 Hello, everyone, and welcome to day 21 of the Level Up Symposium. My name is Andrew Scraver, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to a sneak peek of frequencies created by Heist coming to you live from Halifax, Nova Scotia. This event is presented by the Associated Designers of Canada with support from Toaster Labs Mixed Reality Performance Atelier. I am one of the co-curators of the symposium, as well as a member of the ADC, and I am super excited to be here hosting you for this event. So I would like to first acknowledge that I am coming to you from Chachagé, which is the settler city of Montreal, which is known by the current caretakers of land the Ghani Gahaga Nation as Chachagé, which means broken in two because of the way the river splits around the island. And now this place has long been a place of conflict and creativity for many indigenous peoples, including the Anishinaabe, the Huron-Wendat, and Abenaki peoples. And so I am honored to be here to be able to share and create with you all, and so I offer my thanks. And so in this spirit of gratitude, I would like to first acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, who is the primary supporter and funder of the symposium as a whole, as well as our other sponsors, Ayatzi, the University of British Columbia, Theodore Alberta, CITT Alberta chapter, Concordia University, Ryerson University, York University, and all of our individual donors. Thank you so very much. I'd also like to give a shout out to our board member volunteers and our other volunteers, all of our presenters, and our participants and attendees for making this symposium so special for all of us. So thank you all very much. For your information, all of our symposium events will be recorded and presented in a freely available archive on our website within a few days of the event. So thank you all for joining us here today for this event. You're watching this live stream either on the Level Up website, which is levelup.designers.ca, or on HowlRound through our partners at Toast Your Lab, or on the respective Facebook pages of the ADC or Toast Your Lab. And regardless of your viewing platform embedded on the same page as your video is a chat function in the right-hand corner of the video window, you can click on the little speech bubble. Feel free to add any questions or comments that you have throughout the presentation. And those will be read out to our guests after the little demo. This event can be enjoyed through auditory or visual access or a combination of both. Now, I will read aloud all questions that come from the chat. Visual access is also supported with captioning for myself and for the rest of the speakers in the archived version of the event. So captioning will appear below directly by myself, as you can see here. And if you require technical assistance to support your access, please email levelup at designers.ca for immediate support or to provide feedback following the event. And if you enjoy this session, please consider donating anything that you can to the Associated Designers of Canada to help support our National Arts Service Organization in its goals of advocacy, mentorship, and industry promotion. Donation links are available on all viewing platforms on our website, on the ADC's website, which is designers.ca or on CanadaHelps.org. So please consider donating anything that you can. So that's it for our announcements. Thank you very much for your patience with all that. So it's now my pleasure to introduce the creators of Frequencies. Heist, a live art company committed to creating, producing and presenting innovative, genre-bending and clearly playful performances in Halifax and beyond. An important element to their organization is having a clear and strong commitment to diversity within culture, abilities, and gender. Heist is comprised of artistic director Richie Wilcox, managing director Sylvia Bell, and technical director and performer Aaron Collier. So without further ado, please sit back and enjoy Frequencies. Hello everybody. This is just a little actual candid hello. Not part of the show. I'm here, I'm Aaron Collier, the performer in Frequencies, and I'm here with Sylvia Bell, who is wearing the VR headset. And if I had a mirror, maybe I could show you, but I think you might be able to see our feed as well. From our laptop on the side, and I just wanted to give you a little background. Today we're going to throw to a clip of frequencies that we have recorded in the past, and I'm about to tell you why. We were getting ready for this, and then suddenly our synthesizers and our little devices just spontaneously broke, and it brought to mind this quote that I just thought I would reach you. It's from the far side, and it goes like this. The edge is a fickle hell cat. Well, around here we walk the edge, and the edge is a fickle hell cat. Love her, but never trust her, for her heart is full of lie. And we do love the edge, we do love the VR headset and the camera attached to it, and these synthesizers and all the cables connecting it to the computers and graphics cards. But we do have a little trouble on the trusting side, but we do have no problem with the love. So we are going to play you a clip of sort of where we are in our process, and then we will be with you live to walk through some, maybe some of the other looks we're creating and open to any questions about how and why we're doing this. But as you can see now, in Sylvia's gaze, the show is done in this way. It's direct address myself to you, to our scene partner who is somebody that you'd have to come see the show to figure out, I guess, that you might figure out in this demo. And we've placed some objects sort of around that we can interact with as well as created some immersive environments. And it's all made through TouchDesigner, linked with Ableton Live, linked to a bunch of broken synthesizers and some other things. So without further ado, if the really incredible folks at Level Up wouldn't mind throwing to our video, and then we would love to join you afterwards to discuss mortality. Okay. Okay? Yeah. Let's do it. You're here. I made a show for you. And it centers around some music that I made. I started looking around in nature, looking for frequencies or relationships between things to manifest as music. I was trying to find a new perspective, a new way to see things. Like this. A clock. Marking seconds passing. I imagined that time was sped up so that each tick was marking one hour of time passing. So 60 minutes or 3,600 seconds passing every tick. And I imagined all the things that can happen in an hour happening that quickly. I imagined Earth making one full rotation every 24 ticks. And so to help feel the days pass, I added a massive accent every 24 ticks at midnight. Then I imagined the sun in the late morning beginning to rise, setting in the early evening. And then I imagined the moon crossing our sky every 24 hours and 50 minutes. So moving just at a phase with the sun and then I sped it up the dance of the moon and the Earth and the sun. Now we tend to group days into weeks so I made a melody to count the weeks. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. The phrase repeats every week and I kept speeding it up. The sound of days passing on Earth. I began to think about what would it be like to live a year like this? And so January 1st, 1981, Prince Edward Island. Mom and Dad are pregnant with their fourth child. And Chris, Chris is 15. He's in Army cadets. And then Andy, his little brother, is going to be five this year. He's got mad artistic skill already. His friends are drawing stick figures and he's drawing three-dimensional people. Mom and Dad are really hoping for a girl this time. And that's not quite going to work out. But sort of. Listen, the days are getting a little bit longer, more sunlight every day. And then, as the seasons shift, I'm born. It's a complicated birth. Mom loses so much blood. She almost dies. But she's strong and she pulls through. And after a brief stay in the incubator as I was very tiny, Mom and I come home from the hospital as the days continue to get longer and longer, more sunlight. The air is getting warmer and warmer. At last, summer arrives. The best season on PEI. Mom and Dad, Chris, Andy and Aaron. The best season on PEI with bike rides and beach dates. Fresh strawberries. Happing, catching fireflies and jars at night. And Mom and Dad, they have to work really hard to have that yellow bungalow where we live, but we don't want for anything. The days are already starting to get a little shorter. Evenings are starting to cool off just a touch. Autumn is approaching. It's Mom and Dad's favorite season. And then, as the leaves begin to turn, I'm six months old and I'm able to roll myself on my back from my abdomen and I'm able to grab my feet. And the world is so new. It's so real. Isn't it something being born? Isn't it something being nothing and then suddenly being something? Less and less light. Cooler and cooler temperatures. And then, it's winter and it's January 1st, 1982. Happy New Year, Pides. As all the water on Earth follows the pull of the moon, visualizing a year this way, it made me think about how all the seasons and the time of year is just referencing where we are on this line, on this path. And I thought about how we're all born and we're all going to die somewhere on this path. Oh, this is so easy. Are we back? We're back. So, we're just going to try a little live demo here. This is an excerpt from later in the piece. Here we go. So, here's the new perspective. The sound you're hearing right now is green. I made it by taking the frequencies of several shades of green and then dividing them by two 40 times. So, green light, 40 octaves lower and transposed to vibrating air. It's a pretty high note for me to sing, but try and sing green 40 octaves lower with me. Nailed it. Try and sing green 41 octaves lower. 42. 43 octaves lower. That felt good. Green light is mom's favorite color. Green light is just photons, tiny packets of energy vibrating really quickly. And to be green specifically, they have to be vibrating between 540 and 580 trillion times per second. No big deal. Deep red like the sphere in my dream. Those photons have to be vibrating 400 trillion times per second and it's close to the lowest frequency that we can see. Making this music, I figured out that people can see about an octave of light, but they can hear about 10 octaves of sound, which is I guess why I can sing the same note at several octaves, but I can't really picture a color an octave above green. Go on tree vibe. From the sun, 146 million-ish miles away. May the trees have spirits. I'm a teenager. I'll start to come here alone. I'm sure how to deal with the sadness I feel back. We have this band called Permabuzz and we play at these local all ages rock shows. The best thing in my life right now is being in a mosh pit, slamming my body with as much force as I can into a mass while a band called System Shit plays music that can only be described as a lawnmower driving over a field. He wants to open up and get close and he stops me one day as I'm leaving the house. He's had a few drinks and he's got tears in his eyes and he says to me, you're our smartest child. We lost the child once. He kissed me, really brave and vulnerable thing for him to do. But I couldn't see it. I couldn't see anything except my own fear and shame and angst. That's the one time that he was able to mention your death to me. Why I feel depressed. I have no reason to feel depressed. I'm ashamed and I feel gross and horrified and disgusted by my body and by my thoughts and who I am. I want to be somebody else. Sometimes I feel a grief that is so acute that I want to peel off my skin and merge with something bigger than myself. The dream still haunts me. I'm beginning to wonder if it's somebody I know. I'm beginning to wonder if it's you. Then I had two choices. I could slow down and go inward. Figure some things out to speed up. I'm not going to go on the stream. You don't have to go on the clock. It should be up near the top of the queue list. It should be up near the top of the queue list. Yay! Thank you. So we're back. And I think things worked. Sure. I'm going to grab you this. I'm uncertain if I should leave my microphone on but I think maybe I'll pop my in ears out. It feels a little bit like removing necessary body parts. How do they get in there so deeply? Hi Andrew. Hello. You too. It's great to have you here. Thank you for that. That looked awesome. Thank you. I'm excited to see where the final product is. Where you go with that? Soon we open next week. In our process right now we're three quarters probably through the show. What you saw in the video clip was a number of days ago something near the beginning of the show which we wanted to show to you because it kind of sets up the sort of beginning of the story and the story does take place over the course of it's kind of like a over my 39 years of time so that's part of my adolescence there but that's probably halfway through the show maybe a little bit past halfway through the show where we were there. Very nice. Now we've got team members here why don't you all just take a second and tell us what you're doing. Sylvia Bell, I'm the managing director with Heist and the VR operator for the show, for frequencies. So we'll jump in here. I'm Matt. I developed a bunch of the touch designer modules so a bunch of the visualizations for the show. Cool. I'm a technical assistant. I'm Anne Marie. I'm directing. Great. And I'm Maria and I am assisting with stage management. Great. Well, welcome everyone to the show. Yeah, this is awesome. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your inspirations actually before I say that if anybody has any questions in the audience please get them in now. I'm going to try and finish this up by the hour because they got to get back to work. So yeah, just tell us a little bit about your inspirations and how the show has come to be. Okay. Well, it's been in development as started in 2018 actually in Montreal as a sort of proof of concept the music came first taking these kind of pseudo-science experiments turning into techno music of maybe trying to change the perspective on time so that you could get a different sense of the relationship between things. In that piece you heard green and at the beginning you kind of get to feel the way the sun and the moon feel if you sped them up watching them from Earth. And there's a number of these kinds of experiments that I was trying to do and I thought, well, why not tell a... well, why not? But I had a couple ideas. One was that singer-songwriter shows you get a chance to understand a bit about the songs and a bit about the artist but in techno shows that doesn't really happen. You don't really go to the club and they bring you in and tell you all about their life so I had the idea that maybe I would try this kind of idea of a techno-songwriter show and so to illustrate one of the pieces I just decided to tell the story of 1981 and that sort of cracked open the story nut and yeah, shortly thereafter this team that you see now slowly one by one started to get assembled and Marie's been with us the longest it was a live show I performed it on I put a circle down on the ground and we pointed two projectors at it and we had a ring of 20 people sitting around that circle and so it was a really intimate sort of actual breathing the same air and particles show and when the pandemic hit last year we were actually sort of start experiments on how you scale that kind of a show so it felt great for 20 people but what if you wanted to do it for 200 people you know try to multiply everything by 10 and see if it still works and so we were going to try those experiments and testing and figure out how to maintain some sense of intimacy and some relationship like that while having a bigger sense of scale and louder sound and more spectacle said no you wanted an intimate show you're going to get one so that's when we started to dream about the various ways to do it digitally and the sort of idea of having Sylvia in the VR set sort of personifying the person that the play has already been centered around is the route we chose to go with this that's kind of the origins of how this came to be that's great and so you are opening next week with an audience in the space well no Wednesday we're going to open but so here in Nova Scotia we are quite blessed in terms of how the pandemic is feeling for us right now and we are able to have audiences but we had been planning to not have audiences from the get go we are going to try some experiments with some invited audience because it's easier for us to control we are here at the bus stop theater in Halifax which is a wonderful small space but it's also a very DIY space and our team is working to the max so once the factoring in the treating you know the audiences have to be cared for in a different way in Covid times as we all know so we are going to try some experiments with people we know to get a sense of what it's like to be in the room it's a very much Sylvie and I interacting in a space with nothing while you see it on the tv screens and see how it's all put together but yeah that's really fascinating I love watching the tiny screen version of you performing it live while watching the VR version I think that's really great could you see my ridiculous slow motion running at the same time as how cool it actually looks yeah There's there's obviously another camera in the back that's pointed on you as well as Sylvia's or no for the for the running part. Yeah. Yeah. So we have two cameras like there's a VR set, which is an Oculus Rift S and attached to the front of it is a Z mini, which is like a stereo camera. And that those are Sylvia's eyes and your eyes for the most part. And then we have a connect camera in the back that we end up to do that kind of sort of multi 2D compositing thing. That's great. That actually leads into a really great question from our audience. Can you talk about the process of your performance development in relation to the VR world development? Yeah, we can. It's it's like every day right now is is this our process? I mean, you can you want to speak a little bit about our process and like how it's coming to be as a schedule and as a team? Yeah, it's been a completely different ballgame than even we realized it's software development. And I don't think that, you know, building a theater show, you don't typically tend towards that kind of a schedule. And we gave ourselves four weeks and we hired a whole, you know, virtual reality team to help build all of the modules and all of that that software so that we got to rehearsal and ready to use those things. And realistically, we should have had six months because four weeks allows you to find out what you want and how to use it. But it doesn't necessarily allow you the process of properly documenting every step and making sure that every connection is connected in a way that you can go back and easily change it and tag it on to something else. And so that's just that. But also, we're still a theater company or a live arts production company, you know, we struggle to get funding to do a three week rehearsal process, let alone a six month development program process to hire a team. We have five people that we've hired just to help support Aaron in the development of this program. And Aaron only started coding in January of last year. And here we are in a massive software development program. And so scheduling is completely different, you know, we don't just have rehearsal time, we've got a rehearsal schedule that has three full days of rehearsal a week, and a couple of half days because and a full day that's just development. So we've really had to manipulate what our schedule looks like to suit the fact that we're not, it's not props and carpentry and lighting and all of those things, it's software development. And, you know, we've started using a photography lighting because the cameras don't like theater lights. And so having to come up with different ways of maneuvering that has been a huge part of this process in trying to get us to Wednesday of next week. So yeah. Yeah. And then your process as a direct tour, this is like, don't look at us, look at the screen. All I want to do is look at them in the space and it's not so interesting. But you know, when I do look at the screen with everything integrated and all of the virtual reality and worlds, immersive worlds. But I will tell you, there is something fascinating watching ostensibly two actors connecting over a deeply personal and intimate story. We ran probably 55 minutes, all connected for the first time the other day. And the first thing that happens is these two embrace for a really long time. Because Sylvia has been just clocking minute intimate details of Erin's every movement, every thought. So the blocking, although in the theater looks not so interesting, actually, I feel like Sylvia has managed to find a way to shoot this in a personal scene partner kind of way. But that for me is the new way of thinking about directing. Like, yeah. Well, putting, yeah, it's not Sylvia shooting it, but also Sylvia, you know, for anybody out there who's been in VR. Like, I'm completely in my own world. Like they're regularly talking to me. And I'm like, I know you're in front of me because I can hear you and I can feel your energy, but I can't see any of you. Like I need to remind people sometimes like, can I come back to the room? Can I be here? Two dimensional for it. Yeah, so that actually that that does lead into a question that I was wondering about how much do you ever How much of do you, Erin, do you see in your in your world even in the even in the forest world? Do you have can you see the objects that are around you? Is it all just What you see what you see is what I see. So any movement that is there is because that came came through me. And so there are worlds where we have different levels of the VR where we see Erin in full, even though we are in that VR world. Like there's a transparency level that we can play with so that you can see more of him or more of the space that we're in. We go into technicolor sometimes and it allows us to look at the whole room and you see everything, but you're in this this crazy color. Um, and then there's other times where I'm pulling the cord and pretending to go around a door and there's no door, you know, like your brain does an interesting thing because While your brain knows what it means to go through a door, but that door is not real And so just trying to wrap your brain around a movement that's been trained inside of you That's not there, you know, like clocking that it's okay to take that step forward Even though it looks like you're going to drop you're not going anywhere, you know having that trust in In your ground and that people in the room are going to stop you when you want to run into whatever is There that you want to run into I mean that was an interesting thing that we didn't necessarily anticipate when we started this because this You know, we were like let's do this. We don't know if it's possible and then we started it so so many things we learned In process and one thing is that like with a vr set or at least our vr set. There's there's drift In terms of its positional tracking. So When you center a scene And then you play for three scenes You're not really centered anymore things have a drift to them in a strange way And so we've we've got spikes on the floor for sylvia that they're like braille They're raised up and if they feel a certain way sylvia knows which way that she's facing Um, and so that we can be like as soon as you get there we can fire a little centering cue for you So that the next scene is going to come up where you think it should and so that you can get angles on things It's A bit of a trip Yeah, and the the learning how to trust and not trust the system at the same time We've done a number of runs where it's like Hey, well, we're gonna just have to go with this now And it's completely opposite to what it is because we both know what objects are appearing in the room We both know the story in a way that like we're just gonna shift things around and move and engage Because how what do you do? We're in the middle of a scene and we've got to like start learning how to move forward in that trust of each other and telling the story and hope that next center spike it comes back to us, you know Yeah, yep That's really fascinating. It's a very different way of working than you'd be used to in normal theater, right? So are you uh, sylvia? Are you normally do you ever do do you act normally? Is there is this something also completely different? No, I'm like the I'm for this thing. I don't even want to like place categories or like Like not my thing. I'm a stage manager production manager. I deal with the things that are happening behind Uh, and Erin and I had big conversations around whether or not this was for us But we are heist we do try and keep our team small so we can tour and and make those choices so that In covet times if we need to set this up in the living room then, you know we've already committed as a company to being in each other's bubble, so we made those choices and um, I've been around the show for so long that it just felt like it was the right choice uh to to put me in it, but um It's great. I questioned it at the beginning am I the right person because I don't have any acting I've been in a number of rooms But that's not that that wasn't what I would have considered my instinct to be there. Um, but it's I think it's working out. Well, I think it's You always want to see partners listens deeply and that's exactly what sylvia's doing But also she gets into very committed actor positions Very physical work, you know, we had to have an alexander coach movement coach come in to you know Yeah, you know figure out how to I learned how to move my head. I didn't know I was moving my head properly, but Things of having that set with the like cable and though it's not It's maybe three pounds four pounds with just that little bit of a tilt from the cable Um, but it does make a difference in how you're moving your body and and how far you can look up and and how to adjust in that way was You know big it was actually a huge help to just Learn how to move my head properly made made a huge difference. So yeah Yeah, for sure. It's uh, yeah vr systems already when you're you're moving. There's already something that's strange But now you have to position yourself with another person who's there Uh, and make sure that you're catching your spikes on the ground. There's a lot of complication that's involved in this So so kudos When you run things too, it's funny right because like Like in a theater too like when you reset like it's it's just like okay Like if you're gonna reset for a big thing, you know, like you have a revolve Okay, we'll move the revolve back and then we'll go to another lighting cue and then we'll get set and we'll reset all the Props and then we'll kind of go back and then we'll start running and whereas this is just like Bam, you're in a whole other immersive world. That's terrifying. Sorry silvia. We should have given you a heads up Just the the nimbleness that you can you can transform even without moving is It's awesome, but it's also learning how you build with it. Yeah, how do you go back and try something again? How do you tweak something? Order you have to load things. Yeah What engine we're running this in is that the right? Yeah, that was that was actually that was coming from emily backstage So what yeah, what engines are your worlds running in? It's it's all touch designer so it is um So ableton is the ableton live is the timeline and All the music is in ableton live and then all the most of the automation and cues are in that timeline Uh in ableton and normally uh before it it stops before you do your first presentation in front of people um, I have this little Ring and it's got a button on it that sends midi So I wear this so that I've got a little mobile go button And so I have a little you know cue list in ableton that I'm able to step through so that I can cue Moments, uh, just sort of based on you know, where we are and where music is um, and then yeah, all that's feeding into touch designer, which is you know loading different pieces of geometry and different render pipelines and Um and that kind of thing and and then all of that is fed to the oculus That's super made by facebook, which is terrifying Yeah, that's not great, but But that that uh that pipeline of information is really Fascinating, I love I love the idea that it's all built in touch designer That you don't have to have something like unity or unreal as well Controlling the whole thing so um What what is that ring? Can you just what I've never seen that before can you Yeah, it's called a uh, uh a wave A genki g e n k i wave and you can see that like it measures um Pan and tilt you can see the light sort of it knows what's going on here Um, we don't use any of that, but it also has a little button that will send a midi message Connects by bluetooth And it actually is really effective and very sensitive and very accurate And I think it works all the time. In fact, the ring is not what broke It's it seems to be ableton that broke ableton stuck listening to and sending Certain channels of midi right like moments before we joined your call And then and then I heard you you you did a full reset and it still didn't both machines Fully down back up all the software rebooted And uh, and no dice, so we're still in that position and that's where we'll start when we go back to Back to work fix it. Uh, great um So another question that came in from from the audience was um, how much of the vr was masking The set and how much was your lighting? well, um I mean in in In the forest scene that we did live for you The vr is masking everything Not one bit of the real world comes through that scene And so that's like that's sort of the The show starts in this room Ostensibly and sort of the elements sort of are are built and it does kind of have a Journey that is like more and more surreal and more and more of a lift off and so There there are times when we are in this room and the vr is kind of like the way we started this presentation And in the video where you can see there there's a vr Uh, there's a virtual object in in this space that we can move around And then but we do go to those worlds and in that case Like the the connect camera has a really sort of um very It's got a lot of character, but it it does background subtraction So the connect camera can just see a human and cut out everything around them And it's also kind of the cameras pointed into kind of a black void into blacks And so that is just like a sort of pasted into a scene that is fully immersive for sylvia As you saw on the screen, I mean sylvia is not even really facing me and i'm not facing sylvia And we're still able to sort of assemble it in those ways, but Um, so we're we're figuring out also about how to Yeah, what what? How much of the room will people see once we're we're fully done here when we're open next week? We're not sure at this point. We have almost everything blacked out though And you can just see the lights up top the keyboard and and erin behind the keyboard feels like the fundamental set piece in the room And and kind of the home base in many ways of the story. Um, but it's only there some of the time Hmm Okay, cool. Yeah, that's um, so so in terms of the the the times when You see sylvia in the camera And then also in the world. There's a question actually is our respite. Do we see sylvia in the 3d world? It did intentionally. Okay. Yeah, it did. I was trying to get out of that, which I don't know how that I don't even know here. I've never seen that happen in that moment on that carpet. Yeah, it's a little bit too far But yes, that's not intentional. Yeah, so so in again, I guess kind of just coming back to the sylvia Do you do you see erin's connect feed into your camera as well? When you're in that world Exactly what you saw. Yeah This is what's here. Okay, so okay That's really interesting. I was able to see that I was catching myself trying to get out of it But also being like I don't actually know where I am in the room I don't know how I got here And there was one point where I like had my leg out behind me trying to feel for my braille on the floor And someone went to move me and I was like don't move me because then this is going to be off So it's like I'm trying to know where I am so that I got a sense of where I am in the room But I can't move because then erin will be off of center And then shoes will be going through him And so it's like all of those things is the I feel like the most focus that I'm in is that I have to be aware of my frame So not only am I trying to make eye contact with erin, which is hilarious because we have a lot of like this closeness Um where I feel very direct, but erin's looking into a machine So I feel that's probably why we have to embrace on the other end is because I've been looking so directly into erin's face for An hour and 20 minutes But then there's other times where like that moment where we're separated from each other and it gives a A very different feel but that that disconnect there today where I was like, I don't have any idea where I am I can't move. I don't know how I got into the shot like there's a You know That uncertainty of like well, I just keep him centered and hope that I'm not going outside of this I don't want to get lights in I have to you know And as you see the show next week, there's elements where it's important that I'm keeping my frame So that we're getting all of the elements. I have to keep erin in I have to and what's interesting is that my frame Isn't exactly your frame. No, your frame is bigger than my frame So knowing that though it looks like I've only got half of erin's face You actually have his whole head and a little bit of his shoulder So trying to constantly be connecting with erin to know that the eye contact is correct But that the frame is also carrying what it means to carry So my eyes are actually constantly going but my body can't If that makes any sense the oculus in and vr First of all like silvia witnesses this all in 3d, which is kind of fantastic, but then You know the the oculus moves into the periphery whereas The periphery is actual pixels on our screen that we see completely But the oculus, you know things that appear like right there like I can see my finger But not really like I can't actually see my finger. I just can kind of feel it But on the screen it's clearly right there and so that's an Yeah conundrum and that's and that's really because the uh inside the Inside the vr. You've got the two tiny Your tiny lenses that you can only see what's being seen here, but the computer program is taking two Screen resolutions and putting them together and then there's extra information. That's there. Yeah, so yeah, that's uh This is uh, this has been really delightful to hear about Uh, yeah, so you want to talk a little bit about the the sound setup So it's running through ableton. What other what other pieces of equipment are you working with? So I'm wearing a lab a wireless lab And I just have a set of wireless in-ears and silvia is kind of set up with a set of headphones as well And actually our whole team is on headphones. So We're like no one can hear the music like the sound in the room is feet and breathing and What's that we could show We could take you over there The uh, yeah, maybe this is interesting. Go look at go on a journey. Love it So first these are all the inputs, which is a mini keyboard And and some synthesizers that normally work all the time Going into a mixer and so maybe A percentage of the music involves live synthesizer Mangling and manipulation and there are numerous moments of piano playing in the show and the piano kind of plays are important role in story So this is home home base for that Uh, and then yeah, this is Uh, this maybe we go around the other side. Yeah, that sounds good Uh, here's connect land connect and I have a monitor so I can see myself run below there Okay And then the other side is this is where the computers and alex and matt live manage the stream And manage touch designer. So touch designer and ableton run here on two different computers And a third computer runs the stream and we actually have five computers going during this show because We have uh, the ableton computers for touch design computer the stream computer I'm developing modules on my laptop and you're doing it in work And we're actually serving to you on this one Plus phones and prices so at any given moment, there's like there could be like Five to eight screens doesn't cause No, not at all this what could possibly go wrong When you have five computers running at the same time I mean, it wouldn't be making a show A digital theater show in this time if it wasn't all Junk multiple screens and computers all cobbled together to Yeah, what I what I enjoy about it from my perspective is that once the show starts I have no screens and I see none of this All I see is is sylvia's body and her her glass robot eyes And my my keyboards and I have a good, you know, I have a good sound mix happening And Yeah For me during performance this kind of melts away until it doesn't Work properly. Yeah, and that's and that's that's a perfect place for you to be As a performer It is and we've we've actually talked about what it means to be in conversation with this equipment anyway Like the the acknowledgement of it in terms of being like What happens if we go on a queue And it's way off center or it doesn't load the module or Well, you know, what what do you do in in those cases? You know shows that are usually this Complex well first of all live shows that run this way are are pretty new Um, we're using technology that you know is really first generation in its It's kind of, you know usability And reliability maybe And we don't have redundancy like we don't have a whole other rig of this running At the same time that we switch to if this doesn't run So we've we've been talking about what it means to be Sort of If if things go wrong to say To to stay with you and say there's a there's a problem with the magic machine And So we're gonna have our our magic helpers back here Do some things. Why don't you have a look at this little glowing sphere? And I'll walk you through what i'm about to do. I just need to go back here and reset the feedback parameter And try to load the module again, and uh, yeah, that's That's something we're figuring out Yeah, it's it's a conversation that's come up a couple of times to throughout the symposium is Is how do you how do you really show liveness within a performance? How do you how do you know in this kind of digital context that we live within and Oftentimes the answer is either interactivity from the audience or failure On the point of the of the performance, right? That's how do you how do you take those moments and turn them into part of the show and continue going with it? That's all that it's very exciting for us of our show kind of yeah does sort of center on the fact that I Really I kind of built this show For well for the audience, but also for for the person in the play that I'm with And so I have that little a little permission slip to be like The show I built is it's still buggy Yeah, it's very it's very personal on that on that level and so so your interaction with the audience can be Personal like this is a thing that I've made and I'm presenting to you and Yes, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's really Unlike today And there you go, we know we're live everyone We're actually here We're here talking in the moment Um, so yeah, this has been really great. I think uh, we we've reached the time and now you all need to get back to work And make it ready. Yeah until for wednesday. Yes. Yeah, this is a practice making more mistakes Yeah, thank you for having us as part of this festival. It's truly incredible. What uh, you're doing in terms of this huge Look into digital dramaturgy and design It's incredible. It's huge too like Yeah Yeah, we're we're we're almost at the end of it. It's been four weeks. It's been very long Uh, but it's been really great and thank you. Thank you for saying that Thank you for coming out and being here sharing with us. I know it's it's always very Nerve-wracking when you're in the middle of a process sharing your work and uh sharing your Potentiality for failure. So that's it's really We really appreciate you being here Yeah, yeah, and uh, yeah, and then the parts that worked worked really well and i'm very excited to see uh See it next week. Thank you hinder. Yeah, thank you um So everyone thank you very much for coming out and checking us out if uh, you enjoyed this or any of the other parts of the symposium Uh, please donate to the adc You can do that on our website or on designers.ca, which is the adc's website. Canada helps.org They all link to the same spot. So please uh, go ahead and donate if you can That's it for today. So please go and check out our live digital presentations on our website and you can check out Some other shows that are happening tonight and this weekend And uh tomorrow we have a touch designer for live performance at 2 p.m. Eastern and then we have ableton for live performance. So if you liked what you saw in this Come and check it out because um, there's still time to sign up before tomorrow Uh, thank you very much for your time. Have a great day and uh, we'll see you tomorrow