 You're here in the, and I'm very happy to have Andy Moritz and the whole team back here and the public and other greater festivals. This has been a partnership that we've had for three years after the organic floor, some years before that, and we both, and I'm sure a lot of you have sort of found that there is a need for conversations about while we're presenting the festival and all the amazing work, how does work get made, what goes into supporting and making the work and how do we support the artist and how do we just keep the conversations happening and to have that intended with seeing the work is sort of, you know, quite the courtesy of what's happening behind it a little bit. And I'm so happy that Andy's back here and the amazing speakers that we have for the next two weekends. So we will be having these cultural sessions from noon to 1.30, the Saturday, tomorrow, and then the following weekend also. It's also going to be screened live on PowerRTV, and that's Jamey Galoon and everybody who's playing. So there's me and Pat. This is being screened, so you're not happy about that. Either, I don't know, stand the camera or go to the other side of the computer, I guess. So I'll have again the festival run for two weeks, and you'll find information about the festival downstairs with lots of materials, but I'm going to give you back to Andy. So Andy? Thank you. How's everybody doing? Good. I'm good. I wanted to start taking me in, and there's just Johnny Mark Russell. I don't know if there's any. Oh, that guy. Yeah, that guy. So I just, you know, he's over there, and he found it under the radar, and he also made a call to Bob Bossel, and I used to work for him if he has one, so I'm going to do. And he was just breaking up, saying, I'm sure I'm going to do that in the Internet today. And ten years later, we're here, and so I guess that's a big round of applause for Mark. So just a quick note. Two quick notes. We just grew up at the APAP, the Uptown, the Midtown, where the fans and fans still are. And we're culture-wide, and the Invisible Thought Arts Center launched a cultural community project. So that's all about arts and economics and cultural production. Go to culturalcommunity.org. There's reports around. There's people with buttons that can tell you about that project. You can get a button. So those people are already going to tell you about that. And there's events and stuff. And all of this is kind of related. This today is a discussion about art and technology. We've got some amazing people here, as invited guests. But we are using the format of sort of a modified version of Relvious Weavers along the table. Oh, it's a sort of like open participatory format. We've modified it because a lot of the things that we tackle are pretty big ideas. So we like to sort of have some invited guests to sort of really get things rolling. But this is the etiquette guide. You know, if you feel moved to, like, speak or you're like, I have to say something, the only real rule is, like, come to the table and take a seat. It's hard to not talk from there. But trying to, like, act as if they come here. If there is not a seat, you're welcome to ask somebody before there, since they don't have to give it to you. But, you know, the idea is that it's like a dinner party conversation, but the food is apples and competition. And I also want to, before we get started, I want to give a big, big thanks to Bill O'Brien, who's here from the A&A. Bill organized a talk with a number of these people that just happened up at the hotel and it's been a great person to bounce ideas off of. And so I just thank you very much for helping me make this possible. All right, so I guess I'm going to sit down and start and then go away. As I mentioned with Mark, like, I, you know, about 10 years ago, I started going, oh, it's interesting. I knew just enough that she came up with dangers. You know, I think, you know, in the late 90's, like late West, I could pull that out as an anecdote. But, obviously, we've come a long way since then. And when it comes to performance, it seems like, you know, there's, we're in this whole new world where technology, not only sort of enhances or expands or redefines sort of the nature of what would happen in performance, it also asks a lot of questions about liveness and where performance happens, drawing turtle structures. And, you know, so I thought I would just sort of open up to the table a little bit about, you know, one of the things that I've heard by myself asking a lot is what is the, what is the importance of liveness and sort of what is the relationship? Like, how do you feel like when you, when you're thinking about this work, like, what do you think about the relationship between the liveness and the live music and sort of the media, like, digital space? I mean, so you do. I feel very passionate about what you just said. And Bill told me that I would feel this as cashier. So I'm happy to jump right in there with you because I come from a Paul's background, to the, you know, term of the year, meaning Tish, very, term of the year, you know, why your body was on the wall, making the studio. And then I ended up just being a show. I was in some organizations, and it has, you know, a ton of energy. So I understand what it means to have something that cannot be replaced visually ever if I'm just using a tune and then having your model vibrating into the sound with somebody else's name or having it in the same, whatever that energy is in the space. But then I also was frustrated by spending all my time actually running into the three-month format, six-month process of creating the work in this space, all my push forms and whatever it was. And I love it that it's a moment and it disappears, and it's the only moment that the people in that moment share that I also wanted some art, some kind of artifact around it. So I'm kind of just connecting this with others and I was jealous of filming because of that. I was like, they have something that lives that is, you know, it's kind of an audience but it's just beyond. This is all happening in the 90's, right? So then also there's this little thing called, you know, internet. So now I'm in a space where I love the fact that it was a period where all of our energy was like stuck out of G.C. and there was no mobility in it. And now we have this thing called mobility with our connections and so then it kind of facilitates ritual within it, facilitates in real spaces, but connected at the same time. The challenges however for in real spaces is not screen, but you know how the story that evolved before drives it to happen again and this afterwards, how does it, you know, how do you use screens in an augmentative way that their technology would be able to do no screens in five years? So how do you play with that? How do you play with this last, I don't know if that's no work or not work, to be present and difficult, yet connected and individual, but I'm really excited about what that could be so that we don't have to choose one work together. It was complicated. So digital molecules this really kind of weird arbitrary separation between the virtual and non-virtual as if it's some sort of sacrosanct space to preserve as if it's somehow going to or hanging our humanity on it or hanging the arts on it seems really kind of misguided to me because I think it's fairly clear that the convergence is here, it's happening, you know, the convergence of biology and digital is now and so that changes the entire paradigm of what we're even talking about in terms of using terms like liveness. What does that mean? I also think it's a false and it's a false dichotomy between liveness and something that is mediated. I don't think that we have ever lived or enjoyed participated in performances or events without some kind of a mediation. So if we are always already mediated or we are always already in a mediated situation then liveness as such becomes a difficult thing to articulate conceptually and actually, but I do agree that there are some real values about the liveness of this event the fact that we can see each other or sort of see each other and I don't think we want to run away from the fact that there are some values that come from liveness but I would not want to make the distinctions between the live and the virtual or mediated too stark because I think that we might be missing a whole range of opportunities to collaborate and to interact and to play at the fuzzy end if we keep that, if we see this as an important distinction. The reason I ask the question is that, I mean I agree with you that it's not to necessarily privilege one over the other but rather to suggest that there is work to be done and we need characteristics of each and I think that you've all found over the 15 years that EML doesn't support a certain type of conversation or a different process of being a nation and the inherent change is the nature of the communication so it's not about privilege again we're all pretty comfortable moving to sort of art on the world in which things exist across different and the question is rather what are the what are the particular characteristics of that what are the particular characteristics and what are the effects of the nation and how do we consider that dramatically and what was the question what was the question well for that your project the ascent it feels like it talks a lot about it it's a live experience it's also monitoring what's happening in your head and sort of I'm just curious about what and it's the point that people watch and it's also the point that happens in your head so that relationship so just to if the ascent is a mine it's run on your brainwaves and we use a brainwave sensor to strap you into a harness focus to levitate your stuff to the top of the room and you can win it's a game it was at RPI and we did it in Brooklyn a year ago and it's a game so you can win if you get into the zone you get to the top and the gates of Kiev by Missouri can start playing and so but you can't go off in the sun so it's completely generated by you and your mind state in order to make it work and it's taking this very internal very human process of engaging with your own with your own mind and just becoming totally present when people say well how do you do it the best way that I can describe it is just to say well you have to just totally relax but at the same time be alert and very present and when you do that you're affecting this huge installation there's a lot of sound and lighting there's a lot of different points of view so the way that I always think about is this internal human process is then being there's this translational mechanism which is the EEG and then the software that we bring and then that human element is then becoming translated into digital and creating an amazing show for everyone who's watching yeah I finally forgot what because it feels like the tension when I do it is that one sort of almost trying to cultivate quiet mind well at the same time your inability to cultivate quiet mind or your ability to do that makes more stop happening outside of it so in a way you're embodying that tension which is exactly what everybody goes through the minute before they go on stage on anything right exactly so we found that performers are actually really kind of good at it and producers not so good at it performers are good at it because it's very similar to a state of mind that you need to be in when you're on stage which is completely relaxed and open but at the same time I mean completely relaxed and calm but at the same time very alert and open to anything so we've had this conversation over the last 18 months or so and it's I end up feeling somewhat inflicted by it I feel in some ways it's worth noting that there's something very specific about live human interaction that we need to maybe now with more urgency than we did before understand what that is and how it could be an employee and all of that at the same time I do feel like and I'm not necessarily saying I'm hearing this from you but sometimes I'm afraid of technology and how it might be stopping us from working that way and when you think about I mean anything that we've done in arts involved technology all the way back to 40,000 years ago when somebody turned an ultra bone into a flute that was a technologist who then played with it in a way to create baby and me and I think in some ways we're so fascinated by these new capabilities that to be an app for just about anything we can dream of in the end we wouldn't be surprised to hear that there's an app for something that's actually possible but who knows but when we start to become less amazed just by the capability and more sort of dedicated to thinking about how do we now express ourselves with this new stuff in the same way that you know, Gutenberg you know, that changed everything we're in one of those big changes right now which is confusing I think a second to figure out what blindness means to me but I think one thing why still is a significant thing is that we all like and want to be in places where our presence matters right and I think ultimately we are as humans we're sensual a lot of things and I think that the theater and communal kind of activity is what serves that need and I think what's really exciting about the current sort of state of technology media is that the sort of spectrum of like live and not lives really is now this really fascinating spectrum where we're really most of what we're a lot of what we're seeing is part of a like it's not really live, it's about presence and co-presence on scales like on massive co-presence scales and it opens up all of these like kind of subspaces of live life experiences and that are totally in steroids because of like what the network can do when the network kind of merges with the body that's when it gets really exciting when these spectrums are introduced I think you know like coming out of the 90's and 80's I think a lot of that for me that an interesting intersection was about how like media primarily visual media like obvious media was like impacting the body, that was driving kind of artistic expression but I think now for me the most interesting stuff is where it's actually become invisible and where it's not so much about meaning, image or video or sound but it's actually now the bodies intersecting the algorithm and that's really changing how we communicate and also these really fascinating issues of dramaturgy like network dramaturgy or distributed dramaturgy is how that's impacting creation and economics, education and sort of all of that we were talking about embodying algorithm and that's certainly something that I am looking into the piece that I recently came here called Vache was a ensemble called the broken word opera but it was an ensemble piece for four performers that primarily are vocalists and we got to use as low tech as possible with the technology that we used we could use microphones but we used some fairly contemporary algorithms as far as how we express our vocal lines and the score was written algorithmically as flowcharts and diagrams and a lot of it's been statements and conditionals and a lot of what they were doing was processing information that's not streamed in real time but it's been streamed by another live voice so this is looking at the algorithm in a more embodied way to get a deeper level of what technology is doing maybe in a wider sense rather than focusing on a particular technology or a particular device we'll add this back to what we just talked about Darba they're looking at narrative they're looking at it in a very quantitative way and they're looking at it as in a place where you should have shared for those who haven't impressed each other so how can you be more likely to apply and that's a weapon that's a that is very interesting that's what I'm talking about the weaponization which is the weaponization entity I'm repeating that to everyone who heard that the weaponization entity I wouldn't say that because it's that dual edge sword of what's going on because these technologies are great these algorithms how we can interact directly because we have to understand both sides of how it's operated because on one hand these algorithms are being used to track people in a way the way that corporations have done very intentionally for the same weapon even though the public discourse is really about them but that's where we get into the hacker mentality that I think is a different way of using those tools to sort of up-end peacefully and structures and power dynamics to keep the gears and the flow of ideas moving in check and again exactly I think that's one of the wonderful and unique things that the arts have to offer they can also be used to keep our minds closed by showing us what we already want to see but they can also be used very powerfully to keep rupturing that idea I think that's that raises an interesting question that I'm going to ask but it's a really unique thing it's like one of the things that I find that I don't think works it seems like people actually often are in a similar place and I'm wondering about sort of the relationship of cognition and you're sort of talking about what your body did and the way like yes like today's talk but narrative and machines have changed but like our approach to narrative as a later thing hasn't really even until recently and even sort of like you know Rashomon style multiple narratives are still constructed between the earlier things whereas like what you're talking about with multiple network geometries or like Joe with Lodge and now with WoW where you're using algorithms to sort of like deconstruct the nature of narrative is there a sort of positive point about that that to play to the happy we can sort of hack our profession I think that's one of my interesting things about the idea of the market position of story and tell story is the storyteller where the artist's role is in the market position of storytelling how we we need craftsmanship when we choose the model we generated in the market there's this threat of the artist especially the one that's done up here in my art school you know where you fit if there's so much art our eyes are focused on you know both rent creation of the masses in the story company and that's where we're going but there's storytelling and now we're starting to see that there's important that we jump into this kind of craft sort of dynamic but that we need somebody to create a story world that has the rules whatever so that you have an experience that is successful that doesn't mean highly produced but it means successful artists are moving or residents whatever that is but I think what I understand about that is that there is this thing where it goes on to what they call the truth and some of the dynamic it doesn't stay still for a second but you get a better sense of understanding through the storytelling of the masses but the additional tools you have to synthesize that in a way that can help us to consume that without having to actually it's too overwhelming to just experience all of it but there's a way that it all comes together if you have happenstance you can experience some of the micro-stories and you also have these kind of dynamicizations what is this mass what is the metastore what is the macro-story that's actually the means of living are experiencing what we can tell so it's just a cognition I'm interested in that because so much of our heritage creates our reality where they are showing us how not many Americans can associate positive words with bad people or positive words with people or positive words with black people no matter how active you are how even if you are bad people and black you still are going to have this primate relationship towards those different types because it's a primary story and the beauty of the conversation storytelling and the mass data that can tap into with an unripe and crafted by people like you said it can happen with reality you can be closer to what might be more dynamic complex versus what should be so that's what I'm excited about the multiple points of entry what you're talking about is perhaps a maybe a very broad generalization perhaps an effect of computer interface on our lives where we really things aren't fed to us in such a linear way more like you go to the subject of the material click around click around on the internet or wherever what's your brain maybe just like to be wired in that way you can find yourself in a live performance space perhaps you're not waiting for the thing to get dictated to you like you're being pulled along by a string the whole time maybe you're more like in an environment for your reason to cognitively poke around and see what you want and I think that's been in the air performance for about 100 years at least in terms of thinking about the authorship being partly the audience really but I think now what's happening is not just the hard competency or whatever but everyone going into a lot of situations looks at it and it's not really your narrative that's something to look around and I think someone who's creating or facilitating performance work and I think obviously people are and I should have taken into account around creating art giving you the space for that it seems like one of the big opportunities here we'll of course have a recognition that cognition is changing the neurophysiology is changing that's unquestionable and it's in part due to the multi-tasking facilitation of culture that would be presituated and the adaptation is coming with that so it's no wonder that we've come into these environments and expectations of a different form of interaction and to express ourselves and be part of that expression but it seems like one of the big opportunities in all of this is not then falling back into a more traditional way of thinking about how stories emerge and the possibility of rule systems becomes a way of structuring a different kind of narrative that allows the narrative to self-emerge itself the data wants to be free folks and then we really think about across the eons value of the arts and why isn't there culture holding a beer up to nature and when nature is changing if the nature of our cognitive physical makeup is changing really so if you guys play around with that and show us back what's going on and I think we have a quote about he's talking about how our brains are changing so that allows us to function in a much more scanning of things and that alarms some people but he's saying actually this could be a big asset he points out that the Socrates was dead against the written word because he thought as soon as somebody writes something down I don't have to know it anymore and he made some comment about the worst dinner party would be somebody who writes that down because he's not going to be equipped to just talk yeah well I mean yeah it's real good it's true I think a lot about the nature of attention and the invention of the book moved into one thing with referrals for each other I think one of these is always some full music and recorded music the player piano they say really wrecks the homeland in a lot of ways we're all not well, but I think it's a changing I think to the thing about the struggle you know like the blister group like Husty Sleiman like they've been doing sort of like a lot of cut faces for a long time the idea of having to make meaning out of disparagements and justifications all kind of thing what's exciting to me is that with the computing power and the sort of like advanced technology we can bring us sort of a whole other level of like complexity and thinking and intentionality that's what I'm trying to keep from that too but the the milly thing and telling how that's constructed sure it's very much in the process we're in residency right now collaboration between myself and the director David Levine and Christian Hock and we're doing an opera based on milly filling the scandal that happened looks like a scandal for this you know and we're obviously very interested in the issue of live and assessor-related technology I'm very interested in this moment in the 80s when the digital is becoming mainstream and in the music industry certainly records are being produced where half of it are midi tracks on sequencer, this is the emergence of midi you know what is that drum machines and this sort of thing but I'm interested in the relationship between you know the record industry as technology as algorithmic the story we're telling is very much in the way that we're talking about the new work we're offering scenarios for people to experience but they can take away a lot of what they want from it the score itself is streaming to the performers I don't know what the score is going to be moment to moment and not only to the performers there's again the interface that I've set up and this is actually much more my tech the project I was talking about before in this case I have video monitors in the orchestra and the singers are taking their notes from basically that are being generated from a database and scrambled from a performer after having measured the narratives spat out a little differently every time but really according to very live context it's not actually random it's leaving it open so that I as an composer more of a improviser performer can respond to what's going on in the energy of the room but if you like that they have the last piece went if I need to hand it up a little bit and have a little more density so this is what I can actually change I'm just a composer who's a very frustrating thing for everyone here a composer to do a week with in a traditional set you sit in a concert you hear something you compose a lot of time ago you're only changing so that's how I'm using it there I joined the table and I noticed also just even the difference between sitting at audience and sitting at table immediately changed my physicality in relationship to the conversation and because of the conversation I think I was more alert to that and what I'm noticing is that I enjoy this kind of stuff because it makes my head wake out it goes really fast and it's like very cerebral and intense and I like that kind of stimulation to try to keep up but also to have my mind blown by new thoughts so that's all cool and I find myself sort of engaging with your question around liveness and picking up on the thread that you were sharing around return to ritual so I live in New Orleans where ritual is very much a value and not necessarily done for others even if it's done in public space so whether it's the Mardi Gras Indians and the Monson building the beads and the feathers or whether it's the St. Patty's Day parade where there's cauliflower, cabbage and carrots and potatoes being thrown there's just so many intricate ways and in some ways it also comes out of hitting because not allowed I'm also from California and the San Francisco Bay Area so I grew up with a lot of mariachi music and Cuban music and all these things we think of as participatory art and when I think about indigenous urban or migrant culture I spend a lot of years in hip hop too but I'm just wanting to pull or ask you to pull a little on this thread of ritual because somewhere in the middle there's this interstitial space called dramaturgy and audience and live and we watch and stuff but kind of before that and it sounds like after that is this place where we all play and somewhere in there there's an access question for me though because as I'm trying to think about navigating access and economics for the urban indigenous forms in New Orleans they're not playing that space of pranks and all that kind of stuff they're playing amongst themselves and they may or may not be accessing this new ritual space that you're talking about and so I'm just wanting to pull on the thread that you're suggesting and you're talking about the thoughts you were talking about the apex earlier thank you it's fun here I love that idea I love to point that out but it does change we talk a lot about the story of interaction and the different races when it connects to the actual relationship story in the past and we both, we love both but there is, I need to describe it when I used to there was one moment in the talk one show out of a thousand shows that we actually all saw the exact same time and it was like one out of a thousand shows but I thought that I thought I was going to explode it was so amazing to be on stage having that experience and feel that it's a synergy with the audience it's a different space to be having that sort of experience or just watching that experience or even having that kind of synergy in that experience so I think we need a great space for all those that have existed but I was the gamut when it was I kept trying to create this line to the audience and I never had one there wasn't a circle I think I jumped into that I really did not create that artificial line to the audience so it's very impressive it's not old, it's now it's all over the world that's part of how we exist as a being an experience of art that's where you're now and I think the thing I love about my friends that are all at the MST show is that this digital zone is just tools that make us more efficient at what the world is already doing and it's not necessarily the idea it's the story it's not the idea of inversions and knowledge allows us to see in different ways that you're using it so I'm very excited about this return virtual, the access issue is something that I think is a challenge you know that smartphone technology jumped 47% in the last year we know that there's plenty of places in the world that never have to open a structure or even a theater in a certain way that they are now having a smartphone in their pocket so you know that there's access to audience that didn't exist even a year ago and I think it's a challenge for our children and in some of the states that in weeks out of the secondary one or two you know I wrote again everyone had to come they don't have you know running water for them so what's the next one that's now to a possible one of our projects hashtag now that there's a chance that we're building up a new month and diary because it doesn't mean that we're going to have a lot of show in our community and Jay Bush and the creator he's like I feel like he's an on-do proxel vice I have to figure out how Canada can find an expert for 20 hours a day for 6 months and I have to figure out that part of the story is how people are without money I do a big discussion they don't have the without money the framework foundation that we do I want to thank you for the light bulb and how this connects to that whole Claymore I'm going to be excited to do some studies with people from arts consumption versus active arts making and what he was pointing out is that we may over stress the different steps sometimes and in terms of ritual it occurs to me that one of the things about live, liveness is that there is something very personal between the people on the stage they are doing it for you they're there for you sometimes divas feel that way but there is something about that the example that I think of is I produced a play that I was also sometimes in but then had a long life and I watched a lot more than I was in and there was one moment in this play where the whole stage is singing at the top of their lungs and then suddenly the sound drops off and the deaf kid at the center of the stage is signing suddenly everybody understands and they didn't realize they actually were listening to him and so there's a scat and it was very consistent and it happened everybody when I was on stage voicing for the kid I was hitting my mark, signing my light doing all that stuff but when I was in the audience it impacted me every time I saw it and I think there's something there is something about the liveness of that where these are people actually doing this orchestrated thing to get this to happen to you and it's not a passive consumption thing there's mental activity and there's molecular stuff but that's this is something that's really complicated and I work that because in California Professor Omachan is doing all this work on the mirror and we know that there's non-technology related cognitive operations that are happening and we haven't totally unpacked what has happened so and so this I'm really intrigued by but quite frankly the light bulb is your opposition and has been a weaponization you're having to be opposition that was a creepy part your ritual opposition in your access opposition which is like I'll just go to the top there I wonder if part of the access piece might be about equity the more the technology has created and filters out and just is around the access problem might take care of the song some level I don't know or maybe even stimulus the other thing that I keep coming back to is empathy ritual and who this experience is like have you ever had a moment where like you actually experienced what it was like and you keep locating the performance out there but every once in a while you'll have some experience where your brain will flip you realize oh I'm not gonna say it but you'll be somewhere where you're the only person that's like you and you realize what it's like for other people to experience that all the time and now people play a role or rap they have to sort of outside the body of being in a first person shooter it's only shooting ever but is it possible then to sort of create a like a big quiz pervasive technological environment for deep empathetic conversion right I have to say that it's not my interest but I know it's unique I love your work but the big for two minutes I don't know how many years it's been really I don't know and he talked about this especially and the whole first person shooter grant kind of I think this you know the control of vibrates and you hold the hand of the the whole thing you're trying to say okay so the role control actually vibrates when you hold her hand and the whole object of the game is to save her from these mysterious whatever it is and they set you up and you have to not only rest for about two hours and do a theater experience and each of us takes ten hours to gain a life experience to try to save this woman so you have a deep relationship of purpose and then you have a physical relationship with her because you have this sensory of holding her hand and the amount of hype that a game she does and he said the first time he said that so there is in that world there is a way to feel that sense of embodiment even though it's still external I think technology finds so hard to make this so you know singularity like you're actually kind of on you and wherever in the world but there is something in that experience that's invaluable we're not prejudiced against this so Tracy Fullerton of USC and Bill we all worked on the Walden game so it's a video game and we'll open fun with sounds of a certain play to the computer but her whole point was that how do we get people to actually metaphysically try to go where Walden was trying to go when he was at the pond but virtually and trying to get through that and she's looking at it so you know I was at a meeting at a center and you know there was a lot of technology just last weekend and in that presentation the animation was a little bit blind here up until today five billion class top applications until today three trillion apps on mobile phones it's exponentially you've been with us you know I mean it's moving to you to a kind of ubiquity of experience that's very different in terms of how how one might manifest well there's two levels of it one is that when you're interacting with your phone with your smart phone device and in fact it is in your that's the way it's structured in a sense you're playing the phone so you're in that game already another way of thinking each one of those apps requires a short time thinking there isn't necessarily the opportunity to play out that kind of more classic performance that requires investment that one places into an experience experience can be very very short so you know of course you're standing at Starbucks and you're playing the game and you know you move on and it's over and it's that kind of ubiquity where it's just all the time ever present and in it, out of it, in it, out of it it's part of the flow of everyday life it's not something that's external that you sort of step into or as far as it will be how do you the question that comes up to me is you know how does it work oral tradition but in a way it existed in the pre-technological internet it existed in the internet and it was sort of like the internet before technology in that state because it's this cloud it's this collectively owned imaginative cloud and before it passed out morally and then it was started down so we have this sort of incredible art and sometimes I think that the tragedy of the internet is this bad knowledge so so is there been a tension between this constant sort of pervasive short term ubiquitous technological experience and does that are these either or is there a relationship between that how do we sort of cognitively aggregate our experience in all of I think that's a really good question and but that's not an either or kind of you know thing I mean what it may do is actually free up live experience to be the other to be something you know more than what it has sometimes I feel like it's a little bit of a time where it would be off a short term because it's a little bit of a and often out of here it's a much better film to be even on a little bit of a film about it now I'm a leader today before I came here I took a mic take a little time to come up see both of my boys 15 hours and none of the stuff you know all of that and I had a lot of share and I think about that I think about this discussion about liveness you know and how we all have been driving for that and then I would try to take a little foundation out but for him also he has fantastic he's in the school play so I think it's a good one to say I think I wanted to have this liveness in trying to figure out technologies what we do is figure out what these artists are it's just one part of his life now I mean look at gameplay I think we gotta get out of the video game those game players they're doing cosplay you guys know about cosplay costume play where they're gathering groups all over the world the whole universe that they're playing and they're in forests with their DIY you know shield that mentality of gaming one of the things I would call the reality which is all about having digital spaces driving people experiences to be brought together so I think we can't be fearful that we're going to an all digital age because I think we've had a backlash against Sims and second line I think people don't want to just play in that world they want to be there find each other and then congregate in real space too so I don't think we're going towards that change of communication where how they they don't use all those performers but that's what they're doing I mean if for instance does come out and play River will work with them for a couple of years you know in four days they can take the logic from the individuals that are creating their life games on the street and we also work with because that's amazing I don't know it's interesting like seeing how the second half of the digital space is coming to my face and I wonder with that type of thing like this is not like a privileging I wonder are you going to remember the score you got on a video game or are you going to remember the friend they're hanging out with playing in their living room and like I said I'm not really going to say like as experiencing bodies in this like as an all day car like as a sort of like mind in this body experiencing a physical world in a certain way and I know there are things to be thinking so I'm just curious what are the issues that are rigged around stats so I think about that about a nine year old saying that he is just obsessed but what I'm starting to realize is that it depends on the game for one thing the Mario game sees on a quest and he's trying to get the princess to be done it's a dumb story but he has skill and there's an eye hand that he's really good at he likes to do it just like he used to like to do layups on the sides Minecraft on the other hand is a whole different thing I don't know if people like Minecraft but he'll spend more time on that and he'll still have other people that create worlds where and there's no real quest in that thing it's kind of, it intrigues me that they're so interested in it it's crafting stuff, they build things there's enough danger there if you don't get yourself together and get your torches up in time you won't live through the night and not teach you but most of it is just wandering around doing stuff and it's like what can we make and I sometimes feel like I don't necessarily want to pull him off that one as quick because maybe he's got 20% of your work skills there but he's developing the better than the school it's not because there's one of as many things he does and I think one of the many things he'll do is he'll become an adult and I think going to the theater to see if he can enter or take a dance class or maybe twice or whatever so for us I think it's time to get your fit into our lives and put it in because we work in the arts I have a question just come up about who is the audience and who is the sense audience confused from that gaming world where I actually feel that similar to the if we're talking about the difference between being a participating artist and being an audience there is something to the rehearsal process there's something to the build up and the learning process where you immediately learn this new app this new way to integrate it into your world and how to fuck and teaching our audience now this is a room mostly popular by theater makers who are wondering who and where that audience is and just to speak to a little bit and engaging our audience and teaching them new ways of participating in the work before it's complete I don't think there's so many ways that people are doing their cemeteries and you guys are all coming from different angles and who are they how they can participate what their participation means how is that because we're talking about a maker world what is it actually the integrated is the art that you are then receiving what is that difference and how can we begin to discuss that in a lot of theater makers I do think that we need to reconsider labels for the audience simply because these become extremely difficult to articulate when you are thinking about some of these trans-media because at different points you are being at different points you are speaking to and I think part of our challenge is to acknowledge that technology is much cultural production and I think one of the deep and green belief is that technology is something outside of culture it is not we have fundamentally technological features and technology while we make technology makes us and it's been integrated to us integrated into our rituals the way we behave and do things and so the more we start embracing that this is part of what makes us human rather than thinking about it as something that is external to us that we constantly need to justify constantly need to make excuses for constantly need to say well that's the way it's taken and it's not going to help us and I generally think that if you think about it that way and you look back at how what we classically talked about as reception you know how we receive something reception has become more difficult today in the simplest sense of something being generated and you receiving it and different demands on the performance, different demands on the audience because they are looking for very different kinds of schools because that's what they get outside of the theater they go to or performance the other day and so part of it is really for us to continue to acknowledge that these labels are going to be challenged and it's a good thing simply involving very different kinds of spectatorship listening to the audience and I think it's a good thing this issue of like how do you locate the side of the work is really just saying how do you locate the work is just saying that in all of these like tools and knowledge are really kind of like chipping away a kind of binary of specialization and I think a lot about too in terms of practicing arts in this theater also is how do those things impact how we locate the actual work of the artists in the craft and in the process because I think one of the big shifts that connects to drama and experience is this massive program should say document or production based sort of like experience to like the two major paradigms now are the cloud and the screen and those are the things that not only are shaping narrative but also shaping artistic concepts so in that regard I fit in some of the person where I love being at the person far more than I saw that I love being at the person and in that way it makes me think like okay well this is some progress stuff all of this pressure this pressure to be broadcasting or you log it in yourself I think it's sort of a strange aspect of a kind of like publicity production kind of model whereas now I feel like this whole openness is actually it's not just about my promotion before the event happens but it's actually about remathing the artistic process so that again it's sort of a spectrum it can maybe that's the work itself and I also see that coming up in like why discourse based theater and discourse based performance is so interesting right now why the idea of like conferencing and like conferencing has become such a major force of you know creative and artistic thinking because like it's part of this continuum before you get to products where you can actually invite people into it sometimes I think that the work in progress should become the art conference and actually just be an open invitation to discuss the themes and concepts instead of presenting work what does the work mean and how do we because it should never be done and I think that that's something also to take a cue from from the startup of the tech world is that you present an idea and then you receive feedback from the community and you are constantly adjusting the work to suit the needs of that community as they tell you what your value is they tell you where the idea will be best suited and I think that's it's really counterintuitive to the traditional product model so you know we produced like a Broadway people bought a ticket but I think it's really interesting and healthy to be thinking about so what's it look like if it's it's really more about what's happening as the discoveries are being made rather than how well can they execute a lot repeated thing we've started this we're trying to unlock that problem so we have a fellowship program where we bring artists in part of the responsibility of the artists is first of all respond to an invitation challenge that's kind of higher down in advance so they start to their creative process then is the focus of how the work is presented to the public over a year's time yes there's an outcome it gets to the end and everybody can applaud it about getting there but the value added really is bringing it to the public in a way that's also in a way curated it locates it and it's not like I'm looking over the shoulder of someone because there is a responsibility I think for institutions presenting arts institutions to contextualize experience and that becomes part of the discourse so I described what we do as a kind of platform for discourse right it's not a traditional presenting arts institution how do you create that flow and bring it forward so it has a feedback mechanism built into it and forms its evolution well it really is a question I don't know where Andy went but how does the criticism come into play I mean it has to be a different type of criticism it's about the process rather than the opening night of the review right we had a work in progress this past summer in Detroit the Trial of Detroit is the African American History and they never presented a performance work of this nature an experience or immersive installation environment or projection mapping and game life experience and we had over 20 performances for communities to come and see the work while in progress explicitly to receive feedback so we wanted to figure out specifically like this question of one year gentlemen with technology based work but I think in such a new field we're all trying to figure out how to form together and how to make it aesthetically engaging something that can express ideas coherently as we're learning new technologies and everything but what gets lost and what I've seen because I'll be in a room where there's like 10 people who are like I'm doing a technology based media installation but content wise it gets lost we lose any samples of cultural equity or community engagement in that process because there's so much to learn just about the form itself so I feel like one of the things we were curious about with our work in progress is like as we're testing all these tech elements can we also give an opportunity for communities to feedback into how to make it still content wise, relevant experientially and accessibility wise relevant too because like with these technologies and we're dealing with communities that may have disabilities so like having access to one multiple languages like dealing with technologies how you make that serve to further alienate communities from your work so that was the way that we approached making it like this open working progress call to be able to engage folks and we hope to continue doing that with these pre-residency inter-communities for like a week prior to a year or so prior to like a full engagement where people could co-develop and again you know kind of address this question of like technologies potential elitism by being able to like go directly to communities that usually aren't you know the ones that they have to go on or the ones that the you know technology, arts and technology centers you know meaning be able to to really start from there and make it a conversation about both those things both innovating form and you know being able to be accountable to our communities in that context I also don't think that the changes in a lot of ways like that Broadway show went through five years of development it may have been different than it was in Chicago there was a lot different in the first reading than the second board chef and I think those iterative processes of continual concept development is similar in these sort of technologically involved work but I think what is different now is that the product zone has to find and also there's a larger cultural shift that can't be ignored that's being represented in the manifestation of how people are approaching their this work and there's a collaborative nature to a lot of this work there's open source nature in this work there's a sort of flat not hierarchical approach to how we can rethink traditional commercial models to break out the elitism to make it available and accessible to everybody to be able to have platforms of participation and co-design to be able to articulate stories that in a commercial model didn't necessarily have platforms for being able to be developed, recognized, and produced I think that's exciting I love your work I just want to call out Michael's part of Sandy's story lines which is a phenomenal kind of a story telling healing process to Sandy in New York and I love the teamwork with Sasha who I mentioned earlier and I think it's fundamental that the community is part of the design from the beginning when we were trying to create more complex story projects that he did a project coming out of that philosophy where it took some old-school, mobile type stuff into communities of micro-workers and they collected their stories that were originally for an act of the policy thing and they re-adopted it for a story telling that was phenomenal but it was the first day of the project and then we were there the community the community the community gave us a way to go about business but I found that in many situations where one needs to deal with emotional expert and specialized knowledge and we talked about it but we said we were speaking in the language that people love a lot and you are working with platforms that perhaps needs a little bit of training on the part of the people who are bringing the knowledge in a directly trained community to understand what this is in order to intervene and come up with interesting ideas of generating content but I think we talked about that as another part of this which is again in the picture of Detroit I live in Ann Arbor and I do a lot of projects in Detroit and I've become very aware about kind of being one of how the people enjoy business and the problem really is that look, you know, yes you are well in coming in you want to do something with us but we really don't want you to come and help us because we actually are doing what we find for ourselves so Detroit becomes a stage for someone else's agenda that's laid up in the name of community engagement and I think that there is a kind of interesting political and ethical question of how we engage communities especially when the knowledge we bring that needs to somewhat empower them comes from a particular point of view and has some specialized knowledge that makes it very difficult for the community to read engage in X7S in a very secondary fashion so we need to think about those questions, would you think about engagement and access the work, how they each other or how they fight each other one thing that's really interesting about this presentation is getting the view for why some of us are in this room is this a sense of fear how live performance is going to survive in the world and I think without the knowledge we're going to do this in my first several years and for me this pretty good conversation about the sustainability of our culture and the sustainability of this transition to innovation from any whenever perspective we think about the leadership of the day of the week the director of the culture and we want to give a little opportunity of this table here but I'm wondering if the artists in this table can talk about what they actually need, how they need the infrastructure and support in order to make space for innovation and creativity well I just want to preface it just one thing before we go when the daguerreotype was invented and photography became a thing painters said that painting would be dead forever so I just preface the thought of the idea of the death of like an ancient tradition I think your preface is a solid one but I just want to like challenge that too and reverse it and say how is it supposed to question of digital, whatever and technology survived without live performance and liveness because if anything we look at the shift the predominant shifts in technology are movements to body movements to presence so like instead of things any external sort of like a screen that has something behind it that is actually more feasible like many things like the architecture it's fixed and granite the movement the screens are moving with us and perhaps one could say that performance is becoming the dominant narrative of expression so if these things are maybe happening how can those things live without us and I think in terms of like what artists want and if you reverse that thing I think part of it is that culture has to really let the oppressed mentality that we are marginal and like the funding in the different institutions we acknowledge that as well and start supporting the work in ways that don't say what we're supporting as a product what should be supported as projects and so much of this is about like the preface of the topics are arts and research research is curious research this is a funded asset process and inspected it and maybe it was a product at the end and so really like what could people give us like give us things give us future plans don't give me like a finishing presidency give me a laugh I think the problem there is give there's a certain I mean this I think and not directly to you personally but we have to be very careful about the positioning of the arts in this sort of more antagonistic way relative to the larger cultural creation there is I think there's real danger in the entitlement that can come from that that framework I agree with you totally that there's that convergence is necessary and essential and the paradigm is obvious to I think most of us probably in this room that that paradigm shift at the same time struggling to find out where in this really complex world that we're situated where the problem that society and culture and humanity are facing from globalization to the environment to sustainability to you know the education to the economy I mean all these things are so complex and layered and difficult to navigate and urgent and the arts need to step up to the plate and deliver creative strategies that help us address that world I believe they can do it I'm totally committed to creating the research center to give that law that's what we're trying to do and it is probably difficult the value proposition has to go back to those who will provide the resource and yes we can go to bill and say hey how much was that yeah that's all the piece of this giant economy we go to we can go to technology companies go to me but I think there all has to be a shift in that that whole narrative structure you know how are we playing in the world what is this relationship between the economy and the arts that play out in a very different formula kind of what we were talking about today earlier but also in the the National Science Foundation there's an interesting tension that happens early in some of these conversations from both sides not wanting to just simply be a utility so it's like the arts for arts sake argument is part of that but at the same time there's a lot of people on it I mean some of them are able to actually want to employ this stuff to some specific problem or good and just in terms of capitalization from a large sector sense it can be really useful there's such interesting creativity in technology right now but how do we build the capacity to use that in a way that's meaningful and makes sense and deeply does something that's where suddenly a political conversation is very fruitful and we don't get into these uncomfortable things about the Thailand and can you think of the word the stuff that causes scandal those kinds of things nobody mentioned earlier today nobody's against winning the future on any side of the aisle and there is a tremendous amount of interest right now in the industry and education and broadly general population and foster creativity in a way that really accomplishes things can you say a little bit more about winning the future I think there's very when we talk about competition in the arts and the resources I just think that there's an interesting notion that comes with being in the context with succeed and I'm just curious if we can see a little bit more of that in the context so I guess this would be this would be how it would play out in the political landscape winning the future is a very sort of a high minded way of saying we need to rally so that we create in the STEM scene thing for example bringing arts creativity to STEM thinking and learning and capability and development so that we develop competencies through the 21st century and we also have healthy people I mean yeah well that's what the interesting thing is it's the STEM educators that come up with that and they're interested in creativity and imagination and they really want to understand their problem right now is they know that just memorizing math doesn't equip you to go into a workforce that we don't understand yet because it hasn't been invented and we know that people need to invent solutions for problems not for memory and that becomes really I think just generally a very tangible and good traction for arguing for why we need to have this lab you know because we need to understand ourselves better in terms of how we imagine what it means what kind of transformation of things and then how we can apply those skills in other STEM fields I just wanted to respond to the conversation and your question of what it is that we can offer in exchange for this lab because when it came into this conversation I actually had no idea what this would be I just know that my greatest fear is that as a player what I do might just end up as a YouTube video and just being like that is really I mean it's just very different languages and I feel like the success of film to read about audience in the way theater hasn't has sort of educated a much larger number of people to tell stories in a filmic way and never worked with communities or students and and talk in theater and how to tell their stories what you're getting is television and film narratives so I'm going to end this question of how does this affect things from iturgically what kind of resonated with me throughout the duration of this conversation was that we were all going back to the very basic elements of what makes theater different to film the body, the voice the communal ritual, the participation of the audience time, space and all of these other elements that are just not present when we're watching film yet somehow film is a predominant narrative language that we know and it is not as and younger generations feel are less educated on on how to tell stories with the body and in public and with people in a space where they are present so in this exchange for the technology which I think artists need to experiment with to really advance what my place will not be a YouTube video but actually theater that maybe is online I feel like the exchange is to really provide skills and understanding of the basic elements of theater for a generation that doesn't have much access to it as they do to film and TV which is so pervasive in our culture and anyway that's sort of what I'm going to say. I just want to I'm just going to change that which is this alter reality game production house in Hollywood they have 10 million people playing their alter reality games living inside the expanded narrative of some of these Hollywood properties so they still connect to the obvious but they have to play and those visual experiences drove people in maps to live theater experiences they might not have said more theater but that's what it was they were playing roles, they were actors there telling stories, they were interacting so I don't know that's the model but there is all these things that are so visually connected and they are that way aren't creating what they want to be able to say so I had a coverage that but she didn't really see me I think that's a really great point is that the language of the cinema television the stereotype here changes everything the other part of the educational issue there there's also a huge opportunity because it frees the liveliness in the theater to not do that and to be about something else and that it hasn't been about ever before go man there's thousands and thousands of years and so many multiplicities of practice and film is a 100 year old technology so we're all freaking out about something that happened 20 years ago over an industry that happened 100 years ago but there's years and years and years of you know tools and skills that I feel have in anyone who is involved in this education knows it does have tangible impact on individuals and it does work and I think that needs to be argued for it's just how it's applied how much do you decide to lead theater to the architecture and if you don't read that or you don't believe that then it gets really interesting something that I tell my students pretend you're a fully trained theater artist you've got your own thing let's say someone hands you a script it has words, it has characters it has locations but let's pretend no one ever told you that it's supposed to happen in a theater that someone's supposed to show that a box office and buy a ticket let's say you just forgot how to make a theater but you still have all the tools the training you have all the tools that you have around you besides the architecture of the theater what do you do to make it and when that is handed to people it's pretty amazing because I see full utilization of their the apple training physically designed by the artisans but they find all of these many, many forms of it and also if it helps you our work plays a lot in the film festivals and stuff too but in all these film festivals their language is changing now too like internet and non-cinematic writing is really affecting in that direction as well and you look at any festival now most of the film festivals have rock and roll plus even like television and the up fronts and all that just how things get made and paid for is a big question because anybody can make it anywhere so now you have these online channels that are a whole different way of doing things and it's a whole different direction too another big shift is how much people want a story we think about it in short it's not until like you two go in three minutes people don't know how to tell a long story but on the other side of it it's people binge on story like now besides like television there's only going to be one who lives inside the world and one of these characters can not stop, alright I'm very embarrassed to admit I love this story I love this referential all of the stuff that I love and the references in this book and then on the other side from there to I had the this is a lot of people who work hand in hand who watch movies who are good and so I'm like okay why there's something about how the story is not like there's this feeling of embodiment in the audience I'm always interested in how my relationship to a performance or an event actually can affect it and so how we restructure a narrative so that me as a participant is actually involved in the narrative in a certain way and that can help shape and move that narrative in a certain direction so this idea of embodiment is actually I mean I'm just hearing a lot of words and I keep them in my mind and the embodiment keeps coming up for me and I always just want to I want to be implicated as an audience member I don't want to be an audience member I want to be a participant and I see this sort of top-down I call it top-down storytelling where I'm sitting down and I'm sort of involved in somebody else's thing and I think this is movies and film and theater as well has never been that interesting to me actually even though it's been a format that I've been involved in for many years when you said architecture I was just thinking when I trained in theater in late 1838 the idea of a thrust stage and how disambodious it was how do you rack up that how do you rack up that and then doing something around oh my god and now it's like just a whole new way a lot of different people work in these new narrative formats and I think that really the bottom the real bottom thing is that we are just apparently a storytelling speech that's what we need is to need our story and understand other people's so how and all of these things that we're all doing are just perversions and permutations with that really fundamental human desire and I feel like in the beginning you said well what's human about all this digital stuff and I think that all of this technology and everything that's part of our lives it's going to become more and more part of our lives it's going to be integrated into our bodies I mean it's just the direction that we're going in it's not really an it it's just when that's going to when the biological barrier is actually going to be I think the technology and the amount of data that is released in this age it's obviously overwhelming so there's no way that anyone really will be able to deal with that but the story is how to deal with that the story is how we constantly take all this in maybe meaning out of it so that's why I think the story will put it down whenever I can and I'm really interested in that a lot of people are talking about the new storytellers, the storytellers that help the medicine one example is what you'll be seeing this year is I want you to want me if a piece is coming and it's basically all the online dating data that's available and it uses to create a beautiful visualization of how can we really want to connect and what is the humanist about why I want you to want me and they tell us a beautiful play thing we hardly match so does it connect to the trust of humans and we don't need someone and they found it very amazing and it's a meta story it's not one person's story it's how we as a species respond to each other so I think I mentioned last night we're also we're doing some research with the department of medicine by the way, Erin is going to kill people okay okay, fair enough it's really interesting for me to think about how we talk about what we do and why it's important especially with this program that we're doing with PTSD and TDI and thinking about in an integrated care environment why a story really matters to them you just did it on the head in some ways our lip review for this research thing it really calls it out aerosol as he was a matter of medicine person he thought catharsis was really a way to bring intellectual clarity and emotional chaos and if you think about it with this big data we're all sort of suffering from some form of mild PTSD and there's a story that sort of allows us to kind of chunk that into something that we can connect with and resonate with and then you can find a way to connect with that I just wanted to go back again kind of connect with your what a few people have said about the need for story and also the need for more perceptual awareness of how artists work because I feel less and less people are interested in presenting a representation in the traditional like not the century way of putting play of this person pretending to be someone else and you're going into this particular, you know, area of the place I think there are a lot of artists I mean I shouldn't have worked this way a lot of artists and performers that are bringing the performers to the audience as themselves they might even be indicating another character to some extent but then the other half of their presence is what's important and I I don't really represent character so much it's of course more about them being themselves but I think that's where this whole idea process that you've brought up that works much more process oriented and that's where I get interested and that's also where the narrative is for me more and more but to welcome you to a live performance space and say okay what's the story of how I ended up in this room and I just reported that up in this room what are they doing, what question are they asking what's the process I think that's a kind of a story that maybe is a different it's a narrative perhaps yeah well maybe one of the things of narrative or story is the way of asking a question and perhaps not resolving it explicitly but like working the question through through representation in an hour and a half the question is asked with the three development period an audience that just paid some of the findings I'm going to interject with a story too which is the part where we end but first of all I want to thank everybody for coming to the audience about the future with all these wonderful thoughtful people trying to figure out the eternal questions of how we are we hope I encourage you to connect with these people while we're here