It is evening at this point, I think, that we would say that five o'clock, yeah. Hi, I'm Sunaz, one of the co-curators of the Prelude Festival, and I'm really excited to welcome you to one of our works and process showings. Works and process are excerpts from productions that are new or in development. In this specific grouping, we're very excited to present work by the absolutely wonderful Kate Benson and Jessica Almacy and company Dupali Gupta and Nada Muse. There will be a brief transition in between and we ask that you stay for the duration of the performances and presentations. And then please do stay after for a brief and always fascinating, moderated talk back with the artists. Thank you again. There's another one of these at seven o'clock. There's another one at eight o'clock, and then there's a closing night party at the Museum of Sex. So it's going to be a good night, and I can't wait, we're going to kick it off, yeah? Okay, cool. I'm directing the play, and we've assembled this group of actors, but we're not going to cast them. So you're going to cast them, and we're going to lead up to Chan. So you're going to draw a number out of the bucket, you're going to announce that number out loud to the room, and then tell that person who they're playing, and then they're going to play. Nobody on stage right now knows what role they're about to play. Would you pick a number, please? Don't open it yet. Is it only one? Yes, one. Okay, so this is who's going to play the driver. Could you read the number out loud? Uh, the number? It is. Oh, we're only three. This is who's going to play the navigator. Number one. Anybody want to play? Volunteer? This is who's going to play now. Wait. Thank you. This is who's going to play right. Who's going to play straight? Dude. Great. Anybody else? Yes, thank you. Who's going to play left? Would someone read the last number? That's right. That's who's going to play percent. Spoiled the surprise. Thank you. This was the year 2000. Rare to find what we'd ever moved in. Not now, but then. Everybody ate donuts before. Remember? Fuck. I'll take one. I'll take one. I want to... And they are on the move. Can I at least change the music? No. Driver decides who's the rules.  We should all decide. When you drive, you could decide. You just told me I couldn't drive. Driving is not operating the jukebox. You have points on your license. You aren't going to drive today. The driver gets the music because the driver has to concentrate. Drives. That's it. So...   We'll be there in an hour. I'll take the next exit. What's the number? The next one. The next exit. Nineteen. Eighteen. The next one's nineteen. The next one's eighteen. Take it. Take the exit. Nineteen? It's supposed to be eighteen. Wait, wait. Take it or not? Take eighteen. So the next, next exit. Wait a minute. Take the exit toward... Hey, hey, my job. Don't... Yes, but my job is to make sure that we... Which exit? Eighteen. Eighteen. Take it. Thank you. Get it together, please. It's together.  We're designed... Who was the last one with a single? I was. Then it's your turn. We should all have singles all the time. Four rooms. Seven rooms. What's the difference? A union contract. None of us have one. So we have to share. I should be an union. You can't use that part of your internet. Yeah.  You can't get a contract if you're not a union. And you can't join a union without a union contract.  I was in the union. It's not a great... We'd have our own rooms. That seems great. We wouldn't be here at all. We can't afford a union. We can't raise enough money to turn a profit with union people. Union people are too expensive. Obviously we need them. Yes, they need more money. If they don't have to buy seven rooms every night. Yes, but really? Movies like cars? Tops? Keep each other company? We're all together all the time. Anything? What do you want? Seven separate cars? Two? And internet? You gave me a lot. Do you want one? Are you secretly management? I'm a person who's run this contract before I signed it. Having a great time. I don't mind sharing and rotating a single. It's great. Before. I thought once you were in, you were in. Hey, what's next? We're on this road for a while. And then it's exit 181. We're going to route 23. What happened? Did you get kicked out? How did you? How can a person get kicked out? Well, you have to keep paying your dues, following rules. I wanted to do some other stuff. I mean, all we want right now is to join. It's never a burden to me that you could get kicked out. Now it's a whole new set of problems to worry about. It's a Jesus. You have to work so hard to get in. Not really. And then you couldn't even stand. And now you're here. Oh, for someone you're too. I need that. Swim back into this. Underpaid? Underspected? I was really psyched when I got this gig. I still am. So many people wanted this job. And you have it. There are people who wanted to be here and then not. Because they weren't up to it. So I think that's the whole thing. It's not that simple as ready and not ready. I mean, you can be ready to work and not find the right job. And not be right for that particular job. Too tall or too short or whatever. And then you don't get the job. I do want to think every time I don't get a job, it's because I'm not good enough. I mean, Jesus. To get this job, all you need to be able to do is read.  You have to show up. And not smell too weird. And say the words in order. And then the job is yours if they give it to you. I think it's a little more complicated than that. And so do you. None of you watched auditions. I did. I know who you need out to get this job. Each one of you.  And also you're here because you're good at what you do. And also you're here because we thought you'd be ready to do this. And also ready for the job.  Not smell weird. And say the words in order.  We need your best efforts out there.  Like they could tell. What are the first things most of these people have ever seen?  Is that it? You know? You're all? Never. I got jobs I shouldn't have. I got screwed when I shouldn't have gotten screwed. Nothing works so neatly. Nothing in the world works according to your new reasons. So just tell the music. This is the first job I've had in a long time. Because I start that kind of attacks every time I left the house. You're unstable is what you're saying?   No. Because I'm tough. No, just lucky.  You have to take care of your own head. A panic attack is not punishment for not taking care of such a... How? How long do I stay on this road? Two more months. Look at all those pawn shops.   Finding themselves in emergencies. Selling that stun gun. What does a person need a stun gun? Anything they needed it. Now they're selling it. Because what? They're so desperate. How does that happen? The world is full of loose wheels. I don't have panic attacks because I was raised to think ahead. Really? To live within my resources. Build a sturdy life for myself. How did you land up here? What are you talking about? This is great. The open road. Adventure. Circus. See the world. Turn left at the traffic light. This one? Yeah, this one coming up.  And here I am. Out of town. Hey, vacation. No crisis waiting for me around the corner. The van turns left. Rather the size of the room. It's panic pee. Anxiety pee. Panic pee. Definitely. Go right down. Peeing in the woods. Valleys. Fields. Deserts. Rivers. Swimming pools. Right now. All over the world. Get back in the van. Let's go. The left is back in the van. Are you okay to drive? I'm fine. Cool car collected, see? The van continues on its way.  It wasn't our fault. That person, whoever it was, smashed us and clicked us here. It happened.  It wasn't a deer. Deer don't leap into the size of the car. I don't know what deer is, dude. I'm a city person. I don't know if deer is in the city. The deer are taking over. They don't care about city, not city.  Do you know how that places for food? There are no deer in the city. I've never seen a deer in the city. Doesn't mean they're not there. It's only on this road for two miles or so. Thanks. Just because you don't see deer, doesn't mean they're not there. Actually, yes, that's exactly what that means. If I don't see deer, then there aren't any deer. Unless you're performing some sort of deer blindness.  No one does. But you really don't. Got a tweezer? The world is full of hiding places and deer are better hiding. Eyebrows, ears if I squint. I really need a tweezer. Don't squint. What's the next turn? Coming up, right here, turn left. Right or left? Left, turn left. Like I said, turn left, right ear. Left. Can't you just say now, turn left, now? Look, just now, turn right. Turn right now. Turning right. And then we're looking for Old Mill Road. 4952 Old Mill Road. This is 154 Old Mill Road, so I guess we stopped this for a while. Are you sure it isn't the typo of the address? We're looking for the minaret. No, the minuet on Old Mill Road. It'll probably be one of those old movie theaters, like the Odeon, like two times ago. Really? Oh, great, I love an old theater. The Odeon had mice. A mouse ran across my foot when I was getting breast. All theaters have mice. The theaters are like mouse heaven. Well then they'd be dead if it was not dead.   That's what I would name a theater at night. Are we in the right place? Are we going the right way? Someone tell me what to do. Just stay on Old Mill Road. I mean, this just looks like fast food sprawl. Sprawl. Sprawly. It's just sprawl. This isn't where anyone lives, though. I'm checking the address. Why don't we just stop and ask for directions or something? We're not waffles. No, we're just not where we should be, so how is that different from laws? We're walking right in the road. We just have to.  A whole empire of sweet, cheap, delicious pecan waffles.  Their waffles have tiny squares. Not tiny belgium squares. Which I like, but... They have some funk, but the food is clean.  Belgium waffles hold the better better, like a whole lake of butter in one square. See, that's where you're wrong. Waffle house waffles are perfect. Do people eat veggies down here? What do they do for rubbish? Oprah, are you sure about this address? Vegetables are too expensive. Unless they're potatoes, I love potatoes. Potatoes make the world go round. Or corn, corn syrup, popcorn, corn chips. Junk. Yeah. Farms. They're farms. People grow their own. Liberandia. Chili's, McDonald's, Ruby's, Subway, Ruby Tuesday's, T-G-I-F, Burger King, RV's, Wendy's, Denny's, Papa John's. World means farm. What you can see from the road is nothing. When we get there, we have to load in before dinner, at least a little of the trailer, so we only have an hour in the morning to set up. Oh, I want us to sleep. So sleep. Not sitting up, letting down. Under the covers. Listening to the music that I like.  You drive, you pick the music. Final drive. I'm the driver.  Getting close. 3,000, whatever was the last address. Shakespeare country. Cows. Strip malls. Pawn shops. These people want some Shakespeare. What's the name of the place? The presenters are feeding us.  It's going to be greasy pizza. Why do they think they know how to make pizza down there? Because they do. They make pizza. And for the record, everyone down here, all the places that are hosting us, are doing the best they can, with the 25 cents they have to have an art program. The last place we work, the school board, spent the arts budget on Bible. So take a paycheck. Be cool pizza. Be quick to play. I didn't say cool. I said greasy. I just think a little quiet. You don't know anything about how people live around here. What they have to put up with. How many people are out of work or are struggling to learn anything in a shitty, underfunded school that doesn't want to talk about Darwin. You don't know anything about struggle, or poverty, or what it's like to not be able to buy fancy cheese. You never lived anywhere that didn't have fancy cheese. And bookstores. And art museums.   We're just surviving one more day.   Everyone knows what to do. I need to run for public office no matter what the polls are saying. I'll do something foolish and then false it. I think you may not know about me. You hear something you may not know about me. I'm a born disciple. I'm a natural devotee. I would give up playing God if I found one. Born disciple. Natural devotee. Eventual heretic. Are there any ex angsty teenagers in the house? Former hormonal egomaniacs. What happened to you? And did it ever go away? I look in the mirror and I'm finally older. Too old to be a prodigy. Sometimes I feel like I'm a genius in disguise. I should see a doctor about that.  My old face. The face I used to see. Am I being weird? Am I being weirder than normal? Content warning. I look in the mirror. You asked me. I told you. You told me. I know who I am. I was impressed. What an achievement. I told you. I know who I am.   I'm an actor. You're different. Yes, I'm different. I decided to become different. For you. Yeah. You. You know who you are. Don't worry. They won't. I redacted your name. In January 2017, I sent name redacted an email with an attachment. Subject line. Hey, name redacted. Instapolly. Body of the email. I hope you had a good trip down to DC. Slash. I'm glad we got to see each other last night. Slash. I'm glad we met. Maybe a strange song to send to you, but that's also kind of why I'm sending it. It's definitely about sex, but also God. If you investigate me, you should know there is melancholy in my lyrics. You might find more songs about sex, and it's all actually all about Emily Dickinson. Looking forward to your work. D. The attachment was a song. I'm singing of you. I'm dreaming of you. I'm dreaming of you. To take a moment to introduce some terms that may prove useful to us, I'll start with mania. What is mania? An overly elevated state. Technically speaking, heightened overall activation with enhanced effective expression. Activation and expression overly elevated. Feeling fizzy like a seltzer. What is a manic episode? A manic episode includes an extended period of persistently intense mood. In order to qualify, that period must be marked by at least three of these symptoms. Inflated self-esteem. Intensified theatric speech. Ecstatic racing of thoughts. Decreased need for sleep. Pacing. An inability to sit still. Excessive risk taken. These answers are tributaries to another river of asking. What is bipolar disorder? A manic episode predicates a bipolar one diagnosis. What is bipolar one disorder? A bipolar spectrum disorder. Where do I fall in the spectrum? And what pushed me? Did I trip or something? In March 2017, I was diagnosed with bipolar one disorder after the onset of my first manic episode. That's the fact we can latch on to. When you imagine your suicide and if you've never imagined your suicide, congratulations. Anyway, when the rest of you imagine your suicide, what does it look like? How does it happen? One of my earliest influences was Richie Tenenbaum who didn't succeed in his attempt and isn't a real person. Richie Tenenbaum is a character played by Luke Wilson in the film The Royal Tenenbombs written and directed by Wes Anderson and released in 2001 when I was 11. In the film, Richie Tenenbaum slits his wrists while looking at himself in the mirror while needle in the hay by Elliot Smith who stabbed himself in the heart is playing in the background. He doesn't succeed in his attempt and it's a fictional event. Richie Tenenbaum's suicide is a constant hypothetical ever-present as is mine. Is yours? Let the sound come visit Iowa so boring. If you summon me, I will arrive. I'll cast a spell smiling face. Until my stomach forgot the hunger I wore eyeliner. I enjoyed being terrified. It's like a walking archive. A talking library. A stalking machine. What is the relationship between personal transformation and revenge? If I had a child I would tell them I wouldn't depend on me.  And so is as you know it it will all be long gone My favorite emoji right now is the blue butterfly. What's yours? The laughing goats. Are you open to a radical suggestion? Open, ready. Call me on the phone and say hi. In November 2016 I watched the election on a projector in a basement. In December I quit smoking. I met name redacted in January 2017. In February I went to visit name redacted in Iowa. I returned in March. April. I don't know what happened in May 2017. June, July, August. In September 2017 I wondered privately whether recovery was an option. October, November, December, January, February. In March 2018 I turned 28 on the 28th. It was my golden birthday. In September 2018 my therapist said I seemed good. I agreed. I wrote these words in September 2019. As of October 2019 my public position on this matter is that I am doing well and I'm a credit to my disorder. Come visit Iowa so boring. If you summon me I will arrive. I'll cast a spell. Smiley face. From the old English spell story, fable, myth from the proto Germanic. I can tell you this in the dark.  I was in a school in the library saying that philosophy began way before you two centuries ago. I was so surprised to discover with these early philosophers wronged by the nature of women to make up the ultimate reality was a cosmic strike between others apart and cold wet and dry, male and... I don't even know what I don't know I don't think I know much everything we go with our evil our old things so starved we just suppose men be unfundered and you will if my tool is to have any meaning is so that you are in liberty to examine these questions together with the other men it is impossible if you do not examine them my life is not worth living your life that's good too fuck you girl baby grew feathers and turned into a swan expertise I told you but please let me introduce you to my good friend Plato I'm sure expertise your reputation precedes you and I've come to be enlightened by your reason you are a swan of my dream to get you started ponder my notion that the unexamined life is not worth living and that I know that I know to deal with human beings to associate with men in general that's my choice of life I know full well that if I can tolerate her spirit attach myself to every human being master founded his own academy 1887 BC for meeting women to study with men some women rose high in the academy ranks and even dressed like the men Plato and the other directors of academy were marked for opening the doors to women but they insisted that women could be anything men would be including men though with one caveat women would never be as good as men there is no special faculty of administration in the state which a woman has because she is a woman rich a man has by virtue of his sex but the gifts of nature are like diffused in both all the pursuits of men are the pursuits of women also but in all of them a woman is inferior to a man in 367 BC a 17 year old orphan boy with slender calves, small eyes and a lot of clothes and rings enrolled in Plato's academy his name was Iris Cato he eventually left the academy and married a high born embryologist whose name was Pigeon a name derived from the small the skin flesh from a python that Apollo slayed so Aristotle and Piquius traveled the lesbos an island rich in marine and plant life here it means for his taxonomy a way of being the best nature and the only way to study its purpose was to begin with its biology P.C. P.T.S. is taught to have worked alongside Aristotle she picked the beach for creatures belly part of child warm Mediterranean sun on her back sand on her calves, a bed of octopus and crab on her shoulder Aristotle concluded and wrote from these surveys that the female is as it were a mutilated man a degenerate irrational and passive needing the guidance of men the bloody claws of menses were further evidence of their festivity the active sperm were needed to form a full human being one sex needs the other in an isometrical dynamic that exists not for convenience of harmony states so this was its natural that's correct Aristotle also held that some men that they were fit to be slaves and he had a number of slaves on the dominant stage sure did and anyone who disagreed with his ideas he argued must not be thinking and so more like untrained boxers or children with lists he said lazy people don't forget the most important part oh right what does it take to be a philosopher a profound mind time and space quiet and trees sparkling things and bracelets aesthetic harmony who is going to do all the work the growing the harvesting the annual husbandry the wine making robots it takes time and space to think it takes time and space for intellectual masturbation Aristotle's ideas on women's inferiority influenced western thought for the next 22 centuries take out your text number two quills and choose one of the following essay questions a correct answer is necessary to obtain your degree of philosophy here at Oxford University you must answer this question carefully and without bias you have 12 hours for the test extra sheet of veilu I'll leave a carving knife on my desk the sheet are out of bag ready? yes sir nature intends women that doesn't make sense question two whether women's nature is as intelligent as man's have included a wife as a philosopher telling me that someone says mom or a girlfriend we are testing your capacity for recent not your levels of sympathy sympathy I think therefore I am the mind and body are totally distant that means even if we assume that women's bodies are weak it doesn't follow that their minds are too in fact they could be just as wise man which means they should attend universities not to put words in your mouth what do you say about them? nature are equal what about women and civil society? oops forgot about them philosophy is concerned only with what's essential which reminds me, it's time for my daily massage Eleanor meet me in my chambers the novel argues the aim of civil society is to ensure our freedom specifically the freedom to do so when women can't do philosophy and so they can't be citizens duh, in my chapter on democracy I say one may assert with perfect propriety that women have not by nature an equal right with men and thus it cannot be that both sexes should rule alike much less that men should be ruled by women and why? I continue and men and women cannot rule alike without great hurt to peace what of this? enough so those are the final words of your political tea one of my hero's first sense of playing the most influential finger of the Enlightenment can't who says our minds can't but help see the world the way they do and we can't be sure whether the way we see things is actually how they are so what is the way we can't help but see women women's philosophy is not too easy but too sense even if a woman excels in arduous learning and painstaking thinking they will exterminate the merits of their sex men shouldn't become more perfect as women have a long slumber who can't know anything for certain oh how cute yet the epistemic uncertainty gives me a theoretical idea it's entirely rational for a man to rule around but not a woman you can't be certain who the father of the baby is and as we all know if a man is uncertain he is the father of the baby and so he has the care for the baby oh knowledge more properly than do men men often care no more than necessary about knowledge but some above troublesome and laborious cares are more detached and therefore more capable of contemplating the good and beautiful philosophy, Gretchen is done roasting the schnittle burst I warned well said victim Stein this is why any time a woman walks into the conference room while I am speaking in the late 15th century you probably have a super keen on joining a club maybe I could get an academic post work towards staying here that sort of thing so I have a reason to think that we are not equal to if not superior oh what is that awful noise he is more peaceful unfolding whose principle is the more indeterminate but man is like an animal his reason pokes the three probably arboreal and its have it around to pop you up because man is superior to women and whenever he takes up whether that's deep thought or reason or imagination or merely the use of the senses and hands in my recent book the meaning of disgust by Colin McGinn argue that the fear is from a fear of death some objects like diamonds impart an idea of eternity love jewelry so because of a relatively high level of bodily so the plan in relation to men to please men to be useful to them to win their love and respect to help raise them as children care for them as adults and add to but the discoveries of the scientists so far they go learn some supported traditional reviews so much so now we're just going to do a quick shift and we're bringing on Nick our moderator who I'm going to let you just take it off from here in about two minutes we're going to have a very brief co-show conversation with the lead artists these wonderful pieces that you just saw so stick around if you can and if you can now's the time so we only have like ten minutes so we're going to get rolling and we're going to be very excited for our other artists to join us my name is Nick I'm very honored to be sharing the stage with these artists I am a set designer and director and courtesy director of the assembly and someone who studies for his doctorate on the third floor of this building I'd love for you all and my pronouns are he, him I'd love for you all to go down and say your names, pronouns and what you did I'm Jessica I'll may see my pronouns are she, her, hers I directed and hung out in Kate Benson's play Hi I'm Kate Benson I wrote Where Are We Going which was the first piece in this and then I also read all of the words into the actors ears because I am a tormenter I'm Deepali Gupta she, her, hers and I'm the creator of I Love You Stranger Hi I'm Sofia Mieva and the founder of Not Amuse Theater and she, her, her and yeah we presented the philosophy piece thank you all very much so I'd love to start by asking each of you where you are in the process and then we can get into the details so this this is a play that we have done one developmental workshop in reading we have some former castmates in the house which is excellent we've heard the whole thing and worked on the whole thing for a week and then we just worked on this little piece for the couple of weeks to get ready for this and that's it it's brand new mine has been in gestation for a few years and one former another and then for the past few months we've been developing it with Ars Nova and their Makers Lab and before that sort of the first generation the first draft was generated in the civilians R&D group taking it from like sort of writer's group to writer's group this was the first time that I brought other people into the making room with me Catherine Brookman and Star Busby are the other performers that I worked with and having them in the room developing the material was critical and then Arie Rodriguez is the director I worked with and Michael Costagliola Costagliola was on sound for us I just wanted to say their names so this is very fresh for us this is pretty quickly the first draft of it Regan Penaluna who is in the audience over there he's the writer so that's from her book that's coming out next year and Susu that's a Subaru's next to her it's been a my co-writer for a Medusa project about woman mythology that we've been doing for a couple years now and so we just had this surprise and light love for this piece of Regan and so we wanted to work on it and bring it to stage so this is our first draft and collaboration together I'm excited to ask each of you if you had unlimited resources and this could become anything in the world is there something that comes to mind either in terms of the process or what it would be like in performance how would you go, say if you lived in Germany just kidding okay so this play started as a secret hidden text of what it's like to live in a representative democracy and the entire text has no gender pronouns and so theoretically anybody could play any part and when we got together in the room in Vermont at Northern Stage we discovered, or I discovered that what I was really proposing was anyone can sound like Kate Benson but I think that that is not still not a terrible exercise so I hope people might disagree but that's their right because representative democracy so what I would love is for six weeks eight hours a day rigor so that the actors could be supported in their efforts to really learn all eight parts so that they would have eight lives in their minds eight Kate Benzens that's a fun kaleidoscope in their minds and be able to perform any of the parts at any time I don't know if that's possible which is part of why it would be very exciting because there's a lot of support I also don't know perhaps this was legible all of the, most of the play no, half of the play takes place in a passenger van and the other half takes place in a Ramada in hotel room and so I would love that to at least be able to contemplate whether we need the realism of that set whether there should be a carcass of a passenger van that suddenly magically turns into a hotel room my literary agent was talking to me about it and she was like yes I mean the grill on the front of the car could become the radiator in the room which I'm not sure the last time I've been in a hotel room with a radiator but I really love that idea so it's if unlimited funds I would want to be able to build the van and build the room and then throw it away if it didn't work that's a dream my dream is also to have a huge spreadsheet of like every person and slash actor that we love and have them be paid well to cycle in and like get to be a part of the play so it's never concretely cast everyone gets to be in it so if we continue with in-ear then theoretically anyone could step in and one of the beautiful things that happened about getting ready for this is that it was very difficult to get all eight actors in the room at the same time yeah like 16 hours of rehearsal and it was just really random special guests come in and step in for one day of rehearsal for which we have infinite those infinite gratitude for our friends and colleagues who were willing to do that but it did enlighten us that if we keep going with the in-ear technology in which some you know they're responding to what they hear that you could have a hundred people on a list and they could just sign up for the performances they wished to attend which would be a really exciting radical experiment with this play I would love a lot of design elements fabulous costumes but also I think this is something that I have seen I think just in the audience after slave played in the lobby there were audience engagement people who were there to speak to the audience about their questions, their concerns what they were feeling and I think given the content of my piece that's a service that I really want to provide to my audience and I wish I could provide to all of you if you have anything to talk through I'm not your person but um no but and I think just like having the financial compensation for making the theater be equivalent to the emotional labor involved as well as the time and the mental energy yeah I will take everybody in the bus too and put them in a farm where we can be fed and we work and we don't worry about New York and New York schedule it's been also very challenging for us to work to get to today though fortunately the ensemble today, the cast of today were in Philadelphia two weeks ago so I got them there they were in Philadelphia and we like we worked for we had a couple rehearsal and then once we go back in New York it was really complicated to get together in the room to rehearse so yeah residencies outside of the city that can be supported and support the life also of everybody for two weeks, months well that will be beautiful because for me I'll come from a physical theater with a mask work to produce that result and that expectation on stage it's a lot of work a lot of physical work and it's a very demanding work so it's really hard to work with a number of though we try and my cast I find it fantastic for being game and playful and hardworking and talented and but we always want more and we want to research more how to subvert the text especially with a text like that how to take the time to play with it about this piece sorry as I said with Susu over there and Reagan maybe this will come it's on our play but since we started to work it was hard to be like ok we stop and this is the version we're going to show because it's an amazing material and I'm also learning a lot through that history so there's huge things to uncover, to digest and then to play with and this is also time that's it so we have to wrap up soon I'm going to ask you one more question because we've got to turn this space over to the next performance and this is a brutal question to ask you to be succinct about but I'm going to ask you to do it anyway for all of your works you're asking really big questions that register on a social level a societal level what does the theater what does the theater offer you as a forum for that kind of questioning and actually with Nupali's case I'm curious about what song offers you yeah I'll start, I think song offers me a psychic landscape that I don't access in text, I think it offers the audience a landscape that and a type of attention that can be paid for physical attention and I think similarly in making this piece about disorder and mental illness I think it's important that I put my body on stage and my body on the line and that there is a danger to that but that to me is different than reading a book of poetry by a woman who is writing about her medication which is valid and I love those books of poetry and I enjoy part of a lineage of writing about disease but for me the only way I can talk about this is with my body I am mostly interested in subverting what we think we know and cracking the egg of consciousness so that we can approach each other with more wonder and less certainty very succinct Sophie with the grotesque form I intend to make people laugh try to keep digging deeper into what is the mechanism of power and play with that denounce them, subvert them to maybe be able to bring everybody to love together just some kind of let go let's not take each other too seriously and yeah, big words thank you so please give these artists a round of applause thank you all for being here I know that you can be silly and playful in the lobby and that would be very appreciated and talk, catch up with all these artists there's another at 7 o'clock but if we can just have everyone clear out before that that would be wonderful and there's a closing night party at the museum of sex at 10 p.m. y'all good to meet you


This paper examined the potential of combining different types of microwave remote sensing data with optical data for land use classification. It compared the results of several classifiers on data collected over a single farm in Heilongjiang province, China. The study found that the best results were achieved by combining microwave data from Terras-Rx and Radarsat-2 satellites with optical data from Formasat-2. This combination produced highly accurate land use maps with a spatial resolution of 8 meters. This article was authored by Kristoff Hutt, Wolfgang Kopp, Yusin Miao, and others.


Thanks a lot for that very kind introduction and thanks to all of you for being here I am excited and intimidated to be here because you know all that PhD stuff for me was about 12 years ago And since then I you know realized that sciences is really hard and Writing science fiction is just so much quicker. You know, there's you don't have to go into a laboratory You just hang out at the coffee shop. So that's what I've been doing for the last decade And that's why today. I want to talk to you about killer robots So yes, they are a staple of science fiction, but they're also real and So we need to talk about how we're going to avoid being sliced into tiny bloody pieces by Robots that in our hubris we decided to build with buzz saws for hands And I can tell some of you were thinking about doing that just from just from looking out So that sounds silly, but There are a lot of really smart really high-profile people that it turns out are really afraid of killer robots So people like Stephen Hawking Elon Musk Bill Gates Elon just gave ten million dollars to the future of life Institute a group dedicated to mitigating existential risks facing humanity due to the development of human level AI and Similar mission statements are shared by the lifeboat Institute the Cambridge Center for existential risk The machine intelligence research Institute and the future of humanity Institute. So that is a lot of institutes All right, something must be up Something has frightened our billionaires ladies and gentlemen. We owe it to them to explore what that is So let's get into it. Let's talk about killer robots. So The cultural icon of the killer robot goes all the way back to the inception of the word robot itself So the word is check and it means laborer and it was coined in are you are Rossum's universal robots a play produced in 1920 in which robots revolted against their human masters and You guessed it killed all humans on the earth bender would be proud so From there things really got going in the 30s and 40s in the era of pulp science fiction movies So back then robots were monsters, right? And they were mostly concerned with kidnapping scantily clad women from Square-Jod Space Heroes, which has always confused me. I don't know what they were planning to do I don't know what the in-game was for those robots and as it turns out. I don't really want to know actually so a hundred years later a Lot has is the same and a lot hasn't changed with the idea of killer robots as Monsters so this fundamental killer robot theme, you know that we've got this creation made in the image of humankind And yet bent on destroying its own creators This has really been relevant all the way from Frankenstein's monster in 1818 up to David from last year's Aliens movie in 2017 it's an enduring theme and I think part of that reason why is that it really Changes with the times so our robot stories have evolved alongside our society Back in the 1920s our you are was really about the working class Revolting against their bosses. So essentially it was about income inequality which makes sense whenever you're in a in a society What's ruled by robber barons? Early last century our society was more concerned was more religious and we see more stories About the fear of playing God and daring to create life and then later in the 60s the robot stories start to evolve into stuff like the day the earth stood still representing our our fears about Nuclear holocaust and creating tools that are too powerful and now today. We do have more nuanced Robots than just terminators and Ultron's We have great stories like Blade Runner 2049 Ex machina robot and Frank and her that are really exploring in depth our relationship with technology And I think that all of these stories resonate across the centuries because at its most basic level the killer robot represents a fundamental fear that we all have and But our ancestors have had and that's just a question of do we trust ourselves and in particular Do we trust ourselves with these powerful tools that we're able to build? So by the way no data on my slides just pretty pictures Ten years since the degree so we are a tool making species, right? So we have to be nature is actively trying to kill us at all times if we don't build tools to defend ourselves that's it for us our instinct to build these tools is innate and so Imagine that for around a couple hundred thousand years at least Homo sapiens have been out there building more and more powerful tools and we've been using these tools to Transform our planet and ourselves in good and bad ways and so What I wonder is would we have survived this long if fearing our tools was not an innate part of the process of building the tools so We have to be able to envision different futures the fear makes us think We're drawn toward the utopias and we veer away from the dystopias And I think that fear protects us as we grow and explore and become more powerful and capable as a species and You may also notice that what I'm trying to say here is Envisioning all these different possible futures Perhaps through some sort of science fiction, you know, not tea science, but science fiction I'm just equating that with Being completely necessary for the survival of our species. It's a very important thing for people to do So you can take that with a grain of salt since that's my profession alright, so That said the real robots out there, you know, they're they're really out there and They must be a threat, right? Why are our billionaires shaking in their loafers? You know, there must be some real reason so Let's let's look at that. I think that what we're afraid of is what we can't predict We're afraid that the rate of technological progress is getting out of control and ultimately We're this is embodied by something called the singularity So it's worth mentioning that a science fiction author coined the term singularity Werner Venge and the idea is that It's a hypothetical situation in which we build a machine that can build a smarter version of itself And then that version does the same thing and this iterates until we have a godlike intellect that's trapped in a box And so as it happens if that did occur That could cause some problems And as a science fiction author, these are my bread and butter. So I love these problems I love to think about them. The first one is loss of humanity So human beings could copy their brains into computers or replace their brains with computers and then boom We don't have any more people or at least not in the way that we understand People right now. Um, so a great example of this is in Cory. Dr. Rose novella I robot in which a father is searching for his daughter who's gone missing and when he finds her He realizes that she's made a copy of her brain and put it into a computer and then made a thousand more copies of herself and then one of those copies gets killed and He's left wondering whether he should be mourning for his daughter or how he should feel and she's entered into a post-human Existence and so she's really They've destroyed the natural ties between father and daughter and lost some humanity there another example of Negative outcome is economic collapse. So when super intelligent robots are able to take every single job It'll leave nothing for humanity to do except, you know starved to death, right? So this one is really interesting to think about What is the last job that human beings will keep you know as robots get smarter and more capable now? When you ask people this question they usually well always come back with a version of why the robot will never take my job That's not gonna happen to me. You know, I drive trucks, right? That's impossible. So Intel it happens, you know our instinct is to draw a line in the sand and if you look at the development of AI It's just lines in the sand just all the way to the horizon as we keep stepping back and realizing that machines are more and more capable so I Think that there is One ability that we have that the robots can't take away from us So think of this novel a million little things by James Frey So it's this huge bestseller. It's a memoir. It's lauded. It's incredibly valuable And then there's one piece of information about the book changes We learned the fact that no person actually Lived through what happened in the book so no human being experienced it and the author had lied about living through this It's these experiences of drug addiction. So suddenly the book loses most of its value None of the words changed nothing in the book changed Oprah got very angry, you know, it got her angered up and and so I'm the question is What is it about the book that changed and the answer is the one thing that we have that the robots Can't have and that's just the human experience the act of sucking air and being a human being on the planet earth Now if you don't think that that's valuable, you should look around because as a society We're being taught exactly how to commodify and sell the human experience We've all become experts at this right we market and sell ourselves to each other as a form of entertainment So one example of course is we put pictures of our meals, you know on the internet for everyone to share and The fact is a picture of your meal doesn't have any value associated with it Someone has to eat that meal and you know, there's no intrinsic value to the pictures of my mother's cats It's a it's the human experience that I share with my mother So between all of us we humans create this shared context that gives value to Just the fact that we're alive Now moving on to another negative outcome We've got the big brother AI where we have a super friendly AI Who begins to make all of our hard decisions for us and it's optimally for better or worse We end up as no longer the captains of the USS humanity And then that's closely related to outright slavery in which we're explicitly put to work as resources for our AI Overlords or we're all thrown into the matrix and we never realized that we're just a race of very inefficient batteries And then of course there's my favorite which is the Robo-pocalypse So when we begin to weaponize AI's and we use it to wage war on each other So these outcomes are all very very frightening They're scaring our billionaires and our physicists and a lot of people in movie theaters and everyone sure Michael Bay is going to terrify people with this stuff and all of these existential threats are predicated to some degree on the singularity happening and the problem though is that if you go ask Researchers if you talk to people that are building AI I can't think of a single person who predicts a spontaneous singularity happening overnight So in fact most people consider the spontaneous explosion of intelligence to be really similar to the idea of Elbs sneaking into the cobbler shop and building all of the shoes from them at night And then wow presto you walk into your laboratory in the morning and somebody wrote your thesis for you Apparently, you know, it doesn't seem to happen. So instead I think there'll be a long iterative process of learning how these systems can be created in the best way to ensure that they're safe and What I really want to talk about now is what actually scares the hell out of me So moving one step at a time, you know, we have walked together into this new age And for the first time Technologists have access to this amazing array of new technologies, right? We've got speech recognition face recognition all the things that we've been hearing about today Machine learning and we can just cherry-pick these things and plug them into our devices And of course, that's exactly what we're doing. We're taking all of these things and we're giving people Exactly what they want and I think of this right now as the technological age of Candy so It's just candy. It's exactly what you want to eat But if all you eat is candy, you know, what happens you get sick So I think that's what's happening right now We use mapping algorithms algorithms to get from one place to another But we're left not actually even knowing how to navigate our own cities and neighborhoods We've got Facebook and Twitter feeds that are giving us curated versions of a world That create divisions in our thinking In our dividing our nation our families and we're checking our smartphones in these endless cycles of dopamine reward Like you know rats hitting the cocaine button and some unregulated experiment And it's not just the adults who are guinea pigs in this situation. It's it's children too. So And as a father, this is something that I think about quite a bit. I've got An Amazon echo in my kitchen and I've got a five-year-old son Who finally can say Alexa after years of saying a wexa and trying to tell her what to do And now he can order her around he can tell her exactly what to do and she does it And so for the first time in the history of humanity We can talk to a little black cube and then have it respond to us in the voice of a woman And it's doing speech recognition. We we've never had this ability in the history of humanity So you can imagine our brains are not quite inoculated to this experience and so I think that it shouldn't come as any surprise that our brains will map those interactions with Machines on to our interactions with humans And so the question for me is do I want my son to be involved in an interaction in which he's giving Orders to a subservient woman who complies instantly regardless of how rude he is His mother definitely is not into that interaction She's not pumped about that. So to be clear. I don't really care about Alexa, you know, don't tell her I said that though I'm not worried about her. She's she's a pile of code She doesn't have feelings or thoughts, but I'm worried about my son. I care about him I want to know what kind of person he's going to become is he going to have interactions that help him learn to be polite and thoughtful and Kind and so in our house we say, please and thank you to our Alexa and we do it not because she insists but because I insist and I think that's a really important distinction moving forward because technologists, you know We have they have a lot of experience creating safe consumer products that are going to go into the home and be used by people So that's not to say that, you know, you can ever really win because if you put any object into enough people's homes They would get hurt They're gonna get in the bathtub with it or lick it or put their fingers in it or what people are very curious mammals and Doesn't always end well for them But and I'm sure that this is gonna be a much more difficult problem once we have autonomous Lifelike machines that are that are in our homes as well, but at the end of the day I don't think that physical safety concerns are the biggest challenge for developing new products I think that What's the bigger challenge is something that we've never really had to deal with before which is building ethical products And I really see two main dimensions to this problem. So explicit and implicit behavior so explicitly How do you build a machine that's autonomous?  You know, which human life does it save if it can only save one person from a burning building Does it save the child who's got more years to live? Does it save its owner, you know Who's like got an excellent credit score and you know has still owes a lot of money. So it needs to be earning Or does it just sit back and watch, you know in order to remove itself from from any liability for its parent corporation So I think this is actually a great problem because as sort of a technologically maturing Society, this is this is the kind of problem that that we need to solve We need to be able to quantify our values as a society and embody them in our machines And I kind of love the idea as opposed to the you know, the the robot war I love the idea of our artifacts that are in our lives Being paragons and really representing our values and and acting those out and being something that that you could aspire to behave As well as so it's an idea that's been explored in science fiction So the founding father of artificial intelligence John McCarthy the guy who invented the term artificial intelligence He wrote hundreds of books and articles was brilliant But he only wrote one fictional story and it was about this it was called the robot and the baby and It imagined this future in which a personal service robot is watching over a baby. That's being neglected and abused So the robot takes the baby out into the street to remove it from this dangerous situation And then a police officer comes over and says why robot? Why are you carrying around a baby and the robot won't tell the police officer who it is or where it came from because it's balancing privacy with safety and the really prescient part of this story is that These ethical values that this robot is trying to work its way through. They're decided in the story by congressional committees that argued different Ethics that should be put into the consumer products. So I think that that could be in our future for better or worse God knows what kind of machines we're gonna get honestly, but as an aside I published the robot and the baby in an anthology that I co-edited and Just to brag about it One of the most surreal moments of my life was editing the language of John McCarthy's story When he suddenly switches into Lisp in order to actually go through the utility values of each of these decisions and work out the math of why the robot was vacillating between Safety and privacy and so I had this like moment in my life That was this is golden moment of of editing language and then debugging Lisp code I was just like this is it. This is the synthesis of everything So that was that was just a nice moment that I wanted to share so aside from explicit behaviors like that Implicitly, how is the presence of a lifelike machine going to affect us and and our children? So at my house, I also have a seven-year-old daughter who runs right past me to go hug her mother And I aggressively self-promote. I have a lot of songs about how great dad is Dad is great. What a handsome guy. They don't work. They don't work and I wonder, you know How are either of us going to be able to compete whenever there's a robot in our household? Whenever we've got our children running right past us to go hug their machines because kids are and will be interacting with lifelike machines and so the question is Can they tell the difference between what's fake and what's real and we're starting to find out so researchers at the University of Washington Have videotaped 80 preschoolers interacting with a stuffed dog and with an I bow robot puppy So they found that most kids understood the difference between these two things They know that I bow is not alive, but they still treat it as a moral entity.  They talk to it more frequently. They engage in reciprocal activities with it and I Find this most interesting when a researcher Smacks both dogs really just a sharp tap the children stare at the I bow for twice as long And they're trying to figure out whether it was okay to hit this lifelike machine So if a technology Looks and acts alive then children will naturally treat it that way even if they know that it isn't really true And it's scary to me to think that negative interactions with lifelike technology like kicking a robot dog Could be mapped back on to real humans and animals But it's also reassuring to me that kids naturally empathize with lifelike machines and they want to treat them well So how do we ensure that we have positive interactions with our AI?   You're hurting my feelings whenever you call me stupid So when the character keeps quiet they found that only half the kids reported that the insult was not okay and that number jumps to over 90 percent when the robot stands up for itself and so What I see is that it's up to the robot to tell us how we should be interacting with them And if a robot demands to be treated with respect children are happy to comply with that And if it doesn't then they're more likely to see nothing wrong with abusing a very lifelike robot So in other words, it's up to the technologists to define this ethical dimension of our interactions with machines And it's not really up to us So I'm hoping and predicting that this kind of research is going to bring in a new age After the age of candy the age of meat and potatoes So instead of getting exactly what we want from our technology, which isn't always what we need I'm hoping that our future interactions are going to be designed to give us what we need So if I'm rude to Alexa, I feel like she should ask me for an apology I want mapping algorithms in my car to help me actually learn how to do it myself That's a harder challenge But if you have two products on the market and they both do the same thing one of them is going to slowly help you Actually learn to navigate on your own. I think consumers will pick the one that that makes them better Instead of just giving them exactly what they want immediately You know this self-destructive nature of eating candy all day is starting to make an impact on us And I and I've seen it. I think we've all seen it So a consortium of investors recently wrote an open letter to Apple demanding that they figure out how to help people monitor that Rat cocaine cycle that's happening with our phones You know, we've all seen scenes of families out to dinner where everybody's sitting at a table staring at their phone and it's kind of horrific and I think a backlash is starting to happen so Zuckerberg recently Acknowledged research that shows Facebook makes people feel bad and he said his New Year's resolution is to fix Facebook And their objective is no longer to just surface relevant content But to prioritize meaningful social interactions on their platform Even if it decreases some of their engagement metrics, so they're starting to look at a long-term outcome How are we actually affecting people's lives rather than just focusing on short-term? dopamine cycles so All of this gives me hope that our technology will make us better people and there is there's some precedence So in the 1960s a group of psychologists was asked to study the impact of television programs Which is a pretty new phenomenon on young minds and the end result for them in a limited case was was Sesame Street So this is a pretty sensational achievement, you know for the medium that positively influenced millions of young minds out there in the world and I'm hoping that that this will this will also impact our next generation of technology so killer robots are scary and Our fear of them I think is natural and not necessarily a bad thing and I do think that we should all spend a lot of money buying science Fiction so that we can envision different possible futures and examine that fear But the killer robots that we should be afraid of I don't think they're being built in secret laboratories I don't think they're coming back from the future or from outer space or they're even on battlefields I think that the real killer robots are under Christmas trees. They're in our living rooms our kitchens You guys are building them. They're coming down the pipeline and these new technologies can hurt us or help us But I'm hoping that if we play our cards right, we're much more likely to earn Powerful allies rather than being chopped into tiny bits by robots that in our hubris we've built with buzz saws for hands Thank you very much


For me, communism means an individual embracing the community as myself, whichever government gets elected. I bow down to the people's will. My opinion is not bigger than the people's will of this nation, always. So, Sadhguru, in your one of the earlier videos, you have mentioned of having those leftist orientations. But when we were interacting with the students in the campus, we found out that there is this dominant perception about Sadhguru being right-wing. Has Sadhguru turned right-wing now? Is it? See, right now, we are working with Tamil Nadu government, which you know is AI-DMK. Nobody knows which wing it is. We are doing a lot of work with Andhra Pradesh government. Still, I think even that you can't decide which wing it is. And that wing was part of the big wing in the center, but now it is not, it is flapping against it. Now we are working in Kerala, which is left-wing. And we are working with the central government.  I'm saying, what is this problem with the government? Government means in a democratic country, it's people's choice, isn't it? Now I don't respect people's choice. I respect only my choice. I think you're a nutcase. You're, you're, you're fanatical, you're fanatical about your own beliefs. I don't belong to any wing, but when people elect, whether I agree with it or I don't agree with it. Personally, whether I agree or I do not agree with it, I will bow down to people's will because that's what democracy means. Now the significance, the significance of democracy is just this. Why can't we have... Well, you mentioned about my, say that I was only 14, okay? Please pardon me. Young blood, that time. Even now, even now young. Sadhguru, you are putting it as it was your mistake. No, I did not say it's my mistake. It is just that I'm telling you, this is 70s. 1967, Che passed away. You don't understand at that time, Che was like, he was like our elder brother, he died and how he was killed, those stories spread everywhere and there's a lot of emotion in all of us. Even today I see people wearing Che's t-shirt and going, most probably a whole lot of them don't know who he is, they think he's Bob Marley or something. So, at that time it's like our elder brother was killed in Bolivia. And at that time, the nation was in a state where it looked like there's not going to be any solution in this country. At that time. So, we thought we and a whole lot of other people believed, unless this is an armed revolution, there is no way out for this country. And even in school, there were teachers who were giving us talks and everywhere there was Russian literature and we read and read, you know, we devoured Russian literature and it all made sense. And I'm always angry. You can't believe this. But I'm always angry because everywhere I see injustice in home, on the street, everywhere, everywhere in politics and religion, any damn place, I see only injustice and injustice and injustice. So, I am all the time 24 hours angry about something. When you're angry, you want a quick solution. You're not willing to wait for solutions to happen. You want a quick solution. So, a quick solution looked like armed struggle. These were the heady days of Charu Majumdar and Somaloo in the south. Well, we were fired up by that. I'm not regretting those days, but we have come to a time now where we are threshold on a threshold of possibility. Through democratic means, never before this has happened in the world, I want you to know this. The only nation which has moved a billion people from poverty to a certain level of economic well-being is China, okay? But they did it the hard way, violent way, all bullets and bullets and bullets. So, they did what they did in their own way. And once they achieved what they have to achieve, now they're trying to move slowly towards a democratic process to some extent. At least open market system they're going into. But with India, we have a unique possibility. We can move 500 to 600 million people from abject poverty, in which they are right now, to a reasonable level of well-being in a matter of next 10 to 15 years time. We are just on the threshold of that. Through a democratic process, without bullets, without killing, without massive repression, nothing, no force, without force we are able to do it. If we manage to do it, if all of us get together, it will happen. Otherwise we'll sit on the threshold forever. Right now there is a possibility we can cross the threshold. I think we must make the possibility a reality, because never before any nation, anywhere, has moved 600 million people from poverty to reasonable well-being in a matter of one generation. It's not happened anywhere. We can do this in this country for the first time. So, well, when you were young, you were communist, now you're saying this, I have not changed my position. I'm still that, because for me, communism means an individual embracing the community as myself. That I still am. I may not be in the party, because the party didn't make sense to me, but communism has not gone out of me. We are a community where we live together, a few thousand people without any distinction of caste, creed, religion, anything. Nobody I've ever asked who come to Isayoga Center, what is your religion, what is your caste? I don't even ask because it never occurs to my mind. So, how I became right wing in JNU, I do not know. So, I feel today when information is available everywhere, I think young people, educated people should, all of you research scholars should do some research at least, all right? Just making wild conclusions about somebody whom you have not even met. This I've seen everywhere, especially in this country. This doesn't happen anywhere else in the world, this is what I'm seeing. In this country, people who have never met you seem to know more about me than I know about myself.  I think you must give them a PhD because they're such a imaginative research they are doing. So, I'm working with governments, I will always work, let everybody know this. Whichever government gets elected because I bow down to the people's will. My opinion is not bigger, my opinion is not bigger than the people's will of this nation. Always. Sadhguru, even if we buy this argument, there's a predominant conception that there is some leading towards the right. Because like, this is… did you… did you feel this is high time, this is high time to galvanize votes for 2019 that the Youth and Truth campaign? See, if I give a call, I don't have to go university to university.  But I will tell you this, but I will tell you this. My daughter comes and asks me, which party should I vote? I won't tell her. I tell her, you need to think. She is an artist.  Maybe not good for me, it doesn't matter. What's good for you and people around you, for your community of artists, whatever, you must vote for that party, not what I say. In the… you know, in the yoga center and everywhere I go, people ask, «Sadhguru, whom should I vote for?» I said, I will not take the step of destroying democracy. Because if I give a call and let's say ten million people vote, have you not destroyed democracy? You have turned a democracy into a feudalistic process that one leader gives a call so everybody blindly will vote for something. This is what you're trying to change. People are voting on the basis of religion, caste, creed and all kinds of rubbish. This is what needs to change. Only when individual people think for themselves and vote, every time fresh, not committed to even a party, only then democracy will stay alive. This is the most precious thing we have because what is precious about a democracy is power can shift without bloodletting. Never in the history of humanity such things have happened. Even if power has to change in a family, somebody will be… somebody will bleed. Yes or no? This is how it's been. But for the first time in the last hundred years or 150 years, we are able to change leadership without bloodletting. Do not underestimate that. Do not ever underestimate that.


Well, it's a participatory democracy kind of talk, so everyone is welcome to choose his own title. The only thing is that this is joint work with Alexandre Roantcher, and I would like to thank the organizer for the invitation. Ah, merci beaucoup. So this started with two sources. The first one is a paper by Elias Berg and Hofer, which is called Towards the Definition of Simplactic Boundary, and which asks the following question. Well, if you're given, I will be more specific on the assumption, but a symplectic manifold. So just for a second, the symplectic manifold will be open, but such that it has a boundary, and the question is, does w omega determine sigma? So that's one, and actually the second one is a paper by, or, well, a result, let's say, by Fleur, Dusa and Elias Berg, about the following says that if you have m omega, which is symplectically as spherical, yeah. Do you mean the interior determines the boundary? Yeah, does the interior determine the boundary? That's what I mean. So it's, if m omega... And determine the boundary, which means it's an abstract manifold? No, as, well, if it's a contact boundary with the contact structure, for example, what can you say about that? With omega over pi 2 is zero, so simplatically as spherical. And if m omega is symplectomorphic to r2n with the standard symplectic form, then m is diffeomorphic to r2n. You haven't said that correctly. You mean it's symplectomorphic to that, at infinity? At infinity, yes. I said that. I didn't write it down, but I said it. Well, maybe. But as I said, it's participatory democracy talk, so you're welcome to add your favorite assumptions to, or maybe the necessary assumptions to the statements. And also to modify the conclusion, if you like. Then m is diffeomorphic to r2n, actually, for n equal 4. For n equal 2, sorry, there's a stronger and older result by Gromov, which implies that m is actually symplectomorphic to r4 with the standard symplectic form. But this is very specific to four-dimensional situations, and I will not talk about that, even though what I'm going to explain could be maybe adapted in dimension 4 to get stronger results in this kind of spirit. So just one word about this. Well, first it uses modular spaces of curves, which is the excuse for discussing this kind of problems here. And the second is that the proof is actually in two parts. First, you prove that the homology of m is zero, and then, except in dimension zero, and then you prove that the pi1 is actually zero, which is, if I'm correct, which is what Yasha proved. So I will, again here, not be interested in pi1 questions, although it could be interesting to check that. So what you should remember about this theorem is that if m omega is like r2n with the standard structure at infinity, then the homology of m is like the homology of r2n. And there's a slightly different way to rephrase that, which is the following is that if w omega, and I will again explain a little bit more about that, as contact boundary, which is the sphere with the standard contact structure, then is the thermomorphic to r2n or to the, sorry. First, it's not m, it's w. And here, let's say it's the same, of course, but to the unit ball. Makes it more. You do need omega with, still, again, with omega over pi2. Well, just because if you have such a manifold, you add the simpletization of the sphere, and then you get something which is, so you have your something which bounds the sphere here inside, and then you just have the simpletization, and you get some manifold which is simplectomorphic to r2n with the standard structure at infinity. So this is the kind of question I will be interested in. And in fact, let me just, unfortunately, we have to write down some definition, which are pretty much standard. If you have sigma psi or contact manifold, and if you have an embedding in a simpletic manifold, then this is a contact embedding. If there exists some form alpha near sigma, such that psi is determined by alpha, so is the kernel of alpha, and the alpha is omega, well, of course, near sigma, since that's where it's defined. And the embedding is exact, or sometimes it's a restricted contact type, if alpha extends to m, and, of course, as a primitive of omega. So that's definition one. Definition two, which is basically the same, is that the simpletic filling of sigma psi is just a simpletic manifold m omega, and I will add with no closed component such that the boundary of w is sigma. When by slight abuse of language, I will say that sigma psi is contact embedded in w omega. Well, there's slight abuse of language because w only exists on one side of sigma, not on the other side. So it's not a usual embedding. So the existence of alpha is only on one side, but I think it's pretty clear what it means. Can you, in fact, always extend by some such activation? Yeah, you can always extend by some small simpletization, so there's no real, there's no issue there. And so it's exact, the filling is exact, if, again, as before, let me say, if it's exact as above. And the last thing I need is, can everyone see when I write here? You can't, but it's okay. Well, it only says definition three. And the filling of sigma psi is stein. Well, if it's a stein manifold, so if I have w omega, the simpletic manifold, psi is a function. So psi is j plurisobarmonic, and j times omega, sigma is psi minus one of zero, and psi is negative on w. So w is a sub-level of plurisobarmonic. So as a consequence of being plurisobarmonic, sorry, I missed something here, and psi is j star of deep psi. Okay, so, well, sorry, sorry, the kernel, I should say. So the contact form is given by the kernel of j star of deep psi. So if you have a plurisobarmonic function, all critical points have index less or equal to n, and it's time sub-critical if and only if all critical points of psi have index strictly less than n. Okay, this is... Are you asking for j to be integrable? No, but... So I will start on one of the blackboards. Let's start on this one. By something which is an element we remarked based on the Florian-McDuff-Eliashberg theorem, so some of you may say very elementary remark, maybe. So the theorem is the following. So if sigma psi has a contact embedding in R2N with the standard symplectic form and interior component z. So if you have an hypersurface in R2N, it has an inside and an outside, and the inside is called z. Now let w omega be a symplectic filling of sigma psi, and let's say such that the second relative homology of w with respect to sigma vanishes. Then the map from HP to W, well, let's say 1 first, to HP of sigma induced by inclusion is injective. And the second remark is that any two such fillings have the same betty numbers. And the third remark is that the p-betty number of sigma is the p-betty number of w plus the 2N minus p minus 1 betty number of w. So I must say we are a little bit surprised to discover that. So it's not just the sphere, and you will see that it's totally, I mean, once I tell you it's totally elementary, you can actually prove it in two lines by yourself. But it's not just that the sphere that has a unique contact filling in the sense, unique in the sense that the topology is completely determined by sigma, but you have a whole class here. And in fact, if you have a contact embedding of something into R2N, it's very easy to construct many more. So let's say it's very hard if you have, if you give yourself a sigma, a contact manifold, it's very hard to embed it in R2N a priori. I mean, unless it's already given of something embedded in R2N. But once you have something embedded in R2N, it's very easy to construct new ones by just doing surgery along the handles of index strictly less than n. You have something like this. You can start with a sphere, and then you can add the handle like this just as much as you like. Provided the index is less than n. So you're adding handles to what? Well, you're doing surgery. I mean, so you're adding a Lagrangian or actually isotropic because I say it's less than n. So isotropic. So you're modifying sigma. So you're modifying sigma. So once you have a sigma, for example, in the unit sphere, then you can construct lots of things with quite different topologies. So the only thing that is delicate to touch is the n-dimensional homology. Can I ask about the definition of fulfilling? You don't distinguish between sigma being convex or concave boundary? Sorry, it's always a convex boundary. I should have said that from the beginning that all my contact structures are oriented and everything here is considered compatible with orientation. So indeed, they're all convex boundaries. We're talking about the surgery. So you have sigma as a contact paper surface. And then you're modifying... Well, you attach an isotropic handle and make surgery on this handle. And because it's isotropic, you can just put it in any way you want without by still being embedded. This is something you can find in a paper by... Well, an old paper by Lodenbach in the ATE. But why is it still embedded? Well, because it's embedded... I mean, you start with something embedded, you add an isotropic handle here and basically isotropic, but not Lagrangian. So isotropic in dimension i-1 at most satisfies each principle. So you can just realize that as something embedded and not crossing again the sphere and then you do the surgery around this. So you're finding an isotropic sub-nath on the R2M which is going to be the core of the handle. Yeah, and you can always do that because you're in the dimension where you have each principle. Okay? Did Z enter into this anywhere? Sorry? Well, you could say that because they all have the same Betty number here from 2. You could say that the Betty numbers are the Betty number of Z, if you want. So do you prove that the filling, you've got sigma fixed and you have HP back it's injected into HP sigma. Is the image of that determined? Is that determined? Almost. You're not. You claim that quite. Almost except in dimension... Sorry, no. Not in general. Let me maybe state... Yeah, before I prove that which is... So here how many blackboards? Ah, two already. Okay. Let me state a corollary. Here you probably don't see. Ah, it's great. Is there a blackboard on which you can't see? Ah, it's the one behind. Well, I put myself in between the board and you. So the corollary is the following, is that if sigma psi has a contact embedding in the standard R2M and W omega is a time filling, then I need... Actually, I forgot Y, but I need N to be greater than 3. BP of sigma, so the betty number of sigma is the same as the betty number of W for P between 0 and N minus 2 and BN minus 1. So N minus 1 betty number of sigma, which is the same as the N betty number of sigma by Poincare duality, is the sum of BN of W and BN minus 1 of W. So in particular, if W is time subcritical, then BN minus 1 of sigma is BN minus 1 of W and BN of sigma is BN. No, I don't believe that. BN minus 1 of sigma and BN of sigma is... Here? Here? Equal? On the left? Here? Equal? BN minus 1 and BN are the same because it's 2N minus 1 dimensional manifold and you have Poincare duality. That's the only... So plus sign? Here it's a plus sign. The sum of the two, and here is an equality sign. I think I missed the explanation as to why this elementary mark was elementary. I haven't proved it is elementary yet. You're not going to do some sort of surgery on the... It's almost more trivial than that. So this one, you can't write in the corner like that. Here I am not supposed to write here. Well, it doesn't matter it's elementary anyway. Maybe I'll do my morning exercise then. Maybe I want to send this one. So the proof of the theorem is the following. Just look at W union R to N minus Z. So you take R to N, you have... You remove sigma, you get something with bound... Remove Z, you get something with boundary sigma and you plug in W. At the end, you write... Myerviator is except that instead of doing that with... R to N, you... Well, it's the same R to N or the bowl. So you get this sequence here. HP of R to N minus Z. And goes to HP of sigma. And then, well, there's no need to go back because this is going to be HP plus one of R to N. And so this is zero. This is also zero, at least for most values of P. And so here you get that this is an isomorphism. And so first you get that this map here is injective. And then you get... So this has to be injective. And then you get that BP of sigma is BP of W plus BP of R to N minus Z. And this implies by Alexander duality that BP of sigma is BP of W plus B to N minus P minus one... Sorry, of Z. So I don't need Z in the theorem, but I need Z. And now what do we have? Well, you can apply the same thing for W equals Z because it gives you a feeling. And so what you get is that BP of sigma is BP of Z plus B to N minus P minus one of Z. And as a result, BP of Z is BP of W. Well, this is actually true for P between zero and two N minus one. You have to deal with the non-zero homology of R to N, but you do that as an exercise. So I must... Yes, of course. The fact that the last term... Sorry, the last term is R to N. So it's the fact that the union... Yes, sorry. So it's not only my observatories. I would argue that that means it's not elementary. It's elementary from... It's an elementary step starting from Flora Magda Feliaspar. That's what I meant. Because it's Yasha. Because what? Because it's Yasha. No, I think because Flora Magdaf proved that the homology is zero and then after that Yasha will prove... Am I correct? Proved that the pi one is zero. Is that correct? I think that's right. And the paper is actually in your paper. We were talking at MSRI and I was talking to Andreas and he had this and then Yasha came. Right. So we could say it's elementary, mod... Yasha's Yaha. That's what it uses, sort of jail... Yeah, jail homophic curve and modular spaces. Okay. Yeah, that's the... And the fact that the only breaking can come from... Exactly.  No, what you actually need is that the union... that I picture here, so W union R to N minus Z should be still simulactically as spherical. So this assumption on the h2 implies that. Actually in the paper with Alex, we have other conditions that imply that. But you need some condition that will guarantee that this... this manifold is as spherical and not enough that W and the W itself is as spherical. So let me make a number of remarks. One remark, I don't know how much it fits here, but so according to some result by Meilin Yao, if sigma psi is contact and satisfies the third churn class of psi is zero and W is time subcritical, then we have that the cylindrical contact homology of sigma and psi is isomorphic to the homology of W relative to sigma, tensor well basically with the homology of Cp infinity, I think shifted by two, but that's... And it's interesting to compare the kind of result that you get. So here what you get is that if you know the cylindrical contact homology of sigma and psi, then you know something. I mean from this you can extract the homology of W basically. So you basically know the homology of W and twice versa, provided you have this time subcritical condition. This kind of statement is different. You ask for an information about the contact structure by saying it can be embedded somewhere, in this case it's in R2N, and then from that just the differential or the homology of sigma gives you information about the homology of W. But of course you can also somehow combine the two and say well, if for example sigma has the contact embedding in R2N, then you're going to know the relative homology of W sigma, and therefore you're going to know something. I mean if you're in the situation of the corollary where you have a subcritical stein feeling, then you know also the cylindrical contact homology. But if you look at the two statements somehow separately, they're telling you different things. One starts really from the contact structure that you're supposed to know quite well to compute this and gives you information about this, and the other one you have a sort of much coarser assumption by just saying well there's a contact embedding somewhere and then I know the homology of sigma and from this I know the homology of W basically. So this, yeah. This result is for any dimension, right? Maybe I don't know, and it's greater than something at least. I don't. So let me just continue on similar questions and then, so another obvious question somehow, well I mean the question is obvious, I mean the answer, is the following take L to be a compact manifold? Look at the sphere bundle of the cotangent, the sphere cotangent bundle of L with the standard contact form. And then the question is what are the possible feelings of this, of S t star lambda, S t star L with lambda. Of course the question is well at least homologically should they have the same homology as D, so is it D t star L? And well we have the proposition again I think N has to be greater than trees that if L, which obviously follows from what? If L has a Lagrange embedding in R to N, unfortunately I didn't say exact Lagrange. So you have non-empty set of examples. W, a feeling of S t star L lambda such that the relative homology of W with respect to the boundary is 0, then from what follows W as the homology? And you can construct of course many of these if you have L which has an immersion in R to N then L times S1 for example has an embedding in R to N plus 2 and the assumption of having an immersion in R to N is just an assumption of the tangent bundle. So if the tangent bundle, the complexified tangent bundle is trivial then you have such an immersion for example. So what did I want to say? Okay so of course it's a bit frustrating if you say that all these comes from one a well-known theorem and two Maya vietoris. And then you think well maybe we can work a little bit more and get some... Can you use this S1 trick to upgrade the ring of... No, no because if you try to multiply by D2 so the problem is that the boundary of D t star this is this term which is okay but it concerns also this term which is not okay because it really comes from the feeling that you had. So yeah maybe I can... So the idea is well let's try to generalize this theorem the Fleur-McDuff-Eliashenberg theorem and then apply again Maya vietoris and maybe we get to a wider class of examples. So the theorem is the following. So assume sigma psi admits a contact embedding in a subcritical stein manifold. Now let W be an asphherical feeling such that the relative H2 of W on sigma vanishes then the map I hope this is correct from Hg of W to Hg of sigma is injective for all j. And well if sigma psi is just S-1 S-1 and S-1 with the standard sphere you essentially get well up to this pi one thing which I must admit we were too lazy to investigate we get the Fleur-McDuff-Eliashenberg theorem. Of course S2 and S-1 with the standard structure has a contact embedding in R2M so in a subcritical stein and what this says that if you have an asphherical feeling then the map from Hg of W to Hg of sigma is injective but this is zero for most values so it means that this is zero for basically all values. So just one question. Subcritical stein manifold does not mean it from now is it subset of R2M already? No. It means that well implies that it's a product of C by your theorem by Chilibach is the product of C and I think a stein manifold. And so in particular subcritical stein implies that the symplectic homology so let's say this one is N omega subcritical stein the symplectic homology of N well the plus part let's say and constant part vanishes. So let me state the corollary of this if sigma is a rational or just a homology sphere and if sigma psi embeds in subcritical stein then any symplectically asphherical feeling will be a rational homology ball. Well I had plans to describe a little bit the proof but I think that was overly optimistic. Oh the clock is fast we started five minutes late so you have till 40. I have till 40. On this clock. Oh yes my says 20. Past. Okay then so I was about to skip many things so we'll just skip half of what I plan to skip. Still I don't think I want to embark on the idea of the proof. Can you tell us what the ingredients are? What the ingredients are? They're basically the same as well let's say no for this no. So what we use is that so the first thing is that is a result by Chile back which says that subcritical stein is the product of something which I will denote by M and C. So that's how I start. The second point is result by Liska and Matich which tells me that one can close M to a manifold P and then the idea is to work in P times S2 and now the idea is essentially the same as the one but requires more work in the theorem by Flor Macduff and Eliashberg looking at rational curves which are in the homology class of S2. So what actually we do is to replace and then consider V as well as Z was embedded in M times C here so becomes embedded now in P times S2 so you take P times S2 removes Z and then you glue over sigma your manifold W and then you somehow count homomorphic curves which are so somehow at infinity you have the curves in P times S2 you use some analog of hyperplane section to sort of normalize the homomorphic the homomorphic serves by fixing three points so that you don't have to deal with reparameterization and then you have also some homological argument but basically by kind of continuation you can fill the space V by this homomorphic curves. That's exactly the same idea. Z is the interior of no for once it was not on the board everybody asked what in all previous statements there was a Z and since you complained I dropped it but now you see it's useful so it embeds in a subset in the in a subcritical stein and the interior is Z so here you would say with interior component equal to Z in the other case you have like a choice of which thing to make your S2 no here you have no choice on which thing to make to S2 but I mean that's not so different and then the sort of homological argument in the end is slightly different but basically the ideas are essentially the same so is it an assumption that there is an interior and just being completely different why is there an interior? Is it an assumption? It says no because if it's a critical stein H2N-1 is zero and then by Alexander duality the hypersurface will have an inside and an outside so it follows from the hypothesis here so there are two more things I wanted to discuss about this kind of problem the first one are symplectic, let's say symplectic homology obstructions because so far except for, there's a sort of starting point which uses rational curves in the symplectic manifold but apart from that it's all ordinary homology somehow there's no flow of homology here there's a hidden gram of width and invariant but there's not much so what can we say if we use more about symplectic homology? Well there was the statement I quoted before by Meilin Yao but let me say a few more things so I will say, actually I don't know what this W omega is I would like to say flow as spherical but if it satisfies that the symplectic homology of W vanishes I thought of symplectic, no not as spherical sorry I meant acyclic I don't know if there's, yes P is the manifold you get from M which was probably so you start from the subcritical stein, you write it as M times C so in the original situation of Fleur Macduff and Delyashberg the subcritical stein is just R to N so it's easy to write it as a product of something and C so it's going to be CN minus 1 times C and then the CN minus 1 you close it as a compact symplectic manifold and this is P and so in the original paper it's closed as a torus sorry as a torus as a product of spheres but it doesn't matter what you close it has and then you have that sigma is embedded, of course it was embedded in M times C so it's embedded in P times S2 and then you make surgery over P times S2 by removing this Z which is the interior and gluing W instead and see what you get from there by looking at homomorphic curves such a manifold without a C factor what, subcritical stein? no I mean a fleuric cyclic manifold which is not something that's C ah share our, yeah it's a, every flexible range of domain is where a cyclic ah, but they're not all subcritical so subcritical is a good project for this product so pretty good to do product by, by Chili-Buck theorem and ok thanks so let me state the proposition here so let sigma psi bound a subcritical stein W omega let M omega be a fleuric cyclic and sigma be embedded in such a way that you have a separating embedding and sigma be separating in M with interior Z and then the homology are the same the homology of Z is the same as the homology of W and well, if you want to know the ingredients well there's a result by McLean which says that when you're embedded where you have an exact embedding in fleuric cyclic you're again fleuric cyclic ah, there's the, you use the long exact sequence in symplectic homology and then you use a result by Bourgeois, sorry this is the second Bar Bourgeois and the one chair which says that sigma psi determines the positive part of W and there are some assumptions you need that there are no conlesender orbits on the boundary of index I think less than 3 minus N and you can prove that it's satisfied here if sigma bounds a subcritical stein and so the last thing I wanted to say are applications which may be in a way is most fun and also maybe asks so somewhere here what's hidden is the idea that you, if you have a a co-bordism so if you have a contact manifold which is concave on one side and another which is convex on the other side one of them is more complicated than the other there should be sort of increasing complexity in this way and so there are sort of obvious questions that come up about complex singularities so for example let's f be a complex polynomial zero be an isolated singularity then you can look at this singular hypersurface here you can look at the intersection with the small sphere and this is actually well here it's going to be let's say plus so a complex polynomial on CN plus one so that this now is in S to N minus one this has a contact structure by taking the maximal complex sub spaces here and there's something which is called a symplectic manifold which is the Milner fiber here which essentially you get by instead of looking at f minus one of zero you just move a little bit so you have your singularity here you have a sphere here where you would like to look at this feeling here but you don't you actually look at something which is just below here and so w will just be this this thing here is w so w is a symplectic manifold that bounds sigma and w is a wedge of sieve spheres and it's a wedge of mu spheres and mu is the Milner number and so here the idea is that the biggest mu the more complicated singularity you have I mean if you have no singularity actually mu is equal to two and so the proposition I would like to state is the following and then I prove so again for N greater than three sorry so sigma psi is called the link a singularity such that the intersection form on w is nonzero then sigma psi has no embedding so no contact embedding of course in a subcritical style and the second theorem is that if you're looking at briskorn manifolds and mu is at least equal to two there are no subcritical for example stein embeddings and the idea is that I mean this is somehow the result for mu equal to one it says that if you have a trivial singularity then w is essentially Cn and so you cannot have a larger singularity so something which with the larger mu with some assumption here that will embed of course in Cn what you would like to say is that if you look at two singularity with mu strictly less than mu prime and you take the manifolds w corresponding to mu and to mu prime you cannot embed the more complicated one into the simplest one that's what you would like to know but I have absolutely no idea on how to can you describe it by the statement before that to now? well if you have sigma one w one with mu one sigma two w two with mu two so this one comes with xi one and this comes with omega one this comes with xi two and this one with omega two and then you would say that something like there's no contact embedding or exact contact embedding I don't know sigma two xi two one omega one if mu one is less than mu two so in this sense sigma two is more complicated than sigma one there's one of them degenerates into the other one does any of us avoid it as a no no the only thing I know is is this so with this extra assumption about the intersection and it's essentially the trivial case I mean it says you cannot embed in a subcritical style okay my time is more than up now thank you very much for your attention


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