 Hello everyone. My name is Tiaran Gruber and I use she her pronouns. It's my pleasure to welcome you all to the Level Up Symposium presented by the Associated Designers of Canada with support from Toaster Lab's Mixed Reality Performance Atelier. I'm a member of the board of directors of the ADC and I'm really excited to be your host for this our inaugural event of the Level Up Symposium. To begin our session today I would like to acknowledge that I'm currently located on Treaty Six Territory the traditional lands of First Nations and Métis people. Edmonton as it is known colonially has been home and is home to a diverse range of Indigenous nations and peoples including the Cree, Blackfoot, Métis, Nicotissus, Iroquois, Denei, Ojibwe, Soto, Anishinaabe, Tsutsina, Inuit, and many others. Since time immemorial this land has been a meeting place for this diverse range of Indigenous peoples who have enriched this place with their histories, languages, and cultures. As a settler I have benefited from Indigenous generosity, hospitality, and knowledge and for that I wish to express my gratitude. In the spirit of gratitude I would also like to acknowledge the support of Canada Council for the Arts the primary funder of the Level Up Symposium as a whole. We're equally grateful to these additional sponsors IACI University of British Columbia, Theatre Alberta, CITL Concordia University, Ryerson University, and York University. Thank you everyone. For your information as an attendee all symposium events will be recorded and presented in a freely available archive following the end of events in a few weeks time. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you registered for this event you have joined us on Zoom otherwise you're likely watching this Level Up livestream either on the Level Up website levelup.designers.ca or on HowlRound thanks to our partners at ToasterLab at howlround.com or on the respective Facebook pages for the ADC or ToasterLab. Regardless of your viewing platform embedded in the same page as the video is the chat function and questions for anyone can be asked in the chat at any time and will be read out to the presenter or the my co-curators in this case during the Q&A portion of our session. In Zoom you can access the chat tab at the bottom of your screen right in the middle. If you have technical difficulties at any point in this session please send an email to levelup at designers.ca for immediate support. This event can be enjoyed through auditory or visual access or accommodation of both. I will read aloud all questions we address from the chat and this information will also appear visually at the bottom of your screen. Visual access is also supported with captioning for all speakers. Captioning will appear directly below the active speaker. If you require technical assistance to support your access please email levelup at designers.ca for immediate support or to provide highly valued feedback following our events. Finally if you enjoy this session please consider donating any amount to the Associated Designers of Canada to support our National Arts Service Organization achieve its goals in the areas of advocacy mentorship and industry promotion. Donation links are available in the screen on all streaming platforms and please consider donating. Thank you for your patience with our announcements. That concludes our announcements. Today's event is the Symposium Meet and Greet and it will feature short presentations from myself and my co-curators followed by 20-minute breakout rooms for those attending via Zoom and culminating in a five-minute wrap up right at the end. So now that we've started I guess let's get started. So many people have asked me throughout developing this symposium what it is. What is the level up symposium exactly? So in numbers it's 38 events over the next four weeks starting right now and ending on February 13th. It's featuring more than 50 artists and we're really excited to share the content of these events with you. It was curated by myself, Emily Susanna and Andrew Scriver and Emily is also our symposium's technical director and Andrew is also our marketing promotion and artist liaison. It wouldn't have been possible without the volunteer support of Ken McKenzie, Michelle Cutler, Ian Garrett, Simon Rosseter, Michelle Ramsey, Joanna Yu, Rachel Forbes and other members of the ADC Board of Directors as well as Scott Penner and Megan Koshka. So I just want to send a big shout out of thanks to all the volunteers who've made our symposium happen and gotten us here to our to our first day. So a lot of people are also curious about why we made this symposium or you know what's it all about? What's what was the impetus? It's a little bit obvious I think that you know last year and just about a year's time ago the theater industry live performance industry in general was shut down by COVID-19 and many of us began sort of instantly trying to find ways to continue engaging with audiences. Companies began finding ways to keep their audience subscribership, keep people engaged with their companies and the work that they were doing and artists began just generally playing also with the different ways they could remain connected to one another and to their fans, to their audiences. So as live performance creators we wanted to create an opportunity for all of us to come together to get out of our isolation and to begin engaging with the existing wisdom in this area. So for decades already in the live performance community there have been a lot of individuals and a lot of organizations who've been really curious about digital creation, really interested in unusual live performance modes that included digital tools and so there's a lot of existing wisdom in our community and what we found was that all of us were kind of stumbling along our own little paths of learning by ourselves and that isolation was really degrading of our artistic spirit and really challenging for us personally. So we wanted to create an opportunity where we could bring together all this existing wisdom for artists, producers alike to come together and learn from people who've already been doing this work for you know like I said many years but then also create opportunities for people who've never tried anything like this to begin conceptualizing how their work could pivot or change or transform or adapt to this new COVID reality. So this is really the where this symposium was born out of and some of the primary goals that we have. In terms of how these manifest in terms of what you can expect from the symposium I'm going to be talking about a few styles of events that we have and then my kill curators will go into more detail about some others. So the primary form of presentation that we have are project presentations. Individual artists or teams of artists who are going to be talking to us other about past present or ongoing projects and that includes projects from the pre-COVID era people who had experienced before COVID hit and had access to these tools and were already making exploration in this area and projects they did at that time that were really influential on our digital creation community and we're also going to have demonstrations. We have two different demonstrations happening of projects that artists are currently working on where you'll get to have the audience experience of witnessing the project but then also speak directly with the artist about both their conceptual and technical work they've been putting into that project. So take a look for those demonstrations. We also have a current project presentation so a number of artists will be sharing what they've been up to during this COVID time and what they're actually you know putting out into the world either in the past 20 year of 2020 or just right now. So we have a number of presentations of that nature and then the final format in this sort of category of presentations is our roundtable events. So today's a little bit of a taste tester of the roundtable you guys or you folks I should say are going to have an opportunity after we're done talking to engage with one another directly but that's really the heart of what the roundtable events are about. So you'll notice that roundtable events are usually paired with an event sort of in the morning that day and then a roundtable in the afternoon or just following it and so we really encourage you if you intend that attend that earlier event if you see it's followed by a roundtable that you know sign up for that as well because it's going to be an opportunity instead of having to listen to me ramble on you'll get a chance to really engage with other people who attended that event other people who were curious about that same topic be it VR and AR or pedagogy there's many different topics that we're covering in our roundtables so you'll get a chance to speak with other attendees what did you get out of this I was confused by this you know I have this project right now do you think this would be relevant what was your experience so we're trying to create more opportunities so it's not just stand and deliver and you know right you know listening to other people with experience but also engaging with fellow learners engaging with fellow creators and artists to share in critical conversations around what the symposium is offering you so in addition to learning from those with experience in our project presentations and our demonstrations we wanted to create opportunities for those who are just beginning their journey with digital tools to find many points of access within the symposium and my colleague Andrew is going to speak about those aspects of our symposium now which include the live design experiments the three workshops that we're running and some additional details about roundtables so anyways I'm gonna throw to Andrew. Hi everyone yeah so my name is Andrew Schriver I'm coming to you from Chachage which is known as Montreal and I'm a video designer member of the ADC and I've just been the one of the co-curators of the festival it's just been a whirlwind putting this together it's been a crazy couple months and I'm so excited that we're finally here and putting this together very welcome to all of you it's amazing to see so many faces here already and to see so many sign-ups and so many interested parties from all around the world actually it's kind of been amazing how to see the web traffic and the interest in the emails coming in from not just Canada US from all over the world so yeah so welcome welcome everyone I think so I just I'll mention then we'll talk about the what we're calling the active learning portions of the symposium so the experiments which are our live design experiments is something that we thought was quite interesting we wanted to just see what this could do because we know that presentations are great and everyone can learn a lot from those but our experiments that we've put together have been by submission of artists as well as some curated artists and what we've done is that we have put together groups of four artists per group of varying disciplines from all across the country and have brought them together they're all in they all have different skills and different interests and put them into a group and give them a prompt and the prompts are a combination of a poem a an audio piece and an image of some kind in order to get them started on something with the intent of just creating some kind of eventual some kind of production which isn't sorry not meant to be a final piece in in the end it's meant to be just a chance for them to experiment with something and see what it is that they come up with and in doing so we'll have the chance to respond to that as attendees so we'll have a round table discussion after the experiment after they have their presentation they'll get to talk about it a little bit about what they were creating how they created it what worked and what didn't and then we'll get the chance to sit down as attendees and talk about it and see what they what we learned and what worked what didn't worked it's meant to be a safe space to experiment things we we actually have no idea what these are going to come out with and so far it seems like all of our creators have come to us with different questions different styles of creating different tools that they want to create with so it's really quite exciting to think of what these are going to become in the end a lot of these creators have never worked with each other before either they've never met each other so they were picked and just put together in groups that sort of made sense to us but we'll see what it is that they come up with in the end um so i'm very excited for those experiments uh and we'll see what happens uh the second part is the the workshops the other portion so we have three workshops which have been built in such a way as to be individual in themselves but also to have a connected through line from one workshop to another so if attendees are able to access all three of them then you're going to get quite a lot out of them you'll start with the first one uh which is working with assets uh in analog assets in order to turn them into digital assets so Elijah Lindeverg is going to be taking on that particular workshop I'm actually going to sit through that workshop just to see what it is that he's able to what he's going to pull out from that uh and then from there we're going to go into uh Cinema 4D for designers which Emily Susanna is going to be leading uh so you're going to take some of the digital assets that you'll have prepared in Eli's workshop and then we're going to turn those into a 3d models for working in theater and then moving on from there we bring it into a touch designer for uh theater workshop with myself uh so taking some of the 3d models that you've worked with previously and bringing those in but also again because you don't have to have taken any of the workshops in order to take any of the future ones that's a good opportunity just if you wanted to just learn one particular type of program or one particular skill set you're welcome to join those uh unfortunately they though the well actually not unfortunately it's actually a really great thing the uh Emily the suit three Emily's and my workshop which is to say the Cinema 4D and the touch designer workshop have actually already reached their cap as far as participants which is quite amazing um which is also to say that if anyone is no longer able to do those workshops and you've already signed up we'd ask that you would uh go and cancel your if you can cancel your sign up so that we can get them because we actually have a long list of uh a wait long waiting list for people who might be interested and so yeah uh that's those two things I guess the third thing would be talking a little bit more about the round tables but Aaron spoke already quite a bit about those so yeah so again it's the experiments actually will have round tables after them that's a chance for us to talk about those things yeah and we'll be putting you into breakout rooms we're actually going to be trying using software called Miro which is a good chance for people to brainstorm ideas and see it in a visual format you can put post-its and pictures and lines and stuff that's quite interesting so we're going to be trying out new tools that some of you may not have ever used so I think that that's another way that we get to learn altogether so thank you so much Andrew it's fantastic to hear about those events um I'd love to introduce Emily Susanna who's going to speak now um about the other ways in which this symposium can offer you material and experiences um we have two other platforms our digital art gallery and our live events directory so there are other ways to engage with digital material that we're presenting through this symposium and I look forward to hearing about it from Emily take it away I would like to also thank you for your patience for any of our technical issues this morning we had a few computer uh events that we had to work through but we're here now and we're so glad to have all of you uh so I'd like to talk to you about uh some of our options that we have for engaging with our symposium with your own art so the first is our digital art gallery which is a curated gallery with submissions that uh individuals across the globe have sent to us we're going to be posting the first few today and then um adding to the gallery over the course of the event so if you have a interesting piece of visual or digital art please feel free to send it to us as well we are going to be highlighting events happening in the digital sphere around the month of the symposium so if you have a piece of uh theater or dance or just really something that's digital and live and you'd like some cross promotion uh head over to our website under our calls for submission and uh you can check them out our first one is actually tonight it's skin which is part of the wild side festival and it's a hybrid piece of live and pre-recorded theater so we encourage our participants to check out as many of these digital offerings as they can so that they can further uh our conversations about what you see excuse me what you see what you like what you didn't like um and so forth um and I'm going to turn it back to Erin to get started on our meet and greet wonderful thank you so much thank you so much Emily um so to get us started off I've attended a number of these kind of breakout room style sessions and I have always found as an attendee it was very helpful when I got sent into a breakout room with perfect strangers um to have a bit of a prompt around what we were meant to be talking about um as I say it's a prompt it's a suggestion so if you want to socialize get to know one another uh you're not interested in talking about this uh subject that's 100 acceptable um but I will offer you uh some questions to consider as a group um just to create a bit of framework to help break the ice a little bit and like I said in the events that I've attended I found that that was very useful but if it's not useful to you or you have another suggestion please send us feedback after this event because it will help us to make our future events stronger so um what I'd like you to do initially when you enter the breakout room is to take turns introducing yourself we're going to create relatively small groups so this hopefully won't take too long you'll all get an opportunity to share your name and whatever you want to share about yourself maybe you want to share where you are maybe you want to share the type of artist you are or why you're interested in the symposium um if you are a presenter in our symposium I hope that you will then share about your event um and if you're an attendee I hope that you will share around the question of what are you hoping to get out of a particular event that you registered um and then one other talking point that could be useful for anyone is what's one aspect of this symposium that you're feeling excited about or inspired by or that you're looking forward to so that creates a bit of framework around how we can meet and greet one another and at any time if you have questions or concerns or you want to access myself as moderator or technical support there'll be a breakout room where you can go to ask questions and so I hope that you'll take advantage of that navigating between the breakout rooms yourself if you want to take a little break from your group or if you have some feedback to give us about how things are going so please enjoy your meet and greet and your chat we will do about 15 to 17 minutes of chat and then I'll draw us all back into the main room just to respond to any burning questions or just do a quick wrap up for the last five minutes so hopefully this will be an enjoyable meet and greet opportunity for everyone if you enjoy socializing in this way and you want to connect with more people there is also an event tonight called the drinks with designers this is an ongoing event that the ADC does in person usually and which we've started which we've integrated into our symposium as a digital event and so we hope that you'll join us for this more informal session later this evening and there is one more social event the final drinks with designers on the last day of our event February 13th so if you if you enjoy getting to speak with your fellow attendees I encourage you to register not only for roundtables around specific topics but also consider registering for these other two social events coming up so without any further ado let's break out um I want to welcome back to the main room I think some participants are still making their way back we have another five seconds on those breaking room timers all right welcome back everybody um this concludes our meet and greet uh go ahead and type in the chat if there's any questions you have for me at this point before we wrap up we've got about uh four more minutes before we'll end this session and I hope that at the top of the hour you'll all join us uh for our very first presentation Matt Waddell will be speaking with Andrew Scriver uh about some work that he has been creating over the past year and about his practice as a digital creator in general so um really looking forward to that event and I hope that we'll see many of your similar faces at that presentation and again tonight Ed drinks his designers so I'm really looking forward to that event as well and I hope that uh if you have feedback about this platform about sharing in zoom about using breakout rooms about the experience of speaking with your fellow attendees I hope that you will take an opportunity to send us a message about it and we can integrate that into our future roundtable discussions um it's really wonderful to see everyone's face and to see you all here uh for those who don't have your video on it's wonderful to have you here as well and I'll just take a look at the chat to see if there's any questions that have come up okay a lot of thank yous to the hosts in the breakout rooms I think that's wonderful it's great in those smaller sessions to have someone kind of come forward and and facilitate those groups uh informally I love that yeah that's a really excellent feedback Peter thank you about the limited chat capabilities um tonight in the uh drinks with designers social event we're using a different platform um through Mozilla called Hubs and that allows you to walk around as a little avatar and speak with people um using audio and also typing so it has a bit of a different access point so um we're going to be using uh another program for some of our other roundtables so I really appreciate that feedback we'll integrate that by exploring some other tools throughout the symposium the access to the recorded sessions to the archive of the symposium will be universal so there will be a you know an archive webpage where you can go and get information about every session that occurred and that will be publicly posted um a few weeks after the symposium closes once we finish archiving all the material and that will be available to anyone um at uh into the future so if there's sessions that you missed or if there if you were curious about things um the roundtable sessions instead of uh sharing recordings of people's private conversations we'll simply have a little summary reports about what we learned what we discovered what kind of um discoveries were made what kind of reactions people had in a more general private way um so that's why it's going to take us a few weeks to get the archive together because we're going to be sort of um encapsulating what the events taught us as opposed to just doing a direct um public share so there'll be a really useful archive of this event afterwards so if there's a tool that you heard about but didn't really get a chance to explore because it wasn't relevant to you you want to come back a year from now or six months from now and explore that it'll be available to you oh yeah we have some people joining from the uk wonderful all right well it's 1150 uh here where i am uh which means it's 10 minutes to the hour and 10 minutes until our next presentation so i'm going to wrap up this event and say thank you so much to everyone for being here and we look forward to seeing you at the future symposium events uh if you enjoyed this event or if you're looking forward to other events please consider donating to the abc um you can do that at uh levelup.designers.ca or at our website designers.ca thanks everyone