Good morning. How are you guys feeling? Who stayed overnight here? Nice. Nice. Congratulations. Hope it pays off for you. So we're gonna start by with everyone standing up. I know it's been a long night for some people. We're gonna start by putting your right hand up in the air. Breathe into it and put your left hand up in the air as well. Now, everyone turn to your right and let your hands, did you let, right? Yeah, right, sorry. And let your hands fall on the shoulders of the person in front of you.  They've had a long night. Don't hold back. They need it. Take advantage of this moment. Yeah, really sink into it. Now, let's put our hands back up in the air. Do a nice spin to the other direction, can't leave the other person hanging and return the favor. Yeah, some of you might be the caboose right now. You know, totally fine. You weren't there a moment ago. Really enjoy it. And now let's settle into the panel. Hey, good morning nerds. That is a thing that just happened. My name is Sydney Skybetter. I'm a choreographer and professor of Dance Junk at Brown University. And it is my privilege to be here. Yeah, go Dance Junk. Is that what that was? Go Brown. Okay, great, sure. I don't know. Sometimes the Dance Junk, yeah, Dance Junk. Okay, you say Dance Junk, you say Brown. Dance Junk, Brown. I'm gonna go ahead and move on. It is early, nerds. It is early. So I am really delighted to be here this morning. I have the privilege of sharing three tables across six other nerds. And this is a really singular experience for me. I'm just honored to be part of the hacking arts experience. So I just wanna extend my thanks, first and foremost to my esteemed panelists and also, of course, to the organizers whose blood, sweat, and tears make this all happen. So thank you and mazel tov. Can we give a round of applause for those nerds? They're good.  So thank you for your service. So real quick, this is going to be a morning panel. So it's going to be, I'm gonna be facilitating in the style of fast. So my intention here is to put some soft but also hard parameters around folks' time and attention and guide our conversation through. And ideally, I'd love for you, the audience, to be as involved as possible. Now, I understand that there is a marginally dystopic technology interfacing between us. The slide-do, slide-do? Slide-do. So y'all already know how to use the slide-do. This is all old school. All old knowledge. You use the hashtag pound sign HA 2018, interactive on the slide-do to pose your questions and then they'll pop up in a couple of minutes on the slide-do screens up here. So I'd encourage you to be as vocal if in mediated fashion as you can. I'm very interested in you being, this panel being informed by your interests and experiences, so throw down up in there. So let's do this thing, shall we? We shall. What I'd like to do next is in one sentence or less, ask my esteemed panelists to give a bio statement.  I'm Eli Clark Davis, Chief Production Officer of Daybreaker, an early morning dance community in 25 cities around the world with 500,000 community members, serving as someone who loves production as well as community building. So we're gonna focus on that. I am Ali. I design interactive platforms that enable new user experiences and I make products that make life easier. Cheers. Yeah. I'm digging this clapping after people talk thing. Let's keep that up. Yes, hi, good morning. I'm Carl Sims. I create digital simulations, interactive digital simulations with inspiration from nature. Yeah. Hi, I'm Lucy. I'm an interdisciplinary designer and currently a grad student at Harvard focusing on disruptive approach in holistic systems. Thank you. Yeah. Hey, my name is Tobias Putrich. My work is mostly about art, architecture and design and that's pretty much it, right? Thank you. Hi, my name is Ryan Edwards. I'm a musician and artist and working in the area of light, sound and interactivity. Great, wow. I have to say a very virtuosic job keeping to one sentence. There were a couple of semicolons in there but well played. So next what I'd like you to do is, again for my panelists, given two minutes, I'd like you to tell a story about maybe a choice project, research venture, intervention of some kind that for you starts to define questions of, not only sort of art, but also of interaction and how you're thinking about technology. So we're starting to maybe define our terms a little bit. Two minutes is on the clock and I should also note by way of caveat, I'm going to be timing these nerds with my phone. So if I'm looking at my phone, I'm not like checking on the latest, I guess, moth memes or whatever the kids are sharing these days. I'm just going to, thank you for finding that funny. I'm gonna be timing them and giving them time warning. So on that note, two minutes from my left to my right, please. Okay, so at Daybreaker, we think about cross collaboration in many ways with technology in is one of the biggest ones. I could think about a specific story where we collaborate with IBM Watson and some incredible artists out in San Francisco to create the world's first cognitive dance party where we, the challenge was to make AI more human, less scary. And we did so by having Watson analyze all of the survey data from the attendees coming to Daybreaker, creating personality insights that then determined what human flow they'd go through in the experience, what fitness experience they'd go on, whether they were more the cap wearer, the yoga or the high intensity interval training type of person, what food they would enjoy the event, what color they would wear to the event. And then we used all of that data to program functionality in this 30 by 30 foot LED dance floor that we built. And that functionality was also meant to bring people closer together and make real meaningful human connections and also create more energy for people to dance even harder. With that energy that people created, we then rose this 17 foot LED sun that we fabricated behind the DJ booth and simulated the rising sun. And on top of that, we used the AI to have Watson beat battle, ELU this world-renowned jazz pianist. We read these intention cards as a community to out loud at the end. And we gave Watson 1,000 of them to then sort through based on the personality insights of the community and chose one specific one that would resonate. So it was really a practice in just how AI can enhance our lives in a really meaningful way and create deep connections with others. Come. Coming in under time. Thank you, sir. Moving on, yes. Sure. So I'm a PhD student here at the Media Lab and I think a lot about building platforms that others can design for. So for my master's thesis, which I also did here, I was developing a multimodal interactive interface that was focused primarily on haptic feedback and it enabled people to interact with virtual objects on a stereoscopic or volumetric display. And whenever their hand comes in contact with a virtual object, they experience sensation where the boundary of the object is. And this is one project that falls under this umbrella of a platform that empowers people to develop their own interactive experiences and express their creativity in new ways. Currently, one of my projects is actually quite different from what I had done previously. I'm now doing soft robotics, specifically with applications to hand augmentation for people with disabilities. So I think a lot about design that is inclusive and that is accessible to everyone. So my current project enables people who have some motor impairments are not able to grab something with their hand due to inability to bend their fingers to still be able to use their own hand to pick up objects just by putting their hand over the object and having inflatable actuators grab the object and then be able to pick it up and manipulate it. And similarly, if they are able to move their fingers only slightly, then using the same approach, the actuators are filling the space between the skin and the object so they can use the object with only a very small bending of their fingers.  Thank you, sir.  I should note by way of prelude in a moment I'm going to ask my same panelists to comment on each other's stories and projects. So that's coming up next, sir. So I am fascinated by emergent behavior, situations where you can create simple rules and apply them either over and over again or across many parts of space. And then you get these unexpected complex results. So inspiration from nature, I mentioned, I guess the grand version of that is life coming from primordial soup, right? So we have an example of that. And that is, to me, fascinating. I'll quickly summarize four different interactive pieces that I've created that relate to this, biology, chemistry, physics types of simulations. One is called genetic images, which is a abstract computer art evolution setup.  And that one replicates and fills the other screens. So it's a sort of survival of the most aesthetically interesting abstract artworks system. And after a while, you get more complex, interesting pictures. Another piece is a reaction diffusion chemistry simulation where you have two chemicals that react and diffuse and create these patterns that are fairly unexpected. And things like brain coral patterns or even cellular mitosis type patterns out of these very simple chemical rules. This is your 30 second warning. That piece is playing at the Science Museum. And then two other pieces. One is involving particle systems, physics simulation and a fluid flow physics simulation. So those are the kinds of things that I'm into. Okay. Thank you. Round of applause. We're out. All right, Lucy. So let me start by saying when Sydney sent me the prom, I freaked out a little because I don't actually know what I'm doing 90% of the time. Yeah, because I'm still currently a student and I'm always looking to branch out and looking at all sorts of different designs. And I guess my core is, as I said before, a disruptive approach to holistic systems. So basically looking at all aspects of everything and trying to find the most unlike these and kind of smushed them together. So yeah, so instead of saying what I guess my belief or what are my projects kind of focused on, I'm gonna say three projects and hopefully people can come up something for me. Yeah, so the first project I did was a past virtual reality projects. And it was a physical reality project slash virtual reality project where Sydney knows more about this. It was at Brown University in a place called New York where it's a physical space surrounded by about 70 projectors that work as a VR projection system. And I basically implemented an architecture model in it that corresponds to the person's virtual movement and create a spatial echolocating sound systems that helps them direct through the space through music and notes. So that's one project. Another project was, it was a material-based fabrication systems where I looked at digital ways of fabricating glass as a material in terms of under architecture context. Basically looking at the properties of slump and casting and how that could be constructed into a fragile intricate yet very stable structures that can prevent any further increase in the things like leaner fractures, et cetera. That's very utilitarian. So those are two. And the last project was a more recent projects where I worked as a combination of designers slash cognitive neuroscience person basically by taking fMRI brain scan data and using a process of machine learning and JavaScript as a way of processing visualizations to create an interface that displays brain scan information in a more, I guess, easier to understand way. So those are very different projects and hopefully, yeah. And all that in the service of interface which I'd love to return to. Thank you, Pussy. Yeah, we'll get out. And I also want to just take a moment to point out the slightly obvious that there are people taking me literally and at my word up here using swear words and asking questions. So as we go, we can address that if we can, please. When I was asked for this panel to talk about participatory kind of idea, I think in art it's very strange. What exactly is participation? So, and I was trying to think what in my work exactly could be, everything is participatory in a sense. So I just want to describe just one simple project that was about risk. And we wanted to build a stack of Styrofoam cubes in a museum in England. And actually the whole idea was that working with structure engineers and architects, like to build a stack that's like 10 meters high or more that could potentially collapse. So, and then how exactly you, the whole structures form about this notion of risk. That's basically kind of scientifically kind of, actually working with structure engineers and trying to calculate percentage of risk. So in how actually then museum reacts to this notion that artwork can collapse. So, and of course, the results, final result of this collaboration with museum, with everyone was that museum actually at the end, glued all the stacks, not telling anyone. What? So, it tells you a lot about this kind of participatory and kind of like, notion of like how much institution really, and how institution participate in this kind of process. Because institutions are very conservative in that sense. And participatory art and design tries to be very open. So, and this kind of clash is very interesting that happens. Yeah. And how it happens. Sure. I wanna put a pin in two things that you're talking about. First, indeed, the role of the institution relative to all of our work, I think is something that we can explicate further. But I also am very intrigued by this idea of incorporating corporeal risk into interactivity, especially given some of the conversations we were having immediately before the panel, which had to do with creating a kind of a safe space or a playful space. And maybe these notions of risk and playfulness are in some kind of relationship, he said, leadingly. Please. Cool. Right on. Yeah. That sounds a good one, dude. So, my name is Ryan. And my background is in West African music. And I bring that up because in West Africa, if you play drums, this happened to me one of the first times I played drums there and no one's dancing, they think you're crazy. Because music without dance is like, it doesn't happen. You know what I'm saying? That's just a huge question mark, something is wrong. And so, I did that experience at first as a teenager and that has kind of been a part of all of my work as I've gone forward, where as a composer and as a creative, I really seek for another media or another person or another, something to react and feed off of. So, that's kind of like the basis of how I look at the world in making work. The current project that I'm working on now is a location-aware musical instrument where it's a public artwork that I install. It's a series of plastic cubes. And as people move around these cubes, they actually contribute to the melodic structures. So, it's location-aware in that, say, if this scan is happening this way, this could be rhythm. And as the cubes are moved this way, that could register pitch. So, it really is like actually preparing something for interaction, but not finishing it. I think that's something that like for me has become a very strong piece of what I do, is that I can't actually finish my work. I can only prepare it and set it up for people to play with. And that's really fun. I mean, that's in a way, and I'm sure that might be something we all have in common in interactivity, is that you have to kind of prepare for various conditions and then be ready to be surprised and pivot and change and kind of improvise. And that to me keeps my work really interesting and exciting and also like super present, which is how I just want to live. Sure, cheers. Wow, we got mantras falling down all over the place here. Thank you. No, and I love this, it's sort of Yvonne Rainery, post-modern in the idea of the work never being done. Exactly, so maybe there's a question as to like when an interface or when an art is finished somehow. I now want to invite all of our panelists to now comment on each other's work. So I wonder if you have any questions for each other, maybe potentially invoking some of the swear words or other kinds of words in the slide though. What's on your mind as regards to your fellow panelists? Anybody. Please. Yeah, sir, go ahead, Yvonne. On direct response to Tobias, something that we think about at Daybreaker when creating the framework of these large-scale events is this Venn diagram of mystery and safety. And that meeting in the middle is where some of the greatest magic happens and it's what keeps people coming back and wanting more, right? Where they want to play with risk, they have no idea what's coming, what could happen, could the things collapse. But they also, they want this element of safety and warmth. And I feel like there's something there with the art that you're creating as well. Yeah, but look, I think many times I think this institutional rules really kind of dictate what it's possible to do and what is not possible to do. And I think idea of like participatory art and of this kind of, it was always idea of a different museum, different space where people get interact with kind of art, interact with each other. But to me, interesting moment that happens is that institutions are always places with rules, with very strict rules. So I think the first question is like, how do you implement these rules? And especially, and I think on the level of, if you have a small company, small, I mean, you can improvise, but you're still kind of, you have to fit, right? You have to obey the rules. Simply it's like, when you organize, there's simply the whole infrastructure that you have to follow. So, and this is kind of tension, I think it's very interesting. When, where is this freedom of participation and how does it happen? Can you step out of this, you talk about safety, but this is very serious thing, you know? It's like, if something goes wrong, you're done. Sure, as in dead, yeah. So, that's kind of, you know, or even like, but probably, because if you go to some countries that rules are not that important, you suddenly feel like, I was a project, I was a DACA summit in Bangladesh, you know, actually it's a beautiful place and many things are possible there that would never be possible here. You should try exhibiting at Burning Man instead of museums, maybe. There's fewer rules, I think. Yeah. So, I wanna maybe sort of tag on to this question, this conversation and incorporate the question by, I hope I'm pronouncing this correctly, anonymous. So, the question is, how do you adapt when the audience slash end user leads you down an unexpected path? And I might maybe tag on to that audience end user or institutional framework. Maybe there's a way that art working within the world, within or orthogonal to Burning Man or other places, has an effect on the work. So, I wonder if you can talk about what happens when the audience end user or institution leads you down an unexpected path. So, I think that plays into your risk comment also. I think that's what you hope for. I think once, you know, if you can create an interactive piece of some sort where you'd have no clue what might happen, that's great. Unexpected things are wonderful and sometimes they're not that great and sometimes they're much greater than you would expect, but that's, I think that's a very positive thing for any piece, in my opinion. I'll add to that.  And I think that's like, that's a fundamental piece in anyone's approach. You know, if you think, I'm gonna provide for all of the contingencies and I'll be ready for it. You know, go ahead if you think you could, but I think what's kind of beautiful is not being able to do that or kind of accepting and embracing that, so that would be like the first step. And then realize, like I think on the unfinished thing, that it's unfinished and that's beautiful because then you go back to your studio and like everything you learned from showing it last weekend, you incorporate this week. And you're like, whoa, okay, now I actually need these things because last weekend I wasn't just showing a finished thing and standing there, I was actually researching and participating and like bringing things in because I'm passionate about developing this so that it's a journey, it's a path rather than like kink. All right, what's the next thing, right? And that, so that's actually like more about technology and interaction, but more about an attitude maybe. Or like a stance. Yeah, like I'm into the fact that I don't know how it's gonna work and I'm gonna get information from people interacting with it. Like that's a wonderful shaking that to happen. Sure. I'm curious, do all of you share that vantage point, that kind of improvisatory pliability? Is that something we all agree is important or vital here or useful? Yeah, we consider them the golden moments at Daybreaker where you set up a framework and you hope for people to create their own magic within it. And if it's something that you weren't expecting in a way that might have been a little more challenging it's one of those moments where the community gets to kind of self correct in a way that reinforces community if you will. And it's a way for people to feel more, like they feel more connected to the experience by able to react back to it. Connected, but they also maintain their agency. So they're not, you're not like imposing interaction on them, it sounds like they're there of their own volition. Please. I would go perhaps even one step further and say that we should not only think about how to engage the audience in the experience that we design for them, but how can the audience itself be part of the design of the experience itself. So one of the things I, one of the philosophies I share a lot has to do with open source and engaging people in the development of products and interactions themselves. So it's perhaps, one of the suggestions I would have for all of the hackers here is that when you create something, perhaps consider open sourcing it so that you are not limiting the people to only using the particular system or the particular product that you develop, but enable them to remix and expand upon it and develop their own versions of it, similar to how software works. But we can extend this to hardware and also to performances and more general scenarios as well. So other thoughts, questions for your fellow panelists. Anything that you've been dying to ask each other for literally minutes now? I kind of want to keep on going with the kind of the interface interaction questions like targeted towards all of my panelists. Like for example, I have a question for Ryan because we've been talking about like rules, frameworks, and for example, like taking your box project for example, like it is like set in a space, that's like a regular space, like everything is rectangular, and there are different, I guess the box is a program in a way that when people can move them, like there's a set coordinate and like a relationship between each other. But how do you really decide how much rules I guess to enforce on the people? Like in a way that you could, there's you can go all the way from like, yeah, just let them do whatever they want, like see like whatever like almost like morphic outcome that comes up to, okay, I want the lateral element to be this, the linear element to be this, and I want specific like core slash nodes to be composed. Like how do you like, I guess my question is to what extent do you apply those rules and set people? Maybe to tag on again to Anonymous's question about the interactions with the artwork and how you think of the object and it's lifestyle, no, life cycle. Oh, here's a great lifestyle, I hope it hugs all the time. Amazing. Well, that question I have, to answer that, I have to back up and ask like, what is the, what are some of the philosophies? What are the experiences that I want people to have? I mean, the quick answer is that I program the piece to operate in a number of different ways, both from like kind of confined within parameters so that it's very musical and then also things that are completely organic and with, and removing some of those structures that make it musical. But one of the philosophies for me is I want to try to create spaces where people interact socially with one another. So that to me is the holy grail. The more that I can help put that into the world, the better. So, I answer that musical structures and people are more interactive with one another that way. Then I might go down that path and encourage it.  Like all of a sudden it's detuned church bells and crickets and that's what they're playing with.  You know, so that is, to that end, it's really, those are the two things that I look for. And the other thing too is like, how is removing the barriers to be musical? I think that's one of the things for me that's really important is, you know, you don't have to afford a violin and lessons and go to a school that has an orchestra. How can I democratize music and music making so that people feel the feelings of music in unconventional settings and with people they don't know. So if I can make that happen quickly, you know, strangers happen upon this and then now they're being musical, that to me is an end goal. So not such a concise answer, but those are some of my thoughts on it. Thanks for the question, Lucy. You're also alluding to interactivity, not just between an installation and an object and a participant, but also between participants, between communities of participants. Please, yes. Please, yes. Yeah. Get common cards. Yeah, so it seems like a number of us on the panel have that interest in common. Yeah, we were talking about this earlier. So for me, I love it when a piece can lift sort of an inhibition barrier and cause people to act silly and just feel like they can do crazy stuff that they wouldn't necessarily do walking down the street, but now it's okay, so go for it, right? Way ahead of you, bro. Some of my works have motion sensors and so on because people can, you know, dance or be silly. And then, even better, is when you have a few people using it at once, they start interacting with each other at the same time as they're interacting with the piece and that's just fun when that happens and it's great. And in fact, you could argue that the VR goggles are very risky in terms of an experience that can create that kind of interaction because you don't see the person as well, maybe you can, you see the avatar sometimes, it can work, but I tend to do pieces where people do not wear anything at all, so it's a digital mirror kind of situation with augmented reality, but not wearing the goggles. Sure, no, what I love about that is it positions dorkiness as a kind of utopian virtue and it highlights awkwardness and play as aspirational. He said, with a question mark? I agree, did I get that one right? So I just want to kind of call the process because there's been a number of instances where my esteemed panelists have gestured towards reducing barriers and talking about playfulness and sort of procedurally, here we are on a stage with bright lights so we can't fall asleep and you are in a dim space and comfortable chair is where you can fall asleep. And also our relationship is entirely mediated by this delightful, if frankly distancing technology.  Should we use more swear words, fewer swear words? What's good for you? How are we doing here? Couple of thumbs up, yeah okay. I guess this isn't the best way to ask for long form criticism exactly. But it's like so, well it's not really a question. But I also, I'm gonna shift gears a little bit and go to the screen here because we have a couple of requests with four thumbs up for Daybreaker at MIT with I think five or six exclamation points. So I think, I don't write the bylaws but I think that means that that has to happen. Yeah, okay, there's some support for that. I guess, let's see, what was the main guidance for Watson's analysis of the Daybreaker community? So I guess maybe this is a question ultimately about a kind of algorithmic processing. And I guess I'd extend this to you all. I'm curious how you either think about the design or engineering or the curation of algorithms or of the math behind your work. How do you code for interactivity? I hired somebody to help me do that. Fast and answered. Yeah, but I would say that it matters a lot, first of all, that obviously that's someone you can trust and that you can co-collaborate with and also that you empower. And I think for me that's something that to think of my work, not as my name but as a team has helped that. And then also for me personally, kind of creating the software for me to work with that remains expressive. And I think that's, and kind of continually just to my earlier point, about being able to kind of develop it as it goes, creating that kind of an environment where it isn't something that's like, again, it's not finished. It's like, I don't know what I'd wanna do next weekend. Let's make sure that we have some options. That's been my approach to that. Thank you. Your thoughts? Yeah, I mean, in the last half a year I got really frustrated with this whole process.  And I really try to understand. Now, I really spend a lot of time last few months trying to understand and you're starting to code into, you know, because I think this collaboration, you know, it's a problem for understanding and understanding the context, understanding possibilities within this context. And even, you know, here I'm kind of surprised because we are all coming from very different contexts. And I necessarily don't know much about like design. I mean, probably you don't know much about contemporary art and also what I was frustrated few months ago that I don't know much about like programming and especially like machine learning. So, you know, how much do we have to come together exact to understand each other and to understand what participation really is, you know.  You know, it's not, it's quite a complex thing and how much of my time I really dedicate to this question. That's a super interesting frame. So the question on some level ultimately is how much do you need to learn in order to collaborate effectively? To study each other, to kind of participate, you know. I mean, on the level of like, you know, party or like, you know, we can dance together, right? You know. Oh, absolutely. Any time.  Because I would really like to know what's in there and understand what it does, right? It's funny because I, as a choreographer, I have similar questions about dance, actually. So it's like the machine learning is a black box of a certain kind. But choreography and especially social dancing, which is totally mysterious to me as an elite highly trained conservatory dancer, like is a source of some anxiety, but also wanting to know or wanting to understand. Other thoughts, please. To quickly address the question of how we, what kind of guidance we got from Watson. So we were looking at some of the bigger questions of the community, right? And are they spiritual? Are they adventurous? Do they love risks? And it came down to like understanding if they're more extroverted or more introverted leaning. And those were the questions that we were coding for to help understand what path they would take. I can go much deeper into all those details, but for the sake of time, I'll say that for a question at the end. One thing that we were really proud of is understanding the extroverts versus introverts in the room and making sure that no one felt that labeled inside and that they were all feeling really connected. And one thing that we did was use that information to create functionality on the dance floor where if you were looking at the floor and you're super fastened by these designs under you, you would notice that when you got closer to other people, there would be rings that would come around both of you that would encourage you to dance more in groups and connect with one another and then look up at each other. So it was like, I'm around this person and you look up and you have this meaningful moment with that person. So that was one of the main things we coded for. I just wanna put a pin in functionality on the dance floor and I don't know if we can request t-shirts with that on it. Maybe we can just do that. I love that commingling of a kind of expressive and sort of community-centered moment that is augmented and literally framed by the technology. It was a first for us. But one thing, just to chime in on what you're saying. Oh, the thoughts for t-shirts, maybe. This actually could go on a t-shirt. I think so. So when we are thinking about designing an experience for people that call themselves, or that say that they never dance, they can't dance, but you're also creating experience for really advanced dancers like yourself. We had to create one that would bring them together in a really special way. So when you think about creating the experience and the science behind it, they're trying to get as many of the happy chemicals to fire so that they're really able to interact with one another. And when we were unscrambling, Rada was unscrambling these happy chemicals, we realized that it spells dose. Dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins, which is crazy for a sober early morning dance party, when you think about going to get your drugs at the pharmacy or elsewhere, that you're enabling yourself to release your own dose. And so when you're at Daybreaker, you're able to get your dopamine from this early morning accomplishment. And you're oxytocin from having this hugging train at the entrance and then throwing away handshakes and only having hugs on the dance floor. And you're serotonin from really feeling valued as part of a community member, from either the MC speaking to you or having these sober interactions with other people and actually going deep with them. And you're endorphins from burning 500 to 1,000 plus calories on the dance floor, right? And so when you're creating these interactive pieces, really thinking about the experience that they're having around it and trying to get as many of these happy chemicals to fire so they can have an emotionally resonant moment. And that's really what when you feel that way at Daybreaker, it makes you throw out the like, you know, you leave Daybreaker saying, I can dance. I am confident going out dancing at night without anything else. Yeah. I love how your sort of experiential frame for this work is both not about drugs, but also very, very, very much about drugs. I wanna toss this to Carl and then I'll take a question from the website. I was just gonna give a more geeky answer to the coding question if I can step back. I write most of my own software. I use OpenCL, OpenGL for GPU programming. I don't know if you guys use GPUs out there, but it's fun these days. Those are so fast. OpenCL. Yeah. Yeah. And then C++ and so on. In another life, I created software tools for special effects. So coding is kind of my main thing in a way. Artist is the fun part on the side. Okay. Yes, Lucy. And I kind of wanna add on to what Carl said about programming myself because I program most of my projects myself as well, but in a very different sense whereas I don't know anything. I'm trying to learn everything. And 90% of the time I ended up somewhere where I was like, ooh, I did not know I did that and I like it. So that kind of situation. So I think as my approach to algorithms and programming projects, I think it's from a perspective where I'm not expecting anything as a result and just kind of have it guide me because I feel like that's an important part of interaction design as well. Like from the back end, where I'm interacting with the code in my own way and I'm seeing the code interact with the end user in another way. And that very triangulated, like almost crossover relationship was something that was really interested to me. And this can be like very easily applied to like dance choreography or like other mixed media projects that I think, yeah. Sure, I love that because you're speaking to the kind of interaction design and experience design of your own artistic practice and a kind of coding for serendipity that you yourself value. I wanna take it back to Anonymous who's posing a lot of questions if I'm being honest. Contingency planning and complicity of the audience in relationship to an object in its creation. Can we talk about how the audience is implicated or is complicit in your work? And maybe more by extension, the relationship of your audience and maybe more specifically of the bodies of those participating and your work. And if it involves drugs, then great. Also, non-drug answers are fine. Well, at Daybreaker, wow. It is all about the audience and the moments that they exchange with one another. And what we think about all these moments with ritual, right? And both at the entrance and the exit. You know, on the dance floor, but some of the things that we like to include at every single event when you arrive, instead of having mean bouncers at the door like you do when you go out at night, you have a hugging train, right? And this first interaction is kind of when you throw out everything you know about how you're supposed to meet someone at a social setting, right? So when you get hugged by somebody else, now you're on the dance floor hugging all the new people that you meet, right? And so it's not really creating rules for the event, but creating these frameworks and culture and setting that tone right from the beginning. Another thing that we love doing is saying things during the experience that we're not trying to narrate the experience for everybody, but we are trying to help them break free, right? And so giving little guidance to the people that are actually speaking to the audience and helping people not judge themselves and things like that and things that they would never hear when they go out to the clubs, but also have this moment where they're like feeling really connected to themselves and to everyone around them has been huge for creating transformational moments for people on the dance floor. And so really just thinking about the small tidbits that can create deeper unlocking and help them ask bigger questions and why they're there, why they're showing up and what they want to get out of it. Hug as technology, exactly. Yeah, human technology. Like social grease in a way, like how is an audience complicit in some cases, I can say in some of my work, like the piece is alive and it happens when people interact with it. So there is a chance that the piece is there and no one's playing with it, no one is showing up or they're walking up and they're confused. So like, I think to your point, Eli, like how do you help people get past where they might just be looking at something and be unsure without actually saying, you know, well, here's a pamphlet about our thing. You know, how do you avoid that like too much structure but still kind of find a social elixir that just kind of says like, oh, oh. In one case for one of my pieces, it would be to hand people a pair of drumsticks. Not say anything else.  I don't know you. You're here with two kids on the street. Here's some drumsticks. That's just whale. Yeah. And then hopefully the piece is like structured in a way that that then turns into something meaningful. But that's the, like sometimes it does take that. Like, you know, how do you open doors without actually having to lead people all the way through, but kind of say like, here's some doors. Sure. As opposed to like an IKEA manual of interactive art. I have a very similar situation with some of my pieces where if someone's using it, other people see that, they see how it works, then they get in there and start using it as well. But if no one's using it at a particular moment, it's not as interesting because it's really dependent on the people using it. And so how do you draw people then when no one's using it? So one thing I tried, which was interesting is you have a different mode when it detects that no one's using it. And it starts doing stuff kind of on its own.  So you're not creating too much structure over what people would be creating on their own. So it changes its mode when someone's using it and not using it to attempt to solve exactly that kind of problem.  So I'm told by the thing in front of us that we have seven minutes and 10 seconds left in our panel. I'm going to take that literally. And I'm gonna ask you all one more question from the board. And then I'm going to invite you to tell our audiences first where folks can find more information about you. And then secondly, if you had any hard one trench fought guidance or knowledge to impart on the folks in the audience what that would be. So that's coming in a moment. But I love this question again by anonymous. Can you tell about a project you felt failed and what you took from it? Can we do like kind of a lightning round of failure? Can we just quickly go down and talk about our favorite failures and what you took away from that project or that failure? Unless I'm the only one who's ever failed which is possible. Look, I think a general question could be like if there's something like too much participation if there is some, if there are limits to participation because my experience is that sometimes especially in the frame of contemporary art I think this participant moment became almost problematic because and especially going back to this kind of problem of institution like how, because if you control if you're a company or if you have a group of people and you don't really belong to any institution and kind of you try to establish your own rules, I think that's fine. But immediately when you depend on someone this can become quite weird. How do you manage people? How do you really tell them what they can do and what they cannot do? And of course, and then you can be faced with a failure where people are confused and don't even want to participate. Sure. So maybe there's like two questions buried in there. The first is how you handle dependencies but also secondly, what kinds of rules can scale and to what point? Yeah. Thank you. Other meditations on failure either yours or those you have observed in my career or other people's careers. I guess I kind of want to rephrase the question as to how do you really define failure? Because almost all of my projects ended up somewhere that wasn't supposed to be at all. Yeah. I mean, taking an example of a project that I'm currently working on, I've been working a lot with ceramics lately with slip casting mostly. And just because I had various issues with my mold and it ends up being like very like overflowing, cracked, et cetera. Like by trying to fix everything, now it's turned into like this very morphic, like weird object that I find like almost inspiring for some reason. So I guess the process, like the process is like, do you really take failure as failure or like another opportunity to kind of go further? Like maybe stepping into it doesn't matter where you're not familiar with or maybe like try to come by it with a past knowledge into like creating something that's very like abstract and that could potentially open new fields. Like, yeah, because failure is a relative term. Sure. And maybe one that's attitudinally defined. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I agree with that. I think it's important to start lots of projects, many of which you might not finish. Just go for it, right? Don't be scared to start a project just because it might fail because it doesn't matter. You just don't finish, you do something else, that's fine. Especially these days, I mean, taken from an old timer where computing used to be really expensive and really slow relative to the way it is now, you guys have it really easy. Congratulations. So, you know, go and do it, whatever it might be, whether you finish or not. Thank you. Ali. One way in which you could say perhaps failure could be defined is that if you take too much advice from people, they may have very different opinions about what you are doing and that might give you a very different sense of which direction you should be going. So I think it's important to have a very clear understanding of why you are doing something and you have to be careful who you take advice from and how you incorporate that into your project. So a project I was working on about two years ago was a context awareness system for mobile devices and that's a project that sort of ended up being finished, sort of not completely, but one of the obstacles that I found with that project is that after I tried pursuing it more as a product than just a research project, I ended up getting very conflicting advice from VCs and from some of the people in business I interacted with about whether this would be a project that can be pursued as a real startup or whether it should be just confined to a research project. So that's one project I ended up not pursuing as a product because I got a lot of conflicting advice but even today I still think that was a mistake and I probably should have continued forward. I think that that's such a fascinating conversation for another panel or another conversation about the role of mentorship and the constellation of resources and people that inform all of our work but also your point is very well taken. I don't trust anything that comes out of a panel. Ryan, did you have a quick thought?  I have a quick one just on failure which is instead of being specific in general for me it has been times when I took someone's resume or reputation or skill over the relationship that I had with them when developing work and I think for most of us and I'm probably, I hope everyone in this room the work that you're working on is important and you're filled with passion and it's personal and it's public and it's all those things. So then the people you work with you should love and want to work with them because if everything goes really well you'll stay up late hanging out with them and then you'll take it on the road and you know what I'm saying? Hopefully those things happen and then hopefully you're gonna wanna hang with them because your relationship is the thing that's forward and if the people around you, you have to be honest with yourself if you're not feeling it. I think even if we're writing code and doing, even if electricity is involved you still have to feel good about the people you're with. Sure. Yeah. On that note we have literally 23 seconds before we I guess all get kicked off the stage I guess physically and literally. So what I'm gonna invite us now to do is share a place where folks in the audience can get a little bit more information about your work and very, very, very briefly some piece of maybe advice or guidance that you'd like to impart on our audience go. And we're out of time. You can find us. So we're actually looking to do a daybreaker here at MIT. You can come talk to us right over here after this. It's coming up this, later this fall but you can find more on Instagram at dybrkr or daybreaker.com and I'll be here to talk about any questions you have as well. Some wisdom is when thinking about every experience that you create do think about it through what you want people to feel and that's gonna be the most important thing for people to have an emotional connection to what you're creating. If you want this creation to live longer that's how they're gonna start talking about it and create sharing. Pass it down that we now have a blinking light of some kind and I'm getting very nervous. So please. One piece of advice I would ask for everyone is to think about including as many people as you can in your interactive experiences. So specifically think about people who may not have the full set of abilities that a normal person might have. And as for where you can find more of my upcoming and recent work I'm here downstairs literally in this building so you're always welcome to come talk to me and I update my website about once a year which is my last name.com. Thank you. You can find out more information at CarlSims.com and my advice would be just take risks and do what you love to do. Amen. So my advice to someone who doesn't know what she's doing most of the time is that is completely okay because new media is all about finding out who we are and who we interact with and how to really bring that into art and design and tech. To find out more about me you can literally just Google me the search that doesn't come out as a real estate agent in California is probably me. And yeah, yeah, that happens. And on Monday, Wednesday and Friday I'm at the media lab, Tuesday, Thursday I'm at Harvard. Rest of the time I'm kind of floating around Cambridge so if you catch me say hi. Great. I love that your response was if I'm not at Harvard or MIT just Google me. Thank you, please. Yeah, you can find more information on our website and regarding advice, I try to kind of, I feel I give too much advice all the time so no advice this time. Amen. Cheers. I mean, you're like the dark horse up here, man. My studio is called Masari Studios. You see it there, masaristudios.com. We're based here in Boston and one of my pieces is actually out here in the lobby and I have business cards and brochures if you'd like to check it out and hang here this afternoon. Great. Folks, thank you. Give it up for Sydney for being funny and groping it all together though, right? Good job, buddy. Well, thank you. I don't know that that's ever happened before, man. Please give a warm round of applause for my esteemed panelists. Give it up. Thank you so much. Mazel, mazel.  Shameless plug for my own workshop session that started 15 minutes ago.


Before it happened, most of us thought about fossil fuels only when we filled up our cars. Then the whole extraction industry collapsed and we realized that something more important than transportation was completely dependent on these fuels. That was the food system. We never thought about the fact that from growing and harvesting to processing and transportation, our food was made using fossil fuels. This is the story of a family trying to cope with the loss of those fuels. We have to grow, harvest and forage for ourselves in a new world. It's called Foodmageddon. Welcome back. It's been a busy week here as the fossil fuel crisis drags into its fourth week. Gas prices continue to rise, but for the most part it's business as usual. Although we're starting to see cracks in the transportation network. That's why this week I'm ordering everything that we'll need, or everything I think we'll need. I'm not sure how much longer we can depend on online shopping and shipping, so I'm using it now before it's gone. What's more exciting and dynamic than watching somebody browse the internet? So as it's the end of February, or getting near the end of February, and we don't know how much longer we'll be able to use shipping and gas for transportation, I am trying to collect everything I need for the coming year now. Get it sent here, or go pick it up myself. I'm scouring Craigslist for things like plastic buckets. Someday I'm going to have to come up with some solution beyond plastic buckets to store things, and I'm going to look to prehistory or pre-industrial grain storage. But for right now we have a surfeit of plastic, so I'm going to be using these buckets as much as we can. I have to get some sort of grain mill, and I've been looking at all kinds of different grain mills on eBay, on Amazon, all the usual suspects for what do you want to do when you're doing home shopping, right? And so I found, for example, a corn thresher. And the cool thing about everything I'm trying to buy is I'm buying them with wheels, with fly wheels, that have a groove for a belt.  I'm going to have a stationary bike with a belt drive, and then the gears will shift so you can vary your speed and the amount of work you have to put into it. And there's going to be a V-belt that transmits that energy to, for example, this corn thresher, and then also a grain mill to grind our wheat into flour and stuff like that. Because the hand crank models, you're going to get really huge shoulders, maybe that's what you want, but I'd rather use my legs that are a lot stronger. And then also we could get a KitchenAid attachment and use the electric generated by the solar power, but more moving parts depending on electricity, maybe less so. We can always depend on a bike because I used to be a bike mechanic so we can fix that. Other things we're looking at, getting is seeds. So I'm ordering most of everything through Johnny's seeds, just because they have a wide selection and I'm always partial to Maine and New England for some reason. Yay, Johnny's, because they've been working with us to get our seeds in for this project. So a big thanks to those folks at Johnny's. So, you know, dill, onions, okra, beets, beets, Swiss chard, pumpkins, long island cheese. If you haven't tried long island cheese, it is probably my favorite. It tastes about like butternut squash, but it stores, we still have some in the basement. It stores for months and months and months. Broccoli, Kohlrabi, melon, spaghetti squash, butternut squash, cucumbers, watermelons, tomatoes. I'm just working on compiling this list and trying to get everything in from far away now. The distance from which we can get resources shrinks as fossil fuels are less available, we're going to have to be more and more creative. I could always depend on, you know, going to the nursery or picking some up later in the season. But I don't know that that's going to be available in two months, so we got to get it now. Ooh, barrels, like actual wooden barrels for 130 bucks. Sorry, I get distracted easily. Anyway, so as dynamic as this is me talking to you while I'm looking at my computer, maybe I would do like a really great 80s montage. And he's here because he was fussing on the floor and this is the only way to keep him quiet is to have him in my lap. So last night I went through and sorted out all my seeds. I've been keeping him in this cardboard box, but now I've built this nice new seed, component of the seed arc. And essentially what I have are a whole bunch of jars with all my different seeds in them. I have about 20, space for 21 jars. Here's some brand new one, tomatoes. And so yeah, last night I shelled out a couple dozen ears of corn. So I've got lots of dried corn seed, which is for dried corn. I do have some sweet corn seed left. I got three or four tomato varieties, brand new wine, San Marzano is a paste tomato. But I'm worried that a lot of my stuff is inner bread because I've been on these brand new wine seeds for probably six or seven years that I've been saving them myself. And I think they're starting to lose bigger. So because we can still order things, I think I'm going to order and replace a lot of my own seed lines. They weren't very vigorous last year and that could have been the growing conditions, but it could also be my seed stock. So I'm going to replace some of the seeds I have like my cucumbers. They all wilted and so I wonder if I had some sort of wilt on my seeds. So I'm going to replace my cucumbers, my tomatoes, and then the same thing with my squashes. I just don't have enough space to keep them separated and I haven't really concentrated on that. So sometimes I get a lot of inner breeding. One of my favorite things we have is a kale mustard hybrid. It's got the texture of kale. So it's really hearty, but it has that bite of mustard greens. It's really great. I've also got space here to hold all my little packets. So I've got sunflower. I'll probably have to replace the sunflower. I've got some lettuce left. Ooh, cilantro. There we go. Got some eggplants, some fava beans. See this amount of beans is not really enough to grow a significant amount from. But from this, I can grow out seeds that I'll collect all this year and I'll grow them out more next year. So for example, I started out with a packet of this with my dent corn, which is, I don't know, some people call it Indian corn, whatever. It's got that multicolored and it's dried. It's actually an ornamental corn, but we eat it. And so I started out with just one packet of this and I grew it and it was an old packet. It only grew like 10 plants and then I got, you know, maybe this much of a jar. And then next year I grew out a whole field of it and now I have tons of it. So I'll plant out even more this year and then we'll run it through a mill and crack the corn for the chickens. And then we'll also grind it up and make tortillas and tamales and other things. I got zucchini, summer squash, stuff like that, kohlrabi, plenty of Brussels sprouts actually. Cabbage, we'll make sauerkraut and kimchi. Pretty old broccoli, Veronica Romanesco. It grows in fractal patterns. It's really beautiful. Turnips, thyme, some basil. We're doing okay on seeds, but I still need to get my orders in soon while shipping still exists. And so here I've listed all of my seeds with their Latin names, their varieties, what year I've saved the seeds, if I need to buy them or if I still have them. And I can post this online so you can see exactly what seeds I have. So I used to be an archaeologist and we talked about exchange networks. Kind of like social networks, but for trade and the movement of stuff instead of memes and ideas. Right now we have a global exchange network, but as this catastrophe continues our exchange networks will get smaller and smaller. Think about it as concentric rings around your house and over time these outer rings that are from large distances will drop away. And pretty soon we'll have to start depending on locally available items and foods. So this week we're preparing for getting more local with some last minute purchases. Last year I grew a half a pound of homeless oats into, I don't know, two ground paper bags worth of oat heads. So right now what I have to do is get the oat grotes or the seeds out of these heads. Usually one uses a thresher and then a winnowar, but I don't have a thresher or winnowar yet. I'm going to have to build one this year because this year it's not enough to eat, but it's definitely enough to grow out into a lot more food. So what I actually have to do is bash each one of these heads until the oat grotes start to come out. And then we have to winnow all of this vegetable matter. This is called chaff away from it. I don't know, but threshing might be related to thrashing. I don't know, I'll have to look that up. Basically right now on a small scale I can thresh my oats with food processor. I tried it first with the plastic blade and that was no good. So now I've got the metal serrated blade in there. Let's pop it in there and put it on high for about 35 seconds. And that should knock all the oat grotes right out. But hopefully it won't shred all the oat grotes, so it's kind of a fine line between shredding and releasing the oats. Now come step two and ideally you do this outside in the fall.  I can just double check again that all the oat grotes are knocked out of here. Yeah, there's not a lot of heads left over. So this just gets rid of the big chaff. I'm going to do a few more batches of this and then I will shake it all through and then we'll get to winnowing. So I'm going to try and convert this space in our basement into a big food storage area. It will be insulated, it will be cool. I'll have a refrigerator that pulls in outside cold air over here. And here in the middle I'm going to build a big shelf that's going to hold all of our food, our dry goods, all of that. And it's going to be road and proof so it will keep the mice from getting up. So this is a fairly typical, maybe a little bigger than typical grocery shopping trip for us. Flour, tortilla chips, noodles, bananas for the boy, cheese, tofu, vegan sausage, you know, just random things we need. Lemons, green peppers, bouillon, noodles, nuts, oranges, you know, just fairly typical for us for the week. I've got some tea, tortillas. We'll see how this changes as the fossil fuel system continues to degrade. But right now everything is mostly in the store but we'll see. By next month I'm sure that will have changed and we'll be having slimmer pickings. But that's okay, we'll be starting to grow stuff in two months so hopefully there won't be too much of an overlap. I realized that the temperature is starting to get above freezing during the day and below freezing at night which is the perfect time to collect maple syrup. So I got to clean all my taps. And I made these a few years ago. You can buy metal and plastic taps but you can also just make wooden taps and here I'll show you these a little closer.  And then I use one of these strings to loop around here, the clove hitch and then I tie the bucket to it and the sap drips right out and into the bucket. And that's all you need really, you don't need anything fancy. But I do have to wash all of them because they sit downstairs and after I wash them, I'll disinfect them with a little bit of hydrogen peroxide and they'll be good to go. So this maple tree is a maple tree and I know that because it has what are called opposite branches. So at the very end, do you see how at the tips of the branches, the branches split out from the same point rather than one going left and then going up a little bit on the branch and one going right and then going up a bit and one going left. Both side branches, lateral branches come out from the same point. Also, this is a sugar maple because it has tight bark, meaning it's not sloughing off. Other types of maple trees have bark that looks like it's shedding. Thanks for watching this week's episode. Next week we'll be going into tapping maple trees and boiling down the sap to produce syrup. We'll also put a few things on the blog, which you can find at lowtechinstitute.org. We'll post the seed list that we talked about this week so you can see exactly what we're growing. And we'll also post our hour log and this is a detail of how much time we're spending on growing our own food. It might seem like a lot of time, but it averages out to less than you'd expect over the season. While you're there, why don't you sign up to receive our blog in your inbox. You can do that at the bottom of the home page. And while you're here, why don't you click on the subscribe button below. If you've already subscribed, thanks. And why not click the share link and send this episode to a few friends. We'll also be working on our first podcast soon, which will be a behind-the-scenes look at this project. You can find and subscribe to the lowtech podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or other podcast apps. Just search for lowtechpodcast. We already have 30 episodes covering a wide variety of topics, so you can start listening to those now if you want. And a quick final note. We wanted to thank Johnny's Seeds for help with our seed purchases this week. Just in the interest of full disclosure, we wanted to let you know that we did get a discount on our purchase from Johnny's as a way to help us carry out this project. We'll let you know any time we get promotional consideration on a product or a service. But I want you to know our opinions and our comments will remain independent from that any partnership because we won't partner with anyone we can't speak our mind about. So if we say we like this product or this company, we do. And if we happen to be working with them, I'll let you know. But I like them because I like them, not because of the consideration. Thanks for watching. Stay safe and good luck.


As president and CEO of Horseman, a company founded by educators for educators, I'm proud to honor the five recipients of the Horseman Awards for Teaching Excellence. With three sisters, three nieces, and now potentially my daughter being teachers, I know some of the challenges they face in the classroom, and I hear about the rewards that make it all worth it. Teaching is more than a job. It's a higher calling and a critical role in our society. Teachers mold our future. And for these five finalists and many other teachers, the job isn't confined to the classroom. Teachers pick their students up when they're down, give gentle guidance in the right direction, help them find their strength and overcome their weaknesses. They build teaching teams and inspire some of their own students to hear the call to the profession. And it is a noble profession that is frequently underappreciated. At Horseman, our mission is protecting the short-term risks and securing the long-term financial future of educators. And we make recognizing teachers a part of what we do. For more than a decade, Horseman has sponsored the NEA Foundation Awards for Teaching Excellence, because we know how important and deserving it is to shine a light on outstanding teachers who make a difference in their students' lives and who continue to elevate the role. So please join me in congratulating and honoring five individuals who have been singled out by their peers for going above and beyond and becoming this year's Horseman Award recipients. The state of South Dakota is famous for many things. Bison, sunflowers, winter and Mount Rushmore. But now South Dakota is famous for one more thing. Pam Wells is the face of education. She faces the challenge of a diverse population. The reason I became a teacher, because I had no intention of becoming a teacher, was to become a doctor. When I was in college, I had a tremendous college professor and she said, hey, I have some basketball players that need some tutoring. And I started tutoring. And when they got it because of how I explained it, it was like an adrenaline rush. And I knew then, right then and there, that I could no longer even think about pre-med anymore. I had to become a teacher by then. One of the best things about this school at Mrs. Wells is when it's your birthday, she sings you a birthday song. Happy, happy birthday, happy, happy birthday. Ever since I've known her, she's been an awesome teacher. But every year, she gets better because she's willing to try new things. For me personally, if I'm having fun in a class, I tend to learn it easier. And in other classes, it just sit down and listen to the teacher talk about what we're doing. Kind of doze off and sometimes not learn it. You'll never get tired in her class. And she really gives every student an opportunity to excel.  And everybody's doing something that's making them think, even if that might not be exactly what the assignment was for the day. This year, she's involved with the junior class. As a junior class advisor, she's been there. She's been planning and selling concessions. But everything that she does as a teacher, she really likes to promote and tries to bring people in and be a part of it. The one thing I think that maybe separates Mrs. Wells from others is that the first thing, the most important thing, is developing the relationship with the kid before she focuses on teaching the content. Pam is a master at building relationships. And she builds those relationships with her students, with the leadership in her school, with our state association, and with the community. And every relationship that she builds and every student that she talks with and works with, everything empowers her to do more.


Hello artist newcomers, subscribers, and friends. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and welcome to Monet Café. I hope you enjoyed today's video and also I hope you'll subscribe to keep more videos coming your way. I am very excited to be bringing you this video where I will demonstrate that yes, you can paint on canvas with soft pastels. So here we go. Let's get started. So this discovery was made when my husband and I were in Mississippi going to get his mother who has terminal cancer. We are now home in Tampa and boy, it's nice to be out of that snow. But even though our landscape and situation seemed very bleak and cold, I find God is usually working something for the good that you just can't see yet. While we were snowed in, I did get some painting time, but my supplies were fairly limited since I had to pack quickly on my trip to Mississippi. Fortunately, while helping to move things out of my mother-in-law's home, I stumbled across some canvas panels that were good quality and archival. So I decided, hmm, I've never had success with painting on canvas with pastels, but I had an idea. So in this lesson, I'll be giving you my technique for painting with pastels on canvas and it worked quite well. This is the reference photo I'll be using that I just fell in love with the long shadows. I decided to put this photo in a photo app that I recently found and I love to give it some variety color pizzazz. I often like doing this with my photos to get inspired. The name of the app is Arto Matan. I think I'm saying that right. Unfortunately, it's only for Apple. Sorry, Android users. And I will be giving my patrons a demonstration on how to use the app soon. So here we go. How am I going to do this? First, I decided I wanted to tone the canvas. It's so white. I decided to use Dayla Rowney acrylic inks. You can use whatever you have watercolor acrylic, but I decided on this lovely purple color to create the mood of night. And it's a pretty dark photo anyway. I love using these mats to mark off standard sizes. And now I'm just toning the canvas using some brushes that I brought with me and the acrylic ink. Now, I'll be using this acrylic ink without any water. OK, this is just undiluted acrylic ink. I think I used maybe two dropperfuls. I love this purple, light color.  Look at that. When it goes on a little thinner, it's almost a magenta color. Isn't that pretty? Well, we'll have a pretty color when I'm finished. But what about pastels? Pastels won't stick to this. Also, pastels onto canvas are going to show that really canvassy texture. So it's really not a good way to paint with pastels. However, I decided I would play around with some of my products that I used to add grit and texture to other surfaces. The one that I used. I know you saw me hold up the fixative. I didn't use that when I used the clear liquid gesso that I talk about all the time. And also conveniently, you can find all of the products or most of the products that I talk about in my videos from my Amazon shop. I always have a clickable link to my shop in the about section of each video so you can find it in the description. And here you can find the things I talk about so easily. Here is the clear liquid gesso. Also, if you hover over the little caption, you can read my comments to each of these products so you can easily and conveniently find things. I don't always say you have to buy them from Amazon. You might want to check around to some other art supply stores for the best price. I also want to point out that in this particular section on the do it yourself pastel surfaces, there are other products that may work just as well on canvas, such as the pastel ground, this color fix primer. So you might want to play around and experiment yourself too. Now, I applied two coats. I wish I had had a bigger brush, but I applied it long and then wide after it dried, of course. So I ended up with two dried coats of clear gesso that worked quite well. Now, I want to mention real quickly, make sure you get clear gesso for one. It's clear you wouldn't be able to see through to the beautiful purple if you got regular gesso. And also clear gesso has a little bit of sand or grit in it, which is why these pastels are going to stick to this canvas. Now, as I mentioned, canvas does have a little bit of a textured surface. You know, like the weave of the canvas. I actually embrace a little bit of texture, but I found the clear gesso actually knocked that down a bit. It's not quite so canvassy with texture. Oh, and let me insert the reference image here. I know you can see it on my iPad to the left. I used one that I had, again, converted and played around with in the app that I mentioned, and I guess because it had been white so long, so much white that I just wanted to get fun with color. I like a lot about. Oh, there's my husband. Lady, sweet. Look, he's coming in to light a candle for me. But I really like the app because it seems to do color alterations logically and appropriately when it comes to color theory. So so it's really neat. Once again, patrons, I know I mentioned I'm going to try to give you guys a little tutorial on how I use it. The app doesn't really give you much any tutorials or any help really. It's not real user friendly, but but I really do like it.  Now, this was getting to the point where we had all been snowed in for a little while. And this was the last painting I did while I was there. But we were getting to the point where we really needed to wrap things up and get everything moved out of my mother-in-law's house. So I was a little rushed on this painting, not as fast as I've sped it up right here. But notice me using this paper towel. I have found that the paper towel blending method really does work well on a lot of surfaces and I, again, was having to work with things I had near me. And I was I was a bit rushed to finish this one up. But I was having fun, you know, it's OK. It's all right to if every painting doesn't come out to be what you would consider a masterpiece, everything is a learning process and always find some joy in the journey. Now, notice how this paper towel really is working great to kind of get me in a little value study and I'm using it. I'm grabbing it from areas and using it to create shadows. I really kind of like this moody, shadowy look here. So I'm just kind of creating a nice little value study. And then I'll start applying pastels on top. I'm going to add a bit of music in a minute for you guys to watch the rest of the process. I'm speeding this one up a little more than I usually do because it was this video is more about the technique for being able to work on canvas with soft pastels. But I also wanted to share with you a little bit of my thoughts as to what I thought about this, would I do it again? And yes, I would absolutely do this again. I was very pleasantly surprised. I think the times in the past that I tried canvas, I definitely didn't try the gesso, the clear gesso. And if I did, I may have only just done one coat of gesso because my previous results with using canvas they were not successful and I was frustrated. The pastels wouldn't layer. I couldn't get the color, you know, really vibrant and the texture of the canvas just showed through too much. So whatever it was I did here, I think it might have been the fact that I added the two coats of clear gesso. And like I said before, when I was showing my Amazon shop, I also think pastel ground made by Golden. I think it would work just the same, if not better. I really love that product, too, for making your own pastel surfaces. I think the clear gesso is the cheaper option, though, because you can get a big old bottle and it goes a long way.  But if you've got some extra canvas panels around and you're really getting more into pastels and you'd like to be able to use them, I think this would be an excellent way for you to do that. You can also tone the gesso if you wanted to give it a color. I find that toning the board with something first really gives it more vibrant color than if you add the color to the clear gesso. And I wanted to mention that I get a lot of comments on the channel and from my patrons on my Patreon page that sometimes you have a little bit of a challenge when applying pastels to the clear gesso, that it seems very textural at first. And actually, it does seem very textural at first. And I do recommend that if you apply your value study or underpainting first and then use some sort of blending tool, whether it be paper towel like I used or pipe foam insulation is one that I talk about a lot on my channel. And also a chamois cloth, if your surface isn't too textured, if it's too sandy, sometimes the chamois cloth gets stuck on it. So but my point is that if you use a clear gesso technique and you're finding that it just feels so gritty, go ahead and do an initial layer and sort of blend it in a little bit. And that will take away all of those spaces or that textural look to the paper. So maybe give that a try. And I always recommend when trying these things, don't commit to a big 11 by 14 painting or, you know, something that's a serious piece play. I always say just play more because when you're playing, you're learning and I probably play a little too much and don't do enough serious pieces, but and I always bring you guys along on the journey. So I probably sometimes need to slow down myself and create some pieces that, you know, I really feel are maybe a bit more professional, but but I love the fun part of the journey and I love sharing with you guys. Monet Cafe may be a bit unconventional at times, but I think we're all having fun. And if you're having fun and it's giving you peace and joy, then you've already won. You're already an artist. So so I always love to share that because I think a lot of people feel the same way that I do. I am going to zoom in. I'm going to add the music now, but I'm going to zoom in in a little while. I do end up. You'll see, after I get more applied on the foreground there, I do end up using a paper towel to blend even more in the foreground in hindsight. I did kind of like the little bit of texture I had before I blended. You'll see in a minute, but but I don't know, like I said, this is all kind of fun and experimenting anyway. And then you will also see me. I'll zoom in when I start adding more layers after I blend the foreground. You'll see me adding layers and I'm going to zoom in so that you can see how well this technique with the double coats of the Clear Gesso allows for layering. I was pleasantly surprised at how many layers I was able to achieve with this technique. So I hope you guys are learning from that. If you give it a try, I'd love for you to give some feedback or give feedback anyway or ask questions. Always try to answer your questions if you have comments in the videos and become a patron if you like. A lot of people become patrons for $5 a month just to support this channel. It has really been a blessing. I will say thank you.  We have my mother-in-law living with us now. And I do have her in a location where I can look at her with a camera that we have and I can watch her while I'm painting or working in case she needs assistance or she can haul her out to me. But I know a lot of you, I've messaged a lot of you who are in now or have been in these same situations. And that's what we do. You know, the Lord promises a blessing and we're to take care of our parents and elderly and orphans and widows. And that's what we're here for more than our own personal joy. It's to give and to help and to love. So all right, here's some music and don't go away, keep watching. I will be back at the end. So God bless you all. As you can see, the color was a little bit crazy in this piece, but it was definitely fun. And I always talk about art being like therapy anyway. And it truly does help you to get your mind off of things and to find some peace. I think I may have overworked it a bit in trying to rush up to get ready to leave, but I was still happy with the overall piece. And mostly I was happy with the fact that I had discovered a way to paint with pastels on canvas. Hope you guys try this. I hope you learned something. And as always, happy painting.


Culture Among Secondary School Students, Universal Authors and Writers has organized an inter-secondary school essay writing competition in Kaduna. They say the aim is to strengthen and reawaken the lost glory of reading and writing skills of students to meet up with global system in the 21st century. Plus, TV correspondent Habila de Ralfa's report is presented from our studios. With the use of modern technology and other e-learning platforms, the reading and writing culture among students is fast fading away and there is an urgent need for rates to be revived. Speaking of the final stage of the essay writing competition in Kaduna, the president of the Universal Authors and Writers, Abdulaziz Al-Hasan, says the aim is to motivate students, especially the girl child. He laments that the lack of girl education in North Nigeria is a major setback for women to rise above their contemporaries. However, the Kaduna State Commission of Education was represented by the deputy director, Education Planning. Ruth Hew says the ministry has provided e-learning teaching platforms to all students across the state and quality teachers to boost the educational system. Education is the key to everything. It's the key to national development. It's the key to the growth of a nation. A girl child education is somehow important and paramount to the nation building. Our ladies nowadays drop out from senior section O, senior section of secondary school. They tend to get it difficult to continue with their education. Students should embrace reading culture and this platform is very good to help them. It's not because we now have students going only to social media, to browse, to chat and all what not, but we now have education content in digital ones that students can also go in and learn more and improve their own learning outcome. Some of the students who emerged witness from the competition expressed their delight, saying it has improved their writing skills and also broadened their horizons. 5G technology is useful. If you take as example during the COVID-19 lockdown, people stay at home very longer. So at that time you may use your phones and learn online, like learning online. Today Nigeria women are due to the inequality and danger discrimination. Women are not given the right to for education. If you look at especially in the North, most of the women we have rather were married than their education. Over 400 schools participated in ASN writing competition in other three senatorial zones. With three schools emerging, winners.