 Hello everybody. Welcome to the second day of the Level Up Symposium. My name is Andrew Schriver. I use he, him pronouns. It's my pleasure to welcome you to the digital rehearsal and remote performance spaces panel of the Level Up Symposium presented by the Associated Designers of Canada with support from Toaster Labs Mixed Reality Performance Activier. I am one of the co-curators of the symposium and a member of the ADC and I am super excited to be the moderator for this panel. I'd like to first acknowledge that I myself am coming to you from the city of Montreal which long before the colonizers arrived was a place of conference conflict and creativity for many Indigenous people including the Anishinaabe, the Hurun Wendat, the Abenaki peoples. This land is known by the current caretakers of the land, the Ganyakahaga Nation as Chachage which means broken in two because of the way the St. Lawrence River breaks around the island. I am honoured and humbled to be able to be here to create and share with you all and so I offer my thanks and in that spirit of gratitude I'd also like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which is our primary supporter of the symposium as a whole as well as our other sponsors so that's IATSI, the University of British Columbia, Theatre Alberta, CITT Alberta chapter, Concordia University, Ryerson University, York University and all of our individual donors thank you so much for your support. For your information all of our symposium events will be recorded and presented in a freely available archive following the end of the event in a few weeks time you'll be able to find those on our website levelup.designers.ca So thank you for joining us again you are watching this live stream either on the level up website on HowlRound at HowlRound.com through our partners at ToasterLab or on the Respect Facebook pages of ADC or the ToasterLab. Now regardless of your viewing platform embedded on the same page as your video is a chat function in the top right hand corner of your screen so if you click on the little speech bubble you can check that you can type in the chat anytime a question that you have for the presenters which I will then compile and read out during Q&A portion of the session. So this event can be enjoyed through auditory or visual access or combination of both I will read aloud all questions that we address from the chat and this information will appear visually at the bottom of the stream. Visual access is also supported with captioning as you can see at the bottom of my screen. If you require any technical assistance to support your access please email levelup at designers.ca for immediate support or to provide feedback following the events. So as well if you enjoyed this session or any of the other offerings that level up has to offer please consider donating any amount that you can to the associated designers of Canada to support our National Arts Service Organization to achieve its goals in the areas of advocacy mentorship and industry promotion. Donation links are available on all viewing platforms on the level up website on the ADC's website or canadahelps.org so please consider donating. So thank you for your patience with all of that. It is now my incredible honor to welcome our to the event our two guests. So the first up coming to us from Germany is Mark Kniglio a media artist and composer widely recognized as a pioneering force in the integration of dance and media. He co-directed the media intensive dance company Troika Ranch in New York City for 15 years and has received a New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award a prize from the Prix Electronica and the World Technology Award for which recognized his long-term legacy in art and technology. And on top of that Mark is also the creator of a little thing called Isadora which is a ubiquitous video design software tool used by thousands of artists worldwide myself included. Welcome Mark. Thank you very much for that introduction. By the way I'm not in Germany I'm in Vienna Austria. I have been relocated due to the pandemic but anyway it's nice here too it's nice in both cities. Very good welcome. Sorry a second guest coming to us from almost the other side of the planet is Matthew Reagan perhaps coming to us from Los Angeles unless I'm mistaken. That's correct. Hey look I got that one right. So Matthew has worked as an educational outreach counselor as a faculty developer a technology director and a digital studio confounder. His MFA work focused on the intersection of traditional tools for live production and new approaches for breaking boundaries between performers and media systems. He specializes in creating interactive systems for digital environments and his personal work continues to explore the intersection of digital media live performance and interactive installations. Anyone who has picked up Touch Designer for personal professional use has almost certainly heard the name Matthew Reagan. It's hard for me personally to imagine being at all where I am today without his amazing series of tutorials and online coursework. So welcome Matthew. Oh wonderful thank you for having me and thank you for the very generous and kind introduction. It's lovely to be here. It's also really lovely to be here with Mark. I feel like Mark and I have been ships that have passed in the night. I used Isidore as a part of my graduate program and so it's really an honor to be here with both of you. Well I'm just glad to be here and be able to share in this company. It's really great. So thank you also for the invitation. You're both very welcome. It's truly truly an honor especially this early on in the symposium. You're really helping us to start this thing off pretty great. So without further ado I just wanted to start the conversation off with the two of you just by asking you quickly want to tell me about something that's been really inspiring to you as creators, as developers in during this pandemic. What you've seen, what you've worked on. Something that's inspired. Why don't you start us off Mark? Okay well one of them I don't mean to be self-serving because it was done with Isidora but it was the best theater piece that I saw and also the New York Times seemed to think so because it named it one of the best theater pieces of 2020. That was a piece called Russian Troll Farm and I'm oh gosh the the playwright's name is going to escape me. But it was co-directed by a longtime Isidore user called Jared Masachi. I think the thing that impressed me about it, the first thing is why was it great? Because the actors were great and the story was great right? That's like what made it you know that's always what we need before we need anything else. But beyond that they they really found a way to have actors in multiple cities and a stage manager at someplace else working together in a way that created a seamless experience of this play and even though I wasn't able to I wasn't in a theater I was at home watching it I felt the liveness of it. That to me and I'll talk about that when we when we share our remarks but I really felt the liveness. So that's one thing and at the end or at some point I have a URL I've put a topic in our Troika Tronics forum with some links that I'm going to refer to so I can give that at the end or in the chat. But let me I want to tell one other quick thing if I can because it was so impressive to me. I was actually at a digital dance party a zoom dance party that was also kind of a theater thing and I have a link for that group of people too it's a some people in London called Social Convention and they did a thing as part of that so we all entered in zoom and they asked for two people that would like to experience a theater piece and I volunteered and someone else did and they told us to turn our cameras off and we went into this room and then there was a title card and some kind of incidental music and then we had to say who would like someone asked us in chat who would like to be person one and who would like to be person two so I said person one and then text appeared and it said my name is blank underline but it rhymes with blank and so I said my name is Mark it rhymes with dark and then the person the next line was the same and he said my name is Mike it rhymes with bike but then as this went on there was an invisible operator we couldn't see each other and the text kept coming whether these underlines were where we were supposed to fill in those blanks but as it proceeded the text got more and more personal and the underlines got longer and longer and longer and by the end of this experience it it felt like a theater piece I felt like I got to know this person of course they could have been making it up or lying but somehow it didn't seem that way and I had this very intimate experience only orally with a stranger and that for me was really impressive I that this very simple format this empty lines and two people engaging could make such a sort of tender and beautiful piece of theater so those are my two stories of what I've experienced that kind of moved my heart during the pandemic that's excellent that's like those both feel so very touching Mark I wish I had something that felt like it was quite as compelling and interesting as that I feel like the pieces that I've experienced have been slightly on the other side of that spectrum of intimacy and connection I participated with Alper Sarkabi and the interactive immersive HQ and an interesting project that was a look at the colliding worlds of real-time visual content creation and the kind of gamification and approach that we see in a lot of kind of tiered e-sports kind of structures and the intent of this particular project was to create a online space where artists from across the globe could kind of display their creative chops in different applications for creating real-time artwork and so there was a set of challenges that were laid out over the course of two different days and artists had a kind of narrow window to kind of work on their particular challenge and I was a part of one of the judging teams that not only looked at the work that people were doing but also tried to understand how do we classify this how do we remark on this you know how do we watch someone in the midst of creating their work and what is the kind of e-sports style approach to that and it was interesting because it was kind of structured and focused in a way that I don't think I've seen in the kind of creative content space before often we kind of think of those operators and those artists and technicians as someone whose work whose personalities are invisible and we see their work in performance but we don't necessarily get to see them under the gun solving problems and kind of creating along the way and that was I think one of the really interesting pieces of this is that it was a celebration of the fact that we all face these kind of design challenges under the constraints of time and how do we put those pieces together and kind of create them the you know being a participant on the judging portion of this it was really exciting because the in parallel to what the audience was presented with on twitch there was also a back channel discord and kind of conversation hub for all of the competitors and artists really exciting to see that there wasn't any animosity and there was no sense of kind of competitiveness everyone was very encouraging of one another's creative process and rooting for one another as the kind of championship went on so that was one piece that felt kind of you know somewhere between kind of esports and live performance that I hadn't quite seen before prior to the pandemic that was really exciting to to see unfold. Yep but it also immediately you're triggering things for me that I'm going to talk about but just to say there were people there people knew that other people were there and they were sharing that and that already adds a dimension that to me starts to make things a whole lot more exciting because because anyway well I'll get to that but yeah I mean that also now I'm sorry I didn't see it you know. It was you know a wild ride of an experience is certainly a lot of fun something that I'm hopeful that the interactive MRSA HQ will do in the future because it was excited to see the kind of inspiration and challenge laid out in the first part and then how that materialized an hour. Yeah I did manage to catch some of that I was actually quite quite fun to watch and I really hope that you will do it again in the coming years because it's it's fantastic. Yeah if you're listening Albers start it up yeah so thank you thank you both for that that's really great actually Mark why don't we just use that as a way to start into what you were what you were saying you were going to talk about why don't you okay the kind of the work that you've been doing over the last uh well I mean frankly I haven't been doing any artwork since the pandemic because you know it was a big shift you know it's it's like we were headed down a road of certain features that we were planning to put out in Isadora and then it certainly became clear that everybody was going to be out of work and they were going to be out of work for a long time and theaters weren't going to be open and what are we going to do with this time and so you know uh you know it wasn't a piece but it was very moving to me you know one of the things I decided to do uh immediately because I'm like nobody can see each other nobody's like we're not going to a theater and we're not hanging lights together or whatever you know and so I said okay I'm going to start doing these online sort of tutorials that I'm going to do that we call the guru sessions and I started that in March and what was so gratifying for me and similar to what Matthew was saying was to have 60 people gathered together I could only see them in the chat I couldn't see their faces but being part of the process of bringing our community together and using that time and facing the hardships of being isolated and everything that we've all by now gotten used to and breaking that down and being together as a community and so um while I can't say that I've made any artwork I'm in the process of making working on something new but now but I haven't really made it because I just felt like wow we really have to retool Isadora to start thinking about what can we do to support live performance what tools do people need that will help them make pieces um knowing that they're not going to end up necessarily being in a theater they're going to somehow be online right so that whole process for me has been my focus since you know for sure last March has just been what do we need to help our users do what they need to do and to be creative right and I'll get my chance to be creative soon enough so um so anyway that's what's been going on with Isadora the software but and just to introduce it I think I guess most people here know Isadora and know me or something but I'm just going to say briefly so I'm trained as a composer I happen to be a computer programmer from a very young age when I was co-directing the group Troika Ranch with my longtime collaborator Don Stopiello there was no software around the year 1999 to make the next piece that we had in mind it just didn't exist and so I thought I'd make it myself and that's how Isadora came to be but I think it's interesting given the context of this conversation that um Don and I already in 1991 were working at a very special place which you if you don't know what you need to look it up called the Electronic Cafe was run by two artists called Kit Galloway and Sherry Wood-Binowitz and they were the I would say they're the progenitors of what we might call telepresence or a remote performance or whatever you want to call it they have a famous piece from 1980 or 81 called Hole in Space where they set up a camera and a video projector and a microphone in a storefront in Los Angeles or Santa Monica and the same in New York and they turned this connection on the only way to do it there was no internet remember the only way to do it was to use a satellite from NASA they somehow got access to a satellite and they had this connection uplink downlink and so people in New York could speak and see people in Los Angeles and vice versa and the beautiful thing about this project is that they just turned it on they didn't tell anybody and the documentation of watching people figure out what's going on and what happens over the next three days while it's turned on it's a breakthrough moment and they are under recognized for their contribution to what we're all doing today because they did it so early that nobody even thought it was a thing really in a way so with that but Don and I did several pieces in collaboration with Kit and Sherry at the Electronic Cafe and we were using this technology back then you had to do it with something called an ISDN line which was a high speed connection pre-internet again and a special unit called a picture tell which sent video back and forth but we were actually doing performances which led eventually to Torico Ranch's piece in 1996 where we performed at the kitchen in New York at site Santa Fe and Santa Fe New Mexico and then at highways or at the 13th Street art complex in Los Angeles and we had performance in all those cities and did a performance and I can definitely tell you those were the battle days because there was so much that could go wrong and did go wrong Don reminded me the other day that that performance scheduled for eight o'clock at night did not start until midnight because there were so many problems right so all right that's like enough with the past stuff that's where we came from but actually we were thinking about these processes about about this and one thing this is the reason I tell the story that I want to say about Kit and Sherry they were so right about something that Don and I were so wrong about at that moment we were like composers we came out of the conservatory we made pieces and we dictated them to performers and they did them right like the way that we said and they kept saying to us no mark you don't understand if you're going to do these telepresence pieces they have to be like a telephone call it's got to be in propository and they were so right about that so those experiences are going to inform this this next part I kind of wrote out I won't be boring reading it but I wanted wanted to be clear about the things I wanted to hit so that's where I'm coming from from doing this stuff actually a really long time ago and seeing what was good and what was bad about it right the thing one other point about that time the thing that maybe was not so interesting about it is actually it's not special that you're in three cities doing something that in of itself doesn't mean something except with the context of the pandemic then it absolutely means something because now we have to it's not because we can and technology allowed it to happen it's because we have no other choice right so the pandemic has opened a fissure into a space of creativity that didn't exist before and that's really what I want to talk about now I hope that I don't know when I started but I want to stay within my time frame so please just alert me in the chat window if I'm going longer than my time all right okay cool so all right so like I was talking about throughout the nature of my career it has been my purpose to deeply understand technology I've been so curious about where is that intersection just like Matthew so by discovering and embracing the essential nature of a particular technology my hope was to be led into unforeseen ways of creating rehearsing and performing yeah and importantly my group with Don Troika Ranch was focused on using technology to allow performers to change the timing and the dynamics of the media content live that's why I made his adora was so we could do that much in the same way that a conductor controls the timing and dynamics of an orchestra so in this way technology served for me and Don and hopefully others as an avenue towards liveness because that's why we go to live theater that's why we're there is because anything can happen and I'm come back to that anything can happen idea a few more times okay so I'm calling this remote theater that means as a definition I don't know if that's a good name or not we can debate that but it's when you're doing performances where you've got performers in multiple places and the audience is also not necessarily in any of those places they're probably watching from home okay so but I would say that this idea of remote theater is a new form that is a few you know facilitated by technology but fueled by the pandemic as I was just saying and what I want to see happen or what I want to talk about today is how do we push ourselves to come to a deeper understanding of the inherent nature of this format of this medium of this new theater right and specifically I think is absolutely crucial that we discard any former notions about what a broadcast is because as soon as you put this into the realm of broadcast you've absolutely killed what this is possible right and I'm so excited to hear what Matthew said about all these people being involved and watching a process and whatever that is not a broadcast that feels already like something else yeah but so the question is like I said what is it what is remote theater and the only things that I can say with confidence are the things that it is not it is not television and it is not theater okay so even though it's got theater in the actual name right so like for instance a few weeks ago I saw a couple of announcements by two major New York City dance companies saying that they were going to have their online seasons but you know with I've worked with dance so much with dance in particular the freedom to direct your gaze is the second choreography that is the choreography that we as the viewer create and that never happens if you're looking at it on what is essentially television right all of the decisions of where you're looking and the movements of the eyes that's made for you by the person who is directing that those cameras so to me you know these this is not theater it's just television right that's what's happening with something like that and that's the kind of thing I want to see us go beyond another stark difference between most remote performances in theater is that in theater audience members come together to gather in a space and devote their attention to the work at hand I know this is like obvious to say but I really want us thinking about what is different about this form versus what we're used to or what we used to do in the theaters this act of gathering is one that make one of the things that makes theater so special it's why I love it for sure one of the reasons now we also do this in cinema but cinema lacks the sense of liveness the idea that anything can happen that I said before right that we are offered by the performers on the stage when performances are viewed in the home on a computer or a device the possibility also exists to make your dinner to tend to your children's needs to do some homework whatever you need to do to not be present to it right that's the other danger of this form so we need to think about how can we help to direct the attention of the audience and how they view it to like part of the design process now is how does the does the home viewer experience that this work that's something that we also need to talk about so I have this thinking about this like anything can happen thing you know I have this kind of guilty pleasure I really like watching clips of television programs some usually usually it's mostly the the old Carol Burnett show you have to be my age to know what that is but anyway if you know Carol Burnett where they would have things where the performers would go off script in an explicit attempt to get their other performers to crack up and start laughing right so because these shows were performed or taped in front of a live audience moments like these amplified the improvisational liveness that is central to theater and dance performances ultimately even if it's rehearsed and choreographed and very specific there was always that nuance the dynamics like a conductor the little ebb and flow the slight inflection that makes it live that's what makes it live and we all sense it even if it's on a microscopic level right but in these television programs when these performers went rogue in this way the audience would become electrified I mean you just the laughter in the audience is amazing and my own reaction is amazing yeah because we all know they are using their deepest skills of improvisation as they invent and create right before our eyes they are taking a chance to be right here right now following this lead remote theater must embrace some sort of improvisational structure so that in fact the audience can recognize the liveness and this is going back to what kitten sherry told don and I that we resisted at that time in our young artistic careers because we were going to make things and make it like this it's a telephone call you never know what's going to happen the other person might say I love you the other person might say I hate you you don't know what's going to happen on that telephone call that's the nature of somehow of what we need to bring into these remote performances okay and finally the thing I'm sort of most curious about right now the audience members need to sense the presence of the other audience members unlike theater the audience viewing a television program is totally disconnected we have to find ways to allow the audience to feel each other's presence to somehow sense this is not an individual experience but instead a collective one now one simple method I've seen you successfully and I've done it even in these sort of guru sessions that I've given is text-based chat even though nobody can see each other and but you know everyone logs in before I start to teach or give the presentation hello from Canada hello from Toronto hello from you know Vienna and all these different cities and these people sort of know each other too because we've also had some in real life gatherings so that sense of camaraderie even in the text-based chat actually exists right but we need to go beyond that it needs to be something bigger than that so one simple another option is to give the audience agency and I think this is where things could get really interesting this is where we turn to device theater and I will use the you I suppose by now one of the progenitive pieces or progenitors of this thing is sleep no more if you know that piece but there's lots of other device theater pieces where the audience has a role to play regarding the direction and sometimes even the outcome of the piece if we offer the audience of such or of a remote performance that kind of agency where they're in it they can sense that the other people are in it and they are doing something that has to do with the real how this piece is going to come with the outcome of this piece they become stakeholders they become share in a co-present experience where they know they are together and now we start to feel that feeling that feeling like we might feel if we were actually in a real theater again so regardless of the method what I'm proposing here and what I'd love to talk about is how do we devise ways to use technology to ensure that audience audiences sense their communal participation as viewers of the work and how can we just step back from this remember that it's not television and really dig in to find out what this form can give us because the other big looming question is will this go on once the pandemic is over and yes someday the pandemic will be over at least to it'll be yes I believe it'll be over somehow and when we get there this isn't going away just like the people who have left San Francisco Silicon Valley and all the offices are empty they're never going back to work because you know they can remote work and it works right in the same way this format is not going to go away because maybe what we've discovered is that we can do a show and it's not just for the people in our neighborhood or our city it's a worldwide audience suddenly there's people from all of the world attending and that's possible but yet we miss this element of being together in the theater of of devoting our gaze and our attention to the work what are we going to do with this to make it become something that is as valuable or is it has a different kind of value that is nevertheless very valuable in comparison to theater because I think we can do that if we think creatively and look into it so that's kind of my big opening statement and maybe someone can give me a heads up in the chat about how much time I have left so I get a sense of that five minutes perfect all right so I prepared a couple things in Isadora just to think about this yeah I'm not going to go into details with how any of this works really you'll see the patches from time to time you can ask me about it later etc but and I'm not really going to introduce Isadora except I'll say that as most of you probably know it is a graphic node-based programming language that allows you to manipulate media and as I alluded to before the whole point of it was that I wanted to be able to have performers on the stage control the media with their bodies or with their voices right so if I switch here to miss Izzy for a moment I'm gonna go to the oh I have to click on Izzy so there now you're seeing I'm not going to do this overview thing but let's just go to the next scene here um actually that's one thing that's important maybe to point out here just I'm not gonna like I said I'm not going to get into Isadora itself so much but you know one of the things that makes Isadora special that is seemingly not in so many other softwares is this notion of scenes if you look here across the bottom there are all these little boxes and it's just like a lightboard each scene is a self-contained unit right and the thing that's great about that for setting up these live performances is that you can just move through them in time and every scene is a self-contained item with its own media its own interactive response that structure actually really helps at least me because if you're working in a time-based way that's a good way to work I think so that's one of the things that does work out well with Isadora but here you know here's a typical okay this scene is like PowerPoint scene I'm just telling you things to do here's the next scene after that so we've got a video playing and a little Isadora there comes in as a mask and then I'm going to hit a cue so right here's the first real-time interactivity I hit a cue and as soon as I do that the video starts to warp and change and then it manipulates right okay well we've all hit go on a lightboard or many of us have hit go on a lightboard before so maybe that's not so special the other kind of thing that to me is this has to do with the sense of liveness this thing about how can we show that it's live so here's a really simple patch it's just me again more of me but now my voice is manipulating a video feedback I'm going to look in this camera now and so as I talk the volume of my voice is controlling how loud and how much feedback there is okay so the thing is about that is you can't fake it yet you can have an operator try to make that video respond in the precisely to my voice but it will never happen that is proof of liveness as soon as you start to do things where you cannot deny that there is in as such a microscopic connection between the timing of an action and a response you know that they are related and one thing to that I'm curious about to talk about what happens if we start sending that data to a performer in another city and it's infecting affecting not infecting but or maybe infecting affecting their environment what if we start to set up communication links where my actions are changing something that's going on for the other performer and allows that to inform the way in which you're creating right so here's another little simple thing I want to show you here's my iPad I got to make sure it's turned on so this is my little iPad mini guy and I'm running a program called touch osc or I should be running so touch osc you know if you know it has a bunch of controls on it and things like that so you can use sliders and dials and whatever but I'm not going to use it for that I'm going to use it as a thing that measures its position in space so now if I go back to the other scene here so here you can see that I've got a 360 degree video and as I tilt this iPad I'm looking to the left or to the right I can look up and look around here and look down all right so with this small little controller imagine now that it's much smaller than that that it's a small android or iphone small one and it's in my pocket and I'm now our performer and I'm in this world this is I'm being broadcast but I am now controlling the entire world around me by moving my body what changes when that sense of liveness that I am in control of that enters the world of this remote performance because again it's all about showing how we could have the audience be part of I'm sorry it's it's all about how we can let them in on the fact that it's still happening live even though it looks like television the way in which they are receiving it right one little thing I did with this that's nice too is that when you actually look at the waterfall the waterfall is louder and when you look away it's softer you can almost imagine that we could do this for the audience not even just for the performer what about the audience what if the audience can look around the space in this way something to think about okay all right so just in my last couple of minutes here skipping that thing so I've got to simulate a zoom wall over here I've got this I've got this this is giffy so it made me a grid of all the bridgerton like I don't know latest bridgerton gifts so I'm going to put that back oh wait I don't know if you could see that hold on no you probably I don't know what you're seeing hold on me to see a window oh yeah you can see it okay that's fine um I didn't need to drag it so I've got this giffy window that's just to simulate the zoom grid okay so we can see because in isadora using the new screen capture actor which I made over the summer we can pull out a particular image so here you can see um that I'm pulling out four of those gifts pretend those are people on zoom those are actors or performers on zoom and I've got them as four individual feeds right and I can control them individually like here I can fade this one out and fade for instance this one out okay that's all well and good and that's basically it is the this is the basis of how they did rush and troll farm is to bring those actors in on zoom from remote locations to combine them but here let's look at it a different way let's imagine we have zoom and now you're not seeing the audience the the faces of the performers you're seeing the faces of the audience this is not for the performer this is not for the audience's benefit this is for the performer's benefit let me pull back from that imagine we can set up a space where in fact the performer can see the faces of the people that they are performing for even better if we could come up with a way that the audience can see each other's face could we create that sense of co-presence where we actually have the feeling that we're together because to right now togetherness is all we want it's all I want I know that I am feel super isolated to have that sense of togetherness to feel that we're there experiencing to hear each other laugh yeah that's really interesting to me yeah how can we do that is that one way to extend this idea um you know and just one last thing you know it's just like this kind of interactive control here's a simple thing where the sound of my voice is controlling I want to make sure what you're seeing again hold on it's too many windows here oh no that's not working at all is it that's because this flag is off no okay hold on just need to bring this to the front I don't know what happened there okay I think it's working now anyway the sound of my voice is controlling the one is blurred right now while I'm talking as soon as I stop then we see the other one in focus right I can't see it while I'm talking but the idea that the performers now are in control of cinematic devices like a rack focus this is a rough approximation of a rack focus is that something where the performers like I said can control the environment through the way in which they're acting so in the end to finish up hopefully within my time I think I made it maybe um it's about liveness it's about improvisation and it's about bringing the audience together how are we going to do that that's the questions that I would love to talk about today so thank you for your time that's what I have to say for now anyway that was really wonderful that's all very very interesting lots of great questions that you're asking um it's interesting that the uh your network had a couple of little issues there because it brings exactly into that point of like how do you how do you release this desire as as digital creators for everything to be so streamlined and perfect and work in a live setting with this desire to not know what's going to happen how do you how do you release that that feeling for yourself and still create these things without having um uh anxiety attacks as we all this together thank you very much for that yeah did it did it did the last one actually ever work or did I just I couldn't see all the windows at once what was it doing it was yes because they would blur out fade okay you did see the faces not just some weird graphics and part of the captions okay good you could see our our backstage chat a little bit just might be in pop up there okay okay anything can happen yeah well that's what it's all about so uh that's great thank you so much mark you're welcome Matthew what have you been up to well you know it's so it's really lovely to hear these same usings from mark because I think that it's what so many of us are confronting and thinking about and trying to reconcile right now is that you know we really are trying to understand how do we approach a world that feels and looks an awful lot like television and broadcast and how do we differentiate what theater and what telepresence theater looks like in this world so that we're not just kind of copying things that already exist which I think is something that is is a temptation it's a temptation to say like oh well you know let's go ahead and and use one of these models that we've already seen or kind of understand but we inevitably run into is this again this question of liveness and presence and I think mark really kind of hits a nail in the head there that you know we go to the theater and we go to these experiences not only because of the uh experience of seeing the performance but also because of the liveness of it you know I personally I miss going to movies in part because I love the communal experience of events where you get to share not only in the event that you're seeing and participating in participating in but that you're there with other people the energy of the people that surround you their attention frustration anticipation excitement is there with you in that space simultaneously in a way that is challenging for us to experience in some of these more remote style experiences and so I think many of the same questions that mark kind of italicizes and underlines are pieces that I've not only been thinking about in my own work but many of us are confronting and kind of pushing out to try to get to the bottom up with respect to you know what have I been up to and what are the things that I've been working on you know it's interesting like mark I haven't had quite as much time and space for uh kind of artistic pieces as I might hope but I've been doing and spending a lot of time thinking about thinking about toolbuilding and the intersection between the tools that we build and how we encourage other people to think about building uh systems and solutions that broaden the abilities that they might necessarily be presented with I loved that mark pointed out that the the kind of birth of isadora came from this necessity of the tool that we wanted to use didn't exist so he had to build it and I think that's one of the conversations I've entered with a number of different uh engineers artists and technicians is this kind of question of well you know the kind of experience that I want to craft or cultivate or present doesn't have a good tool that fits that use case so you know how do I begin thinking about building something or rearranging existing tools and a formula that's going to allow me to express and explore some of those ideas so you know similarly a big portion of what's occupied some of my time has been kind of digging in and thinking about how do we build prototypes and structures that help people and artists especially kind of explore some of those pieces and the the kind of like chapter of it's good to eat your own dog food if you're going to you know like oh this is the right way to do it well what does that mean exactly a creative project that's kind of been an offshoot of this process of thinking about how we build our own broadcast uh desks or our remote broadcast desks and how we encourage other people to think about approaching some of those problems and solving some of those problems has been a project called the church of the broken network which has its roots in a conversation from a workshop years and years ago now where the idea was that you would bring to a live event a piece of code in this case touches on your network that was not working or was in a semi-working state and you would offer it to someone with a lot of experience to see if they could solve the problem or bring it back to life in some way and so one of the kind of silly but playful ways that we've been thinking about navigating these experiences to take that premise and then explore how do we see that and experience that as a streamed and live kind of production and piece the collaborators that I've been working with on that project are Zoe Sandoval on Ian Shalansky and you know to Mark's point exactly we've we kind of started with some pieces that we knew were going to be kind of known knowns before we introduced too many known unknowns and unknown unknowns and so we started with networks that and old projects that we'd worked with in the past but you know we hadn't quite dusted off in a few years and we would lob them to one another so I would open a piece that Ian had worked on or Ian would open a piece that I'd worked on and then it was the other person's improvisation to try and figure out what's wrong with this project why is it working what's not working are there ways that we could bring it back to life quickly what's something that we can kind of triage or not triage and how do we think about some of those pieces the interesting kind of companion to that is that Zoe largely operates as our technician and operator and so behind the scenes they're doing the orchestration of the cut between who's present on screen who's not present on screen and then one of the things that they've always loved is the kind of embellishment of video and so they're frequently unbeknownst to us because we're kind of deep in trying to understand the problem that we're solving but invariably in the feed that goes out to the world there is some gift that appears over our heads or in our network or somewhere in our process as we're trying to figure out what this problem might look like and I think this is an interesting piece to to kind of pull up as a reference point in part because it's you know one whole portion of this is kind of this known broken thing that we're exploring but the the kind of curveball that we started to throw ourselves in the last few kind of explorations of this project was to introduce components inside of our projects that were purposely going to start breaking things and so we wouldn't know when that was going to start happening or what might be the kind of precipitating event for those pieces but it would present an obstacle and a challenge to us as we were trying to solve one problem with problems like the nodes in our graph were disappearing or all of the traditional UI colors were changing or the interval at which they were changing was increasing or our windows and parameters moved around on us and for me that kind of stems back to my history and in my own you know personal practice as being a performer and this notion of obstacles and you know part of what's fun about going to the theater and one of the things that I already I always loved about going to live performance was that I really lived for the moments when things would go wrong on stage and not because I didn't want things I didn't want there to be a good show but because when something went astray or there was a problem that was the moment that you were suddenly faced with the reality that the performance isn't going to just stop because someone broke a glass on stage the performance must continue and now we've got to find a way to solve this very present problem and how do we do that gracefully in the world that we're all participating inside of and so this opportunity for us to create those moments of friction that bring us back into that inspirational and improvisational attitude I think our pieces that are really important for what live performance looks like as it's mediated in this new strange and interesting way and I wouldn't say that it's totally new and strange it's probably new in how much we are confronting it and strange in that it feels strange to to be embracing it this way but you know the notion of telepresence is not particularly outside of our canon of ideas it's just something that we are exploring with more intimacy and frustration in some respects as we try to imagine what the world of live performance and live events looks like when it's mediated by these rectangles that sit in front of us and what's the relationship between the rectangle that I sit in front of and the rectangle that I carry in my pocket and how do these things connect and intersect with the worlds that we're exploring and thinking about I think the other piece that I want to just call attention to here before I transition is back into a kind of a bigger conversation because I'm I'm sure there are kind of questions and comments from those of you watching is that I've also been participating in a project that's looking at intersections of machine learning and text creation so part of our effort there has been working on a kind of absurdist performance piece that's part clown and part traditional theater and our script generation has been informed by collecting reference texts texts excuse me and then building models out of those texts to be able to generate the kind of dialogue and questioning that we want to explore in the performance so this is a kind of you know two fold hand in hand style approach to using machine learning inside of a performance context where we're really thinking about how do we collaborate with the system that's going to inform and provide some information to us that then we have some editorial control with so rather than kind of imagining that the machines are going to write the play for us you know which I think is is sometimes the confrontation that many of us encounter when we talk about machine learning we're really starting or trying to think about the processes being more collaborative and just like we you know and all through my graduate experience and hopefully through other people's graduate experience is working with technology and integrated in performance I think one of the big pieces that we can start to hopefully embrace more kind of deeply and intimately is that the machines and the processes that we are involving in these productions are not necessarily kind of blind agents they're they're spaced for us to have different forms of collaboration with technology to express a particular idea or explore a particular concept so it's not necessarily that I'm going to make this perfect thing that will do exactly what I want it to do I'm always curious about what's the chaos that's going to come out of that thing that I've made and how does that inform what I'm doing or change what the actor adjacent to me is doing how does the audience respond to their agency inside of those spaces and how do we build evocative and mutable elements that really embrace the notion that they're it's never going to be the same twice and that the moment that we share together here is unique and special in part because that's the nature of the experience that we've cultivated that we've really designed for and planned for I think that for me is one of the pieces that's most captivating and exciting about live performance is that you know the script might be the same from show to show but you never quite know if the show on Monday is going to be exactly the same same show on Wednesday as the show on Thursday and and those pieces I think that nuance and shift and unpredictability is one of the pieces that I'm hopeful that there's more space for as we think about what live performance looks like in this context before I carry on too much too much more here I want to make sure that I hand it back to Andrew so we can have some questions and some dialogue with all of us that's really great again thank you for for everything that you've had to share it's really quite interesting you but actually both anyway anyone in the contents anybody watching can send questions along so far we have nobody's asked any questions but I was gonna ask because you both you both mentioned sort of separately improvisation as a tool that is important for this live feeling in this kind of performance and I think you've also mentioned chaos and things going wrong and so I'm curious from your standpoints how do you feel you would both set yourselves up for having these in there in a way that will allow you to still feel safe in the performance that you're going for so you're not giving too much away but also enough so that it still feels like you've rested enough control so that it still feels live and in the moment yeah I mean I think yeah it's well I don't know I'm still reeling from some of the things that Matthew said because I just got this church of the broken network thing really and I'm gonna be thinking I want to come back to the question of what is the relationship of the rectangles because the sort of abstraction and truth in that is really interesting to me right but but mainly I really identify with the words chaos and welcoming that sort of thing and I think what's what's cool about well this is what I saw what I realized I haven't watched so many performances I have to say during the pandemic but when I watch Russian troll farm you know is done with Isadora and it's it's so many great things are happening but you know it's Isadora it's not like a network broadcast studio he's layering a bunch of actors that are coming in on zoom they're highly low resolution in the end and you can see the pixels along the edges and I'm just like oh you know it's like it doesn't feel good because it doesn't look super high quality but I realized because I really enjoyed the play so much because it's so good because I didn't say this earlier but the the subject matter this was performed before the election and the subject matter is about how Russian trolls manipulated the election in 2016 so it was incredibly timely that was part of what made it great but I realized oh the pandemic has opened a space where low quality stuff or lower than broadcast quality stuff can happen and it's fine and that is to me great because right now everyone should feel like they can do anything and it should crash and burn like crazy and it's going to be fine because everyone knows we're all struggling to make anything happen so I feel like the pandemic I mean there isn't much good to say about it but I feel like in this realm it opened that fissure I used that word earlier a fissure where things can happen and people are going to be more open to it if you were in a theater and the computer crashes they're going to hate you and walk out the door because by now that shouldn't happen anymore back when I started you could get away with it but now you can't get away with it but during this phase we have some leeway and to me that's exciting well and I think to Mark's point that's part of what's really fun and compelling about this opportunity is that you know you can leverage or lean into the unpredictability of those pieces so why not find ways to you know turn up and turn down the latency in your video and audio you know why not lean into the fact that the camera is going to follow there's going to be a cat that's going to appear or someone's going to like walk through half-clothes right like these are the the kind of tropes that exist in our own lives and so there's even more space for us to think about how we don't have to create perfectly manicured and you know 8k experiences we can really think about the more human side of this technology that we're all experiencing that's great because that that that to me again feels almost exactly like chaos but if you lean into it like you say I usually use that term if you lean into the the things that seem like their mistakes and then they become choices and then that becomes a part of it really adds to the piece um we did get a question here so several questions actually but so as a theater maker who's new to technology of remote theater where do I start to educate myself in order to take a piece ready to go which is an opera and conceive it as a digital project that's an excellent question uh I I think you're lucky you know there's a lot of resources online Matthew I didn't really understand that you were teaching um you were doing a lot of like tutorials or video stuff for touch and um you know so Matthew's there to teach you uh we've got plenty of tutorials we just completed a new series of updated tutorials for Isadora I mean that's one place to go but I think also to join uh the community forums for these softwares because you can also talk not just about how do I connect A to B to make it work but this is what I'm thinking about and I'm a bit overwhelmed by trying to accomplish this has anybody else done this because I can guarantee you there are people that have and can share their knowledge with you and I think seeking that out at this time it would also be it's sort of not a bad idea like you know to to have a get together you know like what if we started having some get-togethers of people that are thinking about this or want to share advice or knowledge or whatever I mean that kind of stuff we could all benefit from right now I don't know I don't Matthew what you would say I would say you know I would echo the same notion of the forums are a really excellent way to kind of get your feet wet there's a you know widespread of materials online these days I think you know the place that I usually steer people into first is what is what's the intersection between the essential part of the experience or essential part of the forum that you're thinking about and this delivery mechanism so how are you going to imagine opera in the context of you know this bounded rectangle that you have and what are the essential parts of that that you can really emphasize or point to as as a way of kind of amplifying the form rather than just producing something that's lots of little squares yeah I think that's you know because because in the end what I said earlier about Russian troll farm is is true if you if you know if the music is great if you're in your opera and the singers are great it's going to be great actually you don't really have to worry but I think if you're thinking about trying to deal with this forum then like really think crazy thoughts like what just popped into my head is like okay it's an opera the only shots you're ever going to get given on my computer screen is this big is that everything is going to be life-size you'll only see a hand like this or a face like this or whatever you're only going to see a life-size human being in this as much as you can show on the screen that's the only shot you're allowed to do for the entire piece okay I don't know if that's good or not but it's an idea because you've imposed a limitation where you're saying this is the rectangle right what's the relationship of the rectangles that's what Matthew said rightly so so this is the rectangle what human part of a human can I show in this and that's when I think as soon as you create that kind of problem with for yourself I think you're in really good place then you're going to be you're going to have something to struggle against which means you're going to invent well and I think to you know just one more piggyback off Mark's comment there is that you know often we resist this notion of boundaries or obstacles but you know from the perspective of a designer it's can be really helpful to say you know we're going to do this show and it's you know the design language is circles and that's it because now you have a problem that you have to figure out how to solve which is much more exciting and compelling than saying well you can do anything anywhere all the time and there's no limit on your budget well you know it's harder to kind of invent in that infinite space than if you give yourself some really explicit rules or conventions that you have to abide by yeah I want to talk about the cat that just decided to come into the screen now we know the whole thing's going to be popular yeah now now everyone will watch this video that's great um I actually had a question that's it's been on my mind a lot with some of the the pieces that I've been working on and it keeps coming up in conversation is where do you draw the line between just creating a sort of a filmed theater piece if you have a piece that's already been built and you want to turn it into something digital where do you draw the line between making it a live performance versus a recorded archive like what would make you think to go one direction or another that's an interesting question I think in part Ms. Sneak in front of Mark here because I wanted pieces and I'm hoping Mark has had this similar experience is that when you work with media in the context of a live performance you're frequently using made media components already or you might even be going out and shooting pieces of media that you intend to use inside of the performance so you are you're kind of already playing that game of well which which pieces am I going to shoot ahead of time and then use in the context of the live event and which pieces are do I need to kind of emphasize as something that needs to be or as best conveyed by the live interaction between performers and audience so you know I think places where I start to think about that is what are the essential kind of inflection moments or conflicts that I'm trying to help people experience or kind of highlight or underline as a kind of mechanic for the piece that you're working on and I think that's one entry point into thinking about well is this better as the shot documentary or as the piece where the you know interviewee doesn't know what questions are going to come and they're not going to be perfectly edited yeah I think all I can add to that is my personal instinct for anything that I mean the thing that I am I started working with a choreographer in the UK Kerry Frankson who I've made pieces with before and this is going to be for it's like four dancers and 12 audience members and they will be present together on zoom because I for me right now it just personally I miss seeing people I miss feeling contact and I want to create an environment where these people can somehow share a meaningful contact not just with the performers but also with each other because I feel like at the very least I mean hopefully the the the topic of the art piece itself is interesting but that to let people to have that experience again even though we don't have theaters to go to right now for me that would be something I would like to offer in the work that I'm making so I don't know I don't know that I would go on I wouldn't know what to do like if some existing Troika ranch piece if we were going to try and remount that for audio I don't know what I do I'd really have to think about that because you know they were created and designed for spaces right I mean that was the other thing that they had going for them from Russian troll farm was that they started from scratch this was not a play that was that had ever been in a theater before it was a new play that had never been done and so they were able to conceive it from the get-go as a piece for this format so what you're saying then as you would we would always want to just lean into new creation lean into the idea of working within the formats that we're allowed to work within rather opposed to trying to shoehorn something into I mean it depends I mean like I'll tell you a story so in 1996 as part of this this piece that Troika ranch did we were actually invited to be part of a festival that was all telepresence stuff yeah and my mentor and teacher the composer Morton Sabotnick who ran the the whole project basically I had this idea that is a great idea and someone should still try to do it but you'll never get permission because what they try to do and please I'm going to get the name of this play wrong it's um it's Beckett there's three people in a trash can and the entire thing they're sitting in the trash can talking do you know is it do you know the name of it that piece is I can't think of the name of it off the top of my head someone in the chat tell me the name of the piece because I don't remember but you it's a famous piece of Beckett's and the idea was because we were working with three cities that you have two television sets on the top of the trash cans with the performers in the other two cities and one live performer and that you do it together right so there you're taking a piece of classic piece that's been around for ages and repurposing it for this kind of that well for that world right like there's ways in to do this and um it could be interesting but I feel like if you start with it from scratch then you can take the medium into account you can make it for this medium and it becomes for this medium and maybe the piece that you make will never work in a theater could be right yeah great um got another question here uh so is there some sort of future technology that doesn't exist that you would like to see developed in order to push this kind of work besides what you're developing yourself I guess of course it's similar to say what problems have you run into that you haven't been able to fix yet I'm gonna say okay I was going to say that you know the pieces that we're close to in many respects are you know sensors like connex or lidar scanners that give us a sense of give us a sense of space and kind of presence of a sense of volume that we're often missing in these kind of flat representations uh you know the entry point and the kind of the the cost of participation in those formats I think is a little bit prohibitive so I would love to see a more democratized toolkit that let us think about ourselves in volume and kind of explore the notion of bodies in volume a little bit more than we're kind of currently experiencing not only in our kind of consumptive format but also in our performance contexts here here I say to that but I'll add to that okay so we have like a pro I supposedly there's over 150 people watching this right now here is what I'm going to say to you something like that's what I heard earlier right okay if every single one of you writes a complaint letter to zoom saying we need siphon output from zoom maybe they'll actually give it to us because I tried to get them to do it I begged them I told them why it was the best idea with would help us so much if we had siphon or spout I got nowhere so that's the technology I want that I haven't been able to realize is to get zoom to have siphon and spout output so we can use that in our shows but actually that goes to I see another question in the chat having to do with zoom and corporations I hope we get to that one too because I'm curious about that in relation to what I just said well then that well let me let me just say though I really I just want to I want to say yes Matthew thank you I want that too and I want it without any kind of a special camera I want an RGB camera that can look at a body and tell me exactly what it's doing that's what I want here here here here no agreed got it I've written that down and it will happen thank you excellent make sure that happens so then the other question is it's from an ethical standpoint the question wants to support developers and small companies and divert attention and traffic from mega corporations I wonder how we are able to navigate the chaos of new and old platforms while still having a degree of control over what I am creating and how I am able to engage an audience in a meaningful way yeah it's a really interesting point I a friend of mine had an idea for a project a web-based project and she turned to me because she's not a technologist to ask them for some help and we quickly realized that it was for a beginner like her like something she could manage like WordPress is probably too much for her let's say like right we know that's an open source free thing but everything else she is super ethical and she's very concerned about corporations she read all of the terms of service of like Wix and all these different things and she's like I cannot put my stuff on this it is not right I will not support it and in the end she didn't do the project because she couldn't find a platform that was easy for her to use and possible for her to use at her technical level that didn't feel like she was like empowering a corporation to take data from people that were visiting the site to look at this artwork and you know it's a it's really something that we should all think about I mean um you know she raised my awareness on this topic and I don't know what the answer is because you know it's like Zoom is a big corporation by now and you know they had the right thing at the right moment and that and you know kudos to them for having created that technology but when those terms of service things um and Apple is you know to me you know terms of service should never be longer than a normal human being can read and understand in five minutes it should never be more complicated than that but yet it is and these kinds of practices I find troubling especially when you're trying to make artwork with this stuff. I would echo so many of the same sentiments that Mark has here is that it it is a really challenging navigation right now in part because understanding the terms of service of all of the things that you might be using and all of the intersecting tools along the way is a huge undertaking in its own right and I don't know that I have good answers for that I think that the piece that is interesting to me from kind of an ethics perspective kind of dovetails partially off of what you started us off with Andrew and an experience of my partner my partner teaches for UC Santa Cruz and part of which they've chosen to do as a portion of their lecture experiences to do a land acknowledgement similar to of what we had today but what does a land acknowledgement look like when your platform is primarily mediated on servers that you don't necessarily know where they live nor the routes for the traffic that have passed it from author to consumer right so you know we are we use these technologies that we're in many ways very blind to how things get from A to B where things live along in the way and what their persistence looks like again like I don't have a good answer for that I think that's just another kind of layer in that onion skin when we start to think about what are our ethical responsibilities when we start to think about which tools do we use when do we use them why do we use them there are certainly places to look and tools to use and I think kind of linear and smaller companies and developers is a good way to think about that the hard part is that many of these technologies also are beholden to the tech behemoths that are you know Microsoft Azure or AWS it's hard to have a project on the web that doesn't pass through one of those services and but you know and it's so this is such a why this is such a big question you mean those are like those sort of ethical questions like but I constantly as I'm doing zooms I'm thinking how much energy does this consume how much energy does it consume not just to run my computer I know I can find that out actually but to go through all the wires and to get halfway across the world and go through those servers you know how much actual energy is being consumed and how much what is my carbon footprint for doing this kind of stuff I mean we can be glad that all the you know so many people are so that the number of people traveling and polluting in that way is less but this is pollution too I mean this is we have to also be aware of it it really goes to so many levels yeah I wish I wish I was clever enough to say I really had a good idea about how to address this because I'm afraid I don't but it's good to be aware of it and it's a good discussion to bring up the only thing I can add to it if you're curious my partner did a project with the contemporary music group here in Vienna called the called the Klang Forum and they based this whole work on a document I've never heard of before it's an Austrian economist but you can find it in English it's called the economy of the common good and if you would like to read a hopeful a hopeful document about how we might manage to have businesses and still work if you want to see a sort of hybrid capitalism that isn't as greedy and as thoughtless as the one we have read this read about this economy of the common good it's a very interesting proposal and it's something that in terms of our own comps we're a tiny company but I still have thought about some of the principles that this document brings forth so for the questioner that might be a place to go to help start thinking about these questions actually because they really make a great point about how we should exist in the world together if we're doing business that's ethical it's great thank you for that I'm gonna check that out yeah it's a big it's a giant question I think a lot of for me personally too it's always just coming down to what you're saying like awareness and the choices that you make and that we'll never be able to control everything in terms of getting our product from one end from from us to everyone that we want to see but at least you can control the little steps along the way so I say that you can control where you put your dollar and that's probably the most that you can really control a lot of ways so that's an important thing to be aware of and thank you for bringing that up another question we have here jumping back to chaos how do we explain the potential chaos in the works that we're creating to our to our clients or non-specific tech non-tech specific collaborators you don't okay all right the first is be the artistic director because then nobody no I think well to me there there's two words in there that send me off in two different directions client that means that someone's paying you to do some kind of like I don't know design for something that client means commercial to me I don't know that's and then in that case I don't think clients love chaos so much I don't know if that's the place you can actually do that I don't know but on the other hand if you're talking about an artwork and you're non-specific collaborators I think that you can make the argument for improvisation you know there's there's lots of pieces that use it in a successful way it doesn't have to be extreme either you know again I think about the conductor remember you know it's like Beethoven's Fifth Symphony can start like this the way you know it that's one way but the other way is because that's how my gesture informed the musicians to play it right that's improvisation actually that's not you didn't change the piece that you did but you know you didn't change the notes you changed the timing and dynamics right and those sorts of inflections I think that's the easy I feel like it's easy to make the argument for that I don't know Matthew what you think but well I know I certainly find myself you know in that balance of you have to do some corporate client work some days and then you get to do some more kind of expressive artwork the other days and you know that pendulum is an interesting kind of roller coaster to ride I think linguistically we can lean into pieces like improvisation these days highly popular are procedural parametric generative and these all suggest the notion of elements that are emergent from a design system and I think that's usually where I kind of lean is that it's not like you know we're going to just like throw things in the air and see what happens it's that you know we're going to design a kind of idea for what that the kind of shape or the score of a might of a piece might look like and that every iteration of it is going to be unique and have a different kind of direction or shape to it and I think that's what's compelling and interesting you know especially when we think about works that are easily reproducible part of what's fun and part of I think what it's compelling is the notion that a piece isn't necessarily exactly reproducible there is some variation in it and then if you wanted to see the piece that happened on Tuesday morning you had to be there on Tuesday morning and that's you know why I go to the theater and I think that's one of the things that is very exciting to me about the notion of a design that has that mutability to it although I think I really would argue that there are times when you absolutely need to throw everything up in the air I wouldn't say you should be in front of an audience but I think in the rehearsal process that's really that's a useful thing to do because you discover things when you do things like that it makes me think a little bit there's a choreographer I know called Susan Rethwurst and she had a great thing she would do in workshops called wreck the dance so you'd make this some choreography it's your thing you know you're making this dance or whatever and then you had to teach it to someone else in the class and their instruction was to wreck it that means do whatever they wanted to do with it which hadn't they had no conversation about your desire about this and then they would make it and then they would give it back to you and you would have to then work with what they gave you to complete the dance and through this kind that's one of those throw things up in the air moment when an outside influence that is not under your control can open you up to a new direction and let you see something you didn't see before and that's the argument I would make for the these people that might be questioning this is like you know you you don't sometimes when you admit you don't always know the answers you can find a new answer if you open yourself to it so here here wholeheartedly agree so so I'll actually use that as a way to dovetail into one of the other questions and I'll shift it a little bit more into a technical like a purely technical range just for those technical people who are watching and it's the question is do either of you have any other examples of proving liveness so in that respect like what ways would you set up your softwares in order to use like what tools would you use in a performance to allow for improvisation or allow for chaos to exist and liveness to exist you know my instinct is that you know some of that depends on the platform that you're using there's a lot of really interesting space you can explore with things like twitch they've got a an api for their chat layer so more than just thinking about like there's a text box that you know pops up that I can read you can instead actually parse the stream of information that comes out of that text layer so ways that I've seen that use that are compelling and interesting is that when someone uses a particular emoji or they use a particular gesture that has a trigger inside of the the live system that's running with the performers and that that's a bit of an invitation towards chaos because you don't know who's going to you know drop that bomb on the performers any given moment but that is a space where you can kind of open up outside influence that also leans on tools that already exist in the world I I have a story about that it's not my piece but a very important piece in the early in the early eras of of inner of interactivity is called Mesa de voce and I'm so terrible with the names I'm going to have to try and remember Zach Lieberman and Golan Levin yeah that's their piece and my composer that my mentor's wife Joan of Barbara contemporary singer was in the piece along with another singer it was all interactive all the graphics it was the first piece that used infrared tracking that I know of to allow musicians to make graphics with their sound and it's a wonderful piece so but halfway through the first performance the audience figured out that their vocals were triggering the graphics and suddenly people were like the whole audience started whistling all over the place but they absolutely knew it was live because then all the graphics were going crazy and so but that's probably not what did what the person was asking about when they were asking the question but it really proved the liveness because the audience took control of the situation once they understood that it was working but I think that in terms of proving liveness you know when I first began this stuff and started making systems that could do this that was sort of really important to me that people understood and I it wasn't too long before I stopped putting any program notes about the technology in our pieces we did that early days of Troika Ranch but soon quit it because it totally put the emphasis in the wrong place I think it should be something that is felt that not is that is explicit I think that if you know certain things happen with subtlety and precise timing enough you'll know that it's coming from the performer because it really can't be any other way that's what I said earlier and this but this is where actually the systems you're using the software is really important because like milliseconds of delay matter eight bits versus versus 16 bits of sensing on something as delicate as your finger that matters right so it's also a question of like really incredibly low latency and high precision because that's you know listen people practice the violin for their whole life and they're never finished getting good at it because it is so responsive to human gesture that you can always get better name an electronic device that offers that same possibility there are none I have never seen that device yet I want to that maybe goes back to the other question that's the technology I want to see is something that makes rewards a lifetime of practice right but I think to answer the question if that timing is so precise and so right on that after five minutes of seeing it you won't you'll just know that it's live that's my that's my feeling about it you don't have to prove anything in the end great um so I got one one last question before we sign off uh do you have and this is this is a big one too do you have thoughts on how to convince theater patrons that technological advancement is not a bad thing we see I hear a lot of naysayers saying that there is too much technology in theater pish posh that's what you do you just look at them and you go pish posh do you have a thought on that matt what you know what's curious to me is that you know the theater has always been an epicenter of technology whether it's you know lighting whether it's special effects whether it's presentations of gore you know like there's a long history in the kind of theatrical world about how we create worlds that are not the world that we're in how we transport you and that storytelling experience is not just about the the kind of fantastical event that's being portrayed to you it's about how we transform the world around you so you know every time I hear that kind of resistance to well that's not what theater is supposed to be well theater is an expression of our imagination and our humanity it's it is in inexorably tied to our exploration of technology uh and how we navigate the world around us so I think that you know technology new emerging uh old analog uh clunky machinery and new fangled algorithms like they all have a space in that paradigm because it it is in inexorably a part of our navigation of thinking about how we express and understand our own humanity yeah that says it I I'll just add to that in Troika Ranch we had a rule we had an imaginary rule book I wish we would have actually written it down but one of the rules one of the most important rules was no technology before need I suspect that some of the reaction that this person is talking about is where in cases where I have seen it and I didn't like it either where the technology was there because it was cool and because it made you go wow and it had nothing to do with the actual dramaturgy of that work so I would encourage you that's a good rule to follow no technology before need don't include something just because it makes you have that that immediate reaction include it because it is so dramaturgically essential that you have no other choice but to include it and I think if everybody did that probably those people would not be voicing those complaints that's my guess that's beautifully put both of you thank you so much that's really great way I think to end off on this this panel and as part of our our symposium of digital tools and live performance I think that's a great way to end us so I just want to thank you both if this has been really wonderful very eye-opening really really interesting chats I think we we had some really great questions there at the end too and I'm super happy that you are both able to make this work and that you know it's not too late or too early for either of you so so again yeah thank you very much and I'll just I'm just gonna sign off here for everyone that's paying attention thank you all audience members for for coming out today to watch this if you've enjoyed this event again please take the time to if you can donate to the ADC you can do that through again through our website through the ADC's website which is designers.ca or you can do it through Canada Helps as well coming up we actually have that's our only event today so tomorrow we have contracts in a digital age at 5 p.m eastern and tonight if not an actual event of ours but you can check out skin it's happening at 8 p.m eastern and you can also check out the wild side festival as part of the centaur's theaters wild side festival all of their other shows are available online until January 31st and just for our own things you can check out our digital art galleries now live on our website so go and check that out and new things will be added to the art gallery as the symposium goes on so thank you very much have a great