So for this next book, what we're gonna do is have a read through Creatures of the Id. And this book is the first appearance of Madman. The guy's name is, the character name is Frank Einstein, which is a mix of Frank Sinatra and Albert Einstein. The reason being, because he's, well, he's pretty cool and he's a genius. He's super smart. He's super fast. He's got clairvoyance. He's got diviner powers. He's got superhuman agility. And this guy, Madman, was created by Mike Alred in 1990 and this book is from 1990. And as far as I know, the print run for this book is pretty low. I think last time I checked, I think it was around 3,000 copies, but you know, don't take my word for it. It might be more. I don't think it's any less. That's pretty low print run. And it's one of the, it's a very cool character and it's been around since 1990. And Mike Alred and others, I believe others have done stories with Madman. He did a crossover with Superman comic ones. So I'm pretty sure someone else wrote him or could have been Mike Alred. And this is basically his first appearance. And we're gonna have a read through it, flip through the books. Got a couple other stories in there as well, but we're just gonna basically read the Madman story. Because it's one of my favorite characters from the 1990s and it's an independent character. And it's still around. And they still keep on producing stories with Mike, from Mike Alred and others writing it.  It's a 3D Madman comic. What does it say here? It says, in your face 3D specials starring Frank Einstein. And it's got glasses in it. So let me crack this open. And we're not gonna, we're not gonna read through this. I just want to show you how intricate the comic books have gotten. Serious. I mean, take a look at this thing. This thing is a thick book. It's 3D. It was pretty expensive. The price tag on this thing was $9, 10 bucks. Right? $10. But it's a lot of bang for your buck considering it. It's got 3D glasses in there that you can push out from here. You can just push out, right? And grab it and read it. It's got his Madman logo on there with his face, right? And it's a 3D comic. And she's sort of creators on this color by Laura Alred. I believe that's Mike Alred's wife. And created, written, illustrated by Mike Alred. So it is Mike Alred doing the whole thing. I haven't read through this one yet. It looks super cool. I mean, I'm not sure if it's pretty coming up pretty good actually on the camera and looking at it without the 3D glasses. Even with the 3D glasses, it looks pretty cool. And I mean, look at that. It's trippy and it's really zany. And he's got a lot of cool toys. Like he uses yo-yos and he's super agile. And he's super smart. He's got, again, he's got super fast reflexes. And these are pin-ups. Looking forward to going through this actually. Look at these pin-ups. Beautiful work. Absolutely beautiful. So what we're going to do, and right now we're in 2014. So this thing came out at the end of 2014. So what we're going to do is go back 20, 24 years and have her read through creatures of the it. The first appearance of Madman.  And I believe that was the only appearance of Madman as black and white. I'm not 100% sure on that actually. His, I believe, his second appearance was in graphic music. Graphic music. And this one is in color. And let me just flip through this one too and just show you what the next progression was from creatures of the it. And then we'll take a look at creatures of the it. And so this is music, graphic music. And it's done my mic already again. And this is a pretty nice, it's a pretty nice copy. As far as grading goes, I've agreed this is, it's around the eight. Okay. And it's color. All the stories. Just a progression. Oh, nakedness. And it's got really, really interesting and weird, the villains and what really defines comic books or superheroes in general is who their adversaries are, who the supervillains are. Like Batman, you know, he's cool and stuff like this. But what's really interesting about Batman is all the villains he faces, they really define who Batman is. For Madman, it's a little different. Madman is, he's got zany characters, he's got zany villains, fighting zany villains, but he is actually very unique. And he's a very interesting character and fun to read. Always taking me on a little ride. So let's crack this one open. Read through creatures of the it. So this book, it's got a little bit of, you know, spots on it, creases on it. It's not bad shape, it's medium high grade. I'll probably give this a seven or so. As far as grading goes, still appealing. Good enough. And it's been read, you can tell. It's got a little bit, flipped it. And it's, it's good. Nice collectible for me. It's the only issue I have of this. Again, we'll take a look at the fine print. What does a fine print say? Creatures of the It, number one published by Calibre Press.  And this has got three different stories and the trains of thought stories. 1990 again, Jerry Lange. The next story is civilization and it's discontent. And again, Jerry Lange. The third story is for the record. Again, copyright 1990. And it's M. Dalton Allred. That's Mike Allred. And that's the story we're going to read. What we're going to do right now is just sort of flip through it. So you get a feel for what seriously independent 1990 comic book look like and felt like. The paper quality is, you know, it's not as good a quality as what's being printed right now. And this story is mainly images, mainly panels laid out. So we're just gonna flip through this Speedy Gonzales style and just have a look through it and then get to the third story of Madman, Frank Einstein. This is like a Twilight Zone episode. And I believe it was the Star Trek Captain Kirk that was in that Star Trek episode where in the Twilight Zone episode it was Outer Limits, I believe. It was Twilight Zone or Outer Limits where he's riding on a plane and there's a gremlin in a storm ripping the plane wing apart and trying to make the plane crash. And he goes crazy in it. And this sort of is reminiscent of that to me anyway. Look at all the creatures coming in. And here's a civilization and it's discontents. And this was published, Lang, Alred, and so Mike Alred actually worked on this one as well. Actually let's see if Mike Alred worked on this one. Written by Geoffrey Lang, art by Mike Alred and Dalton Alred. So Mike Alred actually did the art for this as well. That's why it's fairly consistent. Look at the eyes and the background. I didn't notice that before. The teeth. The eyes and the teeth instead of the stars. Mike Alred's works brilliant. He's one of the greatest comic book creators of all time really. One of the best anyway. Up there with some of the greats. And he's been very consistent and he stayed true to his form. And the art for this is Mike Alred as well. Don't know the story of this one. I haven't read this one yet. Short story. And here is Frank Einstein in For the Record. And the story of Madman. Frank Einstein is that he got into a car accident and he died and he was resurrected by, well I guess a mad scientist you could say. And the mad scientist you know like this creation and named him after Frank Sinatra and Albert Einstein. Frank Sinatra because I guess he thought he was a cool cat. And Albert Einstein because Madman is a genius. He's very smart and he has superhuman abilities. He's he devines. He can touch objects and feel their history. And he's got a lot of cool toys. And he's got a lot of cool toys. So let's read everything in this issue. By Michael Alred, Bernie M. Marul. Laura Alred. Mike Alred and his wife. Okay. You can take a look at that. So what is the story about? Music world. Sail. People can be so, people can be so mean and he's very emotional. Madman. He's got tears coming down. He's crying. So of course the character was developed after Frankenstein. Right sort of a mix of Frankenstein. He's got the scars and the bolts sticking out of him. So what is this? Music world. People can be so mean, Madman says. I've been to the record store at least twice a month for three months trying to get a record I ordered. It may be my imagination. It may be my imagination. Maybe I'm making something of nothing. But when I ordered it, I looked normal. I hadn't had my accident. Come on pilgrim, the pixies. Okay, no problem. That should only take a week to 10 days. So he orders a record, the pixies. Now when I go in, they say no, not in without even looking. Sometimes they just ignore me since the accident. Nope, excuse me. The accident. So he doesn't look, he's all just scarred up so they're ignoring him. You can see sweat coming off the clerk's face right there. The accident. So here the panel is for the accident. Car goes over a cliff. It looks in. Call takes him to the doctor explaining what's going on. Doctor operates. The scalpel comes up. Blood given. Maybe the the cores are part of the umbilical cord for a newborn. Interesting and all the wires maybe that he's connected to. Ah, he sees the lights. He sees the doctor. We brings the brain. Check this out. He takes his brain out just like Frankenstein. The imagery touching the father. He's operating, sewing him up. That's from the Michelangelo's painting with human being, man reaching out, just casually and God reaching towards them and gives them electricity shock and madman is born. Let's check out the rest of the story. So going back to the present, right? I noticed them make fun of people less perfect than themselves. Now that's what I call but ugly. Oh, they're talking behind them. Ha, look, it's the refrigerator repairman. Oh, they're making fun of the refrigerator repairman.  Oh, um, uh, that record you keep asking for. I'm pretty sure we can't get it. Oh, so they're dismissing him. Well, could you please check? Madman says the clerk, look, we don't have it. Look, we don't have. We don't have to check. I know we don't have it. Come back in a few months or maybe some other story can get it for you.  And here's a record right there with a sticker on them. Special order for F. Einstein, the pixies. Come on, pilgrim. Right there.  It's got to be in by now. If they just check, I'd never come here again. Perfectly, perfectly primped. That creeps me out. Look at him talking about him. What's the problem? Okay, I'm not the best looking guy in the world. Well, he's got serious scars. He's got little bolts sticking out of him. I've got intelligence and heart. Yeah, yeah, whose heart? I've heard a lot of jokes. I've heard all the jokes of compromise. I've got intelligence and heart. Yeah, yeah, whose heart? I've heard, heard all the jokes of compromise. I've tried hats, turtle legs and scarves, not too practical in the summer. And why should I hide anyway? So he's got the hat on, puts on the turtle neck. What is this weather going up? And why should I try to hide anyway? He's right. Why should he try to hide? Yeah, why should I hide? People who are different should be celebrated, not outcast. Beauty is in the, beauty is all in the mind. I ought to know since my, I ought to know since my afterlife experience of develop the gift, the talent, a kind of psychic touch. So here's explaining his psychic power, showing his brain, look at all the electricity going around. So this is sort of an origin. Well, I guess you had, this is an origin story as well. So he continues, it's a scurry thing, it's a scurry thing where I can touch people and read or distort their thoughts. The real me is in a boat sailing away, but bodies are just vessels to sail through life in. Unfortunately, more often than not, you're judged on your vessel instead of your crew. That's one of the beauties of comic books. Analyze life, give it to you as it is, right? I shouldn't whine. I don't have it so bad. I saw a man once, his whole nose was missing. He didn't try to hide it. Whoa, guys, nose is missing. Check out the sign. Sign licked oranges, sun licked oranges, 40 cents a pound. And my old friend Charlie, this is an old example, but very important. If he took his family to a restaurant, in some parts they wouldn't get served. They're black, miss, niggers, sick. What's the girl's name? The waitress. Oh, can't read the name. Shallow brain mold heads. With a touch, I could send them on a mind trip. They wouldn't soon forget. Ah, look at what he's thinking. Worms, creatures. Just with the touch, you could do it. Stuck in a vise. And the sign here on the girl says, Miss Perfect.  He says, Madman. No, wait, I know. Something that could really shake them up. Something their narrow minds couldn't take. He's thinking about doing bad things to them. Oh, make them look ugly. The hair falling out. Make him look fat. Make him look diseased. Yes, perfect, Madman says. He wants revenge. Look what's coming back. Call an exterminator. So they're still talking about him. So Madman touches her. Touches her anyway. The clerk. I think that's the first clerk she talked to. Hey, she says, hi, could you please check on a special order for Frank Einstein? Instead of making them look ugly, he made himself look super pretty. She's in love with him now. Oh, he's so dreamy. I never realized what a fox that guy is. Question mark. Yuck. And he gets his record and walks out. Ah, so what? Got my record, didn't I? What? A moral. I'm not sure what that refers to. Is this simple, folks? Be good to each other. If others aren't good to you, maybe you can at least give yourself solace in knowing you've got the character to be your best. Screw them. Awesome. Really, awesome. Some of the greatest stories and some of the greatest human stories really are told in comic books. Fantastic stuff. Then this is the next issue, I guess. Graphic music is a classic act and a delight. Lyrical text, fine, clean art. Wow, this is Neil Gaiman's written this. Check this out. This is a review by Neil Gaiman. Neil Gaiman is one of the greatest writers in comic books. He's the one that wrote Sandman. He created Revamped Sandman and came out with one of the greatest series ever. The Eternals and stuff. Fantastic. I didn't read this before. So let's read the whole thing. Graphic music, which is what I showed you before. This guy, right? Graphic music. This is issue number one. Graphic music is a classic act and a delight. Lyrical text, fine, clean art, both contributing to M. Dalton Alvarez' mediation on music time and what it means to be human. No one else is doing anything like it. Fantastic, fantastic, really. The comic book that asked the big question, who am I? Why am I me and not you? Where does time begin and space end? What's for dinner? Zany, zany, zany. In stores November, from caliber press in full color, needle version. And this is, I believe, this image. If you're into old movies, this image is from an old black and white movie. I think one of the first sci-fi movies that came out where people are traveling to the moon and they go down to the moon. Oh, he's giving us the most important words. Well, it's not Mad Men actually. It's this character right here and we get to see him in music graphic. So what does he say? Let me give you the most important words of advice I know. Be nice to everyone always. As nice as you can, no matter what, because there's more to gain. Throw, skip it. I'm rambling and there's music playing. There are times when I feel I'd rather not be the one behind the wheel. I got to tell. What is Mad Men saying? I got to tell you this is all a lot to take in. You say this is real life. So he's asking a question. Super cool. Mike Allred. So here's a little bio for Mike Allred. Mike Allred first appeared in the comic scene with his graphic novel Dead Air. Since then he has produced graphic music for slave labor and that's different than this one. Graphic music. The spelling is different and I have some of the issues of this as well. Graphic music for slave labor and they're hard to find for labor graphics and has a series of comical called Jaguar stories. I don't have any of the Jaguar stories. He is also working on One Shot for Epic Comics and with his wife Laura doing the all new color series of graphic music for caliber of press and that's the this one he's talking about. Okay and there's four issues of this and right now I only have three of them. I'm missing one. I'm missing number two so that's why I haven't read this one yet. I'd like to read them all in this all in a row. From caliber of press in December. Here's Mike Allred. Should we open this up so you see the whole flip thing? Sure. Let's open this up. Here it is. Creatures of the end.


Hello again. Thanks for coming back. We're going into our second session of the day when we'll have a series of projects presented that we've, you know, we sort of came up with titles for everything to sort of link everything together. There's a little bit of thought into how each of the projects come into conversation with each other. And this one we referred to as working in the landscape, which will be, I think more obvious than some others, would seem to make sense. We're going to have five presentations. We're having a little bit of a slight change from the paper that you might have in front of you, and I'll be moderating inviting people up through this session so that Megan can focus on the presentation because we do not have Meg McKay with us today. She is ill. So first I'm just going to go through who we have here. And first I'm going to invite Paul Sieges to come up and to talk about Blue Hour. He's laughing because we were talking about pronunciations of last names. But come on up.  I'm calling you out. All right. I'm going to duck stage right so that we have less long, dramatic crosses to it. So take it away. Thanks. What do I do here with this pointer? Okay. Thanks. All right. Well, thank you very much. Thanks, Ian. Thanks as well to Toaster Lab in general for the invitation and specifically for being able to give you some information about the project and as well as listen to all of your projects because it's been totally fascinating this morning. And so I really want to thank Toaster Lab for that kind of initiative. So my name is Paul Sieges. I'm a digital sonographer. I'm also a lecturer at the University of Waterloo in the Department of Communication Arts. I'm as well a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at Alto University in Finland. So today, let's see. Well, that just is unexpected. Great. There we go. I'd like to speak to you about Blue Hour Virtual Reality or Blue Hour VR created by myself and Joris Weidem, who is a researcher and designer of mixed reality theater at the University of Arts in Utrecht. The Blue Hour VR experience as part of the three six queue at the 2019 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space is an innovative and formative example of a site responsive mixed reality performance design, which blurs the boundaries between performance, spectatorship and real and virtual environments, piloting interactive virtual reality technology and hybrid environments that blend 360 degree cinematography and real time 3D graphics. Blue Hour VR drew new lines of experience for participants placing them at the center of a performance experience, expanding our understanding of scenographic dramaturgies that exist inside, outside and in between realities. Its artistic impetus was also rooted in a social one, making it while asking the question, what does it mean to be present in relationship to different shifting ecological spaces and the consequences of the Anthropocene. The initial spatial concept for the Maua Sports Hall, which you see here, which is right next to the Vista-Vista Praha Palace was originated by Roman Tardy who was inspired by light, its potential and mystical influence on the creation during a phenomenon known as Blue Hour. This term Blue Hour is a nautical reference to the period of time when we are unable to visually perceive the difference between sea and sky and the line of the horizon simply dissolves. This moment of liminality offers up a moment of seeing, of course, when our normative perceptions of space, time and self become untethered from the quotidian routines of daily life and in turn offer up new ways of knowing the world around us. The Blue Hour VR experience had the desire to activate the multi perceptual apparatuses and disrupt the hyper mediatized and aesthetically barren world of the Sports Hall by grounding the experience in a highly tactile sand pool, activating the body's sensorium in ways that afford us new ways of experiencing space, time and our sense of self. The physical body of the experiencer moving in space and isolated in light was both central to the external sonography of the Sports Hall and integral to the internal visual dramaturgy taking place inside the VR experience. Experiencers' bodies in space, space that was somewhere between real and virtual, automatically collapsed the traditional boundaries between spectator and performer. Experiencers were simultaneously dancers and observers, immersive puppets and players attuned to the centrality of their embodied and bodiless presence. So imagine that from a bright and sunny day in Prague you walk through a door of an unassuming Sports Hall into a dark reception area. Walking down a stairway you are greeted by emerging sounds and haze. At the bottom of the stairs you see an opening to a huge space filled with moving lights and an environmental soundscape. Entering the space you see other visitors exploring around pools filled with water and microenvironments with living plants and other materials. At each end of the space a three story high scaffolding structure is erected on which coloured LED strips and video projections show abstract light patterns and moving textures. Then you notice that in some of the pools people are standing with bare feet in sand, lit by a small spotlight above their heads.  They seem to be looking and moving around in a space you cannot see or hear.   Perhaps that's what's prevented you from wanting to try the experience the day before when you visited the blue hour. But now you are being dressed and made ready to perform. Your stage fright is interrupted by the attendant who whispers several key instructions. As you look around you notice the exact replica of the space. The space architecture is replicated one to one with your headset as though you are only wearing a weighty pair of transparent glasses. You take a deep breath and you step off the edge of the pool into the sand. You feel perhaps unstable at first and then you remember being on a beach or in a sandbox or your balance then quickly recalibrates. You reach out and you clasp the acrylic lantern barely even noticing the incongruities between the virtual space and the real world or the absence of your arms and hands. Oh, it feels good to hold on to something real and virtual. As you lift the lantern the system acknowledges your presence and small sprite-like particles begin to emerge from the lantern casting light shadows into the space. Almost imperceptibly the sand pool begins to lift you up and slowly moves you to the center of the space. The sonic quality changes and you cannot quite discern where the sound originates. You know you are being watched. Your attention is seized by the virtual world. The luminescent sprites seem to be rising upwards collecting and breaking open the roof to allow a voluminous light to pour through the roof while simultaneously the sand pool begins to rise upwards as the beams of the roof peel away like the bones of a whale opening up and back and eventually falling away endlessly beneath you. The environment around you transforms into the blue hour and four spherical portals emerge from your lantern pinned to each of the cardinal directions which you can explore crouching down and moving towards them in the sand. Once activated the portal grows in size to eventually swallow you. Now you are surrounded by an ever-changing 360 degree cinematographic video poem. The video poems lament different aspects of the Anthropocene. They are tethered to the four seasons. Winter contemplates the fragmentation and dematerialization of nature with its increasing presence of technology in our lives. Spring is a plea to consider the seventh generation. Summer laments the impermanence of human systems and the temporality of the organization. Autumn questions the resilience of a forest in a changing climate. A soap bubble appears on the horizon slowly growing in size and eventually it absorbs you. The sudden noise of a Zamboni, a particularly Canadian thing, engulfs you and it takes you back to a hockey arena. The original Mawa Sports Hall and it jolts you out of this dream like Reverie and soon you find yourself back where you stand, we're standing except that now it seems to be drizzling and there is moss under your feet and well, it's a different place. You seem to have made it back to the same space but sometime in the future when nature begins to reclaim the human construct of a building. Each experience are interacted with the sand pool in different ways. Some stood still, rooting themselves to the center of the pool and gazed out forward in a direction only. While others moved around the pool, looked here and there, some crawling, some sitting, some even perching on the ledge trying to get a glimpse of what might be underneath the pool. Of the approximately 500 people that experienced the Blue Hour VR, few had trouble with either motion sickness, vertigo or those that did repeatedly came back next day to try and overcome their bodies' perceptual blockages. We found in conversation with many of the experiences that they felt deeply connected to their bodies despite there being no visual representation of their bodies. Often they would say that this was strange but not destabilizing or off-putting. In fact the deep sense of embodiment that experiencers had made us wonder what perceptual apparatuses they used to seamlessly move between the virtual and the real. As with any theatrical performance, the experience of each person was vastly different but one thing was common to all. After removing the headset, each person was transformed. Felt most often was a kind of joy or exaltation as though they had experienced some profound realization. Often the experiencer needed to describe the journey to an attendant or immediately comment on something that they had discovered. We were struck by the overwhelming need to communicate and share the story of their journey and the act recounted what they experienced to someone else, someone real. They seemed to be a very necessary part of what was to bring them back from the virtual. Being in relation with other humans also seemed to be necessary a necessary bridge back from the absence of their virtual bodies. We also noticed that people seemed to be deeply present in their senses and emotions during the experience. Perhaps this was induced by a feeling of privacy that came from wearing the VR headset which might afford the kind of conditions whereby people feel permission to let down their guard and become more affected by their emotions. Some people wanted to be left alone after the experience and to contemplate in silence while watching the next person go through the experience. There were a few that were moved to tears and who could not explain why. One woman from Trinidad explained that the experience made her think about her home by the sea and how long it might be before she returns home. For another the absence of a visual representation of her body was troubling. While for another it was barely noticeable because of the extent to which the images and animations felt material and made her feel extremely present in her body. And then there was the six year old who after spending several minutes with the headset on darting here and there and up and down and everywhere as you would all know, shouted out to her mother in a moment of pause and said, mama do I still exist? We would like to propose that all of these people including the six year old were not only exploring very sensory experiences of embodiment but were also exploring the intermedial spaces of performance, oscillating between spectator and performer in deep collaboration with the hypermedia of VR. Peter Bonich describes intermediality as an effect created in the perception of observers that is triggered by performance and the confluence of media and machines used in performance. This is a very productive way I think that we can all think about how VR with its incredible potential to refresh our perception can inject new momentum into theater and performance which in turn can open up new dramaturgical potentials and scenographic opportunities. We feel that we are at the beginning of a profoundly exciting moment in performance creation especially as we grapple for new dramaturgical strategies and language that can help us create new modes of representation and new ways of seeing and knowing the world around us. Merci, thank you. You'd think that we had an A discussed names on the lunch break and B had known each other for years. I apologize. I wanted to make two notes that I had notes to make before and I realized that I was saying Paul's last name one. One is that though not articulated on anything else we realized that people did not like to connect and a hashtag has been suggested so if you are posting about things that happen the hashtag that has been suggested is MRPS mixed reality performance symposium 01 and I think that while thinking on the fly here end up sequentially numbering all the following ones from that so when we come to our later symposium our next one it will be 02. The other one is that I know that we were running low there but we do have them servicing the coffee as we speak right now so something to look forward to beyond our next few presentations. I may stay close by to help with some of the technical answers for that but I'm going for this next project having had the pleasure of collaborating with Tishina Parker for the last almost two years on the Groundworks project but I'll invite her to talk about how that project has come together and I won't go too far. Hi, my name is Tishina Parker and I want to say thank you to Paul for presenting that. That was really really cool. It makes me want to get in there. I also want to acknowledge that I'm honored to be on Occupied Territory known as Toronto and as a guest here to the original Indigenous people of this land I come from California. I live in Yolomu otherwise known as San Francisco and I'm from Awani, otherwise known as Yosemite. I'm from Southern Sierra Miwok tribe of Yosemite Monolake Payu and Pomo from Santa Rosa area and I work with Dancing Earth which is an Indigenous contemporary dance group that is based in Santa Fe and also in San Francisco and I'm here on behalf of Rulong Tongan who is the artistic director who is also working in Arizona right now to prep a show for ASU Gammage that we have in January. I want to say thank you to Ian also and Toaster Lab for bringing this project really to Dancing Earth and for stepping us into this whole new tech reality that I think sometimes is elusive to Indigenous communities especially because we live in traditional ways and we really highly value traditional practices so as we see technology and Indigenous tradition come together there's a whole new frontier that we're experiencing and a lot of the people who are involved in this are the younger generations and the older people just really can't even understand what the concepts are and also are not really interested in knowing them. So here we have some pictures with one of our collaborators in this picture on your left, Ross Cadie who is Pomo to Santa Rosa area in California and he's very traditional and also very contemporary. He's a musician as well as working with youth and he's fully engaged in his native community you see him there in his traditional regalia and he worked with us in Dancing Earth to create part of this project that was used in a virtual reality of sacred place so combining virtual reality and 3D on VR headset we can take people back to the sacred space in which they are Indigenous too or use as a learning tool to learn about. We worked with youth in the area a lot of the youth are, they know of the concept of this but often don't have access to it because a lot of this stuff is just financially out of reach a lot of the communities that they come from attend schools that don't have resources that they can get access to this sort of technology so it's also introducing the youth to these ideas. We worked in a theatrical performance aspect and one of the women that we worked with her name is Bernadette Smith and the stage picture on there with the fabric draped across is a dance storytelling of a story that she wrote about the tan oak acorn which is threatened right now by sudden oak death and also just by clear cutting in the area and acorn is the sacred food of the California native people so she had written a story that she called a play and Dancing Earth really helped her to turn that into a performance piece that was an original story of her coming from her tribal people and also an advocacy story about environmental awareness and the need to protect this traditional sacred food so when Ian came with us a lot of the work you see the VR camera there or the 3D camera there a lot of the work that we do takes a lot of ground work and that's why it's called Groundworks and working within indigenous communities the timeline is really really long often times you have to be somebody you have to know somebody very intimately who is integrated into the community part of the community in order to gain access to these stories and places a lot of the sacred places are places that they don't want people to know about that you know we don't want people necessarily to be able to have access to but at the same time there's a necessity for educating people within our own communities and also the wider communities of why these places are sacred and should be preserved so a lot of the work that we do is really working within community to integrate the ideas but also to make personal connections and to gain trust so there's a lot of talk about protocols or what I like to call the good way or what native people call the good way and a lot of times we use the word protocol as how do we enter these spaces in a good way and how do we talk to community so that we gain trust and this is a photo that's on top of a sacred mountain of the Wapo territory another woman that we work with her name is Desiree Harp she's a community activist within California and a traditional singer and we went on a hike up to the top of this mountain and you see the cell tower up there and that was part of her story of the sacred places that a lot of native sacred places are being taken over by technology and also in some way you know defaced and they change the way that we interact with them so from this location point we also did a VR or a 3D filming with Ian and Toaster Lab and she talked about this sacred place and what that tower means to her people and what that means to how we change sacred places with how we interact with them in our modern lives here's us at the top and really a lot of this stuff is used as an educational tool for our own people as well so I'm native to California but I've never been to this sacred mountain I didn't know about it and I live probably 45 minutes south of there in San Francisco so some of the applications that we're talking about using within native community are how do we use these as learning tools so part of that in working with the community that we work with of indigenous people is really sourcing that within the community so asking them you know how could they see this these sort of applications used and part of that is in a mobile phone application as a learning tool and one of the people that we work with in California her name is Canyon Sears-Roods and she's also a community activist but she's very integrated into the tech as well and the people that I have mentioned are younger native people and they help us to really kind of see what the ideas are out there what ideas could fly within their own community and how to indigenize this sort of tech from the point of view of indigenous people so that it's coming directly sourced within the community and some of these ways that we've come up with are using it as a tool to gamify language so in some of the applications like the mountain that you saw before or some of the locations that you saw before or here at the bottom of the screen is Alcatraz Island where we did a performance is that you can learn this the original name of the place and learn to repeat that name and learn language learning in order to get access to some of the VR content so that could be some of the 3D filming that we're doing or dance performance that we have created with native people and really the possibilities are endless and the goal of this is to in the longer term is to build a whole team of indigenous people who are contributing to this so one of the things that I see really lacking in the resources that we have right now are somebody who's indigenous within the community who knows the backend part of the coding and that's something that a lot of us don't really understand who are not as tech savvy as all of the people here but really have the cultural knowledge to be able to know what content we would like to have on there and then also how to present the content. Some of the ways that Dancing Earth is using the application right now, like I said the timeline is really long so right now we don't have anything really showy as far as the tech aspect goes. Ian has worked a lot to edit and produce the film that he has done with our communities but right now the way that we show it is engaging within the native community so last weekend in San Francisco we hosted a show and at that show we had the virtual reality goggles and some of the secret places that we had done with the dancers that were with us and we use that as part of a way to introduce it to the native communities that we work with and know and if you know native community people know Indian countries small so it might seem like here we are in Canada or here we are in the United States but actually when you start to get involved in native community we all really know each other and it's only one or two degrees separation before we start hearing about the things that everybody else is working on so the interest really moves like wildfire in that way. Some of the future artistic applications could be to have more immersive reality that engages sacred place with dance and I think that's the next frontier with how dancing earth would like to interact with this and that's still something that as indigenous people we struggle with how do we connect technology and traditional forms of art and dance on stage or dance like within a round house or within our communities is a traditional form so how can we merge those together in a way that feels authentic to us. So I want to say thank you that was I think all I have to say and we'll probably comment on the tech part later when we do the panel. I'll come back with another mic. Thank you Tashina. One of the people who actually is contributing a bit to that this is by way of a segue who is also with us in San Francisco is Jacob Needs-Wickey who has a number of projects. He's also leading or part of the leadership of another digital strategy fund grant which we're hoping will intersect because we have a lot of similar desires sort of outcomes for that which is the cohort project and I'll invite him to come and talk about his work right now. I know. This is why I'm exiting this side to cut down a mile on that. I'm going to be showing a video but for the tech crew we don't need to take the lights down and I'll just be sort of asking you to play it and then pause at a certain point. My name is Jacob Needs-Wickey or Needs-Wickey is also fine. I'm a choreographer, filmmaker and software developer slash creative technologist so the easier way for me to say that is I work in movement and media and code. I have my own practice which largely relates to movement and choreography and I do a lot of work with theater and dance companies to facilitate ideas they have around ways to use technology. The project that I'm going to be showing and talking a bit about is called Jackereys. It premiered in 2013 and was remounted in 2014 and 15. The first two instances happened in Toronto on the Ryerson campus and then as part of summer works on Queen West and then we took it on tour to the Filmgate Transmedia Festival in Miami. Jackereys was a show for six performers and about 20 to 30 audience members split into small groups following performers and then performers came together for sort of duets and ensemble scenes. The idea was really to take people through parts of a city that you don't get to see. I had been doing a lot of parkour training and part of that ethic is interesting routes between places in urban environments. So we put together a bit of a closed line of narrative that we could hang these scenes off of which was sort of a heist with Jean Le Carré elements. So sort of a political espionage heist story. Can we hit the video now? And we'll just watch a minute or two and then come back. So I'm going to narrate a bit as we go. This is our Miami tour. So we've got about 10 people standing who have followed, five have followed one of these performers, five have followed the other and they're standing and watching this at close range. One of the elements of Jackereys is we license and look for permission for as few of the spaces as possible. So we aim to use public spaces and we aim to use those in a non-exclusive way. So we might be in one location for no more than five minutes and if you've ever watched skateboarders or parkour tracers train that's kind of the way they move through the landscape is almost like grazing animals that don't want to spend too long in one location because then security shows up. One of the interesting parts of working on this show for me was from the beginning there's a trap of site specific performance which is that when it's good it engages really deeply with its site, with its location it also can't go anywhere and becomes very hard to remount or to make accessible to a wider audience. So when we were deciding on the locations for these individual scenes we looked for spaces of common urban infrastructure. So essentially what can we find in any city? Fire exits or fire stairwells Jersey barriers like this concrete barrier in Miami we used a low retaining wall, roof decks back alleys, graffiti walls with graffiti on them so we were really looking to find individual locations that we could reproduce in different cities in different configurations and that worked out quite nicely. The other element that we started to appreciate more and more is that for a show that was a heist story the process of mounting the show becomes actually pulling off a heist. The process of scouting different locations deciding on routes and coordinating everybody's activities actually becomes quite similar to the story we're telling and we always started to really enjoy that process. Technologically what facilitated the show was an idea that I had which is that I this is the first site specific work I had made and I really wanted to be able to bring along the technology that I had access to in a theater sound we can pause there actually. Thanks. Sound cues, video cues comms, time management we wanted to bring those along with us and so I wrote a custom app that allowed us to cue sound, to cue on-screen video and to cue augmented reality video in the context of this show so at the time that I made that I thought oh I would really like for other creators to be able to use this tool as well and so I engineered the first version of the app to make that possible in 2013, two weeks before our show, Apple rejected our app submission because it could enable music piracy because queuing audio on multiple devices in a synchronous way could in theory lead to buying a song once and playing it for many people we've heard of speakers so I didn't quite understand why this was such a challenge but that idea of wow this feels like a really useful set of capabilities that I don't want to keep to myself is actually what led to the project that Ian mentioned cohort which I'll talk a little bit about at the end in like the last minute or two let's keep going on the video so this is a scene where two scenes are happening simultaneously in different places we have one scene on a rooftop, you can see in the tiny little corner there so we have essentially two characters assembling a sniper rifle, it sounds a bit odd out of context while two other characters are meeting at a park bench that's actually within a sight line of the roof deck and so we were really trying to create a cinematic experience of multiple locations at the same time our ability to put cues on, we can pause there, our ability to put cues on the audience devices meant that they could be watching one thing live with their actual eyeballs and could be also keeping tabs on another scene happening simultaneously and so they could sort of do their own cross cutting back and forth that also was really useful to cover transitions we had sort of one to three minute walks between different locations and so we used what's happening somewhere else right now as a way to offer the people who weren't interested in just following a performer which I think is kind of for a lot of people that's a really interesting experience. For people who were more media hungry they were able to sort of fill those walks with screen based content which sort of expanded the world of the show, it made it feel a lot bigger. Let's keep going on the video I said that the show is inspired by parkour this is one chase scene so the audience is effectively running behind me as I beckon them to follow and staying at ground level the ability to have an app and to cue content through the app also helped us a lot with accessibility so we were able to segment people with different appetites or capacities for movement into different groups so when I beckon that group come on run with me we have to keep up we've actually placed people in that group who are capable of that and have that appetite have that sort of desire and we crafted other experiences for people in wheelchairs or for older people like my dad who came and couldn't keep up with that one I'm going to let this video keep going this is a I think the end of this video demo section which shows a bit of how we used augmented reality I had done a lot of projection design in the past and so the approach was let's take material that we might have projected onto a scrim in front of a performer and project it essentially re-project it using augmented reality so the performers live in front of a real wall but all these overlays which were inspired by cheesy hacker movies from the 80s are happening only on screen they're beat here where the character essentially like where the live performer is gathering information and collecting sort of location and appearance so they can follow this other character we also got a nice moment at the end where we got to make them disappear this relies on the performer having a killer deadpan because of course if you look without your phone they are still standing there totally visible I'm going to take the last minute or two of this and talk a little bit about the project that I'm working on now which aims to make those capabilities of queuing, sound, video flashlight on and off, vibration with the and making it possible to integrate those into theatrical experiences really easily so the main URL which is not going to be up on a slide but if you are curious to hear more about this, cohort.rocks and you can, the main get in touch link on there is through Twitter, that's my Twitter so I'm also here for the rest of the day and you can come up to me and we can trade contact info the idea is as Andrew talked about at the beginning of the day to take these tools that are useful on individual projects and find ways to continue to advance the work on them between projects so we can as a community build our tools and share those with each other so we're not starting from scratch every time we have a technologically involved idea so currently we've done our first open source release which is largely existing code around being able to queue media and events on audience devices and five different companies that have partnered with us and have actually created full productions with these tools and we're heading into a stage of work where we're trying to now make the tools more broadly useful and to document them so they're really easy to pick up and do something with so I'll be happy to answer questions on that later either on the panel or individually you can come up to me how much for your time today continuing on and continuing to work on trails I'm going to ask Adrian Mackie who's up from Philadelphia in a collaboration that we've been doing there between twister lab and her company swim pony to talk a little bit about the project trail off and it's multitudes it contains multitudes alright so everybody doing okay that post lunch rush is in there for me so swim pony is my company it is a vehicle basically to design immersive experiences that for me invite audiences into curious questions about the world so I'm really interested in how we understand stories in the context of place and the present moment so just to give you some background of other ways we've done that before hooking up with toaster lab this is a show called the giant squid which I created in collaboration with my husband's company the berserker residence and we called it a crypto zoology horror comedy for those of you who are familiar with HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythology the squid is not a squid it's a piece in which we created sort of Steve Zizou meets Stephen King and this team of terrible marine biology wannabes show up and give a science lecture demonstration that we toured to actual science lecture halls around the Philadelphia region and we would retrofit the performance space and of course at the end the Cthulhu demon attacks the audience this is a piece we built in conjunction with Drexel's entrepreneurial game studio called war the world's Philadelphia and in it we cast audiences as rebel fighters against an alien force called the forgetting which was a metaphor for gentrification and to fight the forgetting audiences would take a mobile app around the area of the community center the performance took place in and gather stories in danger of being lost in order to fight the forgetting from attacking the city the end was one that Ian actually was a beta tester of it was a 30-day alternate reality game that explored personal fears of mortality so each day players would text in to phone number and undergo a small reflective prompt like walking through a cemetery or writing your own obituary and then have a conversation with the end who was essentially a manifestation of death the end was staffed by a team of live performers and we had these dossiers on players and essentially it was just a free form exploration on how do you narrativize what winning life means to you I'm really into trails this year so we're actually concurrently exploring an analog card game at 23 environmental centers throughout the Delaware river watershed where we use sense and memory based prompts just to get people into different relationship to the environment but the project that we're working on with toaster lab is trail off so you might recognize a couple people in that photo there trail off is going to be a transmedial walking performance it's a collaboration between swim pony toaster lab and the pennsylvania environmental council and it'll be a free to download mobile app premiere in june of 2020 and the core of the project is 10 original stories that are intended to be listened to as you walk roughly two mile root on one of philadelphia's circuit trails they are original stories written by artists from the region who are kind of a unique combination of like really artistically rigorous and amazing creators they also have really substantive connections to communities that are traditionally underserved by environmental programming so audiences will be able to access the app and using gps triggering we're going to link these stories that have been created specifically to be heard on the trails as you walk through them so it's kind of creating the sense of an immersive theater experience but in a much more accessible way while simultaneously sort of disrupting that sort of traditional like npr beige idea of who is out on a nature trail and part of the aim is really to think about like how do we imagine these spaces from the unique perspective of these writers so for example there's a suburban trail out in an area called chester valley that we've partnered a spoken word poet who is a trans latinx 22 year old this is necessarily the traditional person you imagine on that space and he's created this incredible walk with as tech gods to the after world right so really sort of rethinking like what are the stories of nature that we imagine when we walk through these places there's some opportunities for a little easter eggs you know using phone data of time or date or weather to also sort of increase that sense of after you walk the trail the app interfacial shift into sort of a bonus content feature with inner podcast style interview with the author to get some background about how they came up with the story as well as historic and environmental content that maybe just didn't make it into the app story some of you might recognize that person we built the sort of app through a series of workshops funded by the network of ensemble theaters the first one we did was a narrative workshop really just to sort of ask questions in a curious way about like what kinds of stories work in this format and what is it about like being in a place hearing a thing having your brain listening to music that is unique to that delivery medium we need to cast a listener in this kind of a story we also had an audio specific workshop where we sort of looked at technical tricks and tools to share with the authors we eventually onboarded and tried some of these stories out on actual sites that we were using to see what worked and didn't work and we finished with a technical residency where we started piloting the actual mechanics of what we were going to do we ended by synthesizing all of that stuff into this amazing dramaturgical packet which we could then hand to people sort of as lessons learned based on the years worth of research we've done concurrently to all that I was reaching out across Philadelphia basically to find any artist who would talk to me about this project and after an initial email conversation I sat down and had coffee with over a hundred people one on one to sort of underscore the idea that this project was going to be a conversation and a collaboration from the get go so many of the artists who applied and didn't get selected still really impacted the process because having that conversation helped me learn a lot about what people did and didn't know about coming into this format these are nine of the ten authors we selected one hasn't sat for her portrait yet and if you go on to Swim Puny's website you can learn about them they are astonishing human things and in March we had a residency that Justine came and co-facilitated where we sort of launched them into their residency on their trail we didn't make them live on the trail for the three months they worked on it we've also been working with graphic designer Maria Chaplin to sort of create the look and feel of the app interface and over the last month and a half our sound designer Mike Kiley and I have been working the actors finally with these final scripts in the studios and then pairing all that audio onto maps and spreadsheets to actually go into the interface that's currently being built so for my last little bit of time here it is not I can't take you to the Heinz Wildlife Refuge outside of Philadelphia but I can share just a little bit of a radio edit that we've put together of one of the stories that's complete after I read this little summary if you'll cue that to like 1430 in the track so this story is called The Land Remembers it is by poet Jacob Winterstein and it takes place at the Heinz Wildlife Refuge which sits next to the area of Eastwick in southwest Philadelphia the summary is in the 1950s as part of the renewal Philadelphia displaced over 8,000 residents from Eastwick a.k.a. the Meadows thought to be one of Philly's only harmoniously integrated neighborhoods at a time when many racist housing policies were legal in The Land Remembers Nick a.k.a. Nickel a.k.a. Abe reminisces about his last days living there so you can go ahead and play that these are some images from our workshop at the space we stopped paddling right here and just let the raft float it barely moved I looked back towards the Meadows at the part of the pond I imagine has always looked the same Ox looked the other way towards the airport he wondered if flying felt like sitting on a raft if sitting on the air felt like sitting on the water he asked Ox why the pond was his favorite part of the park he said it's like an outdoor movie theater that never plays the same picture twice like the time we saw two bald eagles attack that big bird with a fish in its claws or the time we saw a bird as big as a plane take off from behind a clump of cattails or the time we saw a bird that wasn't even bigger than my fist chase a hawk over the lake and past the trees the last time Ox and me were here we laid so still on this raft that the small birds forgot we were here and landed right next to us that day when the sun went and hid behind the trees Ox picked up his paddle it felt like he just had to pull the paddle through the water twice to take us from the middle of the pond all the way back to the banks let's go straight ahead down by the creek and see if Mr. Johnson comes by to fish today that's it leave the remote, that's necessary before we come into the conversation I'm going to invite Megan Byrne Megan works with imaginative and does the digital programming so she's perhaps still recovering a little bit but she's going to be talking a little bit about a document which she has copies of available for sale for on-screen protocol and pathways Tanzi, Megan Byrne, Nisika-san, Apatowakose-san, Hamilton, Ontario and Chun, hi my name is Megan Byrne, I am Apatowakose-san which is the Cree word for Metis and I come from Hamilton, Ontario and today I don't have a really cool project to show you even though everything here has been so awesome so far but what I do have to talk about is a document that imaginative and the Indigenous Screen Office together with a large cohort of advisors and cultural experts got together to deal with a pressing problem that has been going on since I guess the beginning of stories being taken from Indigenous people so this was supported in part by Ontario CREATES the CMF, Creative BC, the NFB Telefilm and the Inspirit Foundation so this came out of a conversation that happened in 2017 at a hot dog summit, I wasn't there for the conversation but essentially it was why do we keep allowing our stories to be mined the same way that they have mined our land and taken the oil from the ground and it was kind of a striking point where people realized that yes in fact this is happening in Indigenous communities that just like the land had been taken just like the resources had been taken now stories and people's histories were starting to be taken and this was done over about three years there were very many people involved these aren't even all the people who are involved in the making of this but it was inspired and directed by the Indigenous artists, filmmakers and creatives that sort of had brought up the problem in the first place you probably all know about Jesse Wente and if you don't he is an amazing speaker, writer and also is the director of the Indigenous Screen Office and he talks about native sovereignty and narrative sovereignty and that is something that is a term we've started to use now when it talks about it's not enough to just own our place, we need to own our own stories we need to be the ones who make and tell and share our stories in a way that are good for us and then I can just read what he says when I talk about narrative sovereignty what I'm really talking about is the ability of the nations to have some measure of control over the stories that are told about themselves throughout the entire history of filmmaking the overwhelming majority of stories told about Indigenous peoples both fictional and documentary have been told by non-Indigenous people and this is something that I also bring up at a lot of events so I myself am a game maker at Imaginative I work as the coordinator for digital interactive works both in the festival and in our institute and one thing that I say at my talks is that essentially every understanding we have about what is Indigenous, what looks Indigenous, what feels Indigenous has been curated by non-Indigenous people so the idea of Indigenous authenticity has not actually been created in an authentic way one would say even and that in fact it plays on a lot of tropes and a lot of stereotypes that continue even to this day so because Indigenous is kind of a catchall just in the way European is a catchall one of the things when people are like oh we're working on an Indigenous project and I'm like okay with who because to say Indigenous is the same as saying European you wouldn't say I'm working on a European project you would say I'm working on this project with the French or I'm working on this project with the Italians so it's the same thing for us and we also had to recognize and respect that in this document this document couldn't be a catchall so in fact it is not what to do it's a how to do so there's nothing in this document that tells you what you should be doing in terms of literally talking to a group what it is in fact is more like a workbook so I'm just going to go briefly over how to use this so the great thing about this document so there's a printed document which comes in English and French so in the same document it is fully bilingual and has been double triple checked for French accuracy we also have free PDFs on the imaginative and also I believe on the Indigenous screen office website so the first section is on how you use the protocols so in which situations they would be used why would you want to have them why would you be thinking about using them mostly this is in context with are you thinking about a project going forward with an Indigenous group or an Indigenous story or even about an Indigenous person that may be deceased so it talks about why would you want to use this the second section talks about how you implement the protocols so it goes into once you have your protocols once you've made them therefore how will you now implement them and one of the big things that I always bring up over this is you can't do this if you've already put together your prototype I have had as as somebody who is kind of a bit of a lightning rod for Indigenous digital projects I have had people come to me and be like oh we have this really cool project we'd like to implement protocols and I was like okay what were you at and almost always they're already at the prototype phase and some cases they're already seeking funding at that point it's too late so one of the things that we do bring up a lot is are you okay with hearing no and you should be okay with hearing no and if you're not okay with hearing no then you need to stop the project where you're at and if you do hear no can you strip out the offensive material to the community that you're talking with and if you can strip it out why is it there in the first place so these are kind of things that come up in the protocols that you should be thinking from day one it also is important to note that the protocols are not one and done everything that you do with an Indigenous community needs to be for life and if that is too heavy of a responsibility for you then it probably shouldn't be done so one of the things in here we also have the appendix is on understanding world view so like I said Indigenous kind of covers a huge umbrella of terms so we also point out how you need to really know about the group that you're working with and you're talking about and again it's why it has to be a life long relationship and it has to start before the project's even at the prototyping phase it goes into mostly Canadian but this can be used across the globe just you're going to have to do a lot of research about who you're talking to and then we also have community resources in here and again this is very Canadian based but again that's because it was funded and done by Indigenous artists in Canada but overall everything in here can be used for almost any screen based project but also any project that involves any Indigenous community that could be arts based so if you're doing theatre there's no reason why you couldn't have protocols in place any time you are taking from a community and even if you don't consider that taking you do have to understand that there are Indigenous ways of owning things and that those things even though a person or a family may own something the community could have right to override or a community could say it's okay but the family has rights to that story or that thing and they can override so these are things that you have to understand going into these groups and that's something that the protocols help develop as a base for any artistic organization or any company so we do want to make sure that these are not a rigid guideline it is sort of like a workbook much in the same way you would learn how to do accounting the guide is sort of like learn how to make your own protocols, learn how to use your own protocols also it needs to fit with the group that you're working with and fit with you this is a conversation and it is a relationship this isn't just a one way street in either case it's better not to think of it as like I'm paying you money and I get a thing okay we're entering into a friendship so these will grow as time goes on and then I kind of already went into the intent over the whole thing and I can talk about that more in the panel but if you'd like to order a copy you can do so online you can also do through imaginative I also have about 10 copies available for sale the hard copy is $60 each but the PDF is available online for free thank you thank you Megan I'm going to invite our speakers back up to the stage and we'll have a conversation right over here we'll get our mics out in just a moment while people are transitioning if there's something we're going to open up to questions I've got a couple to lead with but if you're thinking about questions I would invite you to take a moment maybe turn to the person to your right or left and perhaps discuss those while we get ourselves settled I'll give you a moment while the mics come out yeah everybody have some water one is hot thanks again everyone it's really fantastic to hear thanks no matter what I do to your last name sorry about that we talked about it actually the two that I corrected are the ones that we talked about immediately before I came out I have a couple of questions to start us off and then we'll take questions because we've got a decent amount of time for that in sort of all of the projects there's a question about accessibility whether that's the technology the content how you work with either technology or content that is going into a project and I'm wondering if I could ask you sort of each especially when you're integrating technology into work what opportunities and limitations present themselves by committing to make work accessible can you define accessible I can define it in a number of ways so in terms of let's start with it as a technology question and so far as technology that people actually have access to that is something that I think many of the projects that are working with specific pieces of hardware have ranged from trying to build it and trying to build something that will work on as many mobile devices as possible through working through dedicated hardware we have a little bit of a discussion about how this creates a strain on trying to move some things forward when hardware becomes hard to scale it's an interesting experience when we presented Jackery's at Summerworks we did our preview show and we were at that point relying on I had managed to sort of get four devices that covered so the cast was fully covered and I also cast people who owned iPhones because we couldn't afford to buy them for everybody but that left the audience reliant on devices they brought from home or that they owned and we had a producer from I think Metro Morning the CBC show come to one of our previews and they said well I'd love to share this on the show but you're walling off your experience the experience you're offering from anybody who doesn't have an iPhone and so we can't really promote that and I kind of looked at it and I went okay feedback taken inside I'm thinking we are poor artists ourselves how are we supposed to buy 20 iPhones and make like how can it be our job to solve that problem when we don't have the resources either so that's been an ongoing struggle I think I've certainly had that split where you might design a web based experience rather than an app based experience to make it more accessible economically speaking but I think also it's just something that reflecting the wider culture that divide and that difficulty exist in the wider culture as well so expecting it not to exist in our context would be weird yeah thank you Adrian everybody nodded their head at the same point in there so I can tell that everybody has something to say well it's interesting because part of the research that we did in the funding for Trail-Off was actually so I actually think that immersive theater is an incredibly inaccessible art form it's like the cultural barriers the knowledge barriers like the I mean there are so many barriers beyond this price that actually like the case we made was that by putting it on a phone and allowing people to do it when they wanted relatively where they wanted it's actually making the form of immersive theater significantly more accessible and we can also be much more transparent and in the case of Trail-Off people can do part of the experience and come back you know like if they have like a childcare emergency they don't like blow also it doesn't cost anything and so there are lots of ways that yes there is a technology that is required but I would make the case that the technology is more accessible than all of the ways that the art form in it's like quote-unquote traditional format are not I'd say for the projects that we're working on with Groundworks and ToasterLab is specifically cultural barriers even just selling the idea to the people that we're working with and you know the concept of even understanding how this all functions sometimes is just people don't really understand it especially within elders and then there's also the cultural barriers of what we want to share and what we even want to share with each other or other tribal groups and how do we want to give access to that. Paul, you were working at the other end of technology from what we've talked about so far, how did that work? Yeah I would say on the spectrum like I agree with everybody I mean there's so many different kinds of barriers to consider in designing mixed reality performance events I mean the VR rigs that were required were not only did they require really expensive you know HTC Vive wireless adapter equipment but they required the most state-of-the-art kind of graphics cards in order to drive the kind of processing we needed so huge barriers to accessibility. And it was hot. Since I kept going down. No I mean like literally in that room it was warm. So I mean it was hot. I mean it was so hot that by the end of the seventh day we were down three stations because the technology just couldn't cool itself you know we lost three rigs progressively so we kind of started with four and then we we ended up with one that held on right to the end but I mean that was unexpected as well and of course I mean you know we could talk about like technical bugs or small updates that cause havoc in terms of the programming or scripting. But I was also thinking a little bit in terms of how we design experiences you know in terms of like mobility, cultural accessibility but mobility I mean you know how do we make these really immersive experiences accessible to everybody where you know we're trying to explore new ways of interacting with the body or being embodied in certain ways because for us I think that was the most exciting aspect is you know playing with the technology and the apparatus but also awakening or trying to find new ways of knowing things within our embodied presence and there's not a shared rulebook on what it means to be embodied you know it has to be explored and not just dramaturgically but you know in every aspect so we were attuned to those things certainly by the time we got to the end of the technical fiascos with everything and a significant amount of sponsorship which is really challenging for everyone it's really challenging to find good sponsorship and there's a lot of issues and projects that are not going to be making some kind of commercial capital gain like it's art it's never you know done well that way so I wonder if we could flip the question around a little bit for you Megan and talk about it from a programming perspective and some of the barriers that you run into when you have a lot of you're seeing a lot of projects emerging and you're looking at how those are going and how you see those questions of technology or financial or expertise access yeah well like this year we had a whole bunch of pieces that were on Oculus Go and really we don't have access to that so we actually had to beg and borrow for just to be able to show the pieces which was really interesting because when we came on we imaginative had commissioned something called 2167 which was four pieces by different Indigenous artists to show in a VR 360 film space what would the world look like for Indigenous people in the year 2167 it was done like for the Bicentennial like the 150 years from now what would things look like and that was like a technological nightmare because we were like oh we want to make it as accessible as possible at the time most accessible as possible was the VR gear because you could send the headsets and the phones and within two years it became just impossible to send that out because it didn't just need the headsets it needed like qualified people to run it which was like a huge expense and also this year early in the spring we had a whole bunch of people like oh we just want to download it and we're like and I had been saying yes let's just set it up that way and our programmer was like yes let me set it up that way and our ideal I basically the only one in the room who understands like VR tech, computer tech that kind of stuff so when I say stuff like that they're still thinking very much from like a film standpoint but also looking at this technology is like I don't know how to handle it so that's also another thing like accessibility is more than just like getting people in the room it's also the people who are making decisions about the things being made understanding the thing or at least trusting the person who understands yeah so then we had with the download question I finally got my executive director to relent and said yes and then they're like okay great I would like it for the RIF and we're like we only have it for the gear VR and I don't know if anybody knows what it's like to deal with Oculus and how you need to have a separate build for every, I do wish I don't understand it feels like it should be able to just work on all of them so I was like fine we'll put together a VR RIF build and they're like yeah there's just Oculus Go and I'm like I thought I really had my thumbprint on things and I was like Oculus what? I totally missed the Go was a thing which is great because it just been decommissioned so I'm so glad we invested in it so I was like okay and I got a quote from a program because it's not that much to refactor because it was all built and unreal so we're like it shouldn't take that long and it was like a couple hundred dollars and I was like oh I didn't know we had to pay extra so yeah that's the other thing like accessibility with tech is about keeping up and there's always going to be those like infusions of cash into buying a bunch of tech for arts groups and it's always going to be off from each other and always going to be the newest thing but again because there's nobody there who really understands the technology and I really don't feel like arts organizations that give the funding or helping arts organizations without having somebody there to be like okay so what do you want to do with this money you want to buy VR okay let's look at what's going on like have somebody available who's knowledgeable about the trends and what's going on like we were going to imagine it was going to buy a bunch of Go's and then I was like don't it's just got and I only found out because I know somebody who knows somebody at Oculus and then the announcement came out like a week later but it's like we could have put in that we would have put in that arts grant and then what we were going to do afterwards like tell them like no thanks or I know they wouldn't have been so upset if we just bought in like that's definitely a challenge within any arts project is you write the grant for what you say you're going to do and then if that technology shifts it's a technology different project like whether and depending on the fund and who who the funder is whether or not you can actually make that shift because some of them are like you said you were going to do this so you have to do this versus like well the technology is advanced and that's also the problem with the tech companies like I don't think they realize how much they hobble themselves by constantly flipping over stuff like how can you build up a library if you're constantly putting out something new so yeah I just I feel like Oculus's decision to like run ahead with like go and then cancel and then go into quest is like do you want libraries do you want people to buy your stuff you're going to have to wait around longer than two years great right Adrian did you want to add something I want to open it up to questions I was just going to say that I think actually like that this question of like building a plan and then having the capacity to change really speaks to accessibility and one of the things actually that's been the best about working with the Pennsylvania Environmental Council is they don't talk to me very much like and I mean that in the best way like I think probably many of you have experienced partnerships where you have somebody who isn't really knowledgeable about the work their expertise isn't somewhere else they want your expertise to bring a skill set into their realm and then they have a million opinions about how you do it and then they refuse to allow you to learn anything in order of capacity and one of the things that's been great about these writers is they're really strongly opinionated humans and I think had we not had I had a partner who wasn't able to hear me when I say like this writer just needs a different process like she's a Sudanese refugee her family member was killed she needs two extra months to write her story and that's just the truth and like being truly accessible to different perspectives also means working in ways that are different than the way we set out to and that learning is as much the work as the outcome and if we can't be an honest collaborative processes then we then wire then then we're not actually collaborating we're dictating so thank you I did want to open it up in our last few minutes here before we get to our next coffee if there are any questions out there in the audience there's a scarlet's over here with a mic hi my questions for Paul I remember you had mentioned that you had very little trouble with motion sickness in your experience can you talk about like how one might avoid that because that's definitely a concern when I take my own yeah it's okay I mean it's a broad statement like to say that nobody had any issues and certainly people did but there was a sort of what we found astounding was that in the experience they would keep coming back to sort of realize that it was something very tangible that they could sort of overcome so there's a difference between being completely turned off and you know I'm not going to do that or I feel invested in this narrative journey or this dramaturgical process or the aesthetic environment that I'm engaged in enough to want to come back and try and sort through the kind of counter currents that are running through my physiological body telling me other things so there are some like common best practices like avoiding locomotion for example at certain velocities that are just really good best practices but you know okay for example you know we put people in a two and a half meter pool of sand and then we lifted them up some 30 meters in the air very slowly and we moved them locomotively to the center of the stadium and then we burst them through the roof until they were in you know basically the ether it seemed to work and it seemed to work quite nicely nobody vomited you know and it seemed to work because probably the kinds of imagery the kind of grounding compositional music so all of the elements that were in play and so in the velocity but I would say more than anything is just a sensitivity within the creative team to sort of think about those things and prototype them within the rehearsal hall sort of comes back to a kind of question you know question of how do we design processes or what do we have to do differently in order to incorporate technology into you know especially scripting for example which takes a lot of time to see if the velocity of this elevator lifting up is at the right speed in order to avoid kind of some kind of logic reaction so it has a lot to do with taking a different kind of approach in terms of the rehearsal build or how one goes through that process but also it has a lot to do with how the body feels a certain physical grounding within the environment because it's mixed reality so the fact that people were barefoot in the sand gave them as I mentioned a way of being unstable at first but then a sort of extreme familiarity to be able to even let's say use your toes to root down and to try and like really engage in a different way with the environment so that was also like a real interesting thing that happened but yeah thanks for the question that's interesting yeah thank you we've got time for one more center center here this sort of starts from something that Tessina said but open to everybody the question of getting coding skills into the minds and hands and bodies of people who have not traditionally been the people we see as technologists just wondering do you have ideas of strategies and ways forward for that? I don't necessarily but I do think that introducing this within Native community with the young people and showing them what they normally wouldn't have access to and then also I know that within one of the people that we work with Ross Kiddie in the media programs and one of the things that he just started doing was an indigenous hackathon so it's basically introducing Native people to these very very introductory ideas of how to even be exposed to this type of media because honestly like even the youth that I know their minds would probably be blown by seeing what people are working on here because they don't even know that it exists and also entering into the gaming culture I have strong opinions about this mostly because I work with a lot of like can code not can code specifically but groups like that and there's been a like a lot of I don't want to say harm but I would say maybe you know when you're like too ready to do a thing I've been seeing a lot of that where you have a lot of these non-indigenous groups that are kind of running into getting a lot of money and then running into these like indigenous communities to be like I'm going to slam code down your throat you're going to love it and it's not again it comes down to the protocols but it's also I don't feel like a lot of these groups are coming in because like code is important to them sometimes it feels like they come in because code is the hot new thing and so for me as somebody who like really enjoys doing code it's always kind of really upsetting because I don't see them starting with the basics so for me basics started without even a computer it was learning logic and writing out stuff on paper and like for me as a game designer everything starts with paper and so I guess for me one of the techniques I would like to see being used not just in indigenous communities which I think also should be a community thing not just a youth thing I do also have very strong feelings that may be the fact because like Cree and M-A-T-E are very much about intergenerational sharing so for us it was always that weird feeling of like we're only going to go in for the youth and you're like but why like grandmas like to do stuff like you know coconut code like letter code but also I would like to see less focus on getting kids right in on screens and first like let's build up that knowledge base of you know how does a computer think what are bytes like I had a very interesting conversation with Monique Monach about indigenous languages in like the north so like Canada and the North US have very strong concepts of animate and inanimate and I said code makes a lot of sense and bytes make a lot of sense because binary is essentially it's either on or off where it's dead or alive and so all of a sudden she was like oh my god yes that's why it's always like made so much sense and so the language of code can make a lot of sense to indigenous people because binary at least like the like Anishinaabe and Cree is a lot of animate inanimate so it makes a lot of sense but you don't see I don't see groups coming in from that point because they're kind of rushing in with a very like American college idea of how code should be taught which is like yeah it's not even a European idea it's a very like American college like MIT like we're going to like get you on these computers where it's like let's start real slow let's start at the base it's not code specifically but I think one of the things that's been I'm not like I'm not the front wave of digital technology ever which I think is like the funny thing that I keep getting involved in these tech projects in part and I think it's sort of like I don't know I'm also a person who's trained in game design and I think that there's like a small group of people mostly who are at the forefront of a technological advance designing games and if you imagine like where movies would have been if only a small subset of people who are interested in action movies made films like you wouldn't be accessing the full potential of that medium to communicate and one of the things that's been really interesting about working with the writers for trail off is that they think about place-based storytelling really differently than somebody who's like a geocacher and their interaction with space pushes I think the conversation in a different way oftentimes in like really difficult hard ways but in ways that like expand my thinking about what storytelling can be in part because they're not coming from it from the same perspective so I would completely echo that I would say this is an opportunity to have completely new collaborators in the room I mean we don't okay most of the time we don't expect the actors on stage to be you know programming the moving light board in computer environments okay sometimes it happens a lot but it really is it's a very deep subset skill that requires a high degree of specialization and scripting is incredible with interactive aspects so it's really hard to find those people who want to not work in mainstream or find someone in terms of our programmer who works in the mainstream gaming environment but then who wants on the side to do some more art things you know convincing them to come over and play and for them you know at least in the case of Richard who was our programmer he found an immense amount of joy and you know a totally different outlet in order to be able to create an artistic level so you know it's these new fantastic collaborations and him in the room also offering up possibilities that we would have never imagined because he is such a specialist so I think it's a whole bunch of new collaborative players all of a sudden and it's exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time so yeah Jacob I want to hold time if you have a quick thing otherwise I'm going to thank our panelists for participating in this session we're going to take a break now there should be fresh coffee outside and we'll come back in about 15 minutes to go to our third and final panel for the day thank you very much


integers there are several number worthless there is no 100 you have cant sir! your house is there i would see him i dont know if you have to go


Observational entropy is a measure of entropy that can be used to compare systems in different states of equilibrium or out of equilibrium. It has been argued to provide a useful measure of out-of-equilibrium thermodynamic entropy. In this paper, the authors explore the mathematical properties of observational entropy from an information-theoretic perspective. They derive bounds on observational entropy for general cases, as well as bounds and identities related to sequential and post-processed measurements. Additionally, they introduce the concept of the coarse-grain state, which arises from the measurement statistics without requiring prior knowledge of the system's true state. This coarse-grain state is shown to provide upper and lower bounds on the difference between observational and von Neumann entropies. This article was authored by Francesco Buscemi, Joseph Schindler, and Dominic Afranek.