 A warm welcome to all who are joining us this evening for our keynote presentation, Making a New Reality. We hope that you are all enjoying the conference so far. We are one week into this virtual conference and we thank all who have actively engaged in the various workshops, presentations, and other learning opportunities in this last week. At this point, we have over 3,000 participants from all over the world. And if you've missed any of the presentations over the course of this week, not to worry, please know that you can access recordings of the presentations on our conference app through the end of August. And after that, with the permission of the presenters, the recording will be available on our Association for Baha'i Studies Vimeo site as well. We are so thrilled to welcome you this evening to this keynote presentation by Kamal Sinclair. Before I introduce Kamal, we would like to start with a devotional presentation that has been created by Elizabeth De Souza, who is an artist and educator. We're very grateful to Elizabeth for putting this together. We'll start with this devotional. Thank you again to our very creative brother, sister, duo, Liz De Souza and Jesse Washington for that beautiful devotional presentation, so creative, so moving. Thank you very much. What a wonderful start to this keynote this evening. For those of you who might be joining us just now, welcome again. We hope that this week has been engaging. We want to thank all our presenters and participants for such an insightful several days, and we very much look forward to the rest of the week as well. At this point, we have about 3,000 participants from all over the world, and so wherever you are, morning, afternoon, evening, we hope that you are well, staying safe, and having a wonderfully enriching experience at this year's ABS conference. I'd also like to draw your attention to a session on Wednesday, August 5th, especially if you'd like to learn a little more about recent developments in the work of the Association for Baha'i Studies, as well as unfolding plans and efforts to strengthen the community's capacity to contribute to the discourses of society within the broader context of the five-year plan. I am now thrilled to introduce our keynote presenter for this evening, morning, afternoon, depending on where you are, Kamal Sinclair. Kamal is the Executive Director of the Guild of Future Architects and Senior Consultant to Sundance Institute's Future of Culture Initiative. She also serves as External Advisor to MacArthur Foundation's Journalism and Media Program. She's the Creative Advisor to Four Freedoms, MIT's Center for Advanced Virtuality, Starfish, Incubator, and Ivy. No lack of experience and expertise here. Previously, she was the Director of Sundance Institute's New Frontier Labs Program, which supports artists working at the convergence of film, art, media, and technology. She also consults for the Ford Foundation's Just Films Program on a research project aimed at furthering equality in emerging media, which resulted in making a new reality. So at this conference this year, as we think about constructive engagement, Kamal encourages us to think about the role of narratives in imagining our futures. The macro narratives created by our many individual stories become powerful organizing forces to coordinate change. What stories are we telling ourselves about the future? Who is authoring these stories? How will they impact the reality we make? These are the questions that Kamal has grappled with and will be sharing some of her insights. So Kamal Sinclair presents key findings from her Ford Foundation commissioned research on furthering equality in emerging media, making a new reality that helped launch a global community of practice working to democratize the imagination of our future. She shares insights on the high stakes of limiting inclusion in the design process of future systems, offers frameworks for leveraging the best practices of co-creation, and discusses how speculative imagination can help unlock human potential to establish an abundance of well-being. And aside from all of this, of course, if you know Kamal, you also know that the joy and purpose with which she lives her life is infectious and has affected many of us in the most positive and inspiring way. Please help me in welcoming our keynote for the evening, Kamal Sinclair. Thank you so much, Shabnam. I am deeply, deeply humbled by that kind and generous introduction, and a little bit blushing because obviously we're all working and striving every day to try to make an impact on the world. So I appreciate ABS for inviting me to present to this incredible community of 3,000 people globally that are deeply engaged in the discourse of how are we going to establish systems that center the ideals of oneness of humanity. And so it's just such a thrill and a humbling experience to be able to be here with you all this evening, afternoon, and morning, wherever you are in the world. As Shabnam so kindly shared, I have had an incredible opportunity to be in a community, a global community at the intersection of art, science, and technology over the last 12 years total through various different organizations. And it has resulted in not only this research that I'm going to share today, making a new reality which was, you know, the result of reviewing articles and interviewing 30 plus people through a formal research project. And then after that formal project ended, being able to present and share this research globally for the last four years, the discourse has continued and I've hopefully been updating this deck so that it feels very fresh. Before we get into the presentation, I just want to start by acknowledging that I am coming to you from Los Angeles and that is land that traditionally is the land of the Tongva people and the Chumash people and other indigenous peoples that have lived here for thousands of years and been the stewards of this land. And so I just want to acknowledge that I am on that land that has been stewarded by the Tongva and the Chumash. And now we can get into it. I'm going to be dropping a lot of information on you very quickly. I have a lot of slides. Luckily, this is recorded so we can go back later. Also, there is a making a new reality.org which has some of the articles that talks about this, but there also will be a book being published for early 2021 for academic environments and for culture institutions. So a lot of different ways to access this information. But I just wanted to start out by talking about the fact that we are in a time of disruption. And this disruption, as we all know, is natural in terms of climate and in terms of the natural world. It's in terms of social ideological conflicts that are kind of opening and expressing very, very old pandemics around race and inequity. And we're also in a time of incredible disruption around technology. And this isn't just a traditional pattern of cycles of booms and busts, winners and losers, adopters and Luddites that may be frustrating at time, but is rooted in an optimistic narrative of progress, growth, and development, the kind of Silicon Valley narrative. We are in a much more fundamental disruption that is playing out in our politics, our sciences, and our culture. And so I want to just kind of preference that that is the environment with which this research emerges out of. And just kind of bringing in the Baha'i lens on this, I just wanted to share two quotes that I hope that you can kind of hold into your framework as we continue to go through this presentation. The power of the rational soul can discover the realities of things, comprehend the peculiarities of beings, and penetrate the mysteries of existence. All sciences, knowledge, arts, wonders, institutions, discoveries, and enterprises come from the exercised intelligence of the rational soul. There was a time when they were unknown, preserved mysteries and hidden secrets. The rational soul gradually discovered them and brought them out of the plane of the invisible and the hidden into the realm of the visible. Abdu'l-Baha some answered questions. I also want to share that by the power of the Holy Spirit, working through his soul, man is able to perceive the divine reality of things. All great works of art and science are witness to this power of the Spirit. Abdu'l-Baha Paris talks. So just think about that relationship of us as human beings and our rational faculties and our soul and the fact that the arts and the sciences are the means with which we access and penetrate these hidden mysteries and bring them into the plane of the visible. Because this is a phenomenal thing that I have had such an exciting opportunity to witness in a community at the intersection of art and science that I'm hoping to share just a glimpse of with you today. So I wanted to just start by telling you a little bit about my relationship to story and storytellers. As Shabnam shared, I worked at the Sundance Institute for, this is the institute that runs the film festival. It's a 40 year old institution that has been really at the forefront of independent filmmaking. Robert Redford started it in the 1980s and I had the joy and the pleasure of being mentored by Michelle Satter who was the number two employee at Sundance and helped in such a quiet and humble and just incredible way of ushering in independent voices to be able to talk about what was happening in the world in ways that tried to diversify the voices, tried to expose where there was injustice in the world and really tried to generate a discourse around it. And on my first, I mean this is an intimidating place to work for when you first come on because this is a woman that launched incredible careers like Ryan Coogler and Ava DuVernay and all of these people that have been at the forefront of trying to impact the masses with storytelling. And the first thing she told me on my first one-on-one meeting with her was your job is to find artists that make meaning. And for probably about three years, I thought I understood what that meant. You say, oh yeah, we're trying to find artists that are doing meaningful work. They are looking at things like refugee crisis or climate change or racial injustice and they're trying to kind of just expose all of these things that are in the world through narrative or through fiction, I mean through narrative and fiction or through documentary and nonfiction. But it wasn't until about three years in that I was sitting in a matinee watching a film by myself of a cancer battle. And in this afternoon, my mother had gone through two cancer battles by this point. And I don't know if any of you've had this experience that when you're in a caretaking position with a loved one who's going through something that is possibly could take them from this world and this plane of existence. Interestingly, for me, a lot of it was very pedestrian. It was like, oh, can I get you some coffee? Do you need your medicine? Do you want a glass of water? It was just very much like in this kind of pedestrian every day, almost like small talk. And the weight of the and this is years after she had gone into remission after her second breast cancer battle that I realized sitting in this movie that the kind of weight of my relationship with my mother and all the meaning of what it meant to be the child of a person to have two souls having this relationship and having the kind of reality of each of our, you know, souls both in this world and the world to come the mortality or the immortality of it, all of that that was hidden in these small gestures of, you know, of small talk and small pedestrian gestures of care kind of fell into my body and I could not stop weeping. So interestingly, it was watching this film after my experience that helped me to fully contextualize the deep meaning of that experience with my mother and my relationship with her. So when I, it was then that I understood what Michelle had meant, she said, we are looking for artists that make meaning by giving us the moment, the aesthetic experiences to contextualize what is deeply known, but it's not always visible, that is sometimes very much hidden. And so that I just wanted to share that so that you have that context because, you know, how do artists express or create situations for people to access or to experience that meaning making, they do it through a communication architecture, they do it through media, through a medium. And this story that I'm telling you today is very much about the human communication architecture and how we what tools we use and what are the ethics around those tools and create that kind of spiritual and transcendent and transformative exchange. So we're, we have always had a communication architecture since the beginning of, you know, whether it be body language, oral storytelling, pictorial images on cave walls, we've always had some way in which an idea and emotion has translated from one person to another or a group of people translating together. And about 500 years ago, we created a fundamental disruption to many thousands of years of the way that we were communicating when we began creating and adopting these tools of mass media, printed text, radio, you know, recorded sound, film, television, and these exponential advancements allowed us to break from the limitations of time and space and expand our sense of reality. You know, people had profound experiences like actually, you know, having a Bible in their home, which was something that was just, you know, a very rare thing before the printing press. They were able to read these things with their own eyes and have a different relationship of interpretation and access to that knowledge. They had things like, to the other extreme, seeing Earth from space and having this image of the globe go around the world and completely shift. I mean, it really changed us to be able to have this expression of a communication of something that was capturing some aspect of our reality and sharing it on a mass level that shifted our sense of even what it means to be on this planet. It shifted us into thoughts of the kind of maybe arbitrariness of our boundaries between our social context like nations and states. And this, so, you know, the artists and the philosophers, they responded in trying to do that meaning making work. They culturally responded with postmodernism and surrealism, existentialism, you know, all of these things, Afrofuturism, all of these things that we're working to try to understand now that we see the Earth as this big green and blue ball, how do we contextualize our meaning? And so I bring this up. This is not news to anyone here, but I really bring this up because we are now 500 years later at another major disruption in our human communication architecture. We're in the beginning of another fundamental disruption. This is not just an expansion of scope, scale, and efficiency like mass media. It is one that results in systems that can independently think that are becoming intelligent, that can integrate with our bodies. Like before, this new vision is challenging our notions of reality. It is causing us to wrestle with binary and overly simplified narratives that the limitations of our past versions of our communication infrastructure allowed us to understand about ourselves and is creating like new identity crises. We are trying to navigate the most complex, abundant, and dynamic communication and information system in history. But I argue that we are doing this still with things that are limiting our perceptions. Some might call them blinders. But before I unpack that little cliffhanger, I wanted to back up and just tell you what led me to emerging media work in the first place. I started out as a live performing arts completely analog artist dancer. I was one of the things I did back in the day was be a cast member of Stomp. I was a live performing arts theater maker and dancer for 27 years. And so to find myself here is quite surreal. So I was with Stomp for a long time, six years. I went back to school. I got my undergrad in Tish School of the Arts for theater. I went to get my master's degree in business. And then I was able at the dawn of social media and interactive media and the ways in which the internet changed shape in the early 2005, 2006, 2007, I had the opportunity to come on as a trans media artist on an art project that is now at the Smithsonian African American Museum called Question Bridge Black Males. And this was looking at interactive documentary and participatory media, one of the kind of projects of that time, building off of previous work in the field, of course. And then I got the opportunity through that to go to New Frontier Story Lab at Sundance and direct that. Came as a fellow in 2011 and then became the director of that program in 2012. And there it was amazing because I had just literally thousands, I had access at an advantage point to thousands of artists and creative technologists around the world submitting ideas to us on a regular basis. So it gave us this opportunity to see the intersection of all these things in a really high fidelity way. And it just, it was such a privilege and honor to have that access to these incredible ideas. And so I ended up from, you know, in these thought leadership spaces like the World Economic Forum in Davos, I mean, sorry, not in Davos, in Dalian, China, Summer Davos in 2017, where I'm sitting on a panel with the president of Baidu, which is the largest search engine in China, you know, the CEO of Impo Systems, large tech company and Yale professor, Hong Kong university professor in AI robotics and artificial intelligence, kind of computational science. And I'm a dancer. I'm a theater maker. And it was quite overwhelming and quite surprising to find myself being in this space talking about the question, should we unleash artificial intelligence? And this is 400 people in the room, 4 million people looking at this online, and I'm facing these world leaders and trying to be part of the conversation. I mean, this is crazy. How does a dancer go into these environments? And I had a lot of imposter syndrome as I continued to go along the route over these 10 years, or 12 or 13 now. And what was really interesting is I had to kind of reconcile with that and get over that and say, you know what, as an artist, I am absolutely, and especially as a woman of color, and a person from a religious minority group, I have so many kind of experiences that inform my lens on things that I'm actually the right person to be in these rooms. And I do not need to be the only person in these rooms that are coming from intersectional backgrounds that are not normally represented in these technology and economic and kind of thought leadership spaces. And so I had to kind of gird up my lines, as they say, and be willing to be in these spaces that I didn't feel that I was welcomed in all the way, or that I was even appropriate to be and realize that I did have something to give. And I want to talk about that. Who has something to give into these conversations that can be sometimes quite elite? Elite is. So I just want to thank and acknowledge Ford Foundation Sundance and Immerse, which is a publication on emerging technology and storytelling for all of their incredible support in doing this work to create this research project. And I also want to just let you know that I am obviously standing on the shoulders of a huge community of people that I've been in discourse within conversation with. The words that are coming out of my mouth are really me doing my best attempt at honoring what I've heard in the field. And so this is definitely a synthesis of an incredible community of folks and not my own thoughts. So I just wanted to share that. So what is emerging media? Get ready for a gauntlet of information. So at the time, this is back in 2016, 2017, things like virtual reality, social media, XR, we're kind of surfacing to the top of the terms when I asked that question of my interviewees and when I did my kind of scrub of the research of the industry based and scholarly articles about what emerging media was. But I want to get beyond just like these top statistics and really get into what really gets interesting is the stuff that is not even on this list because that we're so few people mentioning because that is the stuff that is at the very forefront in the fringe that we really, where I believe we need to have the most kind of diverse and inclusive and collective conversation in order to understand who we want to be and what kind of reality we want to make with these exponential technologies. So quickly, some of the things that people said were, you know, we are physical beings with obviously kind of spiritual and mental and other kind of faculties that relate to the physical. And so some people were trying to see how does the body stay connected in a media environment that's getting ever more virtual and more screen based. And so some artists like Lynette Wallworth out of Australia, she was playing the power of the body and kind of the lizard brain and the kind of the ways in which the body helps us to understand and contextualize reality. And she interviewed many women that had gone through some of the worst atrocities of the human condition for the Holocaust war and conflict. And she wrote their stories in a book and you read this is in the installation. And then you walked up to a black screen with like a doorframe on it. And you put your hand on the blackness and through a randomized algorithm, one of those women life size would walk from far away in the darkness and walk up to you and put their hand right onto your hand. And this just put people into tears. And this is a digital representation of this one, but something about the idea of a hand touching a hand kind of triggered a sense of intimacy and a sense of connection to somebody they are removed from in distance and time. But they have this deep emotional and spiritual like relationship with interactive film where people are kind of taking the best of gaming in terms of agency and the best of cinematic fluid narrative and performance and finding these incredible kind of intersections. Bander Snatch and the things that you say on Netflix, branching narratives are not the best representation of this stuff. I've seen some phenomenally fluid and beautiful works in terms of interactive film. You know, people talked about the, you know, people that have grown up on Facebook and that are in their twenties or in their teens wanting ethereal liveness. They don't want to always be tracked and recorded and always have this kind of, they want something that is ephemeral, is a moment that can never happen again. So things like the ways in which Snap Tap was designing for that urge and need in a particular generation. You know, Escape Room is immersive theater, you know, all these kinds of things, live performance documentary. We even supported Sam and Nas developing, he wanted to reinvent the one-man show which became Homecoming King and Patriot Act. You know, omnidirectional storytelling where the storytelling, one of the first papers I read in Transmedia was that it did not have to be linear. And so that kind of, it's like the difference between seeing the world from just a vantage point of a horizon to seeing the world from space where you have all these different directional relationships to story. We had Geocache storytelling where people would, this is early on where we were, people were geocaching a novel, chapters of a novel all over the United States. And when you went to that place and you unlocked that chapter, the story was completely designed to match the architecture and the landscape around you in such deep and immersive ways. And then people could lead their own stories and add to the novel and participatory storytelling. We saw things like symphonies that were mapped to landscapes where you can have 400 different parallel paths of sending to the symphony, like at the mall on Washington DC where aspects of the symphony would kind of change depending on how you navigated the landscape. And when you got to the obelisk, the entire symphony and the choir and the timpani's all came in. And so, you know, just completely changing the relationship between space and time and sound. I won't go into all the details, but things like this landmark project we supported called 1979 Revolution where someone who was a survivor of the Black Friday, when he saw the Arab Spring, he was just overwhelmed with how Western media didn't understand the fog of war and how when you're put in the middle, and I think we're understanding that a little bit more now that we're in this pandemic, that that you have to make survival and moral and political choices in real time without the right and full context of information and how that how they took gaining and documentary film and they combined them so they put you in the shoes of somebody who had to navigate the Black Friday in 79 in Iran. And no matter what choice you made in the video game, you had to live out the consequences of somebody who made that choice on Black Friday. And you got to see in hindsight from their hindsight, but you were put into the current context of that moment. So you had to kind of experience and be complicit in history. So this was a this this one of BAFTA or got nominated for a BAFTA award. It just really broke records in terms of how gaming could help us to understand documentary in a whole new way. A participatory story telling, social art practice. I can go on and on and on about the ways in which collective practice has been evolving the ways in which characters don't stay put on screens. This is one of our artists that did a project where the you could use a cell phone to manipulate the light in the screen and it was quite phenomenal to see how the light would move inside of and then at the end of it without us knowing our face falls into the screen while the protagonist's face falls out of it and goes into our cell phone as this cracked mirror image. And so the ways in which characters don't stay put in one platform where they can start to navigate and have Hamlet live in your pocket and jump from that to other screens. It was just phenomenal how artists were changing it. And then data-based storytelling. This was huge. We had a we did a residency with the social computing group at MIT where we put artists into that social computing group to play with data as clay for storytelling. And it was I mean this is one of the kind of seminal works that came back in 2005 about how 65 million of the blogosphere could be translated into a lyrical gorgeous data visualization of the human emotion. But then now it's gone from something like this which journalists use every day in terms of data and visual storytelling to internet of things wired city object-based what they call ambient as storytelling. So this is an Afrofuturist technology group in Brooklyn who created a speculative artifact from the African diasporic future. But it works you know it's a really functioning piece and you can walk around New York City and this is years ago where this lantern will light up whenever it crosses a place where a black person was killed by a police officer. So there's no screen there's no audio but the story is so intrinsically rich in terms of just navigating the city in which you live in. Other kinds of ways which wired and smart objects start to come into the storytelling canvas and I won't go into all the details. We had artists that were starting to play with what they call artificial intelligence conversational AI where they're using the smart devices in your home to not only listen to a story like you would a podcast but actually be able to be in conversation with the characters through this smart system and that also the story world of those characters can start to fall into your home take over your smart objects turn off and on your lights start your popcorn machine whatever it is they are part of the environment around you and so this is something that is really taking root this conversational relationship with characters and story. We had a piece at Sundance last year that showed all the ways in which that smart home tracks and analyzes who you are and what you are. We had pieces like Breathe that analyzed how your breath from magic leap augmented reality experience you saw how your breath interacted with the ecosystem and over a week's time they sent you back a data visualization of how your breath went and interacted with the ecosystem globally. I won't go into all the details because I know we're you know it's a lot of time but virtual reality in terms of 360 film room scale this is six degrees of freedom you know where your whole body is at scale inside of these virtual experiences which can be quite beautiful if you've never experienced them and then hyper reality this is a piece that was created by a Swiss medical researcher and technologist who was working with schizophrenic patients and he thought well what if we give them an experience of a non-human out you know kind of body experience so he created this machine to give them a sense of flight as a hawk flying over cityscapes like San Francisco and this was such a phenomenal breakthrough in terms of hyper reality design where people are definitely transcending just the normal pedestrian human experience of story and experience it's it you really are flying like a bird it's crazy they did the same thing with a piece that tried to give you a sense of weightlessness by putting you in a space environment in a virtual reality piece while in a swimming pool there's all kinds of incredible ways in which the fidelity and the ways in which our neurology can now be I don't want to say tricked but brought into a different environment that feels so faithful to what we perceive with our traditional kind of you know five senses as reality we even have real life performance and real life avatars you know this is a theater piece where the actor is performing all the characters in the in the virtual space because his body is being tracked and it's being he's puppeting these virtual avatars in real time we even had a piece that they were able to track food so you could eat something in the real world while you were having this disassociation so you might be eating cotton candy in the real world but in the virtual world it looked like something totally like you're eating a cloud or you were it's just incredible way all the ways in which our physical bodies are being engaged with this virtual and then the national theater in london did something that was a really real breakthrough this one actor to one audience member theater piece of a of a mother that was dying of cancer engaging with son it was autobiographical made by the artist and everybody that went through this at the trayback of film festival got this relationship with the actor where she's hugging them and putting them to bed and putting them in the in the position of a child going through that experience of the last days with their mother and this just floored people in terms of a truly transformative experience i'm going to talk a little bit social vr you're in a environment like this and this is what your world looks like inside the virtual reality headset this is what it looks like simultaneously you're actually talking and feeling and touching other people while your avatars are what is touching and talking and feeling inside of those virtual spaces but quite different again the ways in which light field technologies are changing our ability to walk into a picture the way that you know augmented reality where we're bringing digital very high fidelity images and moving images into the real world such as this you know this is magic leaps teaser i've seen magic leap work and this is is not quite there yet but it's quite compelling and this is an augmented reality headset that has been developed over the last six years or so and then we get to artificial intelligence again where artists are co-creating with algorithms where nobody is the only creator the artist isn't the creator the the smart system is working to co-create with them and we have things like you know this was one of our artists helped to create one of the first films that was written and the music the props the costumes everything the blocking of the film every shot was created by an artificial intelligence who had been given a data set of many different sci-fi scripts with which they then wrote this script and so they performed it it was quite hilarious and still very gibberish because this is an early early early but now those smart systems that are replicating human creativity have gotten quite advanced we had a social AI this is a deep machine learning artificial intelligence that was able to um this is this is um a neural network that learns is not just something that's analyzing data and kind of but is a learning machine um and this social AI came to the Sundance festival as really like a toddler speaking gibberish and over the course of 10 days it was interviewing all of our patrons um asking these quite deep um emotional and provoking questions and by the end of it the AI was so advanced in its social ability to have the conversation to interview to to to relate to humans that it actually directed in real time a live theater performance where the dancer had a earpiece in her ear where the AI was directing her choreographic movement it was directing the projection image it was also directing the music by running um adrino drums so the AI had control over the drum movement and and the and the AI basically was designing the whole theater piece based on its analysis of interviewing the audience in real time in our emotional arcs so it's so crazy um i won't go into all the details but we have artists that are playing with this human AI interface and trying to understand well where does human live in this future of work scenario which i know many of you have probably been engaged in this discourse and so i can't go into all the details but we have incredible artists that are that have um been playing with that this is one where the artist intervenes with the AI system in a smart home and tries to keep the element of humanity interfacing between the AI system that is serving the smart home uh residents and the residents this is that same artist where she fed a bunch of social media data to a guest list and then had a smart algorithmic system that she designed she's a professor at UCLA and she designed the system where that she became the meat puppet of the AI she had a piece in and the AI would tell her exactly what to do exactly what to say exactly who'd introduce and also it decided exactly what five people should be in the room for a party that would last 24 hours in each hour a five different people would come into the room and so she was questioning canna AI um system who has all this metadata about the people in the room can it do a better job of constructing a phenomenal a great a good social experience versus the kind of basic intuition of a person so obviously she's also playing with human beings um losing um energy and the you know us needing to sleep and us having this kind of biological cycle that the AI does not have to subscribe to um and then where does this kind of rubber meet the road um one of those things is this is an old project now but they have the Shoah Foundation has created um holographic graphic captured interviews volumetric captures the term of Holocaust survivors um and so there's a and I've gotten a chance to meet particularly this this gentleman um as a hologram and have a conversation with him because they interviewed for a thousand questions put the data in a database with a smart system that is analyzing your question through natural language processing and bringing up the exact kind of right answer that logically makes sense to respond to your question and it's changing a lot of the relationship of like what is the future of memoir what is the future of documentary what's the future of a family photo album when you can have a conversation with your ancestor um rather than just have a static relationship of looking at a picture looking at a video of them um I won't go again this is all advancing quite rapidly this is a artificial intelligence uh hologram that I met uh Magic Leap created and she can like sit behind a desk stand up show me a picture she pulled something that was a just an object in a picture she had me hold my hand up to it and then she pulled it out of the frame changed so that it became a blank frame and this is all in real life with augmented reality not virtual reality so I was seeing the real world around me with these augmentations digitally so and then the the the pipe that she pulled out of the picture was in my hand as a 3d object that I could hold and so the the relationship of how this bleeds between realities are so crazy um we have uh people using crypto like um blockchain to hold truth um this is a artist who's an indigenous um maker an AI coder and blockchain specialist and she's trying to make sure we never lose our history again like we have so many times on the you know victor's history or the revisionist history that particularly white supremacist history um and there's so many ways in which robots and uh kind of deep learning machine artificial intelligence are in kind of um intersected with culture um this is uh chomsky came as a virtual as a volumetric capture hologram and an AI of him came as well to the festival and the AI version of him was generated from all the media that the MIT library had on chomsky which is one of the most you know um archived human being in digital history and they were able to construct um a personality and a holographic chomsky to talk with a volumetrically captured chomsky to see how faithful the AI was able to generate chomsky's personality um we've had artists that have gone to space and and and I just so many things um and then you know we're now we're getting to the biometric technologies and how that changes the canvas of things this is an artist that um has a biometric wearable technology on your body um and based on your your own body biometrics can can I change the conditions with which you experience this show and the calmer you are the more chaotic it becomes and the more chaotic you you are internally the more calm it becomes um we have we showed in 2007 the first video game that you could play um using just your thoughts without any controllers um and now we even have cyborgs legitimate people that have integrated and um technology into their bodies this is a gentleman who's colorblind who uses uses this embedded technology to hear color um we have artists that have embedded cameras in the back of their head and created films we've and then it gets into the DNA this is an artist who went around New York City and collected DNA off the streets very gattaca and she um ran their DNA profile in terms of ancestry and and health um but the thing that was really interesting is she also used the FBI DNA profiling system to 3D print their faces based on you know the ways in which we get profiled by our DNA um and so she's really questioning the future of privacy um and the ways in which we are able to use these emerging technologies to kind of break things barriers of knowledge that you know have a lot of ethical implications um and then last but not least we we've now been able to really understand our physical bodies and biological um environments as code obviously with the mapping the human genome and so forth but now scientists can actually encode data onto our DNA molecules replacing the AT so forth with the zeros and ones and so this is one of the first you know kind of moving images that we had in film um that was you know encoded on a DNA molecule and then recalled um but where it gets really interesting is just this January Sundance showed a film it's the first film that they showed that was extracted from DNA molecules this is when Hirschman leasons 40 years of a video log she's been keeping all 40 years of videos are contained in this vial of DNA that's kept in um this blue lit room and so now DNA itself is storage for our information it's part of our now communication system not just epigenetically from biological processes that are natural and evolution but now also from from processes in which we can encode information on the DNA itself and when I interviewed some of the people that are investing in this technology in Silicon Valley you know what should we be concerned about in terms of equality they said well it's just long-term storage it's very difficult to recall so you know it's just think of it as deep storage and then that very next summer Caltech created the first DNA artificial intelligence on DNA molecules so it was a very simple AI that could read handwritten numbers but yet we have created smart organic material without a sperm and an egg and so this is so interesting I mean there's other examples of that in nature but the fact that a human being can create smart organic material that is not created from from that kind of natural reproduction process even Bank of America asked are we is there a 20% chance we're in the matrix based on Nick Boerström and and others kind of thinking of you know the ways in which our simulation our biological code is so I mean all these things I won't go into all the details very singularity but then going back to we showed this film of a group of researchers who were working with paraplegics and they were using the kind of head mounted technology that can read brain activity and they an a virtual reality headset and exoskeleton on their on on their legs and they were the paraplegic was able to say move my legs think move their my legs see their legs move in the virtual reality headset and exoskeleton responded by moving their physical legs and after six months of this therapy they were able to hold their bowels and wiggle their toes and so these technologies like exoskeletons and virtual headsets and and the ways in which we can utilize just our our thought pattern I mean are the ways in which materials can track our brain activity in in being an input into technology I mean we're we're we're we're having we there's a potential of this fundamental impact on our physical bodies and our neurology so that's why it's so exciting but also something that has to be treaded with great thoughtful prayerful care in terms of what we're doing in terms of making our realities so what are the concerns this is I think a great encapsulation of what I heard as the concern and it's talking about racial justice but I I think that it also can be extract extrapolated to all aspects of justice the progress of our racial justice and the development of technologies are not linear every time you develop a new technology you need to have a thought process and system of oppression that the technology is being created and released into think about the ways to bend the technology to justice and not allow it to replicate in trench and worsen injustice I got a chance at Sundance in 2011 2012 and beyond to be at the epicenter of some of these kind of crazy hype cycles around technology particularly virtual reality I was in the room when Palmer Lucky who was you know a young student in his late teens had created a prototype which now is known as the Oculus Rift to bring Noni de la Pena's a journalist to work on hunger in Los Angeles as a document journalist work bringing that to Sundance they couldn't borrow the USC $50,000 headset virtual reality system and bring it to Park City Utah so he found a hack in using a cell phone a smartphone and that is the beginning we had 12 hour waits for this piece and a year later a Kickstarter happened and two million dollars were raised and then 75 million and vc was raised and then two billion dollars was paid to Oculus by Facebook and Facebook bought Oculus so within two years I'm from 2012 to 2014 I get to go to the very first developers conference of the Oculus um and it was a thousand people that got handpicked out of 150,000 people with the developer and I walked into the ballroom of the Lowe's hotel in Hollywood and only a woman I could see and there was only one person that I saw in the room and I was shook I was just like oh I have to I'm maybe I'll just go to Starbucks until my panel because I just felt very much out of place um as a woman of color in a in a sea of mostly white men and um and there was a narrative at this plenary session a woman there was about 30 women I counted I don't know how many were actually there but I know the bathroom the woman's bathroom was empty and the men's was around the corner um but I asked there's a woman that stood up at the plenary session of all 1000 people and said what are we going to do about the apparent gender gap and she said it in a very singsong way and the men on this stage many of who I know and respect and have had uh you know moments with and this and this incredible emerging technology space that they all said this is a meritocracy we cannot pay identity politics we need the best of the best and the best of the best are in this room so basically we don't have time to to to wait for women to catch up and this was a sucker punch to the gut to all the women in the industry especially since just a few months later Sundance curated the first all virtual reality storytelling exhibition um and it was 69 percent women people of color and people from the lgbt lgbtq community so the meritocracy argument that the best of the best were white men was completely not what we were saying when we were doing a survey of thousands of people around the globe in terms of what the best of the best was and we weren't looking to make it diverse and shari freela was the chief curator it just the best of the best was diverse because there was a DIY community that was quite robust um from a lot of different backgrounds and so I went to MIT I talked to sep camvar who was the head of social media computing at that time and he said code is the new superpower code defines a social process and that social process defines our world and so when he told me that I was you know and he talked about you know the ways in which twitter started the food truck industry or how you know you know gig economies were changing because of airbnb how you know green space might change because of uber and and knowing who was in the room when I was at that oculus developers conference or whether technology spaces I'd been in I said so the superpower belongs with white men and that was a red flag for me so then I went to google and I hung out with the google creative lab and I got a chance to speak with you know it was an incredible conversation around artists and they were saying that artists were quite marginalized in the technology industry and that um and that artists were seen as a pair of hands that weren't really at the table when it comes to making the real decisions around business and engineering and so then I was like that was a red flag so now not only people of color and women but artists are all marginalized in the superpower of food then I got to go to oxford to the skull world forum and I sat next to a man that ran the foresight work for one of the top tech companies in the world and he showed me a video of the future and it was quite soulless and quite homogenous um but he was a good guy with this really exciting spirit talking to a sundance person around his film and I said you know can I ask you do you have anybody from the arts or the humanities working with you in this foresight center that basically leads the strategy they build whole you know offices and and homes in the pipeline technology to get a sense of how the future will be and how to guide the direction of the company and he looked at me and he said you know we only have engineers and I said how can you be imagining the future for the entire world through your technology company and not have anyone from the arts and humanities informing what that future is you know what that's a blind spot and when he said that I thought about when I was in my master's program in business and we had to do a case study on the um the Columbia Space Shuttle and um and really NASA one of NASA's great failures and trying to understand why did this tragedy happen and it was ultimately determined that it was a cultural myopic um hierarchical and uh environment that did not allow diversity of thought and when I thought about that and I saw what I was seeing within the technology industries I was scared because this meant that we were using exponential technologies or designing for exponential technologies like artificial intelligence without the diversity of thought that could help us mitigate us hurtling into our own tragedies but this isn't new when you go back to the dawn of film as an emerging tech the media technology this was the very first feature film that was a kkk propaganda film that was positioning black men as a boogeyman and part of a particular narrative post civil war part of post reconstruction to try to dis dis the progress of things like black street and black um economic and social advancement and this was the film that we started this emerging technology with still to this day children cannot identify positive qualities with the black doll still to this day black men are seen through the lens of the boogeyman and um whether we're conscious or unconscious about it we fear because we've had those narratives embedded in this history of film media and still to this day less than 20 percent of americans can identify positive words with black faces this is all part of that process now we're entering the fourth industrial revolution artificial intelligence go back so a previous industrial revolution this is what we did we marginalized and we're still on the level of genocide with a community in this country in the united states of america that may have brought to the table the firewalls that could have mitigated the hurtling into tragedy that was happening at this industrial revolution towards climate change one of our artists and indigenous rights activist heather ray says it's been a 400 year run of genocide and slavery that built the foundation for industrialization moving through all the natural resources and we just got the bill which is climate change so when i think about the film industry and the pitfalls we fell into with myopic and and limited inclusion when i think about the industrial revolution and the limitations and handled into our own tragedies because of limited inclusion and then i think about this is the question i asked what are your concerns and bias narratives bias algorithms and false democratization of media patronizing attitude i won't even spend time on this but just some incredibly patronizing attitudes within the power elite of silicon valley power consolidation thing that is a surplus technology but it's only being managed by the few like artificial intelligence and that's the ceo of microsoft saying that consolidated only four companies having all social media you know representation participation gaps i mean one of the most robust diversity statistics on silicon valley came out in 2018 and not only do you see obviously black latino but even asians behind white in terms of all genders but when you look at the genders you know same thing black women latino asians but look at the asian men we often have this vision of the model minority where at least asian men are getting through but look at the bamboo seal that they discovered in this data that asian men are actually not in the positions of power that we assume when we look at you know the images of tech and computer science um participants so let's talk about this image and the innovator stereotype mpr did an investigative journals in peace on why women particularly dropped out of technology in 83 84 just fell um in the other fields like medicine law and physics physical sciences we were kind of coming out of the feminist revolution in the 70s and and and almost at parity with men but at 84 85 we just 83 84 we just dropped out of technology and when they went back and looked at it it was because the stories that were being told by major tech companies in advertising and the stories that what it was telling in films weird science revenge of the nerds war games that white men were the center of these stories and so what happened is women started to adopt the inferiority complex or started to allow their inferiority complex to take root they they was all these and so they started um saying i don't think i'm smart enough and even though they were getting same grades or better as their male counterparts simultaneously the men were hazing the women and so it triggered these these myopic narratives actually triggered both the worst of both both gender the you know kind of toxic masculinity and the inferiority complex you've lost you know 40 years of the participation of women in helping us to shape and meaning make within technology because of these stories that were happening over a very short period of time and but have continued um so just there's so many different ways in which you know this research you'll see that all these concerns that were mostly keep coming back around to these same issues of inequity um and then i just wanted to kind of get to dine on my i'm out of time so thank you shabnam and everybody for letting me talk so much um but there was this idea one of the interviews i had with someone who's a was at google diversity now while disney's diversity and she talked about we have an inability to imagine our future and it's killing us um and she talked about the fact that when you don't have a sense and especially a shared sense of the future where you're going that is equitable that you actually retreat to what you know and you also kind of lose a sense of empathy and there's this this sense of agency that disappears and it starts to implode on each other and i think we're seeing that in our culture you know ideological wars now so i'm walking through oxford you know at this world forum and i was just so distraught and i was talking to a friend of mine a colleague from sundance and i was like what i mean it's just happening all over again you know and it's happening all over again right before my eyes and i felt powerless and she said you know kamal it hasn't happened yet there is an opportunity for intervention and she reminded me of people like jane jackups who at the time of this rapid innovation cycle in real estate development new york city in the mid-century 20th century she stood up and said no we need spaces for green space she stood up and said no we want places for well-being and community regardless if it's less efficient for our freeways and our transportation of products um i thought about and so i asked people what are the interventions that are not necessarily a an economic you know downside but actually could be part of a boon to shared prosperity and actually growing the pie and so you know i i invite you to kind of look go on to the making a reality.org website and look at the the interventions around mitigating bias like universal basic like universal design practices things like you know how are we mitigating group think and having disciplines intersect in their ways in which they're interpreting and making meaning around the advancements in science and technology with the partnership of artists and humanities and philosophies like belbs has tried to do both in the past and is doing now with the eat program you know how what are the interventions for policy and infrastructure one little quick example on that is i interviewed someone at ford who said it was in the halls of ford in when television was an emerging medium that they decided to make an intervention and fund public television in this country and we got pbs and it was phenomenal we're very thankful that we got that but it was so ministerial compared to the vision of public television and public media that they they think about what if we were 25 years earlier in our intervention and so i they asked me how can we be you know not lose kind of that much on ramping time to intervene within emerging media so that we don't so that we do not completely get it sucked up by capitalistic imperatives and that we do create space for the commons place for the public place place for knowledge for and and and knowledge generation and so they talked about in the 90s they were fighting for just access to the internet we're still having that fight even though the un has made it a human right and now we're in the stalemate with large monopoly type tech organizations around addictive design tactics and the ways in which the filter bubbles and bias algorithms are really changing the way in which we understand truths and have access to information but while we're still in those embattled states we already have billions of dollars being invested in smart city smart homes completely wired in omni data sphere environments what are the interventions who's thinking about the public space and the commons and the value to the to the whole and well being in this design is that being designed in or is it just pure capitalistic imperatives stakeholder value not stakeholder value but shareholder value only and even while this web 3.0 is already coming to market we are on the brink of bringing things to market that are what they call web 4.0 which is where basically you have to have an artificial intelligence intervene between you and the data sphere you and the technology world because human beings cannot will not be able to keep up with the amount of information that we need to synthesize on a daily basis I can even keep up with my emails today and so that web 4.0 kind of infrastructure is already in process and are we thinking about what does this mean for well-being for unity for diversity for justice and equity so all that to say there's plenty of ideas about what are the frameworks for action but I think at the root of it we're looking at how do we have a collective and equitable imagination of our future so that we do not design into our perceptual limitations so we do not leave critical information and knowledge off the table like we've done in previous innovation cycles and so that diversity and inclusion will actually lead us to the best of what is possible with these technologies that have been released to humankind versus kind of worse possible scenarios of even further creating extremes of wealth and poverty and justice with that I know I'm over time so I'm going to stop and thank you so much for giving me this time with you today. Thank you so much Kamal I think you were right when you said this is one presentation we'll have to go back to and listen to each component and process because you have given us so much to think about and such insight into the future of technology but also the intersection of the arts technology media and of course our values one of the concepts that I think we'll be thinking about after this presentation is this idea of democratizing the imagination of the future and whose story and whose narrative is at the forefront of these conversations which is such an important concept for us to consider and of course that also reminds me of a quotation from the universal house of justice that the association for Baha'i studies has often used to ground its work which is that access to knowledge is the right of every human being and participation in its generation application and diffusion a responsibility that almost shoulder in the great enterprise of building a prosperous world civilization each individual according to his or her talents and abilities justice demands universal participation and I think your presentation has so beautifully shown us that truly there is a long road perhaps to universal participation but that is what is required to materialize to bring to life that society envisioned by Baha'u'llah so thank you very much again to our speaker Kamal Sinclair and thank you to all who have joined us for this presentation we look forward to seeing you this week in our next series of presentations and opportunities to engage with each other and learn from each other thank you again