 Hi everyone, welcome back to full day two and part one of the Canada-U.S. exchange. So we discovered as we started talking to everyone who was coming to convening that we had so many more things that we could learn from each other and we had a sense from that circle we would not even kind of break the surface of what everybody here is up to and so these two exchange sessions are so that we can really kind of learn more from each other about what our work is and I think that was helpful for yesterday because it let us kind of talk more theoretically and philosophically about where the work is going and then to have this place to talk more specifically about what the work is that we're all working on. Yeah definitely and I would just say this continues one of the three lines of the goals of the convening which was to exchange. We have this amazing opportunity to be here together and we wanted to give folks space to really speak specifically to work that is talk of mind and share with one another in that way. We are also live streaming this so hello to anyone tuning in virtually again we're still using the hashtag folder and I'm so happy that you're here. Cool I mean the only thing I'll say is it's so weird for me I'm really happy to sit down because this is the room that I teach in for most of you and so it's great to sit down and learn from someone else in this room. Welcome first up is Cynthia Ling Lee she's a member of the Post-Nachem Collective a grassroots and transnational web based coalition of artists trained in South Asian dance whose work triangulates between art making activism and scholarship welcome. Also Ramona is timing and we will keep these at hard ten minutes so please help us support that. This is a very very old like little dance for camera video that represents one of our like admin calls on Skype which was our technology of choice back in 2009 and you could see a number of different things from that video first of all just wanted to call the people into the room by name Shyamala Morthy Sondra Chatterjee. Shyamala is based in Long Beach California. Sondra is in Munich and in Salzburg and then is in India a lot of the time. Anjali who's no longer with us was in Kansas so we're a transnational collective of artists and you can see us juggling life, children, different time zones, the sort of playful use of South Asian sort of kind of rhythmic and musical structures and sort of gestural vocabulary in this quote-unquote contemporary framework and then of course what may be familiar all these kind of glitches and failures of attempted communication across distance is a clearly a very like grassroots DIY aspect and so we came together to work together the collective was founded I think back in we're 15 years old now and when I joined in 2008 we started trying to connect long distance using free to inexpensive internet technologies largely as a result of lack of funding resources or the needs to kind of in a very sort of feminist women standard way like also center other priorities such as family and so we've been collaborating together for many many years as a result also as a kind of a response to a lack of like-minded artists in our own communities kind of coming from forms that were marginalized and in the particular kind of progressive ways that we're working with them so I joined I was impatient I was like let's collaborate we have this blog which is really old and on blog spot which I know is embarrassing but we have like an archive of 10 years of working together it's a really simple process this is an example we we were writing love letters to Maude Allen who is a historical dance orientalist dance figure from Canada and then she was in the US and worked in Europe from the early early 20th century so we we rotate giving each other assignments like kind of choreographic assignments then we get a few weeks to respond we upload our responses to the blog along with questions we give each other feedback as blog comments and then we keep rotating in that manner so it's just kind of non hierarchical structure we think of this sort of as our online studio we have a sort of open source policy within the collective where we're invited to borrow steel and translate each other's material so yeah let's go to the next video I will talk about it for a second before playing it so this is from a more recent work which is let's scroll down it's called as a really long name Salak San Lorenzo or two rivers two continents so over the years we just sometimes found it useful to give a bit of a thematic or conceptual focus to our long-distance collaborations out of which many different products would sometimes emerge in like kind of local pods and in different sort of forms from scholarly paper to art installation to live performance as was possible within the limitations of our lives so this is an example of the more recent work that came out of a process called borders resurfacing we're thinking about migrations and borders and citizenship across our various contexts so that included the kind of Syrian refugee crisis in Europe it included the unfortunate eventual election of Trump the sort of right wing of kind of emergence of right wing kind of violent nationalisms globally and we're thinking about that that and connections to to water and memories as well so the Salak is a river and that is the actual border between Germany and Austria which Sandra commutes across like weekly and which you know it's EU so it's supposed to be open borders but around that time in 2015 and later suddenly that border closed again and there was this like you know masses of like refugees waiting trying to get into Germany so her experience was really shifted by that and then the San Lorenzo River in Santa Cruz California where I live is a local river that was the site of the last China town in Santa Cruz Santa Cruz for those of you who don't know fancies itself very progressive but it was a center for organized anti-Chinese racism xenophobic racism in the mid 1800s to early 1900s and that river was a source of life of play of sustenance for that community it also destroyed the last community through flooding it and then that man got gentrified so you could just play and then I might be a time answers not a composer but for some reason I've designed the sound for both of these in both these cases all the videos were created long distance in different locales Stones gathered in rinks, black and vestiges of campfires did bear refugees, small fires of hope, rehoming, and belonging. Retrans-drifting, the working class Chinese who once lived and played on these riverbanks. One sentence brief closing remark I'll just say over the course of the 10 plus years I've been part of post-Natyam. We've been really trying to move from being kind of transnational to trans-local to still being really deeply engaged in our local communities, which, you know, this piece I think shows in different ways and it's part of an installation that is site adaptive. So it's moved from that context in Salzburg to San Francisco to India, Deradun most recently and it'll be in Bangladesh. So at each of those sites we also work with local communities and the local issues around issues of borders, migration and water. So this is this kind of like very rich tension between this transnational long distance collaboration and trying also to be very rooted in place. Next up we have Tully Hinkus who is one of the New York based art duo Lovett together with Kyle Lapkus. Lovett's work includes immersive installations, sculptural synthesizers, single channel videos, textile participatory projects, mobile media cinema, works on paper and multimedia performance. Lovett has exhibited, performed and participated in many cultural and educational programs around the world including among many at real art ways, Concordia University, Dijon Museum, Smack Mellon, the Jewish Museum, Agnes Etherington Art Center, Netherland Media Art Institute, Issue Project Room, MoMA, River to River Festival, The Kitchen and More. Lovett has received support from organizations including New York Hall of Science, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, IBEAM Harvest Works, Wayfarm, Rhizome, Franklin Furnace, New York Foundation for the Arts and New York State Arts, State Council of the Arts. Welcome to Lovett. I'm going to partly place performance here. Presentation. Hi, yes, improvised. What do I need? Oh, this is just your quicker. Oh, cool. Hi. So I started, I'm going to talk about one piece specifically but based on our conversations yesterday, I did want to contextualize a little bit the work that I do. I think we talked a little bit, or I mentioned the idea that the work I do really is centered on technology. I know Michael started yesterday talking about how we live in a world where technology, media impacts from the moment people are probably while we're asleep, it's impacting us. And so we really work with that idea in mind. So the technology we use, we use it for the sake of technology. We're really embracing the idea that working with media art is media and technology and the way it affects our bodies, our minds is at the center of the work. It's not in the service of another context. It kind of creates its own context and its aesthetic, conceptual and technical, really interwoven and all of them are approaching the same kind of rigor and coherent ideas. So this is like one of our earliest pieces. It's called the VideoWare. This was in 2001 that we created. So this predates any mobile devices that we have in our body. There were no iPhones, eye, anything, kind of video that we could take around. And what we did is we took LCD screens and we mounted them on wearables. So it's this costume that we each have seven monitors on our body. And they're all interconnected with wires. One of the terms I think I have there is wireful, which is something we think a lot about. Wireless, it's basically communications. We do not see. What we do is we reverse that and everything is tangible, wireful, physical. So we perform with this. And also another context, we come from like a noise music background. So if you hear something, it's gonna be loud. I hate it. It's okay, it's not for everybody. This, next. The one on the right. And I also want to give shout out to my inspirations. Again, to give it a context to where I come from. I know hopefully some of you are familiar with the EAT nine evenings, kind of historical event. They're really brought together from what I know for the first time at least in technology, artists, technologists working together, musicians, choreographers. And it was a historical thing that happened in New York City. And for me, this is kind of when I wanted to do art. That's kind of what I want to do, you know. And really celebrating innovation, collaboration, process and into this really interdisciplinary dialogue. And coming from the perspective of at the time, you know, we had all these technologies. How can artists use it? Now, not at the time. Of course, you know, artists didn't, we're not programmers. So really bringing people together to probably solve and come up with your ideas. They worked on a really tight timeline, which was really interesting. They didn't have a lot of time, but they had a lot of resources. Another one is Stena Vasolca, who's an artist and also has always been involved in creating her own, with her husband Woody, their Vasolcas, they've done a lot of really important work in developing software and hardware. And Jody, which was like early net art, you know, like really revolutionary in terms of glitch. And I'm gonna bring that out there because we talked about fragility yesterday. And so I really embraced fragility in technology as a way to connect with technology and the human body and remind us it's, you know, everything breaks. It's okay, we just have to take care of it. And so just a couple of quick things. Again, the work that we do, the performance based that we do, they come from the music tradition. It's kind of AV, it's big, it's immersive, it's loud, it's noisy, it's flickery. And so a couple of just like quick slides. And also the instrument we make. So the thing we wear, and this is Kyle, my husband and partner. The instrument, this is an instrument that made out of cardboard and like paper mache and a lot of collage. It makes sound and video, it's a handmade analog synthesizer. We attached them in weird ways. So we're like hanging between us. It's uncomfortable to perform. It's like, you have to be there looking at each other's eyes with like people watching you, that's what this is. A couple of other projects that kind of also related to things we're talking about. This is a big series we did called I Parade, which was mobile. It's like a site specific cinema. So I actually researched different neighborhoods. I'm not gonna go in New York state mostly, did little clips and then I led people. I didn't have dancers leading people through the neighborhood. All it did, it's not interactive in a way, but you had to be present in a physical environment. And when you were in the right place, a video would come up that's inspired by where you were. And so it's this immersive, a different way of thinking of immersive media in public space. And the human body, in relation to video, 10 years after we did the video wear. Here it goes, video in public spaces handheld connected to the body. Another quick reference, this I was thinking of it also because we were in these beautiful circles yesterday. And for me, that was a really effective way to do it. And also an item we have a long project we did for three years, which was called Reaction Bubble. And it was based around the idea that we have these areas of interaction. We have like physical public spaces, personal space, intimate space, these kind of areas like zones. And they really mapped out in the same way so we had the inner circle, outer circle. So let me think of that. And I will show you a little clip quickly. Switch to that. Let's see, let's see. This one, and I will talk a little bit about it. And I don't need to sound, because I actually, I'm gonna turn off the sound. No, I don't need to sound on that. This is like the sound was for the performance. So again, this was, so I did get to do some work in response to the eight, nine evenings project. So this is something that's come out of it. And this was a Russian Refinition project that was a three year research with a choreographer Deborah Goff and a ceramicist Matthew Towers. And what we did is we really studied and took really like three years to think what these four circles of interaction mean in relationship to performance space, exhibition space, and also just technology. Where does technology fit in and how do we play with these? So we work together, you know, meeting about once a month in person or digitally and then at the end, we have this installation that includes the sculptural work. The bowls in the middle that they're kind of hovering about have sensors in them. So it's actually affecting their close to how close they are to these bowls affects the video that you see in the back. It has kind of video effects. And I'll have to run so I'll go quickly to my next section, which is gonna be my final section. This section is interactive. It's interactive because I couldn't log into my arena platform on that computer. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pass this around, but I do wanna talk, you can play that at the same time. This is our current project. I've launched a project. It's gonna take a million years to do. I have 10 people worrying me on it, but I wanna talk about it and I can pass it around. So you can, this is, we're keeping kind of like a arena so can you pass it around and scroll through it? So this is a public workshop. We're right now at a residency in New York Hall of Science. We are working with these biosensors. We have a choreographer experimenting with what the sensors are doing on the video. The idea behind it is we started working at UC Santa Barbara looking at environmental issues around, in the way they're restoring like this kind of landscapes around the campus doing research into sustainability and ecology. So all the footage that you'll see and you'll see there in the photos is filmed on site. And we're taking that and animating in this part of a performance. Let's see what else is happening here. You'll see some of our research stuff and you'll see us working at the lab. We have two students, two high school students working with us. How many, how am I doing? Two minutes, okay. Yeah, I have a lot to say about this project but I think what I'm gonna say is I really, we're taking on this, a lot of what we were talking yesterday about how do we make something interactive interdisciplinary and we're really taking the time to explore this. This is the first time that I have the ability to bring in a lot of different people and I have a costume maker. We've already probably seen some of the photos. I'm designing a new textile piece for this wearable jacket that will also interact with some of the performance. And this is an experiment that we opened it to the public for like a couple of hours. We're doing another one this Saturday and people were invited to come and just kind of interact with what it feels like to wear this biosensor. Just like a quick thing, the biosensor, you'll see it kind of flickers. Right now it's very simple. We're starting very simple. When you're moving, it does this kind of flickering thing depending on what they're doing and there's a kind of a red flicker that based on their heart rate. And so conceptually, the idea is based on experiences that I have a very intuitive person when it comes to technology and nature. And so bringing those two intuitions together to on space, the experience of being in a natural immersive experience, especially one that's not manicured. That's very wild. It has a lot of unpredictable things. For me it's a very, obviously it's a multi-sensual experience. And I experienced video in the same way, in media in the same way. So the idea behind this performance is to bring the audience to have that same relationship with the surrounding immersive video and to make these connections between the natural world and electronic world. This is playing an electronic synthesizer. Play it for one second, the sound. So you hear it's noisy. And I know I'll turn out of time. Oh, we can hear a little bit of it. So the sound is all analog. There'll be analog video too. I didn't get into that, but yeah. Now then you had little kids doing YouTube videos, like YouTube dance, you know? Anyways, that's it, that's it, cool. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, thank you for that. Next up is Bridget McIntosh. Bridget is an award-winning arts and culture strategist. She has held senior cultural programming and policy roles at the city of Toronto, Mississauga and Hamilton. She's the past vice president of Festival and Events Ontario and speaks on the Canadian Arts Coalition Research and Policy Committee and for the Project for Public Spaces Placemaking Leadership Council. Her work is focused on the role government plays in creating infrastructure for the arts and culture to flourish as well as exploring ways to support and champion cultural expression in the public realm. You can find her online at Aft, Bridget and Mac. And I might also add I've known Bridget for a very long time. She also used to be the producer of the Fringe Festival when I was an indie artist. So we've been negotiating performance for a while. She's also the most recent member of the spiderweb show board, thank you. I don't have any visuals and I just thought, you know, it was so great just having the opportunity to see the other artists present their work. And I just wanted to give a shout out to Folda for bringing us all together to talk about this work. So yeah, some of policy won't. And I do think that cultural policy is such a vital part of the artistic process. And my personal work ethos is all about how to make that accessible, how to encourage more performing artists to be aware of what is happening with their governments in terms of arts and culture policy because it does guide so much of our work. So the first thing I'm gonna talk about is just the Canadian Arts Coalition. There is a research and policy committee that Michael mentioned that I sit on. The Canadian Arts Coalition, it is a nonpartisan organization guided by a volunteer steering committee made up of arts organizations from across the country with artists and arts administrators sitting on various groups. One of the groups that we're focusing on is digitally related. And what the coalition does first and foremost, we advocate. We make sure that arts and culture funding is championed, that we are stressing its importance, we are making sure that it is incorporated in federal budgets, and we also advocate for strong cultural policy. We wanna make sure that any cultural policy that is developed is based on meaningful consultation with arts communities and that it is well informed by the actual practitioners who are working and living in that world. So I mentioned that digital, and also if I'm talking too fast or too loud, just give me a shout out, you're all good, excellent. So with the digital, yeah, so there are many different federal related digital strategies that are coming out. So there's the Creative Canada framework, so that was put out by our current liberal government. And when these types of policies are put out, our job at the coalition is we review them, we analyze them, and we make sure that there is a response that is distributed out that the governments are aware that we're reading it, we're providing comment on it, and we're making sure that artists across the country are aware of what's happening there. So that's one piece of policy that we help enrich by ensuring good consultation, and then we also respond back to governments, let them know what we think about it. There are also funding programs, such as the Canada Council's Digital Strategy Fund. So this is a significant investment, just make sure you check my notes, between 2017 and 2021, the Canadian government's going to be investing $88.5 million into this fund. It is significant in terms of how digital will affect the Canadian performing arts and Canadian creative industries. So again, with the Canadian Arts Coalition, we have a very, very vested interest in making sure that we're following how that fund is being developed, who is receiving the money, how is it being used, and just keeping an eye on how that is affecting the sector. So when I go back to the Research and Policy Committee work that we're doing, I talked about digital being one of the aspects. What we are planning on doing is releasing a series of white papers, just to again, make sure that the community is informed of what is happening. Three of the main issues that have come up in terms of the role of digital and performance is one, just competition and distribution. So with the internet and just so many different digital forms, we want to make sure that artists' rights are protected, that copyright is in place. When artists are creating, using a digital medium, and that is, you know, internet it out, or communicate, internet it out, I just want the word, internet it out. And communicate it out. We do, we do, we do, I like it, we're gonna coin that internet it, yes, TM it. We want to make sure that artists' rights are protected. I know CARFAC is a great organization as well that does work in that world to make sure that copyright is protected. We're also very curious about the role of digital in the actual art form itself. So when you have anyone who can access the digital technology and create art, what does that mean for the actual craft? So if you have your traditional disciplines of dance, theater, visual art, a long history of people who have trained in a certain medium, when suddenly anyone can create art, what is the value of the actual craft? And just making sure that, well, what is that? What is art? What is Canadian culture? When everybody now through a digital medium has the ability to create in it. And then what did I have here? Oh, and third, just in terms of the roles of digital, is digital more or less a tool for innovation or is it a means of making the art more accessible to many different people? So there are just many different questions that we are looking at and investigating there. So with the Canadian Arts Coalition, I encourage you to check out their website, CanadianArtsCoalition.com, they're on Twitter. And especially with the federal election coming up this year, here in Canada in October, very curious to see how that potential change in government could affect some recently announced arts funding that happened earlier this year. So that's another concern that we have here in the Canadian Arts Ecology is just sustainability in terms of funding. So a funding program's announced, so many arts organizations plan out their season to figure out what projects they're going to do. But then suddenly when that project funding or that funding is cut off and priority shift, how do you continue to create in a digital world when suddenly your funding isn't there but the technology continues to advance and how do you reconcile that? So Segway, how am I for time, am I okay? You're good. All right. You've got four and a half minutes. Perfect, so quick Segway, the other project that I'm working on is a group called Mass Culture. And I talked really briefly about how do we make sure that the arts community is keeping tabs on cultural policy? How can it get involved in making sure that their needs and their wants and what have you are incorporated into cultural policy? So Mass Culture is a non-profit organization that is aimed at identifying what gaps there are in Canadian arts and culture research. Just to make sure that we are reaching out not just in the major city centers but we are going deep into the rural communities as well, there's many different practitioners in rural and remote regions across Canada and unfortunately in the past sometimes their views aren't heard as loudly as urban city centers. So we wanna make sure that what they need, what they want are also incorporated into just what is needed on the arts and culture research front. So we're gonna identify what is missing and then we also wanna make sure that we are communicating current artistic policy and research that does exist and making sure that it's communicated extensively out to the Canadian arts and culture community. So my role with Mass Culture is I'm their digital gathering coordinator and in the past, Mass Culture's only been around for a couple of years since like 2017 and they have been convening a series of in-person gatherings and that is going to communities across the country to identify different issues affecting the arts community across Canada and it was felt that we needed to be able to use digital to make those gatherings more accessible to communities across the country. So we piloted two digital gatherings earlier this year. The first one had to deal with municipal cultural planning and just the evolution of that and what are the next steps because as we know most cities and towns across the country, both Canada and the US have cultural plans to guide how municipal governments support culture in their communities and in most cases those policies are now just sitting on a shelf collecting dust and there are many cities who are looking for guidance in terms of what are the next steps. So digital gathering was a chance to gather people together to discuss the topic and it was fantastic for a pilot project. We had about 400 people from across Canada and the US join us in that initial gathering. It's all online, massculture.ca, you can check it out. And yeah, so now we're just using Zoom and trying to find a way to have those digital gatherings not so much be about a talking head talking out but looking at using breakout rooms, doing a lot of pre-planning to make sure that we are engaging our communities more effectively. So yeah, I guess that's about it for now. I know it's not a lot of visuals but massculture.ca, they're online. You can follow their work and yeah, but no, I'm really happy to hear. So thanks. So next up we have Future Perfect. Future Perfect is an interdisciplinary, creative studio and research collective confronting the shifting features of live performance. Wayne Ashley started the company in 2011 and Xander Saren joined in 2015 as the co-artistic director. Working across different histories and knowledge, they create unique projects for the web, park, street, theater, opera festival and more. Thank you. And Xander. Woo! New York text to read. So kind of re-orchestrated the room here. Thank you. And also can you put the volume up a little bit? Yeah. So I'm Wayne Ashley and this is Xander Saren. We're from New York City, Brooklyn. So in 2009, Future Perfect's first project sent three people to the hospital. After experiencing convulsions, hallucinations and temporary memory loss and induced euphoria and panic in hundreds of others. The work was called Z by artist Kurt Henschlaiger. We built Z in a huge room filled with fog. It was the fog was so thick you could barely see your hands. When the audience entered the room, powerful strobe lights began pulsing which the artist controlled manipulating their speed, intensity and color with complex software and computer interface. Well, pulsing lights are one of those stimuli that causes the brain to become unstable. And this instability creates a curious effect. The architecture of the brain reveals itself to itself projecting onto the retinas the most vivid pulsing hallucinatory mandalas. These are some of the things that people are experiencing inside the brain. These are the actual patterns that are happening. So for 20 minutes with their eyes open, spectators lost a sensation of having a physical body while existing in pure abstract psychedelia. The entire work took place in the brain and was impossible to document. We call this a dramaturgy of the brain. The only way you can access the work is through verbal testimony. So we have some interviews of people that just came out of the experience. I assume you're going to say something smart about something that's sort of purely sensual, which is just like all the images are what you create. That was the most sensual thing I've ever been a part of. At first it was extremely uncomfortable. I really wanted out. The anxiety was almost scary. He opens that first door and it's like boom. Once your visibility starts going you're kind of like well what's happening? You don't even know where you are. You lose your sense of space, time, emotion. I didn't even know I was in there for 20 minutes. I would have guessed like 2 minutes. It did feel a little bit like death. If you don't have a body, is this what your existence is like? If you went into heaven, it felt like you were entering heaven. I've never felt like that. That happens so purely in your own brain that it's impossible to even compare to anybody else in this event. Forms are appearing in front of you. Fractals and B-ways have just moved around. So Z represents something we've been struggling with for a long time. How do we structure and design collaborations across disciplines that enable different metaphors and perceptual experiences? To create Z required an epilepsy doctor, an industrial fog specialist, a brain researcher, and an exhibition designer. I'll share a little bit about what Future Perfect is as we were introduced where we define ourselves as an interdisciplinary creative studio and research collective. You might ask, what is that? We situate ourselves somewhere in between an architecture firm, a think tank, a research lab, and a design studio for performance. And we're not connected to an institution or university. We're an independent company. We work with clients to build and implement, design, build and implement artistic and commercial projects. We originate new work, and we consult with governments and institutions. We are a company that values, and we've been thinking through a lot about this, what are our core values, and being here with all of you has been really helpful to kind of think through that and situate that. Our core values are hybridity, failure, play, uncertainty, process, vulnerability, and time to think deep and critically, and raising money to support those values. So here's another project I want to talk to you about that we commissioned that further exemplifies the way we work. This is a piece called Shuffle. It's a performance installation that premiered in New York, at the New York Public Library in 2011. We brought together the theater company Elevator Repair Service, which some of you may know. A statistician and a professor, Mark Hansen, and media artist Ben Rubin. We asked them to consider the question, what might a theater piece look like and feel like that was completely structured and orchestrated by a computer database? Working together with Hansen and Rubin, we built a software system for analyzing the novels of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald. Complex algorithms combined words and sentences from each of the three novels to generate new dramatic texts on the fly every 20 minutes. These texts were sent wirelessly to touchpads that were embedded in books, which artists read and improvised in front of a constant shifting audience. With Shuffle, I think we talked about data, this is one of our ways of working with data and figuring out how it could relate to the body, because data has been visualized, it's been analyzed, but we really wanted to talk about the embodiment of data, and this was one of our ways of exploring how performance and data analytics might inform one another. It's a compelling hybrid that opened up new thinking about text, narrative, and mise-en-scene, and the role of libraries as generators of culture, creating playful dialogues between machines and humans. And more recently, in 2017, we were hired to serve as the creative producer for Aquasonic, an underwater music concert by the Danish ensemble Between Music. The company had been working on the project for at least six years, running up against a number of obstacles they could solve, and the group discovered that creating melody and sound underwater was obviously incredibly complicated. For example, when the instruments were submerged underwater, the tuning changed from one moment to another and was difficult to stabilize. One moment they made sound, another moment they were completely soundless. The instruments started to deteriorate and rust as soon as they were put in the water. And amplifying sound from underwater obviously has many electrical risks. To begin to solve these problems, we brought in a number of specialists. The first of which was an aquatic acoustic engineer who was dealing with sound pollution affecting the world's oceans. He helped us to understand the acoustics of water and how sound behaves in confined glass tanks and help us solve various problems related to bubbles, temperature, algae, chemicals in the water, skin particles, all of which affect the sound and volume and tone. And we discovered that every time we performed we had to create a whole ecosystem. We also brought in a future perfect team member, Andy Capitorta, an engineer and artist who had previously worked with Bjork to develop instruments for biofilia. And an electronic engineer turned to Symbol Smith who's sole job was to tune the instruments because underwater their tone would shift becoming flat from one moment to another. And then finally we brought it to an anthropologist who helped us understand the historical and cultural implications of producing music underwater. There's a long preoccupation around sound and water that goes back to Handel Berlioz, Ravel, John Cage, others. And we finally premiered the work at Operdagen Festival of New Music and Theater in Rotterdam and the work went on to tour worldwide. And we'll just show you a short clip of Aquasong. Thank you. It's all choreographed in the work. It's a very complex piece to reproduce each time because it really does create a whole ecosystem. Thank you very much. But where are we going to sit at? So, that's why I was looking. So, next up we're going to hear from two of my colleagues. I'm going to talk to him today, Matthew, who are going to talk a little bit about Howrown's latest digital project, The World Theatre Map. Where is it? So, let me set my timer. Here, I can time it. That's okay, I got it. Awesome. So, hi everybody. I'm Ramona Szczawski. I'm the producer of Howrown Theatre Commons. We're a non-profit organization based in the U.S. And as some of you know, we partnered with Spiderweb Show to produce the digital and performance convening yesterday. And now we're around for the rest of Fulda seeing shows and live streaming some sessions. So, Howrown is a free and open platform for theater makers worldwide. We amplify progressive, disruptive ideas about the art form and connect diverse practitioners. On average, about 50,000 theater makers participate in our platform per month. Some of our tools include an online journal where theater makers share ideas and opinions, a live streaming television channel that any theater organization can use for free. But as Jamie said today, we're here to talk about our newest project, the World Theater Map. So, what is the World Theater Map? It's a user-generated directory and a real-time map of the global theater community. It features information about theater productions, all types of theater practitioners, and organizations. So, similar to Wikipedia, anybody can add information and edit the map. Right now, the map is in English, French, and Spanish. And it features over 10,000 practitioners, 5,000 organizations, 7,000 shows, and 300 festivals around the world. But what does it do? Really, the purpose of the map is to connect the global theater community in order to facilitate conversation, knowledge sharing, and ideally movement building. It's an ever-growing map of the global theater infrastructure, the art we make, and the people in our community. So, on the homepage, you can see all the events in the directory that are happening on that day. I'll pull up the map live later, but this is basically a map that rotates and sort of highlights the different shows that are happening on that day. But you can also search our directory in many different ways. So, you can use it to find directors or designers or scholars in a specific country or specific city. You can discover people, shows, festivals, and organizations by their area of interest. So, for example, you could search for artists and organizations interested in puppetry, climate change, or indigenous work. You could also find shows by women or directors who are interested in theater by and for women. The possibilities are endless, and the more the theater community participates in this collaborative process, the more useful it becomes. It's really as good as the information that people put into it. So, we believe that the World Theater Map can reveal and connect our global theater community in a new way for this digital age. And we're really eager to hear, to use really the bulk of our time today, to hear questions that you guys might have about the map, ways you think it could be useful to you, both in its current iteration and in potential future iterations, and any ideas about how we can activate it in order to make it a truly useful tool for folks around the world. So, as Jamie said, obviously she's here, I'm here, a couple of our other colleagues are here, but in particular, our colleague Vijay is here, who has been sort of the point person on our team who worked closely with the developers and continues to engage with the community who are deeply using the map. So, we'd love to open it up. Yeah. I've asked a question earlier, which I didn't get an answer to, so we were all asked as convening participants to put our information in. And I've got to figure out how to do that since we're located in multiple places around the world. So, I was wondering if there was an answer to that. Totally. Yeah. Matt, so at the moment it's one, to appear as an actual pan maker organization, one location is necessary. Right. So, it's not able to have multiple things. Yeah. I would probably not enter my information because it would contribute to the hierarchies in our collective. So, cool. Good to know. Yeah. That's really interesting, because you could potentially put multiple entries for the same organization. Like, you know what I mean? Great. That's not too important. You could. Yes. Okay. And you could, like, if you had a particular, are all your pieces created digitally, or are there, like, you could create a performance for an event. That would be a specific place, but I guess if the organization or the collective wanted to just, like, be on the map, then I'd have to pin it in at least three places. Totally. Yeah. The other thing, just to say that, I mean, this would be a little bit of a workaround, it's not a little text, but there is a function to set up, like, an association network, like, partnership. Each of the individuals could have profiles that were then linked under the banner, post-NATM, but it would be a little, it wouldn't be exactly what you're asking for, but it would still, So either I, like, enter it in three times, or I do it, like, a network. This isn't particularly helpful, but just to say, it really makes me think of the idea yesterday of carbon-based reality, and, like, that this is about where your carbon-based is, but the performances are not carbon-based, and this is a picture of our big ball of carbon. Yeah, and people working, yeah, across distances, becoming quite common. Yeah. For sure. No, I think that's definitely a potential picture. I built one of them, too. Yeah, cool. Regarding shows, has it become, like, an archive of shows that have already happened, and is it only, like, running current, like, if I sign up for it, or register my information, can it become a folding space of, like, every show I've ever done in the past? Yeah, yeah. So the archives, so this is the current homepage only shows, like, current and future, but if you go to an organization's site, you'll get a whole archive, yeah. So an artist could technically, like, put their whole, like, CV of performance work so far back, and make that part of this database? Yeah, absolutely. And, like, in our dreamy vision, Utopia, it was, like, this could be, like, a living CV, because, like, you can literally link out, you could link out to, you know, the framework is there to be able to link out to whatever other kinds of media or things you would want to share about a piece, and so that's very much part of what some of the original thinking was, and how it could be used. Yeah, one thing that came up, like, a couple of times in early conversations, I remember is, like, theater people don't really use LinkedIn, right? Like, what LinkedIn might be for other organizations, or for other industries, like, this is potentially one use of this. Do you have a sense of how much it's being used in terms of, like, not just people posting, which is really obvious, but, like, people searching for artists, collaborators, events, or this? Yeah. No, but actually, well, we're able to track how much, how much of, how many organizations and artists and shows are in there. Right. But then the actual, like, did a connection happen? Yeah, that's harder for us to capture. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, we can get Google Analytics of, like, how many people are on the site at a time, but, yeah, not necessarily. We can track the engagement of, like, if I find Kate, like, through this site and be connected through this site, that will attract. Yeah, not well. Yeah, and I think that's a dream, though. Yeah. I mean, I think one thing that we've been spending a lot of time talking about is how to incentivize people to activate this tool more. And I think if it could have, like, a real-time sort of illustration of the kinds of connections that are being made, right, that could be one way that would really bring people, perhaps, into it. So that's an interesting notion to think about how we would move in that direction. I had a comment here, and then we'll go to the stage. It's a functionality question. It's about when registering any, like, a show or an organization, does it require that the person registering it is part of that show or that organization? Oh, yeah, no. It's because, okay, so it is as open as Wikipedia actually, yeah. Which is smart in terms of, like, if you have someone who's really keen, like, in Toronto, we actually have a guy who's doing this basically at the most minute level by himself. And it's called the Toronto Theatre Database. And he's just, like, entering everything that has ever happened. It's amazing. I think it's, like, it's amazing. Like, what he's doing is amazing. It's also, like, totally unsustainable. But, like, if you have a key person like that in the community who at least could just, like, enter all of the basic organizations, I think about, like, when I travel, I try to see theatre wherever I am. It's incredibly difficult to do that, particularly when language is a barrier. But even more so than language being a barrier is, like, marketing budgets being a barrier and sort of who has bought Google AdWords and who's not. You know, like, it's a bit hard to kind of navigate. And so I see this as a really exciting tool for that, but particularly if, sort of, per community, like, I'll just go home and input all the Toronto Theatre or something. You can know where they are, but they can figure it out to write in what shows they're doing. We have experimented with a program called World Theatre Map Ambassadors where we've basically had people exactly like that, like, in specific communities apply. Not even apply, basically, just opt in to be, like, the ambassador for their community and do work both in putting it into the map and then, like, sharing the map out. Yeah, and we're definitely interested in continuing that. It democratizes the idea of, like, what makes something a legitimate theater. Yeah, absolutely. A necessary, sort of, platform or place for it. Yeah. Totally. Well, that was our time, but we'll go to Sage and then I'm just curious that in such a different organization show that all of those are there tags? Like, if I want to find work around abolition? Yeah. So if you go to the search, you can basically this interest tag. We have only a certain number of ones now. Yeah, there are about 44 interest tags. And this was a list that was co-created over many, many years of a previous project and many organizations got involved in creating this kind of taxonomy. And that's really, like, the core of how people can find particular artists or organizations or festivals that have a particular interest and to be able to connect these communities that may not even know each other. So I think if you just click just underneath there, it'll have loaded now. So there you'll see these tags. Yeah, and I think we're very open to adding these interest tags. It's 1103. And we have only a handful of people. We have two folks left on the carpet for today. So I'd love to ask this group for your support if we could maybe spend a little bit more time on this. It's just so valuable for us to have feedback from folks from all over. I would really, yeah. So okay, so we're going to have to spend maybe 10 more minutes then. Thank you. Appreciate that. I have a question. I guess comment. Any like, if we could have like a vision for some support for a platform like this as like an app, like a mobile like, you know, art related, you know, like a real funding to make something that is social media that is mapping and has all these things that, you know, whatever, Google, but it's really for art and culture that is kind of like a function from the nonprofit art community to serve that, but to get real, you know, government, you know, talking about legislators' support to get that kind of, because I mean because I'm thinking sometimes like you want it on mobile, you want it on mobile, but I know like to, you know, app design has costs and, you know, hassles that are different. The other thing I want to just offer about the impact of the interests, which we haven't touched on yet, is that these interests also align with taxonomy terms, like topic terms on the Haloran website, so there's a connection between the map and the Haloran website, so anyone who has an account on Haloran that's single sign on also has an account in the map and there's a way in which what we're trying to do is have these different sites kind of move folks back and forth, right, so if you're interested in research for a topic on Haloran, you'll also see related basically anything from the map that has been tagged with that interest, so individuals, organizations, shows, which is kind of our first attempt at bringing together well not first, but one of many attempts we've had at bringing together these things that sometimes have felt disparate, we're trying to bring them under kind of one banner and let the energy that might exist in one inform the energy of the other. I just have two my gesture, I have two thoughts, one is more of a question in terms of the intersectional interests in the Haloran articles you can have, it's like opera, new work, music theater could all be part of one article, is it possible to search like multiple interests together intersecting, or is it one of these things? And then second, I just wonder in terms of reinventing the wheel and things like that, how there might be a larger call or organizations, or government organizations might be able to help connect you to people like this guy in Toronto who are doing similar work already, because I also know there's a California database and I wonder and I just think, I wonder how maybe there are other people I wonder what the call is, or where the call is, for people to come and say we would like to participate and the network could broaden so that this could be a tool that intersects a number of different endeavors. And I think one cool thing that we've actually envisioned is that it can go the other way too, right? Do you want to talk about how people can take the data and do stuff they want with it? Already at the moment we've published all of the data publicly as an API, so any other organization that is able to engage web developers can take all of this data that's a huge amount and be able to totally redesign and re-sculpt this data into something that can be for a particular application. So for example if I don't know a Toronto wanted just to know about their particular shows they can make a mobile app pulling from this data and yeah and it's a real time being able to pull that in and we have an example of using this publicly available API on howlron.com where if you go to our tags page several of the tags, like for example Roma Theater if you go to that tag page you'll see pulled into howlron.com are the artist profiles in the organizations that are related to that particular tag Roma. So that's just to say that's connecting with the people who are already doing it is a great idea and could potentially work both ways. That guy in Toronto can make this more robust with Fisher. That guy. Amazing. But right and then also if you wanted to then like take it back out and have it embedded in his own website like as whatever yeah. And then the last question would be what would be a dream scenario where you would see someone interacting with this successfully in your mind or like your ideal of someone interacting with this? Yeah. I mean that's kind of what we're like dreaming a lot about right now. It's like what is the ideal. I mean I think some of it for sure is like for me is like the person to person connection. Someone who maybe is in a place where they feel kind of isolated being like the only dramaturg who cares about climate change in Montana or like some I don't know can find somebody else and like have a deep conversation or maybe they start to collaborate. But do you want to talk a little bit about like the sort of community-wide vision? The thing about this project is in a way it's a conversation starter in terms of helping to reveal what are the particular needs out there that a peer produced dataset database will address. And we know that for Howround one of our concerns is to break isolation of theater makers and organizations around the world. And so one use that we particularly for Howround that found valuable was that for example in Malawi the theater community there has been using this to really find out who everyone is throughout the country, all the artists and they've been creating offline and real-life meetings with the help of the map helping to identify each other. And then doing other kinds of activities like kind of a book club or article club for Howround articles and then they started to write articles and real kind of it's been used as a community development tool that we've been working on amazingly. And then there are other needs that we've seen revealed like for example someone who wants to find out locally what's happening now. So it feels like it's difficult to try to meet every single need in one massive project. And so in a way this idea of a conversation starter is also like what do we do when we try to create this massive dataset and then we allow it to be freely accessible for other people to re-sculpt that. And then maybe those people can re-contribute to this project and we can have multiple nodes of development. But I mean that's a kind of utopian dream. But yeah, so it's we're kind of in a phase of discovering, thinking that maybe what we need to do is refocus and address one specific need and that is going to let other needs follow by the wayside. So that's I think where we are at the moment. But we do find a lot of promise in this idea being an open peer produced platform revealing and allowing anybody to become visible to other people. Yeah, to tag on to that I want to say that part of what this map is doing is when someone talked about it earlier is really it's almost like a remap being right. I mean because there's a sort of democratization of any theater is a theater any theater that's in this map is a theater right. It's also a way to kind of re-vision, remap what is our infrastructure right. And also address the question of like who designs what the infrastructure is. And so you know we have some folks also use it as a kind of a tool for provocation around say putting in you know all of the female directors who have done work in the last year right in their particular community. And then using that to kind of have a conversation around like look like we exist as female directors we're being underrepresented in the whole but we are here and you can't ignore the fact that we're trying to move things forward right. I think also in the utopian version and I know that word is complicated but I do think this notion of people and organizations being able to find other people and organizations who have aligned values and interests is a huge potential application of the map especially across borders right because like I'll speak for myself in the US I might have a sense of to some extent the kind of people or orgs that I feel like are quite aligned with the work that we might be doing but for me when you take me outside of the US context it's a very different story right and so I think there's a world in which that could also be a dream would be that people could really find each other to organize across borders through a tool like this right that it could help create some of help offer some of the information needed to create some of those connections. So we'll go I just wanted to point out the theater wiki which is something that spiderweb show organized in Canada it's a nationwide project dedicated to it's a community maintained Canadian online encyclopedia of Performing Arts so it's interesting to just think about how as you mentioned different kind of countries or different kind of groups of people this kind of thing and how we can kind of bring that all together this being in a global context because it's very similar in fact you know and it's community generated and it's been really useful. So I just wanted to bring it up to give Michael the permission because he knows the most but you know it's really amazing of course people are thinking about where the need is and how we want to define like what this community is and of course then all of these things are happening in places at the same time which actually brings us back to thinking about this map how can we kind of connect all of our initiatives how can we be like instead of doing those things all disparate in our own kind of communities or countries how can we kind of bring our forces together and attribute to one bigger thing so this is really exciting I think. I mean I'd be honest we've stopped putting resources into what's called performance wiki.ca okay sorry and for a couple of reasons and I'm going to be totally honest one of them was we looked at this and we're like this is better and I don't really want to fight it let's find a way to contribute to it since we're collaborating with how around all of them but two things that bring up that might be of interest it was called theater wiki originally and then Sarah Stanley was at a gathering of indigenous cultural leaders from across the country and presented it and they're like we don't really make theater and we don't want to put ourselves on the map and so we had to buy a new URL and had to rethink about it and we have some checkboxes for the type of artists you are so there's a checkbox for here first for indigenous artists to identify such also on the map and so that was just something we ran into really early with that and then I have to just say like you know we I talked a little bit about this yesterday but we made this transition from being an organization that just put stuff online to also creating work and presenting work like this and we just found that the resources that we would need to put into it to keep all this stuff up to date was really massive I in this very classroom I gave an assignment to these students to each make five wiki entries and you know students do things of varying quality and they're doing some of high profile artists and I'm getting messages from those artists being like there's this really crappy wiki article out there my career and so so then you know you got to fix that and that's a lot of human resources and human resources are money and so that's why that's moving forwards now and so I am really interested in how we can leverage your platform that does go back to the point made earlier about who contributes what and do you have to be part of the organization to contribute to it or not yeah so right now anybody can edit or add but we have like a report feature yeah so for example if someone enters in something that you are particularly interested in or for example you are that organization on that artist you could subscribe to any changes and know again email notification that that particular page that you're interested in was changed and then you can request it if you don't like it so there is you can in a way claim the ownership in a way or it's a way of the community being a self police if necessary yeah and I think maybe an important aspect of the model of this which I think for us as algorithms the most important thing is that it's a different narrative about ownership of information it's a different narrative about who can become visible or who can be in the same space as other people so that model of peer production actively creating a database is I think a model or a concept that we're always interested in trying to figure out and experiment with and it's very much in play in all of our other tools right like the live streaming platform is shared infrastructure the journal is community science and care produced so we're of a piece in using this model and how we work maybe with that yeah I think we'll wrap up but thank you guys so much thank you so much we've got some postcards here so feel free to take one if you're curious or a stack if you have a place to put them where other people will take them thank you guys so much okay next up is Lisa Marie Deliberto she is the artistic director of theater direct she's the founder of fixed point and tale of a town she's doing her graduate studies in theater performance at York University she's faculty at Centennial College where she teaches clown and just to say a brief story about Lisa Marie she also led our wrap up session to fold up last year and we were so burnout on the end of day four and nobody wanted to come to wrap up session I had like really pure pressure everybody in this room and then Lisa did the most amazing clown routine like rolling around with the microphone that like actually activated the room in this way I've never seen before and so clown is more important than you think welcome Lisa Marie oh she's a model Michael it's so amazing to be here I'm learning so much maybe we can put that on a little bit later it's a bit of a joke but not really yeah it's so amazing to be here because I'm actually really come from a clown in performance background and really you know my heart lies in the actual just pure theater comedy connection with people and I'm really trying to kind of branch out and figure out different ways that we can bring that kind of comedy and timing and performance and play into theater and in particular um in particular because well I'll just quote a couple things I heard yesterday I heard someone say we had a dream the internet would evaporate walls between people like and the internet would open up access and take away boundaries those are and you know and in terms of that utopia and talking about utopia and it when the belief that theater and performance can create some kind of social change or create some kind of can bring people together so that we can start to think about things or look at things in a different way or to to you know remind ourselves that we're human together and so then you think about like digital technologies coming on top of that and I'm in particular thinking about thinking about it because I just recently took over theater for young audiences company theater direct and so now you know I have this hat on and these big shoes to big clown shoes to try and figure out how how can we how can we use digital technology with with young people I'll just say that I came from a background where I worked with my husband Charles Ketchierbaugh right here and we did a project called The Tale of a Town it was a trans media storytelling project and we toured across the entire country over three years gathering over 3,000 stories in 200 communities through interviews and creating performance pieces in collaboration with local professional artists in every province and territory up to the north to the east to the west it was an amazing project and it ended up that we created an online story map we created a we're in the second season of an animated short TV series on TVO called Main Street Ontario and but Charles was the digital media side of that so as I move into leading this company and Charles is continuing with The Tale of a Town Canada and Fixpoint I'm starting to think about I'm on my own here in this in this digital side so if I was presenting for The Tale of a Town I would have like I have a story map I've got like a really amazing presentation with videos and the story map and all these things but I'm so brand new in TYA so I don't have any work yet to show you but I do have a lot of questions and ideas and I really would like to all this work is really inspiring thinking of ways that we could collaborate together and that's kind of why I'm here to think to look through and look at all these different things that we could bring in I want to talk a little bit about a workshop some things that have inspired me some questions that I'm thinking of in terms of bringing in digital technology into Theatre for Young Audiences I did a workshop with Alex Ballmer who's here you saw in the circle yesterday called Blind Imaginings and you know Alex was talking a lot about how can we de-center sight in performance and then I thought a lot about Theatre for Young Audiences and then also digital technologies like how can we create more access to young audiences by using digital technologies through sound through emersivity through interaction how can we get them to become more involved can technology be the platform for us to share more and to create more accessibility and that's a big question that I have can actually technology be that but then I think who has access so that's another thing I think of in Canada we actually won't have internet everywhere until 2030 so you think oh my gosh we'll live stream that's how we'll reach these remote communities this is how we'll reach these small schools those places where we can't where we can't tour and bring that but we can't actually we'll live stream it but how can we live stream it because many of those communities don't have internet so you get people to tweet and use their phone and work together but in many of the communities just around here if you think of rural Saskatchewan or rural Manitoba everybody doesn't have a smart phone you know so that's something I'm always thinking about you're trying to create more access you're trying to create more community through digital technologies but who are you leaving behind in that in terms of and who is at the table and how can we these are just some questions that I'm just putting out there I don't have the answers for example we were going to do a piece with Common Boots and Nightwood those are two Canadian companies the theater director called the election right before the Canadian election and it's an amazing piece that looks at the 2015 election through like verbatim text and people that went and volunteered through writings and we want to livestream to high schools across Canada right before the election but again it's like what high schools can do that will do that can pay for that so there's something to think about there and I also think when I saw that amazing super inspiring piece you think about the things that we're seeing and how where young people are in those things that we're thinking and that I also think also about the effects of digital technology on young people and their brains so I think about my son going to see Batman or whatever Spider-Verse and like asking me every day like are the doors shut are they locked are there bats in here what does it do to their brains and like how can we just how much do we know about that as we experiment so that's another question that I have so I went to this gathering I just got back which is why you'll see my scratch paper in one second but I just got back from this place it was digital challenges for young people in theater and national conference it was in North Vancouver and whatever theater artistic directors and general managers from across the country but the small group like it was on purpose a small group of us at presentation house led by Kim Selity an amazing facilitator and thinker he runs presentation house and we were asking each other the questions the provocations were sharing best practices and innovations between our organizations using new technologies and platforms to better connect with our audiences and how we're adapting or not to our audiences which is young people in this case as they are impacted by the new reality of the digital revolution so it was interesting because there was a lot of talk about the or not you know like what like maybe not there was also then all this talk about oh well you know we could have them tweeting during the show or we could just like these kind of and they were all add on things and again what kids have their foot like who has access to that there was some interesting talks about creating digital conversations through like talk backs like how can one school talk to another school or one community respond to a question and then see in the next community what that school responded to and how can we kind of create these conversations creating more empathy you know which is like I think a thing that digital technology can do especially for young people I can kind of open their minds to understand that there's more than just them there that people are living in a different way over there that there's people over there that think this and I think that does I hope that makes sense but they were talking a lot about like touring out master tour making one for Canada which makes me think about the world theater math and that kind like that like for practitioners those kinds of nitty gritty things that you want to know when you're touring so I'm just reporting on this a little bit and yeah and having these kind of digital conversations however I think you know it's really important and we talked about this that we all all of us they're old people because there was no young people there and really there's no young people here so that's just I'm just putting that out there too because we have a we all most of us grew up with an analog childhood and now we are in a having a digital adulthood so we are we are adding on like we grew up with without these things and we're adding them into our life we're adding them into our performance we're adding them into our work so I think about how do we actually integrate technologies into our work and how do we and perhaps that's co-creating with young people who are growing up with these technologies like young people as co-creators working with us and maybe the elephant in the room which I wrote down during that conference I've been carrying around this book but maybe the elephant in the room is is the elephant in the room that theater needs to innovate and digitize or it will just die you know is that why all of this talk like are we worried that if we don't then young people are just not going to be interested you know so those are some things I was thinking about anyways um I want to show you is that my time yeah I'm sorry I really was like I have nothing to say I'm like I'll tell you this really quickly because this is out of that digital conference I mean if you know me you know that I work by writing lots of things down on big pieces of paper and then I write them again on big pieces of paper and so we're doing this at the conference it's very on a lot one of the things that came forward so I just share it with you because anyway this is something that the TYA sector in Canada is working on it's called DigiBox Conceptual DigiBox it is really messy but I just came from that conference and um how it works is this the first step is if we were to I'm just going to pretend we're doing it so we go and research and consult with experts and technologies and companies and like people like you that are doing all this mind-blowing stuff and figure out what's going on and then figure out what we want to do what we want to experiment with and then we create these kind of like DigiBox and it could be a concept it could also be like a binaural sound system in a VR headset or it could be like a digital like a plan or a concept but we kind of package those up and then those lines are all different they each go to different companies in TYA because we're trying to figure out a way that we can play with the digital stuff with young people and so just thinking about it then investing a whole bunch of money and it doesn't work and they don't like it so then and then so each time it goes there we would the pilot would be to take a digital media expert a youth in the community as co-creators a youth collaborative designer that would kind of take the like like work in collaboration with the digital media expert to gather the expertise and then other artists and technicians maybe three to five days some people were saying I was saying like two weeks you know but to play with that that tool or those of that equipment and then to share what they learned online could be like template is so that's like kind of another like sharing and then it would go to the next company and you could sign up for the next box and I'll wrap it up here but just to say that I also that's why it says showcase sharing because I was when a colleague I was working with wanted to keep it really small and I wanted to like blow it up so massive but I was thinking also this is a way that we can like play with some of these tools see how it integrates in our work see how it integrates with young people and then co-create work in that kind of more organic way with young people and see what they discover and I would like to see also like the youth collaborator designer who works with the tool in this company then move along with the box to the next company to share actually in real time and experiment with what they did with the company before share that those expertise as they develop a new thing and perhaps even create a piece that is like that we use one technology you know as it goes across the country one scene is created and then another and then another and then another until we kind of create like this digital train of thought based on different like tools and what we can do with them so this is kind of where we're at thanks so much for listening it's amazing I'll say my last thing my question is can we build community around each other through technology that's certainly not me Kate Bergstrom Kate Bergstrom is a director and artist in the band HOTCLUB HOTCLUB based in New York City co-created with Todd Anderson Alex Dupuis and Martin Galvao HOTCLUB Galvao thank you HOTCLUB's work has been seen at Ars Nova, Red Cat and more in this excerpt from their piece Fish and Seafood created in residency at Baby Castle's gallery in May Valerie her character and Alexa Google home amalgamation is introduced to her homeowner a millennial marine biologist named Martin and begins her work hi thanks for having us via me from HOTCLUB I was very excited to hear some of the conversation yesterday we were having about different ways digital technology intersects with the body I also wanted to talk today about our own team's radical excavation of self commodification because we have so many different levels of technology that we're speaking in I'd like to focus today on our most recent residency and our work around this one character the Google home Alexa amalgamation known as Valerie what you're going to see are some really wide tech aesthetics this is a moment where we as HOTCLUB in our gallery residency locked ourselves in a basement for four days spent all of our per diem money on goods from party city to turn it into a miniature celebration and uncover different things that we as millennials we are considering in ourselves becoming and thinking about our own branding so if you want to go to the next page I'll show you this is a small excerpt from our piece HOTBOX from our NOVA or it's sort of a trailer so that you can see some of the aesthetics we're working in and then I'll share a little bit further in our personal videos and how our piece is evolving into this piece fish and seafood you know assistant you need children changing the world on your path you know assistant and you are martin I heard martin is that right yeah ok martin let's get started I would mean to log into your wifi with your password every time I get started or you can connect me to your password manager and I can handle it from there and connect to your password manager ok great Valerie Valerie got it so that was from our our piece HOTBOX in this residency where we we decided to lock ourselves in a basement thanks to party city festoonie we have tried to take our sort of aesthetic of vaporwave culture jamming the somatic experience of shopping the tech aesthetic and concepts of for millennials and turn it into a deeper excavation of our own gender politics within the group the idea of toxic masculinity, environmentalism third culture kids and then a different percussive experimentation that martin was doing with his drum kit this ended up translating to about fishing, fish, TMZ and Johnny Depp lock yourself in a basement anything can happen and so as some of you know Johnny Depp is sort of a celebrity environmentalist he also has had recently problems in the exposure of his own relationships to hit the women in his life and he is in a couple of my male friends mind an idyllic man so moving into our next into our next sort of videos we have started playing with how we are continuing to use chrome extensions to sort of jam and make chrome extensions and the creation of instrumentation on tech intersect with analog instruments like since from the 90's and 80's or keyboards like casio keyboards and different percussive instruments that are being used on both Valerie's body and Martim's body but here is how a moment of Todd and Martim jamming into the Valerie hoping that it sort of reflects a kind of sort of like Coachella mini concert vibe so we are experimenting with vibes here let's see what we got from the operation of conversational interface with intelligence connectivity news news innovations by Alex to point we just have to show you okay great so if you are the next video so we are starting to play with turning that into a more full song and then what you saw in the other video was a moment where we had a youtube video live streaming Alex playing guitar in Europe where he was on a European tour band but he was actually in Europe for a conference so we had this famous guitarist in Europe live streaming in for the show but now we are trying to experiment with how we can make it a live song and explore the intersection between death metal and anti-female sentiments and unboxing videos so here we go it's the same moment so you can't hear there but we've got a couple singers who are working with us to find that vocalization like give me the package in that moment and what we are doing is the singers one of them, Kristen Hader is a sort of death metal explorer but it's all female voices that have been vocoded down into other registers in that section a little bit of that here I'm really putting myself out here this is a song that we are developing called 4 men about products for men and it is also being told by right now the Valerie character and we are figuring out how we are going to keep moving that forward exploring the intersection between Valerie as an entity which is neither male nor female but like a an amalgamation of heteronormative patriarchal heterotropes and a character embodied on stage so Valerie in this section has learned as explained to play the Cassio Piano and is, Martim has just left his dissertation about fish and seafood to go buy at Tony's pizzeria for men a double XL like protein packed sandwich so this is, there will be some screw ups but this is part of the song it's this is a wiki page about men that Google Chrome extensions have turned into a page about Martim Valerie's learning great, another time thank you for watching, this is one of our pieces in progress and ideally we wouldn't be projecting it on a back wall but hoping to continue to excavate using like Chrome extensions and web browsing character and self-modification if anyone has any thoughts, questions, please talk to me about feedback and yeah, hopefully you can see one of our shows awesome thank you so much everyone for sharing it it's actually really great to understand more about what everyone's doing and for those of you who are here for the festival looking forward to the Canada U.S. Exchange Part 2 on Friday at the Thousand Islands Playhouse we'll continue this work to festival note