 So I got up at six this morning. Anyone else? Yeah. I'm not an ordinary six o'clock waker-upper, so it'll take me a little while to stretch my wings into the day, but I'm really looking forward to meeting you all. My name is Adrienne Wong. I'm one of the Spiderweb Show people. I have a title, but I don't like it, so I'm not going to say it out loud. We did change it. I'm the artistic producer. Thank you. So I get the pleasure this morning of acknowledging the land that we're on today and to let you know that the venues for our gathering today and this week are situated on the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee territory. The Huron-Wendat also claim traditional connection to these lands, and I want to take a moment right now to ask you to share the gratitude that I feel to be here, to live, to work, to play and to learn in this beautiful place. So land acknowledgement is a disruption. It's a time to consider the history of these lands and waterways that we are so privileged to gather on today. And since our activities are shared digitally to the internet, I'd also like to take a moment to consider the legacies of colonization embedded within these technologies, these structures, and these ways of thinking that we use every day. So we're using equipment and high speed internet that's not available in many indigenous communities across Canada and I'm sure the United States as well. I'm going to ask you to take that first page. And many of us have traveled here from other places, burning fuels and consuming resources. Even the technologies that are central to much of the art that we're going to talk about leave significant carbon footprints that contribute to changing climates that disproportionately affect indigenous peoples worldwide. So I invite you to join me in acknowledging all of this, as well as the shared responsibility that it holds. Which is to make best use of our time here together. And for each of us to consider our roles in reconciliation, decolonization, and allyship. Thank you. Thank you, Adrienne. Hi. My name is Michael Wheeler and I'm the artistic director of Spider Web Show and it's my great pleasure to welcome you all here today to the Digital Plus Performance Convening at the Isabel Bader Center for the Performing Arts as the lead up to the Festival of Live Digital Art. It's so incredible to have everyone here and I feel like it is most certainly a watershed moment for our organization to have all of you here today. So many incredible minds that are working on so many of the things that we've been thinking about gathered together in one space is an incredible opportunity. And I just think it boasts mentioning that I feel personally that the art of live performance is changing radically as these new tools and these new opportunities aren't just part of the medium but they're actually changing our lives and that human experience is changing as these tools become available. And the really kind of simple example is that recent statistic that 80% of us check our cell phone before we brush our teeth in the morning. And so there's so many just little ways that our lives are changing and so art should reflect what human experience is and so I'm very excited to talk about these ideas with people who have also been looking into this from across North America. I also have to say that I'm just so proud to be partnering with HowlRound. There are so many almost strange serendipities between our organizations. We almost have a doppelganger between each organization and each role and you can guess throughout the day who's the witch of HowlRound in SpiderWebShow. It's true, it's true. But also to say that this we've been partnering with HowlRound since our organization began. We live streamed an event with the help of Vijay about five years ago and so working with HowlRound has really been embedded in the DNA of what the organization is and so this seems a very organic outcome of that and so thank you to everyone from the HowlRound team here. It also felt like, hey, there's a lot of people here who have no idea what SpiderWebShow is. I should maybe get into that a little bit, you know, what you're dealing with. So SpiderWebShow 101, we began as the answer to a dramaturgical question which was what is the state of Canadian theater now and we tried to answer that with a website at spiderwebshow.ca. That became an impossible task because well, you can imagine a number of reasons why, but not the least of which is that howl and then it's now and then it's now. So you can never actually know what the state of anything is in the present sense. We expanded to be a national organization supported by New World Theater in Vancouver, Alberta Theater Projects in Calgary, Praxis Theater in Toronto, and the National Arts Center in Ottawa and we were kind of an ad hoc organization for about three years and then we were very fortunate to be offered residency here at the Isabel Bader Center in Kingston and so we incorporated our own organization that's based here generously supported by the Department of Film and Media, the Dance School of Drama Music and the Isabel Bader Center here and so we feel really fortunate that we've kind of come from being an ad hoc organization to one that's based here in Kingston and looking at these questions. When we moved here, we changed our activities quite a bit. We were mostly publishing things on a website now SpiderWebShow creates work and we also have this festival that we create so we're producers and creators also and the impetus of creating this festival that this leads into is we're really obsessed with social change and digital change and if we really wanted to look at it we needed to bring a critical mass of these types of work together in one place to talk about them and so this is the second year and it is our intention for this to be an annual festival where people from around the world can come together for four days and look at a lot of different examples of digitally engaged live performance. Very briefly, the curatorial model is a bit different we curate works in alpha, beta and go which is stealing pretty deliberately from software development and the idea is that to test these works that are digitally engaged there's an element of interactivity to them and so they actually have to be tested on audience before they're ready to be open and so you'll see on the website when you're looking at things are all labeled alpha, beta and go and so that's to help you know the stage of development that those works are in. Gotta let you know if you really love us you can go to folder.ca backslash donate and we have an opportunity for you to show your love and interest of this event and I also wanted to let you know about something that will be available right here in the studio theater between one and six years ago. I was at NC here with an incredible company called the Electric Company that was here last year and they created some VR experiences that are complementary to a theater work and they're showing up in the afternoon for people to just try them out and you can sign up on the Slack for that just tag at Mariah in the convening Slack and you can sign up for a slot to experience some of the VR pieces that were in their earliest stages of development here at the festival last year and then I would be remiss without some thank yous so thank you very much to the Canada Council for the Arts the Department of Canadian Heritage the Isabelle Bader Centre for the Performing Arts and in particular Trisha Baldwin thank you the Dan School of Drama and Music and Craig Walker who is here the Department of Film and Media at Queens the Ontario Arts Council the City of Kingston RT09 which is a tourism organization the Canada's National Arts Centre and I should shout out both the British Theatre and the Interactive Department there that has provided resources Plank who powers our website and we have an ongoing relationship with Plank and Toaster Lab thank you very much Good morning everyone it's so nice to see you all here in real life my name is Jamie Galoon my pronouns are she her hers I'm the director and one of four co-founders of HowlRound Theatre Commons is a free and open platform for theatre makers worldwide to connect we amplify progressive and disruptive ideas about theatre and performance and facilitate connection between diverse practitioners we do this through a number of ways we are primarily an online space similar to spider web show although now that has shifted and we have an online journal that we publish five times a week live streaming television network I should say we are live streaming right now and we also do convenings like this one it has been core to our work since the beginning that while we totally love and lift up the power of digital to connect us nothing can replace the power of this experience face to face so I'm really proud to stand here today because this feels like the manifestation of a dream that we've had for a long time around trying to foster more international exchange trying to foster more opportunities for us to have conversations across national borders so a huge thank you to spider web show for your partnership and ongoing collaboration in this work we're thrilled to be here and a huge thank you to all the folks who traveled in many cases quite a long way to be here we know that that is not always easy and we appreciate you spending the time to be here with us today I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Arts for their support of this event in particular I'd also like to thank the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation the Barr Foundation and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation for their ongoing support of our programs and I would be remiss without thanking everyone on the hall round team who has worked deeply deeply hard to make this event happen and I would just ask that folks raise your hands as you're able right now if you're part of the hall round team great thank you so we have three goals for our time together today the first of which is to interrogate we want to ask where is digital technology now in the performance landscape how are we using it what are the opportunities and challenges therein and where is it going to demonstrate the value of digital so we want to explore what's working and its potential we also are trying in a number of ways to integrate some practical applications into the convening itself you'll note that we have well we will it will be on that screen in a little bit we have a social wall that's showing any kind of oh it is over there that wall over there is showing any kind of social engagement and we'll be trying to bring in questions throughout the day from folks who are watching along online and to make them a part of the conversation the third goal of our day is to exchange to share knowledge perspectives approaches and concrete tools and also I think this is such a unique and valuable moment to be able to have this conversation between folks from the US folks from Canada you know there aren't enough in my opinion opportunities for these kinds of exchanges to happen and so it's not lost on me that this in and of itself is kind of a huge a huge opportunity that we have today is to hear from each other in our different perspectives from where we're sitting in our respective homes and to be able to not only think about today as the beginning and end but really the start of a conversation right we have the opportunity to be here many of us through the rest of the festival so we know that you know today is just the start and we're not expecting closure here I'm going to hand it over to Sarah thanks so much Jamie I'm Sarah Garten Stanley and I'm a co-founder of spiderweb show and my title I also struggle with but I chose it it's creative catalyst and I'm a festival programmer as well and I'm so excited to be here with all of you obviously the work with how around has been extremely exciting invigorating and inspiring and also for anybody in the spiderweb show company fold the company please put your hands up just so people can see you white t-shirts and orange if you're here thank you I just want to take one moment to say that we work as a triangle Mike Wheeler artistic director myself and Adrian Wong and we're assisted and supported by so many other people and we're really proud of our model and in some ways I think we're also share a sympatical relationship to how authority and artistic decisions are made with how around so another way that we're really excited to be partnering so I've been asked to share the group agreements for the day it was a wonderful process getting to now we met probably weekly sometimes twice a week with how around and spiderweb show to come up with a today's agenda and to come up with some of these things behind Jamie more or less on the screen you'll see the agreements but just to read them out today we are explorers tomorrow we can move to solutions getting together together as Adrian mentioned in the land acknowledgement is a privilege so we hope to make the most of it today and throughout the festival work towards presence if you use technology to reach outside the room please do so in order to bring other people back into the room or to use it in ways that help you be more present as much as possible speak from your personal position from your eye employ this is my final thought to let the group know that you're finished speaking this will help obviously overlap but also it's a it's a much more democratic way and in fact I learned from Alex Balmer who's here in the room at the back a successful tool to move a conversation forward so thanks for that Alex agree to disagree never sure about that one not sure if I agree amplify agreement with snapping sparkle fingers or emphatic head nodding or whatever feels necessary don't feel you need to take up room to agree again but do take space and make space and practice self care take breaks when you need them it's really wonderful to be here and now I'm passing it over to me still to talk about certain things you may need to know if you need to get water down at the end of the hallway there are there's a gender gender neutral accessible washroom and men and women's washroom and then at the end of the hallway quite a ways down there are other washrooms down way down at the end of the hall so if you need any help finding those please come to any of us with the orange with the full t-shirts on and ask us if for breaks the best place on today's day is outside you're welcome to stay in here coffee juice there will be other refreshments throughout the day and lunch will also be served here at the end of the morning session I think I've covered all the things I need to cover wonderful thank you very much okay I'm going to do a quick rundown of our schedule for the day which you all have in slack in the convening channel it's also up here on the screen so we are very shortly going to move into some group introductions and then we have our first session which is digital and performance in the here and now we'll have a short break session two connecting with some colleagues in Prague at the quadrennial also in this space and then we will move on to lunch we'll have a third session that is from monologue to dialogue and then we'll have a break a brief warm up and close out with our final session are there any questions at this moment about flow of day anything we haven't covered that feels important great so because we are live streaming we're going to ask everyone to use a mic anytime you speak that is both so the audio is good for the live stream but it's also for accessibility in this space as you can imagine the acoustics in here if we didn't have mics might be a little tricky for some folks so please be mindful of that we have three wireless mics we have a plan to rotate them when we're doing larger group conversations but thank you for your support and patience with that as we as we move through the day yeah and I guess we already mentioned Twitter but just to say the hashtag is folder so if at any point you feel so moved or want to check out the conversation that is where to find it great and I'm going to pass it over to Adrian and Sarah hello again so this is the point in time when we will move around the circle to introduce we've introduced ourselves again as a demonstration but we're going to do this in a timely manner which will involve a timer and then a when your time is up now I have no musical theory knowledge so those of you who do please don't read anything into the notes that I choose which I think have meaning but I don't know what it is so it's really how I feel in the moment so we'll model what we hope is going to happen so it's a name pronoun where you're from why did you say yes to the invitation to attend what gets you most excited as an artist or a bridger and if you have time before the non-judgmental note is chosen if you have time this is a one word game digital makes me think of one word so Adrian would you like to model this and then I'll follow and then we'll go to my left so I won't pass the timer and the glockenspiel I'll do that but I'm just going to do this additional degree of difficulty one time only hello my name is Adrian Wong she, her, hers I currently live in Banff by way of Ottawa by way of Vancouver by way of Calgary I am here because I helped organize this event and what inspires me as a maker is connection and digital makes me think of fingers four seconds left so awesome thank you so my name is Sarah Garten Stanley my pronouns are she, her, but I also like they I'm from Montreal originally I live here in Kingston and in many other spots I said yes to the invitation because I thought Fulda was a really awesome idea and I'm really happy to be here what gets me most excited as an artist or a bridger is actually connection in all its manifestations and a one word thank for digital connection my pronouns are he, him I'm here not only because I'm the artistic director but I'm also an instructor at the dance school of drama and music here my team currently changing you've also met me my name is Jamie Galoon she, her, hers I'm currently coming from Boston though was originally born in Minneapolis I said yes to the invitation because it made a lot of sense because I was looking forward to partner because I wanted to have this conversation and I get excited about digital and possibilities for new ways of connection and new forms of work and new ways of relating to one another and I will give back some of my time sorry hi I'm Ramona Ostrowski her, hers the producer of HowlRound so here from Boston I'm excited about the eco-friendly possibilities of digital technology and digital makes me think about being connected with my friends hi I'm Vijay Mathew he, him, his and I'm from Boston I'm with the HowlRound Theatre Commons and what gets me excited is new models and new models for for social production hi I'm Noah Sullivan I'm here helping out with some audio stuff this morning I go by he, him and I am very excited about the possibilities of audio in digital technology thank you and now back to the circle hello my name is Milton Lim he, him I work with Hong Kong Exile and Theatre Conspiracy as well as doing my own work I am most excited by video games and anime these days and I came here because I am hopeful that the performance community can be more rigorous about its use of technology as a mode of disruption towards traditional models computers hi I'm Remy Siu he, him, his I work with Hong Kong Exile I'm also here with Theatre Replacement to do mine which is why I accepted the invitation I guess what was the question the oh what inspires all the different ways that you can work and constantly have to change working and one word for digital I guess is difficult I'm Kevin Cunningham I'm the artistic director it's really like a dog in New York he, him what inspires me about digital production is the way it deepens collaboration and expands scale and I guess integration would be my word for tech hi I'm Jenny Balasubramanian I'm based in New York City I'm a resident artist at the Public Theatre and the Department of Astrophysics in the Museum of Natural History I'm excited to be here because I'm specifically interested in how digital technologies can be used to invite people into the story of theatre who have not been allowed in the story of different kinds of theatre in the past I what inspires me is all the badass scientists that I work with every day and digital makes me think of analog hi I'm Catherine Hamilton I make work as sister Sylvester currently based in New York but have been making work for the last five years in Istanbul I am excited by bringing together the biological and the digital and digital makes me think of pressure yeah sorry Shiha hi my name is Mia Susan Amir I live on the unceded and occupied territories of the Musqueam School Home Mission Slewa Tooth People known as Vancouver British Columbia I was born in Israel occupied Palestine I use she her pronouns I am here because I'm a multiply affiliated artist educator advocate who is here representing unsettling dramaturgy which is a colloquium bringing together Crip and indigenous artists from across Canada so-called Canada in the United States we're partnering with HowlRound and with Spyderweb show and so that's one of the reasons that I'm here the end hi I'm Abigail Vega she her hers I came here today from San Antonio, Texas I'm also kind of on the HowlRound I'm on the HowlRound team but I didn't work on this convening so I didn't raise my hand because I didn't deserve any praise I'm the producer of the Latinx Theatre Commons which is a flagship program of HowlRound and why I accepted the invitation today because I'm curious about what other organizers and bridgers I love that word how they're using technology to connect people from really really disparate parts of the world and what inspires me as an artist is time travel I'm very interested in time travel right now all kinds of time travel digital makes me think of an onion Hello I'm Charles Douglas my pronouns are he, him, his I'm an actor and fight director I'm from Ottawa and I'm here supporting Sheridan College's screen industries research and training center what inspires me is the potential for accessibility for digital to make that more possible in our world and when I think of digital I think of magic Hi I'm John Heliker and I'm from Toronto and I also am representing Sheridan College I came here for the conversations I'm originally a film director who came to Sheridan and started a technology research center so I'm really interested in how creative and technology can interact so I think of digital as interaction and empathy Hi I'm Craig Walker I'm the director of the dance school of drama and music he, him I'm here because I guess the themes cover a lot of what I find most frightening and most exciting in my field what inspires me is being taken on a mental journey somewhere I have never traveled and digital makes me think of ones and zeros I'm Colleen Renahan my pronouns are she, her, hers I'm here from here in Kingston by way of okay Guelph, New Brunswick, Winnipeg, Toronto, Vancouver and Saskatoon originally I'm a professor here at the dance school of drama and music I'm a musicologist and what brought me here is that the next question yeah so I'm interested in voice aesthetics I'm interested in materiality and relationality of voice and ways in which that is disrupted and made new in the context of the digital so that's why I'm here thank you Hi my name is Gada Jane my pronouns are she, her I'm a research associate at the University of Waterloo focused on VR and specifically making partnerships between creatives and industry and researchers around VR and specifically VR storytelling so I accepted the invitation because my main interest is how you tell stories in new forms and how you translate the deeply personal work of creating something into digital forms and specifically 360 and that I think the personal spaces of artists is what most excites me Hi my name is Nick Beall my pronouns are he, him I'm a artist playwright originally from Montreal I said yes because I was very curious about the storytelling possibilities of VR and that's probably also the thing that I'm most intrigued about right now specifically about technology Hi I'm Rob Kempzen I'm a writer and director I'm originally from Kingston and I live most of the time in Toronto now I said yes because I have a show in the festival I guess I should say yes and also I like to do things that scare me and being in a room of people who are quite smart with computers scares me a lot what I find exciting and inspiring in my work is always a community which if you see the show on Saturday you'll understand more about but is pretty standard to a lot of the practices that I engage in as an artist and digital makes me think of unbridled fear maybe Hi my name is Jen Stevenson my pronouns are she, her, hers I'm a professor here at Queens in the dance school of drama and music I am here because I like being in the room with engaged thinkers my particular interest at the moment is thinking about participation and thinking about how digital platforms draw people together and invite different kinds of interactivity digital makes me think of an open door Hello my name is Whit McLaughlin he, him, his I'm from Philadelphia I'm the artistic director of New Paradise Laboratories that's been doing digital performance since the 2009 I came because I really feel isolated in the digital work space I don't actually enjoy it I'm inspired by varying models of space and time which I think makes me a science fiction buff the single word that most comes to mind is fragility Hi my name is Chantal Bilodeau I am a playwright and the artistic director of the Arctic Cycle I use she, her, hers I live in New York but I'm originally from Montreal I am inspired by people who do things that I can't do or who do things that I do but much better than me and the one word for digital would be actually it's two words social movement Hi I'm Michael Yamamoto and I'm one of the artistic directors of theater replacement my fans are she and her I came here from Vancouver I'm here because we also have a show in the festival and we're very happy to be here thanks for having us what inspires me are people and the collaborators I get to work with and also changing the way in which we understand and tell stories what word is digital clocks I'm Connor Wiley he, him I am here with theater replacement as well I am inspired by the ability to work with flexibility regards to scale using digital technology which is often challenging in the theater so the word that I would use is scale Hi I'm Sophie Traub that's my voice now and my pronouns are she, her I also like they, them and I'm from Toronto I'm here with or on behalf of Toaster Lab and I also run an arts organization called the School of Making Thinking and specifically I've been running for the last three years 360 video creation residency in North Carolina with them so I'm really excited to bring some of the conversations back to that work what inspire or why I accepted the invitation I was sort of required to come on behalf of Toaster Lab and I'm very glad that I got the opportunity what inspires me is the possibilities for social change in the political decisions that are made around the kind of, yeah as the invention hi done I'm the director of the Isabelle Bader Center for the Performing Arts and I have been really inspired this past year by the Eva Goyan Ear Witness project Lisa Jackson's Bid-A-Ban project and visiting arts technology in Linn's and having great conversations with Michael so when I think of digital and technology I think adventure Hello my name is Wesley Taylor I'm another part of the Anishinaabe Expanse on the state side called Detroit I also work in Richmond Virginia as an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University I was not invited I asked HowlRound said yes and I'm here because I have FOMO and so things that excite me are a new generation of artists and makers also the prospect of me being able to make into my 80s 90s maybe 100 that's exciting to me Good morning my name is David House and I am from Boston by way of Murfreesboro Tennessee I co-lead the Office of the Arts at Emerson College where HowlRound lives which is why I'm here today I'm inspired by the work that HowlRound does we have a fantastic team and the possibilities of working more closely with spiderweb is exciting I'm inspired by those who are much more knowledgeable and wise about digital technology and inspired by what I would learn and take away from here and this is the last thing I will say that digital makes me think about the opportunity My name is Cynthia Ling Lee I use she and they pronouns I'm here because I love HowlRound and I was curious I am inspired by art that moves us towards liberation and reminds us of our capacity for play What's the other thing I was just going to say Exciting did I just say that Zing zing zing I'm a dancer and I get to follow Cynthia Hi folks my name is Sage Crump I'm a member of Complex Movements in New Orleans, Louisiana we are a Detroit based artist collective we invited to accept the invitation because HowlRound is one of the only places that I feel like writes about our work and gets it and also the opportunity to live inside this idea of theater because so often our work people want to create new words and if we stay in this realm of theater we get to live into the legacy of like the Free Southern Theater or Carpebag Theater or all the amazing theaters that have created work that impacts the world in which we live I'm inspired by people who wake up every day look at the world around them and try and make it better and I'm excited by the way our work supports their ability to do that When I think about digital I think about the matrix Did I do it? Did I do it? Ahhhh Hi I'm Alex Bulmer I go by pronouns she her I'm an audio artist and theater maker and I'm here today with Red Dress Productions I'm from Ontario and I've lived in London, England and I'm currently in Toronto why I accepted an invitation to come was because I want to learn as a bridger or art maker I'm inspired by relationships and when I think of digital I think of breathing and not breathing Hi my name is Tristan Weston I prefer he, him pronouns I'm here as the co-artist director of Red Dress Productions with Anna we're presenting May I Take Your Arm which was the invitation which we said yes to and I'm really happy we did what inspires me is stories I think primarily and the digital possibilities of just as another tool of sharing stories and helping to have I also really like layered things and sometimes digital technology can help with that When I think of it I also think of doors but I think of it as open and closed and smacking me in the face Hi everyone my name is Anna Camilleri I'm here by way of Toronto my pronoun is she, her I'm happy to present work with Tristan and Katie Jailand during this festival I accepted the invitation because I'm curious I'm not sure how I fit even though digital is part of our work so really I'm here out of curiosity I'm interested in the relationship between stories materiality and the intangibly material if that makes any sense and when I think of digital the colours blue and red come to mind temperature falling rising Hi I'm Andrew Burke I am from the Migma Shabakto the Great Harbor Halifax and I'm mostly he-him and I took the invitation here because I worked last year with Halifax's Zupa Theatre on this big project called This Is Nowhere I'm a software developer and I used to have an arts background but then I ended up getting regular boring work and last year I discovered you can actually do this like art stuff so I'm really excited to be back into doing and learning about all of that kind of thing and what inspires me about digital is especially these days with mobile devices and things the ability to sort of layer other worlds on top of the regular day to day world that's historical oh my goodness hello my name is Corbin I'm the managing producer of Theatre Replacement we're here with mine I was born a settler on the unceded Coast Salish territory of the West Quim Squamish and Salish Tooth First Nations he-him-his when we were making this show when Mike was making this show with the company we were like oh man I hope we get to go to Folda with this and then we got asked and so we that's why we accepted the invitation which we did with great enthusiasm my inspiration words are paradigm shift and my digital word is frustration Hi my name is Brenda Baker Harger she her I'm here by way of Carnegie Mellon University which is in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in case you were wondering everyone heard of Carnegie Mellon nobody knows where it is my background is theatre director slash advisor and I now teach in a graduate program that combines art and technology so I use theatre techniques to invent new things and teach students how to collaborate cross-discipline I accepted this invitation because of all of you I want to have this conversation and I want to share ideas with people who get it what inspired I'm sorry David Saltz he-him-his from the University of Georgia in Athens I'm a professor and department head there originally grew up in Detroit and have lived on both coasts in between I accepted the invitation because my work as a director and a scholar and a teacher has focused for the past 30 years very much on digital technology and its application to theatre and I'm super excited to hear about the work that you guys are doing both as practitioners and your ideas and what inspires me is theatre's ability to create new worlds new realities as a laboratory and computers do precisely the same thing Hi I'm Tali Hinkis my artist name is Lovid I am coming here from Long Island New York and she her and what brought me here I'm actually a media and visual artist and I do work in some performances but I really wanted to learn and hear more from people in the theatre and performance world what inspires me is big collaborations and a big open process and instead of a word about digital I would say that digital is not enough and the way I think about it is technology more broadly and electronic art electronic system there's more than binary even in technology Hi I'm Miwa Mitraic I'm an animator designer and performer because I perform my own work based in Los Angeles before that the Bay Area and before that I grew up in Japan I accepted the invitation because I was very curious about the conversation that I would get to be a part of here and who would be in the room. Inspiration I'm interested in the rabbit holes of play that we as artists get to go down and kind of find our personal ways of defining what our work is digital toys Hello I'm Kristen McQuarter I'm an artist traveling here from a residency at Banff and before that Los Angeles and Chicago where I'm based and before that Baltimore, Maryland and Denver, Colorado I'm interested in the complexity of competitive play and competitive interaction and I accepted the invitation here because the really talented Adrian Dawes told me that I had to and I'm super thrilled to be here. Digital makes me think of skins Hi I'm Stephanie Lind, pronouns she hers I'm a faculty member here at the Dance School of Music Queens by way of Vancouver, Waterloo and Northern Ontario I'm a music theorist by trade so I appreciate the Glockenspiel and looking at specifically music and culture in video games. I'm excited about teaching and I accepted the invitation because I'm always curious Digital makes me think of culture. Hi I'm Wayne Ashley I'm the founder and artistic director of Future Perfect We are an interdisciplinary creative studio very interested in the contradictory outcomes and the futures of live performance My pronouns are he, his, him, but I'm open to other kinds of pronouns so I'm interested in exploring that I accepted the invitation here because we're in the process of thinking about new language and evaluating our goals and missions for our studio and I thought this would be the perfect place to meditate on that Hi I'm Xander Soren, he, his pronouns I'm from Brooklyn, New York here together with Wayne Ashley. It's a part of Future Perfect I'm the co-artistic director. I'm also a software developer and computer musician. I accepted the invitation We're interested in the shifting futures of live performance and digital is a part of that conversation and interested in hearing what the current rhetorics are around digital What was the next thing? What inspires me is contradiction and tension and digital makes me think of hyper capitalism and control. Hi I'm Kristen Martin, she, her, hers I'm from New York City by way of Birmingham, Alabama which most people don't know about me. I'm a director of multi-genre work. I'm the founding artistic director of here and a co-founding director of the prototype festival My interest, the reason that I wanted to come here is because of my interest in dialogue around these issues because this type of work is at the intersection of my personal practice and my producing main area of work and it feels to me like the most potent way to address the social justice issues through performance today and my digital is community. Hi I'm Kate Bergstrom I go by she, hers pronouns. I'm here via LaGuardia Airport in New York Providence, Rhode Island before that and born on Chumash territory in Santa Barbara, California. I'm an intermediate director and performer and a professor at RISD and NYU now no longer in New School. I have accepted the invitation to meet all of you in commune and hopefully be surprised and excited by what could be next. I am inspired by the possibilities of joy as a radical act in this space and in theatrical spaces and digital makes me think of expansiveness and the unknown. Hi my name is Anshuli Felicia King. I go by Felicia in English speaking countries. I'm half Thai half Australian by way of New York I'm a multidisciplinary artist and my day job is being a playwright I am interested in finding new dramaturgies for emerging technologies and using them with formal rigor and digital makes me think of liminality and global potential Hi I'm Adam Cooper Terran, pronouns are them they and from Taunautam of Arizona, Tucson and I said yes to coming because I'm interested in cross pollinating and connecting with a greater community of artists working in this capacity with technology and performance art and I'm really excited about storytelling and how that can evolve spaces and alter perceptions of reality and challenge different narratives that might be more dominant or in power and destabilizing that and when I think of digital I think about cats. Hi I'm Shawn Kerwin, she, her I'm a set and costume designer and I teach in the department of theater at York University. I wanted to come because I've been aware of the work that spiderweb show has been doing for a while of which and I have been full of admiration for it and I wanted to spend time in the room. What inspires me trying to find hope in a difficult troubled world and trying to understand the value of theater in being able to help maneuver that world digital makes me think of overwhelmed Hello, my name is Sylvia Defend I'm from Toronto, I'm a theater costumer and I teach at York University, theater technology I'm here today because I know nothing about this and I thought it would be a really interesting opportunity to learn more about the digital approach in performance I'm inspired by learning and collaboration and when I think of digital I really think of endless possibilities and exciting possibilities. Thank you. Thank you, I'm going to draw your attention to some of the people over there. Bonjour tout le monde My name is Claude Schreyer, I work at Canada Council for the Arts in Ottawa. So I'm here because I was invited to observe the festival and we're in a partnership with the National Arts Centre on a project on theater and climate change and I think some of that work is going to be shown here next year I'm an auto artist as well and I've used technology most of my life right now I'm looking at those wind engines out there and I think a lot about sustainability and I'm interested in how technology and the arts can make us not a more sustainable world but a truly sustainable world. It's nice to be here. Hi, I'm Warren Wolanski, I'm the president of Planck I'm from Montreal and I'm here mainly because we've been working with Folder for a couple of years now and I wanted to be here to observe and learn about arts and culture which is our personal passion as a company and digital makes me think about my team. Hi, I'm Roy Serrette, director of Certified, one of the shows in the festival and the artistic director at Touchstone Theatre in Vancouver. I go by he, him. I'm inspired by HowlRound and SpiderWeb and the people and the communicative skills that they bring and I thought that would be great to participate. Access digital, access, discovery, hurdles, glitches. Hi, my name is Mae Antaki, my pronouns are she, her, hers. I'm part of the HowlRound team but I'm based in Toronto and I'm from Montreal I'm going to be writing a report at the end of this convening so we're just going to be taking in what people are saying and what happens. I'm inspired by the exchange of ideas and learning from other people what they're doing, what they're creating. And when I think of digital, I think of screens. Thank you very much everyone. I think that's it for the introductions and I think it's over to you Jamie, is that right? Okay, great. So I'm going to just briefly talk about how our first session of the day is going to work. So this format, we're going to have a series of inner circle conversations ringed by an outer circle. And this format is inspired by and adapted from the work of David Baum who's a theoretical physicist and the work he did on dialogue HowlRound since we were founded in 2011 have used different versions of this methodology to try and encourage conversations like these. We have found that it can help get us very deeply into conversation quite quickly and can allow for a multiplicity of perspectives to emerge. So I'm going to talk through a little bit of what the actual functional format is so everyone has a sense of what's going to happen. So in this next session the first 20 minutes or so we are going to have an inner circle of six folks which will move our chairs and these six folks are going to be in conversation with one another. These folks know who they are, we've had a conversation and they're really going to provide some reflections, have a casual conversation with one another that will then yield with one another. The role of the outside circle, so everyone who's not in the inner circle, we call this the listening circle. So this is not the time to sit back and check your email. Your role here is to really listen to what's being said in the inner circle and what isn't being said. What are the other perspectives that need to emerge in response to the prompt that is being offered. So after 20 minutes we will expand the inner circle to a second circle. We will add six new chairs and those who feel moved to add a perspective to the conversation will then be able to opt themselves into this second circle. We'll have that same format for about 20 minutes. People can move in and out. So similar to a long table format you'll be able to tap in if you want to join that circle or if you have something to offer and you feel now you've offered what you have to the conversation you can also step back out. The last 20 minutes of the conversation will be a full circle dialogue. This exact setup is a bit of an experiment today. So we may learn things in this first session that we may actually adapt future sessions based on what we learned. So thank you for your support in us trying this out right now. So okay great. At this time I'm going to ask Kristen, David, Cynthia, Milton and Remy to take their chairs along with me and set up along these spike marks for the inner circle right here. I'd also ask that the other mics be brought to the center of the room. I think it might be, no that's okay. Sarah just started double chairing. We'll do a double chair. We'll just do it. Okay. So here we are and I'm going to ask folks who are understandably grabbing a coffee to grab what you need quickly and make your way back to the circle but we will get started. So this session is digital and performance in the here and now. We are aiming to look at the state of the field specifically at the intersection of digital and performance. What is happening now? I've asked each person in the inner circle to reflect on the question what are the current opportunities and challenges at the intersection of digital and performance and to kick us off I'm going to ask Milton to share. Each person is going to have up to three minutes here and I will be timing. Am I talking about last year first or am I going to introduce myself first with those thoughts? Combine those thoughts. Okay. Yeah so you can introduce yourself and respond to the prompt and feel free to bring in thoughts as they relate to that prompt. Perfectly. Great. Yeah so from where I said what is the state of digital and the performance field I wanted to break that down to three separate things so like nationally I feel like there's in Canada a significant separation between digital and performing arts and mostly that's because of a big gap in financial structures and not profit sector but I do feel like it's also a big funding priority but there are a lot of people who are also not part of the conversation that really should be and people that leave for the for profit sector I will also go to Vancouver the city which I'm from my peers and I make systems for performance that often use digital technology to construct visual and sonic architecture questioning agency and presence often with smaller teams sometimes with technology in the place of another human and I draw heavy inspiration from video games and allow that to change the kind of work we make and personally I look to digital as an expression of communication and as an additional outlet of labour within the changing landscape of the attention economy and as a growing conversation of spectacle and performance so last year it was this is the second year of full day and yeah I think Lisa Marie de Liberto, Ajif Paraz Ramani were asked to lead the final closing discussion of last year's forum following some looming questions about what the festival is and what are the objectives of the festival and there were some big questions if this gathering should be a festival of works, a forum of ideas or symposium of sharing research and practice because we felt last year with the huge schedule and the very ambitious scope of programming that the panels sometimes let in conversations that led back to similar patterns of engagement within other performing arts festivals and we were all kind of pining for a little bit more specificity as to what digital means in the performing arts and specifically trying to find ways to include disruptive kind of formats that radically change the kind of work that we make rather than augment the kind of work that we already do so there were desires to see and I'll just list them off until my time runs out tech demos and new technologies both proof of concept works and conceptually rigorous works, links between what we are seeing and what we are learning a marriage of independent artists and the industry a place of upscaling or leveling up as some people said and from the theater practitioner standpoint placing art and the unknown at the center so listening to designers of which I have to admit there were very few last year and so I hope this year we can make a concerted effort in being very specific about our approach to digital rather than just talking very generally about and making space for truly disruptive kind of ideas about how art functions with digital technology insofar as our approach to live performance what is live that is maybe not necessarily predicated on physical proximity time and tangibility. Thank you so around this question I thought about first I was thinking about all the different things that people are doing today the use of green screen to create alternate spaces games integration of audience info into projects video is a character video is back drop long distance collaboration life feed movement sensor triggers augmented reality performer created audio melded dramaturgical use of tech to shape narrative immersive VR location based interactive non-linearity more easily facilitated communication formation of community open source I just feel like there are all these different ways that that was just a small list that I was thinking about of all the different ways that the people in this room and that nationally and globally that people are working and when I think about the challenges I was thinking about how how we use tech to connect on a human and immediate emotional level is the biggest challenge and the greatest opportunity about that complex movements article that was published by around this week about using technology in a way that's not too surveillance heavy or not to accessible not too inaccessible resource wise like that idea is really at the core of how we make this something that speaks to larger groups of people and communities that might not have access and might not think that they're invited into the conversation and then in my own work a thing I'm thinking a lot about is our privacy and the erosion and commercialization of our identities online and how that relates to this work so those were things that I was thinking about as challenges in terms of opportunities I think it's alluded to already over here to the prevalence of tech in people's hands and the extensive use of social media we have access points that we didn't have before as artists and how we can use those access points responsibly and in a really communal and inclusive as opposed to invasive way is a really interesting opportunity because it gives us access to multiple stories from multiple perspectives in a truly like way where we can remove privilege from that so that seems like a really amazing opportunity right now the energy and interest in game theory principles for creating interactive inclusive spaces that people are willing to engage in as opposed to feeling like they're going to be that stage of immersive work where people were afraid of what was going to happen to them but by using the game theory and game world people will feel more comfortable to come into the space and invited to come into the space in a way that they understand and then lastly and it's kind of tied into the previous two points the opportunity for the dramaturgical impact of the use of technology on how we tell stories and on the new forms that are going to bubble up as a result of that so those were my like opening thoughts alright so I took this opportunity to reflect on the question of the challenges and opportunities of digital media by thinking back on when I started out working with these technologies in the early 90s and the differences between that time and this time which in thinking about it are in many ways completely radically different the whole universe has transformed but in other ways remarkably the same and in some ways it sort of surprised me as I thought about it what hasn't changed so to start with briefly what draws me, what's always drawn me to digital technology is my passion for live performance and the capability of digital technology to become live to be interactive so it's not simply and media that the performers have to adapt to but it becomes an active player participant and through participation can draw spectators into performance and create fully interactive events so one really obvious huge difference is that now digital technology is ubiquitous and widely accessible to most areas but there are still some excluded areas but these days bringing a laptop into a theater and cooking it up to a projector and filling the entire space even using multiple screens is simply not out of reach for even community theaters not to mention university and professional theaters so you can do all sorts of wonderful subversive work in all different sorts of spaces with this much more easily and inexpensively than you could in the 90s and an even more exciting potential is in the 90s we were working with sensors and actuators and most of this was very inexpensive shoestring and so the current maker culture is very much part of continuing in that vein but these days everybody again not everybody but many people throughout many many countries and many economic classes are carrying around these amazing devices that have sensors built right into them easy to use cameras that you can use not just for cameras but as sensors wonderful screens animation GPS connectivity internet connect is unbelievable what this amazing device can do and so that's a huge possibility for artistic creative political social activist uses that has barely the surface has barely been scratched and this gets me to a difference that sort of surprises me and that's that the tools that are now available for people to create creative performance and artistic and installation works using digital technologies really have not gotten any easier to work with in the time and in some ways they've become even harder there are the tools for creating canned videos basically exactly the same use of film and sound that people were doing with analog reel to reel or you know back in the article I posted and how around back to 1914 or you know the Scotter in the 20s and the 50s and 60s the sort of work that they were doing is exactly the kind of work except most people these days aren't nearly as creative or innovative in creating interactions with the canned video but they're using computers to queue using like QLab or expensive media servers just to queue canned sequences but if you really am I done so hopefully in the future we'll be able to get so the new technologies are just as harder to use I'm Tia Ling Li and I just wanted to express my gratitude for being here on Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee land and actually just to remind us of some of the really salient points that Adrian brought up at the beginning of our circle I wanted to briefly position myself I'm part of a collective called the Postnatium Collective we are transnational web based collective of artist activist scholars who are all trained in South Asian dance and for us free and inexpensive technologies have offered a way for us to connect over the past 11 years despite being financially under resourced and are urged to connect and collaborate long distance has been a direct response to being marginalized aesthetically in our home communities which influx everything I'm about to say so when I think of opportunities and challenges around digital technology I'm reminded on the one hand of the power of technology to galvanize resistance such as in Black Lives Matter with the use of social media and to make survival possible for the vulnerable such as the centrality of cell phones for Syrian refugees and on the other hand social media can just as easily be used for bullying, advertising spreading misinformation and technology has often been used to divide the haves from the have nots which leaves me us with the following questions which are quite related to what Kristen articulated as well how can we use digital technology to connect marginalized communities to work towards equity what is artistically possible and exciting with widely accessible free chief technologies and how can we create collaborative inclusive spaces that connect us and allow us to celebrate and acknowledge our differences. My name is Remy I guess I introduced myself earlier and to kind of talk about this question again I'll repeat is it getting quieter okay from where you sit what are some current opportunities and challenges at the intersection of digital technology and performance I'll start I think with the opportunities that I at least see myself I should say that maybe that I my background is in composition music composition but then having worked over several years in either theater and dance that I found my way into doing kind of new media work which I would now do that kind of primarily but also still write music so if some of these I might be using music key terms that if you need to know please just say that I don't know what that term is but a lot of opportunities for me is I find that I can because I'm working with it's I get to disrupt a lot of processes that and work flows and kind of infrastructures and a lot of it just stems from the fact that from a decision to kind of re-examine what this score object is at least in music if I were to think about it as a score is a fixed medium even if there are like say chance materials or aleator content there it still takes actually written on paper which is I would say a fixed medium and so for me it's it allows me access to a lot of new formal ways to kind of reflect the world that we live in and kind of systems that are currently yes to speak about systems and policy in ways that I think that were not possible before and so let me go through here I like the fact that even re-examining just the score object and kind of re-examining what set of course setness I should say things that are set already something very simple like this like and you play it out with the means that we have now really challenge a lot of the infrastructure that is in place for either theater or music whether it's that an orchestra is used to just rehearsing with you for like I don't know 10 minutes but or if you only have like a day to set up in a theater and other things like this there's like immediately infrastructure questions come into play so that's another big obsession of mine is infrastructure I guess that's a good way to challenges infrastructural challenges I guess I'll say one last thing in challenges I'm worried that technology or some kind of thing is a fresh coat of paint for something that's really rotten at the bottom and so I'm always worried about seeing things like some stuff with the I don't know the first thing that pops in my head is like oh yeah there's an orchestra playing and then there's like some projection stuff at the back and it's the same old stuff but they're trying to get people to come and they're spending a lot of money to do it but I think the reason people are not coming is a lot more at the bottom so yeah thank you all so we're going to spend the next five ish minutes I would love to hear what landed on you anything about based on what your fellow circle members shared anything you want to riff on I'd like to so your comment that you were ending with is actually I feel touches very much on what I was talking about too is using the technology as window dressing not to radically question anything or to explore new forms but simply to repackage and resell what people have been doing forever and are there any more sort of creative uses of thinking about the way the digital interactive technology can really radically challenge the very notion of a score and the relationship between a playwright or whatever between a pre-existing work that somebody has performed when you're actually creating and performing simultaneously brings in issues of improvisation that some people have talked about have you worked with those areas? for me is that I'm trying to understand the question right here having done a lot of interdisciplinary into arts work something that like a lot of this window dressing feeling is a worry that when you have multiple disciplines in the room it becomes a super additive process where like what you get is just kind of like oh that was obvious you would get on the other end in that sense as opposed to every kind of discipline in the room including people working in digital mediums kind of asking very difficult questions about their own at least their presence there and kind of like well what am I willing to not do or what am I willing to give up so that other mediums have space to do this or like it's a case by case basis I think where in every project you're going to be like oh am I going to give up my playwright am I going to not write anything this time or like yeah I'm a composer am I not going to write any music or I don't know something like that those are very basic but like something like this yeah so I think what that makes me think of is the topic digital plus performance convening that maybe that paradigm it's not so much the separate things that you've got digital here performance here and it becomes additive the image behind the orchestra but actually when you put those together they fuse Steven Universe style if anybody knows that you come one new a whole new thing and how do we make that happen what processes can enable that I should pass this on to you I mean a lot of what so you each talked at one point about the disruption that in both you know a really positive and potential filled way that this technology can bring but also some of the inherent risks therein I guess I'm curious in the last couple minutes we have in this format to hear about examples of companies work people who you feel are making the most of the opportunity side folks that you might want to lift up who are meeting some of these challenges and meeting them yeah we're meeting some of these challenges in just talking about the state of presence and time just for an example I was thinking last night more and more about the Singaporean artist Troika Phi and his use of shocking with little bits of electricity shocking muscles in order to recreate and record certain styles of movement and therefore be able to play it back on half person's body on a full person's body also to be able to then space out the way in which a performance is timed out so therefore getting to perform yourself from yesterday and then the day after and then the day after and that there's a kind of iterative process that can arise out of how do I record this thing day by day and do I get a cleaner sample if I'm able to which is kind of like a augmentation but also I would say a fundamental disruption of a kind of rehearsal process from a movement based standpoint there's an artist whose name I'm blanking on so I'll share it with everyone later when I look it up but she is doing a piece that's a low tech version of that that is a collaboration by mail so with the prisoner he writes a movement sequence it gets sent in the mail and then the choreographer that he's collaborating with writes the next movement sequence and together they create a dance and then that dance gets created for a public and then they're able to send that back to him and so this is a low tech collaboration that is using communication but at a different speed and I think that's a really fascinating way to empower someone who's in a place where they're not empowered outside the walls I mean there have been groups like the builders association has been doing amazing stuff 1927 which is a London based group has been doing really amazing things obviously when you talked about the electric shocking I thought Stella had been doing that before so there is a huge amount of really interesting and very different sort of work that's being done but not to get to the practical issue most of these groups either are wonderfully low tech because you can actually be low tech and use the digital technology or are working with systems like Max MSP or Unity modifying Unity game engine which takes some high level programming talents great thank you I think that's a perfect segue to expand out to our second circle so you may have noticed we have double chairs we're gonna double ourselves and yeah the second circle has been spiked okay so here we are in the second circle and just a reminder to everyone this is the moment where anyone who's been sitting in the listening circle and feels they want to join this conversation is welcome to come and sit in any of the empty seats thank you please don't be shy and we're gonna continue the conversation with adding some new folks into the mix also now since there's more people we have three mics please don't be shy let's just facilitate this passing amongst us and so please just be mindful if you're holding the mic and not speaking that you may need to move it around great I'm looking at Michael I have thoughts I'm on the pink mic I was just thinking listening to this about and just almost reflecting on being here about one of the major opportunities is about presence and how presence physical presence or non physical presence is something that's blurring a lot and there are examples of that in the theater I think about holograms like I think the most famous one is the two pack hologram that we saw but we've seen politicians in France also give a speech in one city and their hologram gives a speech in another city simultaneously and so where performers exist in time and space seems to be shifting and so that's the example on the stage but I also just was thinking about my own life and my decision to move here from Toronto about two years ago and how as a theater artist it's a bit sketchy to like move from a big city to like a small town and like where's your career going and etc and I haven't really felt like the career impact and I think it's because of digital I think it's because we're on Facebook and we're in all of the platforms that people are on and when I go back to Toronto which I do about once a month everybody seems to know what we're up to and I don't think like just even from a career perspective my presence has left the cultural centers in a way that it would have 10 years ago this is my final thought I'm really inspired by the conversation you're having and maybe the first comment that I think David made around where we are now in technology and I do think we're in a place where we're kind of globally lack vision to what technology is and kind of referencing kind of contextualizing where we came from in technology before we had I everything artists, engineers had to be extremely creative in producing systems to produce to create work so that music, composition, video so that engineering, integrating engineering and art was a part of their practice a part of their studio practice and I often wonder especially talking to younger people I know folks who grow up with a laptop that has the capabilities to do anything then what do you do with it where is your personal touch and what do we learn what do we think of technology and my worry within the performance and globally is that our vision of what technology is is dominated by two, three big companies and their idea of what technology is and generally speaking we have moved from a utopian place where we saw technology as an expansion of the humanity to a platform for entertainment and I think then that comes back again to your idea of what is this, how does this kind of the bottom run place where we need to really liberate ourselves from that we need to encourage artists to think creatively with the tools and really like constantly remind people that technology is not just Facebook in the smallest terms just like tiny like personal examples I've done many workshops where I teach people from all ages all backgrounds how to solder two components to produce an LED light and someone here mentioned technology digital as being magic and you would think this is just a smaller thing you know you put something in the light but bringing people connected to the simplest things about technology in a way to me it also connects them to just the natural world and seeing that technology is an extension of our relationship with nature so can I, sorry I just want to I was going to but you go ahead so I want to just drop in early in our time together a question around this word disruption and I think we're using it a lot to invite us to think about being really clearly and speaking clearly what we are disrupting and why because I think that's really important in terms of the work that we do when we're using the forms that we are there's that I really appreciated this idea of like conceptual rigorousness or rigorous is that a word? I don't know which y'all know what I mean you know and how that applies to both like the technology the skills that we use but also why we're applying it where we're applying it who has access to it what is it designed to do in the world how we are reclaiming what is designed to do in the world or how we are fostering what it was originally designed to do in the world which we all know is technically not often very good things and really beginning for this gathering and in our practice if you're not already like what are we disrupting why are we doing it how do the resources we use where do those come from like really taking the time to think about the ways in which the relationship between this digital work that we're talking about digital performance and its impact on the terrestrial material world to live in. I wanted to reflect on I think actually something very similar to what you when you're talking about disruption so often with regards to the window dressing sort of comments that were made earlier we think of digital technology or I think there is an invitation to think of digital technology as a way to save money or a way to somehow shortcut something and I think that's why when we were in the introduction circle I spoke about unbridled fear because I think collaboration through digital technology is really exciting and I think about all the meetings that I've had in non-physical places that have led to eventual physical meetings and that collaboration would not have been possible without the technology present but I used to work at an organization where the leader had on their wall do less better and they didn't follow that mantra at all and in working at that organization what I found that we constantly did was we looked at resources as a challenge and as talking about knowing the limitations rather than working within them just using them as this like incredible elastic piece which led to I think the depletion of human resources the overextension of people and this idea that digital technology might save us all and so I think where I have a fear is around us thinking of digital technology as a replacement for something and where I have a real excitement is as digital technology as an augmentation of something instead and so to the degree that I think there's capacity in this room for that conversation to happen in a pretty substantial way I think what I'm excited about or I guess when we talk about disruption it's actually about true integration rather than replacing or siphoning or finding a creative budget solution I'll come on top of that one and can I say just really quick I realize a communication strategy can we just say our names again when we're talking since we might not all know each other with McLaughlin New Paradise Laboratories it occurs to me when I hear conversations about the history of digital media and when I start thinking about what digital media what we imagine it doing in this extension of the senses and for us to also figure out how to mark and understand the history of media as it has transitioned from non-digital technologies to digital ones because it's not really that big of a gap you know in early days of theater the body the voice the word analog technologies created media through which communication occurred really there's no difference we're just enhancing the taxonomy of media and using the digital world and I think it's important for us to see that one problem is that we in digital fields we're really not concerned with history it's kind of like an innovation inflation always that we're trying to sort of enhance and expand upon the possibilities without actually understanding where we've been and where we're going it's like what is the next thing that I can do to maybe increase or enhance or augment something so for instance we have no way of archiving digital experimentation zero way digital technology is extraordinarily fragile I know this because last night 2am I received a phone call that our server farm went down and all 8 of our digital properties are gone overnight this is 20 years of work and we're not sure where it is or how to find it whether there's been an attack so you know we're really inflating air you know we just need to understand where we've been and where we're going really I'm just shocked by the other story what is interesting because you sorry you were saying that about augmenting and or something about augmenting and replacing just to kind of pick up on that branch and also something about like inflating just like oh what can I add what can it do next or what can it just a funny kind of observation or comment is that and this is also I'm not saying that I think it's something that has kind of emerged out of some of my own practice is that we didn't in some of the works that I do now or almost all the works that I do now we didn't augment the stage manager or the lighting designer or the sound operator or the lighting operator we replace them I don't know about that like that's the most of the time how that turns out in practice is that we have the IATC kind of sound operator and or stage manager and or whoever that's required to be there based on what you're using in the theater kind of sit there and kind of get to have a chill time and get paid which is good but again it's not like I just wanted to throw that out there it's like a thing that happens sometimes and it's not that 100% condone the labor thing about it but it's been a challenge kind of thinking about like while I can't get to work with the lights get to work with light the way that I'd like with the lighting operator but maybe we can request the lighting operator and they would just still get paid anyways I don't know that's a thing that I think about sometimes I think there's a kind of keen reflection on the contemporary politic of the replacement of labor that is happening using technology and that the technology as a tool made to make things more efficient seems like it's in one train of thought as a way to liberate us from labor practices not for displacement although that is one thing that arises from it but also to free up things that could otherwise be done more efficiently and so I often think I often work together and the replacement of certain positions seems more efficient for our practices but I think that one major categorization that happens is what is the industry doing and then what are we as young artists doing there was a kind of talk about are we still kind of tinkering away and making our own systems and very much so I think we are going to go up like Max MSP and I'll be teaching a workshop in Azadora that there are systems that we do work away on our own time to try and make ways to resituate ourselves within a performance practice but also commonly working in theater often I have to negotiate with other roles in the theater and say like I could be doing sound and video but instead I can just be doing video because someone is already doing sound and then we have to link our computers and so there's at least in my practice there's been a lot of added labor because of having to go back into working with traditional industries which I would say is when I bring up disruption I'm often talking about disrupting ways that we already create work. I'd love to also take up Sage's invitation to think about disruption and in my mind there is on the one hand thinking of disrupting systems of power that have historically been oppressive towards particular kinds of people but then there's also a tradition at least in the practices I've been trained in of experimentation being associated with disruption which is associated with whiteness so like the new and the experimental and throwing away what's been established in the past as being a kind of inherent value for me is very and I'm trained in dance right comes from a very white postmodern place and if you look on the other hand at like the black art dance tradition in the United States it's not about throwing away and disruption it's about building upon and honoring our ancestors and so I'm wondering how we can think carefully about these kind of competing notions of disruption together and mindfully. Yeah I have some thoughts about that Here's a proposal that I make to my students here at the dance school which is that we have had all these design departments we've had sound design and lighting design, set design etc. added video design at a certain point and that now with digital disruption if we want to call it there's a new design department in performance and so right from the very beginning if we think about it that way then we can be starting to think about these things as artistic tools and then we also have to understand from budgeting perspective that we need a design budget for those things and for the designer itself and the reason that I propose that to my students is because some shows actually have no sound design and that's fine and some shows can have no digital design that's fine but it gives them a way in where it's from the beginning an artistic choice and something that allows the disruption to be something that's building within the rest of the context of the work of the art and so but I think that's a really good point that this art form that we all work in has thousands of years of history and just because we put some flashing lights on it doesn't mean that it all didn't exist before. So I love this conversation around time. I think a lot about time travel and past, present and future as condensed and I'm looking at my friend across the way but your name tag has turned around so I can't say your name. Whit, I couldn't hear from here anyway. Hi, I'm Sage and I've been thinking a lot of what you said Whit and I had some notes from the first conversation about looking at our relationship with the past, the present and where we want to go in the future and you were talking about that within digital media and in the first circle where that hit me most is this conversation around gaming and I'm about to sort of out my age a little bit but when I hear games I think about hand games like Miss Mary Mac like a lot of these things right and so there's an embedded technology in that right, there's a rhythm, there's a physicality, there's a connection, there are all kinds of things that are embedded in that and how do we pull those things forward, how do we pull that through and this gets back to like technology as augmenting or as an innovation and so there's like this conversation around disruption but I think a lot about vision and iteration and innovation and how these things all live together within this conversation. I think that was a ramble but that's where I landed and that's my final thought. So I'm going to pick up on some of the comments about the disruptive potential of digital technology in the process of creating theater. So I create work in two different contexts a lot of my work is totally as an independent artist in my lab doing, you know, in which case I've got total freedom as to how the process works and a lot of my work is also in conventional theater settings where you've got the different roles assigned so getting into this labor issue and I think the challenge there, so you're talking about creating the new media role which within that process you sort of have to do and that's the way we've always done it. There's been the media person added to the table but in the essay that I put on how around I talk about the different roles that media plays and when it's really getting, unless you're going to have the projection behind the event, so it's just added it actually necessarily collaborates deeply or even usurps the role of the scenic designer or the lighting designer. So if you've got interactive, this is a simple example let's say you just want the media, you've got a tracker, the spotlight is following the performer the colors change depending on the gestures and the motion so your whole pieces you can have audience members improvisational events that then trigger different media elements so it's going to happen differently every performance then you don't have the conventional lighting designer doing the lighting cues you still need to have a sense of lighting, you still need that expertise or that expertise could still help enormously but integral to the process working from the very beginning with the digital technologies so I think you really need to have the supple ability to innovate the process from the ground up that most theater companies even you know, subversive theater companies often simply don't have I want to pick up on what you were saying Milton because I think it's really strongly connected to this when I was speaking about the idea of technology as a replacement I don't think I'm specifically thinking about labor replacement though that's a really interesting perspective on that because it does make me think about how we value theater as a profession anyway and how any of the jobs within theater are valued or not valued based on a professional designation or a community designation and the way in which that then translates to transactions and money and stuff but that feels like a separate sort of piece I think I'm more interested in when the digital application or the invention of the digital is Sarah what's your title in Spiderweb show again Creative Catalyst so when it comes from a place of creative catalyzing like when it comes from a place of like is this an impulse that is led by this is what we want to do for this project sort of as you were just speaking about like one size fits one model for this project we require this kind of approach design wise or creation wise or whatever what is that creative catalyst and to me that's really exciting and where it becomes less exciting as if it's like well here's this is the way that we can make this work within this budget line and when it is led by an impulse that is not about art I get a bit scared I'll add another boss of mine which is I guess what I'll just do now but had a really strong affection for applying to a grant and then deciding how to make that grant in some way connect to the work of the organization which was a form that I found really challenging to figure out but once I figured it out I found it just sort of deeply problematic and problematic because it meant that we ended up doing a bunch of stuff that we had no intention of doing and it wasn't at all connected to what we wanted to do as an organization but was connected instead to how we could get money to do the stuff that we didn't want to do anyway and so I guess I my concern is about the way that that impulse to employ a digital technology or to in some cases replace a particular person or a form of labor related to my time should I stop? Okay. Whether that impulse comes from a place of making work or whether that impulse comes from a place of like saving money, shortcuts, yeah that's what freaks me out about it and like we can talk endlessly about Ayatsi people sitting there doing nothing like I got lots of those for you too but I think where I'm interested in digital technology is where it comes from a place of honest inquiry related to an artistic practice rather than as a way to shortcut an artistic practice that might otherwise exist in another form. Great, thank you Rob. So we are going to transition into the full circle, the last circle conversation and I'm going to ask that we all move our chairs back and then Kristen that you share your comment from that part of the circle. Yeah I think just following on that point I mean what we're talking about is an upending of process and that the process of art making is different with the integration of technology and that every piece that you're making however the technology comes into play in the conversation and then the making of the work means different people need to be in the room in different configurations and that you're finding different methods for telling stories than perhaps you've used before. The project that I'm currently developing has one team that is like creating a database that we're pulling information from of two people, another team that are building how that information gets into 25 tablets that are in front of audience members and plays integrated sound that works with singers and then a video team of two who are taking all of the data and putting it on the tablets and on different sources around the room and it's been like an incredibly complicated and fun, oh and then there's also two data minors that we work with in the afternoons before every performance. So there's a team of eight people on that project four different teams that all have their own ways of working that we're trying to integrate so I just think there's one of the interesting opportunities is how we can engage in process and thinking in completely different ways through the technology integrating it. Thank you. I'm going to kind of come back, I don't know how long ago this comment was made but sort of thinking through the platforms that a lot of this technology is built within and how we access and build literacy around technology particularly when we think of game engines like Unreal and Unity and that while there is an immense amount of technical literacy that creates pretty significant barriers to working with those that there's still largely free platforms for a lot of people to use and learn from and that YouTube provides tutorials and whatnot that makes some accessibility in terms of working with those and how that as a visual artist departs pretty significantly from like the Adobe creative suite which creates a financial dependency with a company in order to engage in a creative process and so especially around this conversation of labor and working within teams where we're kind of outsourcing our technical literacy I think a lot about how as creative makers and working within creative teams we also build space for learning I guess so that it's not just computer science departments who are building the accessibility tracks to being able to work this way, just sort of an open comment. Thank you. Hi I'm John. Just picking up on the previous two speakers I come from a particular background in terms of technology and creative and it is film and television but there's a lot of similarities I think. I mean a lot of the start of digital and this is mostly about game engines and virtual worlds and using those technologies as a starting point but not necessarily as a final part of the process so as a director I used to when I started out using digital technologies it wasn't necessarily to then have digital technologies as part of the end process it was using them for collaboration using them for in real time being able to work with actors and have camera people come in and play around and people be able to see things and be able to send that to people someplace else and so whether you actually used digital technologies in that same way at the end or as part of the process was not really necessary it was about the collaboration so again to me it's about the design process and then figuring out how you want to use digital within that but it's really about digital for collaboration and for visualization and that communication that you can have at an early stage. I'm Miwa so I'm not sure I think it was sort of like ideas that were floating around so I'm not sure what question I'm answering or who I'm kind of commenting towards at this point but I was just thinking about how it feels like there's sort of a hierarchy of technology and like digital technology in terms of like top keeps getting replaced by the newest tech and I can feel that when I go to festivals there's new tech and artists working in this new thing and they're looking for people like for example VR a few years ago and I mean I come from a background in animation I use technology I can't make my work without technology but for my own work I am making canned performances that are choreographed with tech with media that I've made with my theater company or with other companies I have done some interaction stuff but unlike own practices mostly choreographed and I think there is something to be said that like as technology kind of like the attention of technology gets replaced with the newest thing there is something to be said about certain artists who tinker in sort of like maybe an older medium but through that tinkering process in the 10,000 hours can make something that transcends and you know you can say that about like craft as well in terms of like even basket weaving if someone has like completely mastered it they can create magic and transcendence it's important to remember that and I think also that like you know like canned media performances you know in some ways it doesn't involve the tech that the newest technology and like interaction but I think choreography can also be like music and you know there is something to be said about listening like listening or watching or experiencing something that feels like a symphonic canned audience as opposed to something that is maybe interactive but doesn't have that flow and reveal of magic so just that's my thought. Thank you. Okay we're going to hear Kevin and then there were some Wesley, Kate I'm just giving the mic runner some instruction here so Kevin, Wesley, Kate I saw Claude Okay Claude but then also what's your name? Remind me of your name, Mia. Thank you Mia. Claude then Mia. Okay Kevin. Oh okay so we've come up with a couple of different sort of principles or ways of thinking about technology in live performance and interactive work and two principles that we sort of follow at Three Legged Dog are the first one is the art is the boss and the project is the team and the way that we approach the work is determined by what the project needs to grow into not by a departmental structure determined by the history of Off-Broadway Theater or any other externally applied structure. A lot of times for us that means there's a figure in the team that's a production designer somebody who oversees all the different elements of the design process but I just wanted to say for me anyway the biggest sort of effective technology on my artistic practice since the 90's at least doesn't have anything to do with big crazy video which we do a lot of in or holography or any of the effects that the technology produces but the tools that we use the nature of those tools is to help integrate the different elements of the production including live action. Isadora is a good example it's an inexpensive very very powerful tool if you learn how to use it that's gotten us into some interesting territory recently we brought we've been developing an immersive platform immersive interactive platform that went to Sundance this year and what we did was we set up a mapped room and we invited 40 artists into work in the room it's completely video mapped it has immersive sound and there are various sensor elements in there but what we did was instead of revising the system for each artist that came in is we did an additive process and we built a complex system that included Isadora, Max MSP, Ableton QLab, Unity, Unreal Engine and the system ended up being across platform having a box a computer and two Mac trash cans and HTC Vive trackers and elite motion so it was interesting we were able to get them all to work together and to be switchable so that we could completely reconfigure the system in a five to ten minute turnaround so I guess what I'm trying to say is that technology doesn't have to be focused on effects you know the backdrop video for example is pervasive right the other track in digital arts that I find problematic is the one I went to Film Knee Block Studio to see a digital musical piece and we all walked into the studio and the band set up in front of the door so we couldn't leave and proceeded to show us how they played with their toys for three and a half hours but you know it really is a matter of how you use it and I think that one of the really interesting opportunities are these integrative tools that are inexpensive and easy to use Great thank you I want to note that we have about five minutes left together and I would like for us to get through Wes, Kate, Claude and Mia so please keep that in mind and hand it over to Chris. Yeah so I mean I guess I'll make this short I think Kevin what you were talking about is really exciting I feel like as a member of Complex Movements we find ourselves in that all the time trying to have certain tech talk to different tech right and I feel like we've been able to do it through platforms such as like TouchDesigner and things like that that have been able to do crazy things with some of the same software you're talking about yeah yeah I think one thing and this is I'll keep it really brief because it's just a thing that I think about especially when the word of like disruption comes up and has been like I don't know a hot point you know but I think where I get really itchy especially like in creative spaces is when the ethos and words and certain things are just borrowed from I would say startup culture and so like all of those words like really give me an allergic reaction only because I think there are these histories that come up but I don't like my creative spaces to track or parallel some of these cultures and just thinking about the things that we borrow and absorb or don't even question when we start to bring these things up so okay thanks I really appreciate what you said and I'll keep it brief only because when I think about disruption I think about the disruption of corporate hegemony and I wonder about what we are trying to disrupt and how if we're talking about integration of these complex technologies and the amount of finances we're pouring into these sort of integrations we also have to think about learning and I really appreciate amidst this like making of magic thinking about how we are integrating our audiences with care and purposefully amidst obliteration or the obsolescence of technology like bringing technology in as a way of invitation rather than ostracization and I'd be curious to talk more about that over the course of the day Hi I just wanted to mention people talked a little bit about infrastructure and funding and what I do at Canada Council is what I would like to mention to you is that we've invested and especially for our American friends we've put a lot of money into critical thinking around digital technology we've created the digital strategy fund and we've just launched a project with CBC Creation Accelerator so there's a number of opportunities for artists to critically look at technology and I really appreciate with Sage said earlier about the notion of disruption but also looking at being more aware of the tools that we're using and not making assumptions about them you know that the amount of energy used, the amount of energy in production I was with Chantal and Sarah at a summit on climate change in BAM that was quite troubling is not the right word but there was a woman Alison Tickle from Julie's Bicycle some of you might know in the UK and what they're trying to do is get arts organizations and artists to measure their impact and to make decisions on how they can have a more sustainable approach to their lives including use of technology so I think it's something we should really think about seriously and challenge some of our own assumptions that it's okay to do the kind of things we did in the past it might not be okay. Thank you. One of my greatest curiosities right now stems from what cognitive neuroscience calls co-presence which is the way in which we somatically entrain when we're in shared space and time the way our breath rate and our heart rate come into synchronicity and so everything that we're talking about the use of these technologies happen on bodies and on brains and I'm curious about how we're thinking about whose bodies and whose brains these technologies are being used to create works for and whose bodies and brains are being engaged in the process of creation so I'm talking about from a CRIP perspective our CRIP bodies and minds being centered in these creative processes and practices for the large part no and so thinking about access and inclusion really I'm more interested in who's being centered and how are these access points being generated or not and similarly I'm also interested in how the use of digital technology allows us to CRIP time or work on alternative time signatures a lot of the projects that I'm working on right now are really experimenting with the tension and possibility that live inside of using technology to connect artists across geographic boundaries and I'm really curious about how do we remain, how do we mobilize fundamentally body and place based practices through mediums that in a lot of ways displace us, how do we engage in placement so those are some of the questions that are coursing through me. Thank you with that, with that you guys are working here I'm going to close us out because we have a hard stop here so that we can get our friends from Prague connected thank you all so much this is just the beginning of our conversation today we're now moving into a break for the next 10 minutes we'll be back at 11.30 but before we start moving I would ask that everyone actually take your things with you you can go get coffee right there hit up the washroom you can go to the patio we need to do a bit of a reset right here to get set up for this Prague session so thank you all so much