 Okay, I think we're live on CDN Studio. Fantastic, I'm so excited to be here at the end of our very first day, our very first all digital holdup. I'll start with some introductions. My name is Iguian Wong. I'm the Artistic Director of Spiderweb Show Performance and co-curator of the Festival of Live Digital Art. I am a 40-ish something woman with kind of short dark black hair. Asymmetrically cut because I did it myself and I'm wearing a gravy neck t-shirt. I want to introduce my colleagues or maybe I'll let you guys introduce yourselves. I'm going to go to my right, which I think is the right in the screen. Yeah, maybe the middle. I'm, hey, thanks, Adrian. I'm Sarah Garton Stanley. I'm a 50-something female-ish appearing person. I'm wearing a cap, usually am, and a hoodie or two, usually am. I'm seated and I've got some dark-brimmed glasses on. I'm the Executive Producer of Spiderweb Show Performance and one of the co-curators for Folda. And to my other side is not Adrian. Hi, everybody. I'm Michael Wheeler. I'm one of the co-curators of the Festival and also the Director of Artistic Research at Spiderweb Show. I'm a very tall white guy in his 40s. I'm wearing an Atari t-shirt and a baseball cap and that's who I am. Thanks. It's actually great t-shirt. It's all great. I just am high and high after the day of showing up at Atari. Sarah, do you want to explain how it is? We didn't say, but I'm in Banff right now and you two are both in Kingston and here we are in the same picture, but it's not a Zoom. Do you want to explain what's going on here? Sure, yeah. So we're sitting in CDN Studio. In fact, we're all in three different places. CDN Studio is something that I created with Joel Adria. Joel is a technologist who was able to really make the idea happen and make it live. But it came about as a result of being influenced by a number of artists, but most particularly Stan Douglas who was working on a show called Helen Lawrence, which I was a stage director for. And I began to wonder like what would happen if we could find ways for artists to meet at a distance in a shared space and develop their work. So that was the birth of CDN Studio. And this is actually a fair indication of what it can easily do, which is to place three to four spaces together into one picture and to begin to think about how we relate to one another spatially. So welcome to CDN Studio. Thanks Sarah. So much has happened today that I can barely even like keep it all in my brain. Did I hit you in the face? Sorry. It's my gesticulating. I'll try and keep it like in this little box. When I'm out of my zoom box, I just wave my arms around like crazy. But anyway, we're talking about what we saw today. The festival started with the opening picnic actually with the green rooms, which is an initiative that Sarah's been working on for a long time. We got to have a startup event. Startup is our industry series called, and this event was called a recent to gather. It was a party, a gathering hosted by the chop. And where we came in and where we got to kind of have a facilitated opening night party. And then we heard talk to me, which is Cellar Door Products, a radio play that was broadcast on CFRC. And then we just wrapped up with a 17 minute performance by Miwa Mitreak out of LA doing her show, Myth and Infrastructure. I mean, that show just is really sticking with me. It's so magical and beautiful and gentle. Yeah. What's sticking with you guys? Well, for me, I think it's worth saying that the online experience is really sticking with me, like what it means to have an opening and to put out shows into the world. And to not feel the crush of energy and bodies from one another, even when we've been so beautifully influenced by incredible work like Miwa's piece that just ended is so staggeringly beautiful. It's just extraordinary. And then it just kind of, it's over. And she was so present and full in it. And then there's just a card that's done, you know, or Erin Ball earlier, an aerial artist here in Kingston. You know, she has incredible physical piece all alone in her studio and you feel the weight of it and the beauty of it. And then, boom, a card comes down. And so there's a, there's a, I'm thinking a lot about the tensions of online work that I think it's, it's quite, I think when it works, easy to receive, but the cost on performers and the exchange, I think is really different. I'm interested in that. I agree, Sarah. It's super weird for these like things that we've been working on for a really long time to like happen. And then they're like, we're like, we did them. And then you don't have that thing where you go out into the lobby and then, you know, and there's that energy there or, you know, I think one of the rules I learned or was told really early in running a festival is like, don't drink until the last night because you got to keep your energy to get all the way through a festival. But like, there's no people at a bar to tempt me tonight. Like I'm really just going to ride my bike home and eat a chocolate chip cookie or something. So it's totally different experience. I think this is the part of the conversation where we pull up a couple of tweets that come in from social media here. So, so let's do it. The first one I've got is from Cyrus Marcus Ware, who was the keynote speaker at the Green Rooms today. You know, this tweet is... One of the keynote speakers. Ariel was the sort of the main keynote and Cyrus made some beautiful keynotes during his speech as well. Oh, great. Well, that's good because I think that actually what I was going to bring up was a similar point that they both made, which is so Cyrus's tweet, which we have here, he keynote the Green Room today, focusing on environmental justice and important connections between fighting anti-blackness, supporting indigenous resurgence, abolishing police and prisons, and solving the crisis of the Anthropocene. And I was really left from the Green Rooms today with this intersectional understanding of all the different resistings that are required. And I think that was something that was echoed in Ariel's statement as well. Yeah, I would agree. I think Garrett talks about designer artist and university professor at York. He talks about this nesting of all of the intersections and just how it's all held under, kind of this nesting of issues that need to kind of find their way to... The image I get is to build a beautiful nest that can hold us again, you know, in a way. So yeah, I thought that all of the speakers ended up linking kind of beautifully to one another and also leaving me with a ton of questions about as we intersect, how do we, you know, what can crack open? And there was some beautiful notes in there about cracking open as well, I felt. That's nice. What you're saying is also making me think about the performance of Talk To Me, which parallel to it, there was a ASL performance of it that was happening on YouTube that had a completely different audience, a different kind of stream of outreach and connection. And with individuals or some people kind of crossing over between the two. And one of the sentences in the write-up on YouTube was, this stream has no audio period. And then the other stream doesn't have any ASL, sort of that. And just the way that right now those two things are sitting in separate places. And I think my dream, and I think you guys shared, is that we start to like smush them together more. You know, like it's baby steps where we're like, yes, this show has actors who are doing the full show in ASL. Like that's amazing. And the next step is to make it so that it's not in a different place. That somehow they kind of sit next to each other and nested inside each other. That's just like that we are all intertwined. And somehow we've teased ourselves apart, but our work now is to try and get messy and intertwined again and not be so tidy. Which is hard for us producer types. It's really hard for you. For me? Yeah. Can I just say, I'm not sure this sounds different, just how amazing it is that we get to work together and that you're in a two-hour different time zone. And I'm thinking about festival producer Madison Limer, also on a two-hour different time zone and our digital content producer who also just starred and created one of the shows and just this amazing team. Jesse McMillan, who's actually in another part of this building right now. I just think about all of these people that are spread out. Charles Petjava, the festival live stream director in Toronto and Andrea Lundy, the production manager in Montreal and Martin Jones, who's command central for all of the, you know, bringing all the streams together and the J, Matthew and just outside of Boston. Like I'm just thinking about all these people who hopefully are sharing some of our, like what just happened, feelings. But there's, it's such a privilege to get to sort of try to figure out how to do this all together and sitting here at the end of this first night, feeling in a way for the first time, like three of us are in the same space. Yeah, it feels like we pulled off an okay first day. I mean, I feel really good about how alive it feels and even actually even in this call, like it feels like we're doing a live thing and I might do a weird thing if I'm not paying attention, I can pick my nose and never be able to take that back. I had to pick my nose on the broadcast and people would have seen it. I don't worry, I'm not going to, but I feel good about the liveness and the risk that we're in right now. I know I am conscious of time, so I just want to pull up one more tweet here. So the other tweet we have is from the Theater Center. We're grateful to collaborate with Fulda and Iskwe to present this live digital performance and explore new ways of sharing art with the world. Thank you to the artists, technicians, and staff who are taking this journey with us. Tune in this Saturday at 9.30 p.m. So this is something that we've been sitting on for a long time trying to make sure that we could get everything right before we made any announcements about it. But the concert on the final night of Fulda is going to happen live from the Theater Center. No, you can't go to the Theater Center by ticket. You can't see anything there. No one is allowed in the building. And even though we've, you know, Ontario's loosened up the rules a bit so that 10 people can be in a room. We're keeping it to five in a room at all times. And we've been working really closely with the Theater Center and their staff to make a plan that's super safe for everyone and also gives Iskwe the opportunity to present a concert in its fullest manner. And I'm really excited for that because I think, you know, so far everything in the festival and everything else we've seen online, we've been limited to what we can broadcast from our homes and hopefully this concert, now that we're doing it from a venue, we'll be able to offer something a bit different and a bit of a step up to audiences. I'm so excited about that concert. It's just, it's going to be fantastic. Yes, seeing one of the photographs of them hanging lights. Just like, you know, there's like two people in their hanging lights because that's all the people that could be in there at the time or whatever. And just this feeling of like, oh, that's this most beautiful foreign thing because it's been so long that any of us have been, since any of us have been in a theater to do something so physical mechanical. Yeah. So I do, I do feel that it's going to bring that forward. I do want to say though, I don't just one more. For me, what I show like that that was in her living room. I don't know. Of that, that she was in her living room and then basically said, okay, turn off lights. Hey, everybody. And then, you know, everybody, her basically and just pulled this. It's extraordinary what we can do. And her work is such a testament to the possibilities that exist between the physical space and the digital space. Just incredible. Yeah. I have to say that my biggest tension to watching Miwa's show was being so stunned that I wanted to take screenshots and then feeling guilty that I wasn't paying attention because I was busy taking screenshots, but I didn't want to lose it. And so that's a compliment I can give, I guess. I don't know. That's funny. Like when you say you didn't want to lose it, like to me, that's part of the thing of the theater, which is like, you do lose it. Like it's, oh, now I get it. Sarah said something about what next level ephemera, like this is next level ephemera and most how we get it. It always takes me about 20, at least 20 minutes and sometimes like a year to understand some things that you say Sarah. But I was like, okay, it's just passing through the screen and let it, let it be there and watch. I turned off all the lights. I turned up the sound and just tried to be in that moment. And that's one thing I really appreciated about the green rooms programming today too, where the number of times that you curated moments for us to just be to listen to something, to have permission to close our eyes and not stare at the screen and to just be ourselves in our bodies. And because ultimately like, if I'm the willow and the willow is me, I am my body, my body is me. But oh gosh, I'm going to go deep here. But if like, if I'm me and you're you and our, like we're all connected, then the more connected I am to me, then the more connected I am to you, and the more we can do together. That's the end of my thought. I think that's a really good final thought for tonight. Yeah, let's do some more of it. There's a whole bunch of, I think really great programming things happening tomorrow. So I look forward to actually being here at the end of tomorrow night and thinking what, what was that, you know, guys, I have one last thing to tell you, which is there's a bird nest out my window and the eggs hatch today and the mom and dad bird. You can, yeah, that right, yeah, right over there. The mom and dad bird have been flying back and forth all day and everybody will see like a little naked hatchling mouth like come up and it's just like the contrast of what's happening on the screens here and what's happening outside is anyhow, I think I need to go get, have a chocolate chip cookie. That's all great. Thank you very much to everybody who has stuck with us all day or at least this end part of the day. Welcome to the very first online folder. This is our third year running. We're going to be back. Oh my gosh, what time do we pick up again tomorrow? Does anybody have it on the top of their minds? Four o'clock in standard time for some, some more of the green rooms, some awesome. And our first show is seven o'clock tomorrow night. Field notes from the future with Elena Mitchell of Seasick Renown and other, other amazing writings and things. Yeah. Awesome. So four p.m. Eastern daylight time. We'll see you then. My name is Adrian Wong. This is Sarah Garten Stanley and Michael Wheeler. Have a great night. Have a great night everybody.