structures on each side and They've been doing this for a really long time. Obviously these edge effects are the reasons Why the earth became and has remained habitable? Of course and in the human and these become geopolitical events, you know stage invasions species migrations boundary transgressions and associated antroprogenic pushbacks Of course, this is one example amongst many today where the inability for us to understand another species will view or umbelts has produced undesirable effects in this sense then Mixed reality for an ecologist really represents a sort of failed equilibrium and it's a source of despair However a large part of the environmental humanities today revolves around a rediscovery or redefinition of what while or wilderness is And in our futile Search for feral places and things that are untouched or unmaimed by our hands since everything including the air We breathe as a product of civilization Wildness becomes a concept then that that teaches us a way to see or to observe or to describe It becomes as author Jack turner describes a nature literacy that is not rooted in place or circumstance But in the concept of self physical psychological and philosophical transformations Something that exists deep in our evolutionary history that is immeasurable and beyond academic definition I posit it's a biology of wellness. Really. That's the seed of our perception our sensory apparatus or our sensorium So that's what we aspire to be here at the research center aptly titled sensorium Center for creative inquiry and experimentation in the digital arts As a haven for outliers in the academic community here at York Who transition between disciplinary boundaries and engage in these departmental edge effects? If a hundred thousand flesh-eating zombies can reveal so much more about humanity as in the walking did then regular documentary May I venture to suggest that makes reality and all its myriad shapes and forms Processes and technologies that will be described of course in the in the course of today's events Will teach us more about what it means to be real what it means to be natural what it means to feel to sense To show empathy to love Makes reality therefore becomes a site for productive frictions between the new and emerging and the emerging with the deeply centered wellness of creativity Imagination and play the technologies today and in Toaster Labs Italia series Will explore the cutting edge the visuals and sounds and stimulus of today's fast-growing aesthetic cultures But add in the human and these become productive frictions and moments for truly profound revelation So on behalf of sensorium and its associated faculty and graduate student members I thank you for bringing us into this process together, and I look forward to the rest of the day's events. Thank you Thank you, Joel. I'm gonna welcome the other two-thirds of toaster lamb to the stage Justin Garrett and Andrew Sampri Yes, I did right this time. I know I know you hardly think that we work together on a regular basis So we came together what we wanted to do and we're gonna get together a couple of mikes And we're gonna move over the seats here where what we wanted to do in this sort of first bit Was to talk a little bit about the origins of the way that we work and what we're working on How the Atelier came together and that will sort of take us through to that that first period I think You can still see the monitor there so we the history of toaster lab is that we came together in 2016 I keep saying 17 But that was sort of the first project that we worked that that was the premier of the first project that we did together Which will highlight a couple of the aspects to it here the origins of how we became toaster lab as opposed to another name is that we needed a name to register a project under and It had for a while I'd say a decade or more been Something of a personal website so that's sort of where the name came in but it fits really well into what we're doing Of the logic there. Do you feel differently under you're making face? I don't feel differently, but I'm actually curious how I want to hear about how we're connected to toast how it's connected to toast I Did not put an image of its origins and its relationship to toast In this slideshow that we're about to show But I will explain that there was at one point Where I made a thing out of a toaster And I just got really attached to the form of it and so everything like if you want to follow me on Twitter It's at toaster dog. I remember this now. Yes and so it was toaster lab because I just didn't want a vanity URL at the time and Then when we put together our first show and we needed to register it under something The name stuck and has has has stuck. There'll be multiple labs only one toast though moving forward so What we do is place-based extended reality experiences they take on a number of different forms There we go so the three of us each have different levels Or different areas of expertise and then different levels of knowledge within each other's sort of expertise my My area tends to be in the physical production and media production So in terms of working with recorded media and then connecting it Andrew, what do you do? So my focus is at least in this context is mostly on the engineering aspect I am an artist so I do I used to do a lot more installation work And then I moved into doing theater work and digital sonography But again in the context of toaster I think I'm mostly handling the the technology and the infrastructure back end And my background is in Creative writing and performance and narrative, but also in production management. So all of those things combined make toaster lab Yeah, so we have a we have a co-governance model where we sort of work under unanimous decision-making amongst the three of us We also and then we'll get into the structure of the atelier in just a moment So that's a little bit more. We each have our own individual practices What's that? Yeah, look it's us. There we are Yes So we each have these backgrounds that have these These areas of expertise that work together well and the one of the hallmarks of the way that we end up developing Projects is making sure that we're working together at each step of the way knowing that sometimes narrative and production work together production and Any sort of development and coding need to work together and those all need to move together at one time because we've all been involved in projects in which One of those is leading or you've been delivered with one of those things then I have to make something fit nothing And that's sort of outside of the way that that we choose to work So where where this came together is that? We were interested in Sort of social mixed reality experiences things that took people out of headsets I know there's a slide of a picture of someone in a headset here We also Have been into varying degrees. I'm more of an avid geocacher than anything else in this list here, but looking at Various types of place-based activities that you could do together and the explosion of that especially with the addition of Pokemon go Pokemon go actually like was released in the middle of our first large project together and made all of our grant narratives about half as long Because when we started we had to explain the mechanics of what became Pokemon go in a very abstract way We're like Pokemon go, but outer space and art And people like I get it But before that they didn't necessarily and then one of the things that this opens up an opportunity for these like Inter interwoven metanarrative so a lot of the projects that we work on look a work across a number of different locations and Try and integrate like story into the place that we're in and come into these extended universes Which in our in our own framework not necessarily that we're working with any of this IP But that in our own network that has led to some Significantly sized undertakings things So What we aim to do as a company as a production company is to produce mixed reality content that delivers it through an original platform a lot of the Code that is developed with the projects Is is Itself bespoke a lot of that the responsibility of Andrew We want to take users on a hunt of the experience. So we're trying to guide people through additional space There's always an element of gamification to well No, you're not always but there's typically an element of gamification to that and so far is how somebody progresses through it and the Logics of how somebody accumulate that experience when it's not because we're all theater makers That it's not necessarily as clear as working through a theatrical experience from start to finish that adds an enchanting digital overlay to life integrating original and awful tech and Bringing the audience into the place, right? So our first project together was called transmission and this is before we actually knew that we were going to be a Company like I said, we created more of an extended universe than necessarily one script In the end there were 13 hours of content Involved in it. There was a live stage performance. We had done a lot of mixed reality production There was a couple of installations associated with it that were tied to also some of that media We had a companion podcast series both in world and out of world that sort of transitioned over the course of its run And then some additional events to that What was what was it? What was your experience like working on transmission? Well, I think taking some of our cues from maybe writing like a Season of television was more what we were thinking of but at the same time you could experience it all at once in And geo located in the city So that was the it was just a really simple like a quick weekend project that we did to write learning scenes Just kidding. It was years and years of work and and that that is I know that it's up on the side But this is does say that all of this took place over 30 specific sites across the city of Edinburgh During the festival as part of the future play festival in Edinburgh and then we did a smaller version of it for the future of storytelling festival in New York on Staten Island Andrew anything to add on to what it was like to do a transmission So I came we met sort of after transmission most of the creative process was underway So for me, yeah, it was I mean it was a great project. I really enjoyed it But it was definitely like you want to do what in in what timeline? So, I mean, I think I literally flew in the week before the show and sequestered myself in a room and piled up a bunch of beer and coated And we've been doing some work It's not to say that there was no nothing there But it it was I think it will talk about this in a bit But it led in part to sort of the the plan that we have to try to create a long-term infrastructure as opposed to The kind of like oh my god, we need all this stuff right now Which is usually what happens no matter what and I don't mean to put that at the feet of toaster lab I think that's common to a lot of art and tech projects But no, but the project itself was was really nice and actually even even that sort of in the room working was was quite fun Because we had other expertise in the space as well So like the sound designer was staying across the room for me across the hall So at some point I realized we didn't actually have any sound in the app So I just knocked on the door and I said hey, I see you have a synthesizer here And he composed a soundtrack So it was actually in that in that respect. It was super fun. It was like wrap summer camp for app right Yeah, it becomes an interesting like budding up against what we think we can accomplish in theater and often times Can if it was very analog theater versus the limits what you can get away what you can get away with on the technology So what would I recommend doing this as your first project? Well, it seems like it worked out because here we are on a stage So that's good, but it was I think when you're kind of at the beginning of experimenting with new technology I think we'll hear a lot about that today You're not sure what your own limits are and then you kind of move past like the normal meat space limits of time and space And then you just keep going and you end up with this like really ambitious large piece of art Yeah, I'd say that it it was probably it's not I wouldn't recommend doing this as your first project But that's only if you realize that this is the project that you're doing when you commit to doing it so a little bit of the background to it you can see sort of it was available in Various Apple stores. It was an iOS only experience. It's still there It has the New York content in it though. It's the New York content. Yes, it's just fun And so and you can still download the podcast the podcast is actually really interesting the first 12 episodes are actually just It's Topical conversations with space scientists. So in the process of researching the project we interviewed about 18 different experts within various aspects of space science to like as the dramaturgical research and recorded a lot of them because they were at distance and Turned it into a podcast and then turned it into an in-world discussion of moving ahead You can take a look at some of the app here and you can see a little bit of the interface here So we've got in the in the lower corner They're one of the site-specific performances that happened in the windows of which is also where we were staying This is this is efficiency running it as a theater project that people were sleeping but in these rooms But from 7 to 8 p.m On most nights or 8 p.m. To 9 p.m. On most nights there was a dance performance that you could watch in those windows as well But you can see here that they're the main way that someone interfaced or that the two main ways that someone could interface with this Experience was either being notified when they became proximate to something or they could guide themselves around through a map And we also would suggest various pathways that they could take all of the content that was in it not all of it But about half of the content all of it's geo located About half of it is locked to a specific place in this experience So that it was an experience that took place in a specific place So you had to go to that place to actually unlock it and access it We had a few power users that went through everything one of them involved a hike not a not like a strenuous hike But it took a while someone broke their ankle while we were trying to make to build it Mixed reality is really hard The reality part of the mixed is so there's a couple of different screenshots here of the mixture between the Live they're recorded pre-recorded like archival footage That's there and then a bunch of the the 360 sort of VR Experiences that were embedded within so put these put these all together So it sort of set up the way that we work We work with much more knowledge as to exactly how one of these projects comes together at this point The funding for it was a combination of research funding We had a bit of private investment some people who just like thought what we were doing with school public grants, there's some corporate partnerships and And ticket sales so it's like really in so far as an arts project One of the weird things about it is that it was very small for a media project But it was massive for a live project. Yeah So people would engage with some part of it like a hundred to 200 times a day based off One of the other interesting things that that we learned about this is that we can actually get metrics over viewership because we were Streaming content or somebody had to download something and so in addition to ticket sales We're also like how many people and when are they watching individual pieces of content? Which has informed a lot of the ways that we've been working And I mentioned the presentations that we had before So what this led to was actually a relationship Between now two entities. I'm gonna turn this over to you to talk a little bit about place lab And it's relationship to toaster lab just to make it more complicated No worries. So I had actually prepped a very quick talk. Should I do that? Okay, can I stand at the podium you can stand a very weird doing this sitting. We'll talk amongst ourselves. We'll sit here very supporting Thank you very much. Good morning everyone So my name is Andrew. I've been doing art and technology work for a long time, especially software development in creative mode In around 2009 I was working at IBM and I started to obsess a bit about this new location feature that was popping up on web browsers And especially iPhone apps and I organized a conference called the social and the spatial and the idea was to bring together a bunch of Practitioners from different corners of the internet and from different types of practice And my favorite folks who we brought there were people who are working in virtual worlds And folks who are working in sound who are trying to kind of bridge this conceptual space between the layers that we occupy online And the real world One of the attendees is a plug But one of the attendees is a sound artist who some of you might know named Halsey Burgund And he recently launched a project called audio AR org which is a community catalog of resources related to audio augmented reality And you should all check it out But fast forward a few years I had done a collaborative film project called Hotel City Which was a film project where we took the content of film Slice it up and put it on places on a map and then the film actually recreated itself through a geographic algorithm So it would redraw different paths and then recompose the story And then my partner on indeed and I made an app called summer of darkness for the summer of 2016 Which was the bicentennial of the year without summer. This was an unprecedented global climate change incident So there was a volcanic eruption it completely changed the weather and because of this Lord Byron and his entourage who were spending the summer on Lake Geneva, which is actually where I live Were stuck inside and so Byron challenged his compatriots to write a ghost story and that's when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein So as a result of this project, which was an app-based project I met Ian and then we collaborated on transmission, which we just talked about So then around this time basically Ian and Justine and Anandita and I were just geeking out about doing location-based work How interesting this was how we could tell stories differently And I was also taking a look at some of what we just discussed the technical effort on a lot of these projects And I was seeing from my own side a lot of duplication like I was solving the same problem in these different projects over and over again slightly different ways and Also, there was some there there are many issues There's also the scaling issue that Ian mentioned where a lot of these projects would be like way too small to be a media project or way Too small for an app project, but way too large for a fringe type theater project And I also I do make my own work But here and in most of my collaboration I find myself in an engineering role And if you've ever done that you know how difficult it can be to mentally switch from kind of like I need to Solve these technical engineering problems and then oh, yeah There's a dramaturgical thing that we need to do and it's because the pace of this work is different The way that it actually needs to come about is different time timelines So in order to fix this problem We need to have some kind of a longitudinal effort some sort of sustained long-term development work to try to create a set of frameworks to try to create software or technologies and What's the word I'm looking for best practices that will allow us to kind of solve these problems at the speed of aesthetic composition And that's really the end goal that's a really hard problem so how do we actually scope this down and We thought that maybe we could do this in one particular area Which was to try to figure out a way to create some sustained long-term development work around tools for creating geographic stories And that's the reason that's the long story for the place lab Which is a company that founded with myself and my partner on andita and we're focused on creating these tools The strategy specifically is to try to keep up this development pace by producing one single code base With a maximally permissive open-source license so that we can reuse the techniques across different projects And the key part here technically is that the emphasis is on reusable code and infrastructure So we're not trying to create a platform like Twitter or layer or YouTube We're not trying to create a container into which people can put things But rather create a bunch of stuff and scaffolding that you can just use and make your own projects The very first project here, and I'm wrapping up is a tool that is creatively called the map tool It's a kind of Swiss Army knife for creating these experiences of media on a map We're handling the composition of the map the collection the packaging and the serving of the media to mobile devices And the next step we're working on creating a rule set around how this media gets played back depending on local conditions Ultimately, we'll also have a set of example code for how you can consume this on the web on Android and iOS And it's tricky work because creating reusable anything is many times harder than creating a one-off But we're trying to drive this this way and using especially the atelier projects if not as direct Use cases at least conceptually so there's a lot of times that Ian and I will sit down and talk through these projects and say Okay, what's in common here? What could we actually build out that would that would support this? In the end my hope is to solve some of the issues that Adrian and I were talking about on the way over Adrian's from Pony and you'll hear from her later Where we create a whole project and our project and we love it and we see it and we go. Yeah, that was a great first draft I want to do it again So that's me. That's place lab Thank you, and it there's a You deserve the applause. Yeah Yeah, where'd your mic go? Here it comes Thank you so much An interesting point that I just want to like pull out of there is in so far as this question of scale is that when we got to The end of transmission and we sort of realized what we had actually Committed ourselves to and making this project. There's a conversation of like what's next and how do we work with this again? And how do we fund that and part of that became a Conversation or a difference between working from project to project which is sort of how we started Moving into what is now the Atelier project and then a couple of conversations we had on more of a although that Those who we talked to would say that they are not Venture capitalist, but that somebody was like oh, so you're gonna make a platform for delivering AR content That's like scalable like YouTube and we're like, but we're artists and they said well Yeah, but you know what you make some case studies and then you'll have the platform And then you'll be rich and you'll do whatever you want and I was like I just want to make the thing I don't want to I don't want to run a company of that like that which is maybe not the Some people will think that I was a foolish choice. It's so far has worked out for us No, no, I think that that's part of how we find each of ourselves in the position that we're in individually and collectively So what is the Atelier and what are we here to talk about today? So we're doing this two-year deep dive. It's sort of we locked it kicked it off in June of this last year and sort of a Co-presented panel between where we were all working at the time in Prague as part of the Prague quadrennial I know actually see some work from that a little bit later today and folded a festival of live digital art Which takes place it's put together by spiderweb show and takes place on the Queen's University campus in Kingston and In informing this partnership we launched a project there And then wanted to essentially work through this process of like holding up ideas or boosting other performance projects and providing the capacity Recognizing that within a lot of performance projects that Whenever you add in another department, that's hard like those are hard to scale as well because there's not necessarily the thought of What exactly that is and it's hard to picture So what if we were able to come in and say like we have these goals of developing these tools? We need case studies to be able to do that also If there's somebody who's interested in that coming together Then how can we support them and actually realizing that work? So we've committed over the the course of this two years culminating in our final report out will be in In June of 2021 with as many projects as possible presented at world stage design in Calgary in August of 2021 And that each of those will be working through roughly 18 of those So this is a list of our current projects that we're working on right now We'll hear from all of these in some fashion today To update here. So we sort of came in to start of the project with some things that we're already Working with but they're sort of all over the place taking different approaches to the way that things come together Just a couple of shots that you'll probably see some of later We've been this is as part of the groundworks project that we've been working on With communities in Northern California We've been climbing mountains and going to acorn gathering sites with our VR cameras This is over in in North York. This is our Parkway Forest project, which we created a web app for youth to create small VR films and then presented that that this last summer but the previous summer Back to the community and looking at continuing to develop this as well as one of the first implementations I think of toaster lab of the actual map tool is also part of that It's still still techniques of beta. Yeah, yeah and then there'll be much more detail in in 80 and Mackie's presentation on our collaboration with swim pony, which is a location-driven audio project that's happening around the Along trails along in the watershed area around Philadelphia So one of the other things that we did in in addition to starting to provide the capacity for this was also How do we bring in the expertise either because they have technical expertise or production expertise? So we've put together an advisory board that consults on our project. Most of them are here today There's a couple of people who can't be with us So we'll be introducing people throughout the day. Beth Gates will actually be presenting remotely, but otherwise Eileen Jessup is very pregnant right now. And so can't travel so she can't join us today and Sydney sky better also has some and Patrick was out there No, they both have parenting responsibilities that prevented them from being with us today But we'll actually hear from everybody else today as well So this also became our first opportunity to pull together everybody as many people as possible in in In-person because people are scattered throughout North America in the way that they're working And just sort of as an indication of sort of the direction of where we're going right now this is as part of the Grand Works project we were doing some work on Alcatraz and So we did a VR shoot of a performance there Which I'm not going to talk too much about because it will come up during our panel right after lunch as well So we've we've really cut down on our level of ambition After that project reeling those those little work now we're doing what we're trying to do ultimately is trying to make things like trying to understand this way of working and trying to Introduce people together. So the outputs of what we hope that this project will offer are an open source script library that will allow somebody to do the mapping and then also the framework for how to Start up creating their own bespoke applications as well and then looking at the different media types and how those get integrated in the different ways we take We're able to use The data in people's phone a lot of our projects are rooted in the idea that we want them to be accessible as possible So you'll see a lot of our stuff tends to be focused on mobile because people tend to have mobile devices as opposed to More single-use hardware I just want to say how grateful I am that you all are here today to join us to talk through these questions and talk about these projects and That we are also very grateful for the funding from the Canada Council for the arts For our digital strategy fund, which will take us through these two years and the six symposia That we're going to be hosting and we're grateful for York University and Centaurium for hosting us today We hope that everyone has a great day and that you are free to come and go as you please This is just as by way of housekeeping And tell your friends is not too late. We're here till five And we really hope that you have a great day and you feel free to ask questions It is as we are clearly expressing it meant to be a casual conversation day As Ian said even though we're in the formal space And so if you all have any questions for us before we take a quick coffee break Please let us know otherwise you can find us in the lobby too Share the live stream link. Yes, the live stream link. You can find it. Yes on howlround.com on our website at toasterlab.com slash atelier slash York or on our Facebook page and slash mr. Toaster lab and we're recording it as well and Hoping to share at least a summary and the recording Later on and that will be true for all of the symposia moving forward Which will take on different forms some of them will be formal like this others will be more sort of hackathons within other larger Infrastructure asking key questions, but we'll have more information about that at the closing as well So our next session will start at 11 o'clock And it's focused on social ghosts at 12 o'clock We're gonna have a lunch break and the space will need to be cleared that will be on your own And if you do need recommendations for where to go for lunch We will help point you the way while in the lobby to lunch options We'll reconvene at 1 30 have a short break at 3 3 15 again, and then we'll close the day at around 5 o'clock Thank you