 My journey to digital technology, I would say it started even before I was at Cirque du Soleil. So I was a dancer and an actor in Montreal when it was a very effervescent innovative time in the 1980s and 1990s. So Cirque du Soleil, Robert LePage, other innovative theater companies all came out of that time. And they were already beginning to play a little bit with technology. There were people who were playing with dancers in a sound space and what did that look like. So I think it was in our minds already. And then I came into Cirque and did what is a traditional scouting job, scouting for artists, scouting for trends and design. And the company had been asked many times whether they were going to do traditional media like movies or television. And it was always no because basically at the time there were two different business models. And then media became part of everybody's lives and they created a small kind of experimental group. It was called Special Projects, I think, which was to look at that possibility. And after a year and a half they decided to start an actual joint venture company within the company that was looking at creating any kind of media product from the DNA, from the creative essence of Cirque du Soleil. When we would meet with big, lots of very interesting companies in, you know, the top companies basically in Hollywood because Cirque was such a big company. They're in a big disruption. They're looking for any kind of interesting out-of-the-box partner that might help them with that disruption. We would always hit a point after the second or third meeting they would ask about Cirque's creative process versus the production process of a movie. And there would always be this moment of how different they are. So part of my job became to both wonder about technology that had physical interactive elements to it and also what are the core experiences with digital tools that give you a sensorial experience. The conversation about the negative impact of digital technology, I think it's everywhere and it's something that is talked about to varying degrees but pretty consistently in the tech world or the concerns about it. I'm not by any means a specialist or a researcher, I just have my experience. And what I've seen is maybe as an artist and a creator that when tech is being developed there isn't enough focus on people actually participating creatively with the technology. It's happening more with interactive and also with platforms where the user is putting their own content into it. There's television shows where they're open sourcing, you know, some of the characters in cartoon animated shows and people are allowed to make their own episodes, this kind of using technology to make more creative possibilities available to people. What I'm seeing as a general rule is with social media, this tendency to almost put our identity out into the virtual space and perhaps with people that, the generation that's come into media that's born into these tools, their actual sense of self is out in the virtual world. And that's a little bit fragile, it can create a sense of anxiety. But if we give them opportunities to express their creativity in that space and to reflect on their creativity and how that can go into these digital tools and shared virtual spaces, then they're getting their identity back. As a dancer and performer, live performer for 20 to 25 years coming into Cirque du Soleil, I'm interested in experiences that are sensorial and looking across what's happening in digital tools, virtual reality and augmented reality have been the vanguards of that in the last five years or so. They definitely seem to have more possibility of creating more full-bodied experiences because the VR embraces your hearing and your sight fully when you have the headset on and AR can involve physical movement and engagement with the surface on which either the thing that's being projected into space or the surface that the image is on. And I think it's really important and important for people to notice, not just for our general health as embodied beings, but also because if what we're looking for is communication and engagement, whether it's in marketing or for a government to pass a message or for a storyteller to tell a story, I experience through live performance, when a show is beautifully designed, it's such an impactful experience because the person's whole body is sitting in the chair the time of the show. And if you see another body moving in front of you, you have a kinesthetic experience of them dancing. And if you're moved by what they're doing, you remember it in your whole body afterwards. You don't just remember it as a kind of film in your mind, you actually remember your whole body experience. So stories that engage people in a way that they remember them later, stories that have a message that you want a person to actually go on a journey with you and potentially think differently afterwards, if you engage the senses, you have a much better chance of that working. Things that come into our mind passively, we're just receiving the information, both physically and mentally passively, have very little chance of sticking. And there were people who expressed to me that they had been to see their first Cirque du Soleil show, and they remembered it the same way they remembered their wedding day. So that's pretty powerful. What I've noticed in the time that I've been engaged with the world of virtual reality, augmented reality, it's been called mixed reality now, is a movement away from the object of, let's say the headset or glasses or an object that is going to allow for this kind of content to be brought closer to people into spaces, environments. So there's a VR dome that's become very interesting lately. Montreal has what's called Société des Arts Technologiques, which is a research center, one of the biggest ones in North America. And a few years ago, they realized that they were working with business and science and different communities, and they hit a wall because they needed to content and storytelling to put into the tools, and they turned towards the arts community for that. And what's happened since is that the arts community has taken this expansion away from the object, the phone, the screen, the headset into environments, so where any window can become a screen, any ceiling can become a screen, the content and the technology is moving into our physical environment away from just an object that we have to hold and look at. And that's interesting to me because it's going to start involving the whole body. And I think for businesses that are interested in the evolution of technology and the opportunities there to start paying attention to the arts community and what they are doing with this technology and how they're taking it out into the world away from the restriction of an object.