Welcome to our second weekend of PXR 2020. PXR is brought to you by Single Thread and Electric Company Theater. We are also grateful to our community partners, Toaster Lab, Langara Center for Entertainment Arts, and especially the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Strategy Fund. We'd like to acknowledge that we have organized this event primarily on the traditional ancestral and unseated territory of the Coast Salish peoples, the Squamish, the Salem Tooth, and the Musqueam Nations. And now it is my great pleasure to introduce you to Catherine Bourgeois. She's actually waiting for us in the world beyond this one. And Catherine is one of the first people who agreed to present at PXR. And I really am excited about the work that she's doing. So this presentation is going to be exploring the parallels between the genre of theater and virtual reality and the dramaturgical journey between them. Catherine is going to speak to the goals, objectives, and experience of creating her mixed reality piece, Violette, as well as the urgent need for and need of diverse groups of creators working in VR and foraging paths to develop wider audiences. So I'm going to give you a choice. I'm going to do a belly portal. I don't know if any of you have taken part in a belly portal or you can go through this teleporter if it does not work for you. So I'm going to, let's see here. Give me one second, bear with me. Yeah. Okay. Let's see here. Give me one second. You'll know that you've done it successfully because there'll be a line extending. Look at that. Isn't that amazing? And if this doesn't work and you're left behind, you can go through the teleporter just to my left. You're right. Okay. Here we go. Over here. Hit this way in the intro. So once we get everyone over here, we can start. Perfect. Let me know. Are we waiting for more people? You're able to hit play on this? Yeah, I try. I practice and I'm good with it. Yeah. Okay. Cool. I'll just go back and see if we've missed anyone. Perfect. Thank you. I guess James didn't make it or something. Yeah, Alex went back to go get the stragglers. Oh, okay. Yeah. But you can also, you can invite anyone who you are friends with that didn't make it. You can, you can invite them. Oh, okay. Yeah.  Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's pretty handy when you lose people. The only problem is, is they don't actually port right to you. They port to the spawn point. So you can't have them actually come to you and right where you're standing. But it's actually amazing that we haven't had more problems like this with all the porting and jumping around. I mean, like any conference, the logistics are almost the hardest part. Right. It just can't be. Yeah. But the number of times that I've wanted the schedule and the location in my hands so that I could know, no ocular. Oh, he's saying the quest isn't working. He's saying we're having a couple technical issues. Sorry about the delay in all of this. We will, we will assist you as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience. Much love to all who loves technology. Throw some hearts up. Isn't everything an everyday, a learning experience. Oh yeah. Thanks so much. Thanks. We'll unmute you as soon as we can. Feel free to mingle, Catherine. I'll speak to you in just a second. Send you a couple messages and yeah. Enjoy the world. Hop around. Fall off the edge. It's quite an experience. Thank you. This is where we need virtual snacks and coffee. Oh my God. Yeah. This is where I go to the craft table and get a bonbon. Oh my gosh. Yes, that would be it. We were talking about it the other day, actually how fun it could potentially be to, it would be a logistical nightmare, but to like schedule, skip the dishes, to deliver everyone. You mean? That's right. You mean? Yeah. I have a message for Natalie. I was with another guy on Monday who was in a different kind of conference and they actually sent him like a package in a box and it had a swag and it had some snacks. So when you zoom in, you can actually. Okay, let's hope you can actually. I think it's so great. I've tried a couple of different conferences to make shirts for the avatars so that you could wear a swag or have a lanyard. But it's like we keep running into platform issues and then you gotta like train everyone on how to change their avatar and stuff. But yeah, it's pretty, I think there's all kinds of those fun things that we'll be able to try to recapture what it was like to be in person. Like to be stupid, this isn't your first virtual like conference and this is kind of a thing now. This is my first time and it's This is quickly becoming a thing. Oh, sorry. That's kind of to interrupt that. I had a message from Alex that said that we could, maybe we should start. So Aiden, are you in agreement with that? Uh, we are receiving conflicting information. We might need to reset the world. So thank you all for your patience. We all got here through a belly portal and I'm going to offer that we all go back to your presentation room B for a quick second. I see you now. Where are you? I'm behind you. I'm just chilling behind you. Hi, Sarah. Peter of heights. I guess the different kinds of portals work different ways. Where'd you go? Behind you. Hi, Andrew. You're starting. Everybody's a different color. So should I write through it? Yes. Wow. Yeah. There wasn't as many color choices as I thought. You know, I just knew that. Oh, are you? No, I'm not. Okay, I know. Oh, yeah. I know. We just might push her. We should push her. We should push her. We should push her. Maybe she'll. Yes. Yeah, you too. Okay, you know. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. No, we didn't. Are you? Are you? Also, I'm fine. You were blind. Hello. Did you see it again? How are you doing? Perfect. Good. No, Matt. And we know we've never been in the real world. Hello, tout le monde. Bonjour. Hello. Hi, everyone. Sorry. Good morning. You know, it's rough morning. Hi. Hi, everyone. Oh, please. Hi, everyone. Sorry about that. That was entirely my fault. I didn't do an Android build of the world. So everyone on a quest was unable to get in. Thank you, Catherine. But I'd like to reintroduce and maybe let's get a round of applause for Catherine Bourgeois speaking to us about her production, Violette. Merci, Catherine. And take it away. Thank you. Thank you. Can you hear me all right? Yeah. Yep. Okay. So thank you, Alex. And thank you for being here. It's my first time giving a talk in virtual reality and while sitting in the comfort of my home in Toccage, Montreal. So I'm here as the artistic director of a company called Joe Jack and John. And we are like 17 years old, the theater company based in Montreal. And our mandate focused around collaboration and as well like with a special, with a particular focus on collaborating with artists living with disabilities. So we are like an interdependent company that love to create new shows and make a device collectively together. Today I'm here to talk about Violette, which is our project that involves mixed reality, which is like live theater and VR, like a VR film. So this project started about like four years ago. They're kind of like the creation, inception process started like four years ago. And initially I had in mind a site specific piece that would then like get like an audience member to knock on the door and come in an apartment and meet one person. So that would have been like a one person at a time play. And we're like an actress with a disability would open the door, welcome the spectator and make a cup of tea and share our story. And then I traveled to Europe and I was in a conference about like live arts and there was this conference more about like mixed reality and augmented reality and virtual reality. And my only experience in that was that as a user, so I had very little to, I knew very little about it, but the conference person was like actually convinced that theater people were actually good artists to help develop the literacy and the medium of VR because we are used to kind of like compose and write compelling story, engaging story, complex storytelling in actually immersive environment because like the theater experience being like a kind of like 360 immersive moment when you go to theater. And so I came back to Montreal and I read more about the VR and I reflected and I felt really attracted to this new medium because I felt that it kind of like created a sense of connection that maybe so TV and film could create way back when it came out because there was this proximity and the novelty of the medium. But now like this new medium that could create such a sensation was actually VR. At the same time, I was a bit like repulsed by the medium because not because of the empathy feeling that it creates, but I just wonder if we needed in our society like more privileged people with high tech, expensive gears, developing a sense of entitlement around in the world of this kind of like, oh, yes. I know what is a refugee camp. I was there. I walked in the shoes of a refugee. Oh, I know what is Ebola crisis in Africa because I was there. I walked in those shoes. So I guess that like convince of the attracted by the medium and as we're convinced of the importance of having more diverse voices emerging, I kind of jumped in and decided to transform my site specific theater project into like a mixed reality of like theater and VR. So we started to work on a story that was encoded in a reality that we don't talk often or that we don't hear often about, which is the fact that 70 to 90% of women living with the intellectual disability will experience sexual abuse in the course of their lives. And so this is a difficult reality that like collaborating with artists with disability over the last 17 years, the company has been very kind of like, it's a reality that we encountered in our lives. And so we gathered like a team of differently abled artists and we started to devise on the subject. So Violet is actually like a story about intimacy, about consent and about abuse, abuse made by a family friend. In the process of development of the script and all of that, it became clear that we needed to do a better version of it because actually like most of us being like theater maker, we had no clue what we were talking about and it was very difficult to have meeting and to actually like see how it would be unfolding. So we did like a better version at very low cost. It was shot in my own apartment in my bedroom and it was as well presented. The theater piece or the performance itself was as well presented in my apartment in the spring of 2018 here in Montreal. So I'm just gonna present you like a short clip of this kind of like first beta version installment and it's like this version is in French and the sound is not that great but it's basically the welcoming of a participant that arrived so the live part of it, the more like theater part of it and going to like a quick excerpt of the 360 movie that we produced. Here we go. Participant that arrived, so the live part of it, the more... Okay, okay. So actually, I think there's some sun going over. Well, hi everybody. So sorry for the technical difficulty. My name is Yumi. I'm a colleague of Catherine. I also work for Joe, Jack and John. I guess that Catherine had a small connection issue so she has just disappeared but she should be back in a few seconds. Were you guys able to see the video or was it not showing for you? Not really. Yeah, no, I could see it. I could see it. I couldn't see anything. I could see it. I can't see it. It's just repeating. It's just playing in green. There's... I also see two screens for me. Yeah, there's two screens in the audio it was really echoey and hard to make out. Oh, okay. Well, I'm really sorry about that. For those of you who could not see the screen, the video showed the actress Violette, Violet, welcoming the spectator into an apartment and leaning him to the bedroom where the interactive experience used to take place in the regional beta version of the play. So it was really a site-specific experience and that created a whole set of issues because we wanted to bring this work to more people out in the world and have it tour and be able to reach as many people as we could with the story of Violet. So from the very first version that was shown in the video, we worked towards a second version that was not site-specific anymore, even though it was shot in the same set but the video itself shows a bedroom and the experience takes place in a very similar setting. However, the interactive experience takes place in a custom-built cabin that is half the size of the real VR space so that when the spectator arrives to take part into the experience, it finds themselves in this tiny cabin that gives this kind of feeling of intrusion and it's a little bit claustrophobic and you feel really uncomfortable because you're really entering a personal and private space of Violet and you're about to hear her very personal and private story. So it was really important for us to find a way to keep a connection between the real physical space and the virtual world space. So let's say that we used a couple of tricks to try to ensure continuity in the space perception. So one is that the accessories and the furniture that are in the cabin are exactly the same ones that you see in the virtual world. It's just the dimensions are a little bit different and another one is that we used a blanket that is given to the audience member when it arrives on the set that he puts or she puts on herself and then in the virtual world you enter the experience sitting on a bed with the same blanket on you that you can see.  And I think I saw that time. So I'm gonna let her continue. I guess you were covering when they're anchoring their participant in the reality. Some of the challenge, I'm sorry, I disappeared. I was exposed from the space. I'm back. So some of the challenge that I faced and I discovered through that first incarnation was actually the fact of directing actors when there's a 360 camera in a space where I can't be in the space and I still have to direct and get this to see what it looks like. So that was one of the challenges that we faced. And as well, I think that one of the finding that we had was the importance of other characters because if it's only one character talking, there's a very minimal use of the actual 360 environment. Well, if there's interaction with different characters in the space, there's a possibility for using more like the 360 element of it. And in the golden version that we produced after that, we even pushed it further in the sense that we put more emphasis on creating an interaction with the audience member and getting the audience member to become more like a participating role in it. Like as a witness, but as well as a friend, as a confiding friend. So I think that that's about like that, what we learned from that. And I would like to just like for you, it was possible to follow me on the second platform over there. I'd like to show you like an excerpt of like the golden version, the golden version that like we produced last year. So teleportation. So do you want to do that while I do the video screen? You're going to do slides? No, I'm finishing with the slides. Okay, yes, but this is the one I'm going to tweak here. Oh, okay. You can start. Nice work, Catherine. Hi, Clayton. Hi. My God. I'm sweaty. I know I have eyes flat. I think we kind of like gathered. So Alex is going to rebuild the projection screen, but I just going to keep chatting away.  So in the golden version, we also decided to push further the confinement in the room and not using like footage like of external elements. Have you seen downstairs with the beta version where we kind of like put like the impression of like a layer of forest of actual forest in the room, but we just developed more like the magical aspect in a more like imaginative way. And the screen's still not there. So I guess that like the prediction, I could tell you that the projection was meant to open in Montreal last May, but obviously because of COVID, it was postponed and we thought that we would be able to open this October, this late October, but as you might know, the COVID crisis in Montreal is like we're about like 1100 new cases a day. So we don't think that we're going to be able to present the production this fall. So we're just like keeping a finger crossed that one day we'll be able to actually present the full experience with the live interaction and the VR element to it. We were in touch with the PHY Center in Montreal and they advised us to buy a clean box. So I don't know if any of you had to deal with like COVID issue, COVID related issue, but like a clean box from the States and it's basically like a UV rays that kind of kill everything. So between each participant will have to put the headset in the clean box and Alex, where are you? Oh, ready. Here, it's cramped. You'd be better off with me. People will come and see me. People like who? People like him. People like Joe. Joe will always be grateful to us. Joe fills our house with flowers of our colors, balloons, teddy bears, and thank you cards to play music. Joe sends me a blue rose every for the march to thank me for saving his life. Joe speaks French. He dresses well and he's a really good guy. Joe buys me a slinky red dress for my 16th birthday. Joe comes to see me one evening and my parents are at the movies. Joe shows me a movie that I don't know how I feel. Joe invites me for a picnic. Joe puts his hand somewhere that I'm not too sure. For my 18th birthday, Joe tells me about an even more special flower. Joe says that at 18, we can. At 18, we can. Joe is a magician, his best trick, disappearing from my life. His best trick, disappearing from my life. Yeah, that was an excerpt. So opening it won't be October 28th, but soon, soon it will happen. So as I said, like in the little notes through the videos, I guess that like what I wanted to stretch by that is that like as theater makers, we have some tools or skills that we developed, which is I guess the power of words, acting, the transitioning as well. And so instead of like just relying on more like pricey and special effects and things that maybe were a bit outside of our reach, we actually like use the things that we were good at. One thing that we rely all the way in theater is the suspension of this belief because nobody like like you go to the theater and nobody believes that there's this is real stuff happening. There's wings, there's other people around. There's like all kind of element that tells you that this is not real life. Well, sometimes in movie, we do get this impression of real life happening. So like we kind of like if we point out and say this is a forest and although it's like a shadow theater forest, like we rely on the fact that people will believe it is a forest. So we use that a lot because basically we really stayed way more in the room in that version than in the previous version. And we try to kind of like push the image imaginative aspect of it. I'm just going to move to the slide section, which I can move Catherine, I can move it to you. Oh, okay. I would also say where we are a bit short on time and it's entirely my fault. Do you want to maybe take questions from the audience, like to give them a chance to to ask you about the question, do you want to go to the slides? Oh, I just like just I would like to finish just like as in terms of like if you could put up the slides, I will just use one slide or two. Just quickly to finish, I guess that like the first version was shot in my bedroom. And as you can imagine, I didn't want to go with the full production shot in oops, here we are, shot in my bedroom with the hundreds of audience members going through my apartment. So we did build a set and we paired up with the very fine company here in Montreal. It's named Unlimited and this is the company. And quickly, we as well shot the thing with three different actresses. So we could actually present it three different times. So there's Anne Steffi that you've seen in the English excerpt. And there's as well, Stephanie, that's doing another French version. And Tamara is a bilingual and placeboat car boat version. This is us cutting wood in the forest. And this is actually the set we built. So it's a box set that was meant to be like a closed room. So this bridge between. Oh, no, it looks like the last category again. So sorry about that. So what you're seeing right now in the town left is the actual set where the cabin where the experience takes place. And as you can see, the bed and the chair are the exactly same. And the pictures on the wall are the exact same elements. That are in the VR video when you're in experiencing the VR parts of the story. So just to conclude, we, I'm back. Thank you, Yumi. So so that was our way of making a terrible set that would like bridge between the reality and the fiction and bridge the two worlds together. And maybe we have time for a few questions. But as well, I just wanted to let you know that if any of you would be interested to see the full version, we now have it on YouTube VR. And you can contact or you can talk to Yumi or I about it. And we could send you the link. And Alex, if there's time for one question or two, like I'll let you decide. Of course. Yeah. Anyone have a question? I want to raise your hands. You can operate. Thanks so much for creating that, Catherine. I think that's beautiful, by the way. Amy, Amy, one question over here. Amy Bouchard. Hi, Catherine. Yeah, I'm just curious about the audience coming in to experience the show. I'm not sure if you can hear me. Do you find that you have audiences who are also coming in on the spectrum or neurodiverse who are taking part in the work as well? This is like the question of accessibility is very close to our art. Obviously, like the accessibility as an audience member as well. So we are developing kind of like groups of people, of women mostly living with a disability and doing a workshop, a prepping workshop and like just some special session for them to actually come in. So this is something that we are working on in terms of like making sure that this work reach an audience that's actually concerned about it. So I would say yes. This is like actually like a quite accessible work. It's not like the story unfolds very kind of like smoothly and accessibility, I would say. Thanks for your question. Yeah, thank you. We are unfortunately at time. If you have other questions for Catherine, please maybe go find her and ask her one-on-one. And Catherine, I just want to thank you.  You were brilliant. You were absolutely fantastic. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for that. I'm sorry about all that. Thank you. No, it's, no, you were amazing. Thank you so much. So we're moving on to our next, we have Beth Kate's workshop. And if you want to check out Darren O'Donnell's presentation, that is on Zoom. You can find the link in Discord. And yes, thank you again, Catherine. My pleasure. Thanks to you. We're going to put the cash in. Okay. Are you going to give it to me? That's good. That's good. If in the course of the experiment, you feel bad, we're going to take the cash out. Okay. I'm going to put the cash in. Do you see the blue line? I'm going to have to find my story. No, no, it's over. I'm going to give you your own story. It's a little love story. You're going to see it. It's like in the cereal boxes. There's a surprise at the bottom. Oh, that's enough. You don't know what you're doing. It's the moment. Count to three. One, two. Do you hear the forest breathing? I don't know why. I always start my story here. Maybe it's because it's so noisy. Hi, welcome everybody. Welcome story that it's over here. And as opposed to the old space, but it, my go was just not stable enough. It was really glitchy. And I was quite concerned about it crash. Oh, it crashes too every now and again. So often I just disappear from a space. I'm going to my friends and I'm gone. So. So, yeah. Maybe next year I'll have a quest. I'm trying to, I'm making Logan a co-host. Okay. Oh yeah, you're the live streamer. Hey Logan. Howard is just arriving. So where is everybody. Located anybody in any place? We've got a couple of Germans in the house. So where are you from? I'm from Atlanta, I. Iding and Christopher. And Rojo. 10 PM. 10 PM in Germany, 6 AM. Who's making the bigger sacrifice, 6 AM or 10 PM? So after you. I actually feel quite the opposite. I don't like staying up late. I prefer getting up early. Yeah. Sorry, I'm double checking around here we still got about eight five more minutes before we're supposed to start so I'm going to go do another call in our virtual conference room and we'll be back okay great. So Deb Lim where are you located I'm in Toronto okay great where what's give me an intersection um I I'm here with Fujian theater okay well but where you your actual geolocation like what's your close what's your closest intersection I don't know just oh I'm I am currently located in Chinatown so it's the Dainan Dundas okay great and that's where your home is or you know that's where my home is yeah okay nice how's the weather um I haven't gone out but fall weather it's nice it's been nice yeah okay great how's Fujian doing we're doing pretty well we've been working from home for since March right but but doing well which you plan for the pandemic we've been doing a lot of like just like commission work and development not only very few like presentation and on very small scales online right yeah it's brutal I mean it's been very non the opposite of fun whatever that is brutal and who's who's the what's your role there um I my title is administrator I work with David Yee and it's kind of just the two of us with an intern so I really just do it all right right right okay cool yeah it's been a mammalian we're just sort of kind of treading water a tiny bit with luckily we had a project that was able to go ahead and that's what I'm talking about in in Germany at a very reduced sort of scale as I'll as I'll cover but yeah it's been not very pleasant and and also just this question of should I be thinking about solving this in a major way or should we just like just you know plug our noses and hope we survive and then we get through the other side you know that's a big question for me I don't want to I don't want to invest too many resources in pivoting when when I'm not interested so much in the digital kind of thing so that's it's an interesting it's a challenging question for me yeah yeah the thing that I think about is that theater for me is there's three things about it which is I do it to or I go I tend to work to leave the house or I attend work and I attend work to hang out with other people and then the sort of the third one third of my desire is to actually see the work so there's two thirds without those two thirds checking out even other people stuff online is I just don't I'm not motivated although the the all-space VR that's been are you enjoying that by any chance like do you find that you're you're there with people and that feels good and in a kind of meaningful way um I don't know I think that's a it's a it's something that we're still navigating very much so because it feels like as much as we're trying to do collaborative things it's almost like you're working on your own unit you know right and and there may be some collaboration but it's it's really challenging so I'm not too sure yet right yeah yeah for sure I don't know tan I don't know what you were practice all or who you are so I can you are who you how what are you doing well who are you and what are you doing here oh my god I did not expect to get the interrogated I'm on toaster labs advisory board okay yeah and I'm in media arts I'm actually one of the few non theater practitioners okay great I teach media arts with while I'm at York with Ian Garrett okay okay cool okay well great thanks for coming that's good to know and anybody else want to say hi Jason I've never met you I don't think you don't look familiar to me I'm there oh I know we have not met hi yes I am Jason I'm also a non theater person but I came came into VR at from from the filmmaking angle but I always felt right from the beginning that the VR is more VR is more akin to theater than filmmaking in my opinion that really came apparent to me when I started hearing directors saying things like yeah but the problem with 360 videos you can't direct to the audience I'm like that that kind of sounds like a problem theater directors have not worried about for a thousand years like it doesn't sound like a problem you know so so I started looking more toward theater and you know a lot of my friends are theater folk but I've just not had the experience myself so I feel like I'm learning about theater through VR actually kind of going the opposite way well okay that's interesting all right thanks who else so I do I not know Madison do you want to introduce yourself a little bit about what you're up to if you're there hi hi how you doing I'm good yourself yeah yeah good good thanks for coming just meeting somebody what time yeah so what's what's your interest in this or which what's your practice or what brought you to the conference so I was introduced the whole PXR thing from Ian Garrett he was one of my profs at York okay yeah I graduated York last year and I gotta claim my Applecare on the last day it was a thing apart from that I've been well since graduating I was working with Canada's belly organ as their lighting director until the pandemic happened it's funny because literally town after town it felt like everything was shutting down as we were moving apart from that it's mainly lighting in media design that I'm interested in and as far as XR I mean when I was in high school I learned a bit about the Unity engine slowly I've been interested more in Unreal Engine mainly because of how they have the Unreal marketplace and they do the free items for the month and that's just a lot of assets available to creators okay a lot of yeah it's a lot of assets that a creator can use to build an environment I mentioned a lot in that and Blender and eventually I want to create my own stuff but never really had time until now all of those words have next to no meaning for me they have meaning for you Chris okay that's Chris Rojo who's one of the performers in the project that I'm about to introduce and he's beaming in from Germany yeah so thanks everybody for coming here I'm just as before we start I'm just asking a few people who I don't know just introduce themselves I see somebody that I don't know Rinchen Doma do you want to say hi and just introduce yourself to whatever thing you feel like I'm late I got lost no worries no worries hi folks I'm I'm from Toronto and I'm with theater past Mariah okay yeah so I'm just I'm happy to be here thanks for letting me into myself yeah thanks for coming appreciate it um so should we roll this Aiden do you think we're yeah yeah let's get to the boat going okay great all right I just need to do my little preamble so thank you all for making it and pivoting with us in this technological adventure that we are calling PXR 2020 I am Aiden Hammond I am the project manager and I'm so glad that we are all here together PXR 2020 is brought to you by single thread theater company and electric company theater with thanks to our community partners toaster lab and Langara Center for Entertainment Arts and with the spending support of Canada Council for the Arts is Arts is Canada Council for the Arts Digital Strategies Fund I would like to acknowledge that I am reporting to you live from the stolen and unseated territories of the Coast Salish peoples of Musqueam the Squamish and Slewa tooth and I see that we're coming in from all over so I want you on this Thanksgiving weekend to respect where you are and how privileged we are to be here sharing this moment with the technology we have here today please Darren you know more about this than I do I'm so excited to hear what you have to bring to us okay cool thanks a lot so I'm going to share a screen and get this rolling there we go make sure am I clicker yeah okay so great I obviously also want to thank everybody that that Aiden thanked and thank Aiden Alex and Liam from from single thread Clayton from electric company for providing all of the support that they've been providing it as well I'm setting all of this up it's all very confusing to me also wanted to acknowledge Cannon Hewitt who is in the room with us Cannon is helping with the tech stuff and is also a producer with mammalian on on this project and it's part of the team that managed to get our video running and all the goggles through VR sync so maybe there might be some questions for Cannon after this so our project mammalian diving reflexes project the last minutes before Mars we just premiered on the 25th of September in Baucham Germany and it was presented by Schauspielhaus Baucham and co-commissioned by the Milano Trinale and Zona K in Milano I would protect I would I would encourage you to check out Zona K they're really interesting organization that punches well above their weight in Milan it's a project space they're super cool Milano Trinale is cool but it's big and everybody knows it but Zona K if you're if you're curious about cool stuff going on there so first up I want to introduce the co-director of the project Iana Eiting that's her picture she's also in the room with us and she's she was on the ground directing in Germany while I directed via zoom this project in from Australia which was fucking nightmare and she also directed all of the 360 video bits that we used and I've been working with her since 2011 on on a variety of projects that's a project we worked on with refugees and then there she is getting her haircut by kids and so I also want to introduce Christopher Rockall who is also in in zoom with us and he is one of the member of mitona Alice which is a collective of young people that we've been working with since 2012 in Germany when he was 12 years old and there he is Christopher Rockall at age 12 look at how look how cute he is and she's still cute he's now becoming more handsome than cute and so so that's him and so I've been working with him since he was 12 Iana since she was 24 and I was 47 at that time obviously we're all a lot older especially me so my million started to work in the region with the children's choice awards at the Ritran El festival so this is a project where you take a bunch of kids and we see all of the shows in a given festival and then we give out awards at the end and so we did that for three years with young people in the region and and and then since that time we've worked with the same group of young people from the basically from the first year and we work with them of course as winnowed down but we've worked with those guys since that time we've done a project at least one project a year over the course of the last bunch of years and in in 2014 we posted them the question of what they wanted to do next and that was just when the situation with the refugees coming to Europe was starting to heat up and they all said the first thing they framed it in terms of working with marginalized people there was kind of the language that they were using at that time they were using that sort of language and then we evolved that and continued to discuss what that might look like and then we decided to work with youth who are new to the country particularly interested in finding a population who was where there were representatives from the refugee crisis that was happening then particularly it was with Syria at the time but there were people coming from all over the place so we created this project called million and million and million and that title comes from the Schiller quote from the the anthem of Europe which is owed to joy and the quote is side on schlongham million and which means be embraced you millions and so the the leap motif or the theme of the festival was side on schlongham and million and I'm just gonna admit somebody in here okay I'm million and was was the second line be embraced you millions so this the show was really the theme of the festival was side on schlongham and or the tagline and we named our fest our actual show million and as in millions millions millions of the people to be embraced and so what we did for the project is we took a bunch of German born teens and about 40 and those about maybe 20 of those and then 20 teens from who had come to the region fairly recently refugees immigrants to the region very recently and we took them all camping and we did what you do in camping we played games we made crowns for our hair we climbed in trees we climbed on piles of dirt we pat you know pat horses we played chess we went canoeing and then what we did was we created a show that basically recorded on what happened over the course of these these camping trips we went on three camping trips over the course of three weekends and and if you take 40 teens from Germany Syria Albania Gambia and Poland among other places you take all those guys camping trust me lots of shit happens so we just basically reported on this is what happens when you take these two groups together and and we all this is what happens and so at that point mit ona Alice the collective that was originally mostly German born young people that we've been working with expanded to include a bunch of these other guys two of these other guys are in this project and that we're I'm introducing now and so sorry here's here's some more familiar million and we had iPads where we looked at all the photographs you can see the photographs there and the younger young people are controlling them through iPads and we just talked about what we what we did there the disco ball is representing the fire that we used to go around and we marshmallows who roasted marshmallows on a disco ball so and here you can see that's that's Pascal in the middle and he's been with mitona Alice since the beginning and that's Robert on the right and they're both in in the Mars project and they're now you can see here I love these two pictures they're older they're now eight years older than they were then and they look like they've lived they've lived some they live they've had some sometimes that they've lived through and they have but this is this is these are stills from the 360 video so they're acting there too just FYI so the last minutes before Mars is a mixed reality project that combines live performance with 360 video first I'm going to take you through the show as the audience experiences it and then I'm going to go through a bit of the development process in the making of I'll share I'll share some stills from the 360 video but you can watch them themselves in their 360 form through the YouTube links that I've got in the discord so if you want to check that out or if you don't have access to that just let me know and I can share the YouTube link so that you can see them in their 360 now at this point I'll just describe the show from the audience perspective so you can have a sense of the experience and I've got some photos of it I've also got some drawings by the Montreal's Sorsha give Sorsha Gibson who's the designer on the project and just the show is conceived to accommodate as many audience members as the budget will allow for for VR goggles however with the premiere we only could fit 12 people in this due to COVID so we had eight performers and 12 audience members which was obviously ridiculous but that's what I mean we're lucky to get that happening at all so so you can see there in the audience enters you sit on either side of what appears to be a cube in the center of the room there there are a few people in the cube seen through the translucent dividers that are keeping you that are creating the cube and there's three performers walking around the cube there's beautiful mysterious music playing there's fog in the air and basically the performers first guide you through putting the goggles on and you test them with an image of the room and that you're in so when you first put on the goggles you're in the same room but it's empty there's no set there's no lights there's nothing and you spin around you look you're guided so that you can you know start to feel what it's like to operate the the goggles then they they basically take you through some meditations and visualizations asking you to imagine your own bathroom that's where it sort of ends up is that you're you're asked to to imagine your own bathroom and and and and go through think about what has happened to you in that particular room and that particular room as a very very ordinary room a room that you're in almost every day of your life if you're at home certainly every day of your life if you're at home and all of the trials and tribulations that you've had there all the good times you've had there with warm baths and lovely poops and then obviously the bad times you've had there when you're and whatever you're sick or you're stressed out about something or it's five in the morning and you're you've been up all night doing cocaine and you're thinking you've fucked up your life so badly by your life choices so so but this room is very special room and and and just the fact is that one day whether you go to mars or not you will never see that room again which starts to introduce some of the themes that are related in the related to I guess it's stoicism and buddhism or two the places we're drawing some of these ideas and impermanence so then they ask you to don the goggles and whenever you enter the goggles again you first see the room that you're in and and this this space without without the set and then these series of videos and the first video you see is is the these five youths who are astronauts you learn that they're astronauts that have been selected to go to Mars to colonize Mars in the face of an existential threat of a speeding meteor that's coming to earth which may or may not be fake news and you and you hear them receive their last assignment so 48 hours before liftoff they're they're asked to create a 360 archive of their most beautiful but ordinary places on earth and over the course of the show the audience is in and out of the goggles as they spend time with these guys over the last their last minutes on earth in some of their favorite spots you know their homes there's Chris at his favorite comic store there's Robert with his brother in a park that that they hang out in there's Lynn hanging out with her family I think Lynn may be in the room right in zoom right now if you are high and there's Lynn her grandmother's to the left there in the family there's Iska with her sister and we encourage them at times to actually acknowledge the camera because the fictional conceit is that they're creating this for themselves to look at when they're on Mars and they're feeling lonely they can look back and relive relive it so it's sort of it's their POV the video is the POV of the astronaut in the future and so just just some technical stuff time spent in the goggles is roughly six minutes per session in the goggles for a total of 30 minutes of 360 videos so five sessions in the goggles with a couple sessions that are a little bit shorter and then there's 40 minutes of live performance so that's about a 70 minute experience some of the 360 sequences are just with the sound that was recorded during the shoot some are accompanied by a live voiceover provided by the performers and the performers are providing this live voiceover from an area on the set that's that's that mission control area so there's the mission control and and that's they're they're performing it there and and and some of the videos are also supported by music which is also played by the cast using a Roland sampler and that's Emma using the sampler there learning how to use it and that's located in this mission control there's Lynn with the sampler in front of her she also played the sampler or activated it I guess so they're providing a they're the youth are providing our performers are providing a live scoring by switching between different tracks on a given piece of music which was composed by a couple friends of mine in Hamburg called Isola Isola music is the company every time the performers take off the goggles or every time the performers are in the goggles watching the video not the performers I'm sorry the audience is in the goggles watching the video the performers surreptitiously are moving these dividers around so that so that every time you take off the goggles as the audience member you are suddenly in a different space I want that feeling and for me that capitalizes on on what I think is the is the most interesting part for me or the weirdest part of a VR 360 is for me it's the moment when you take them off that's the most alarming to me and and it there's almost afforded sort of dystopian feeling as you return back to reality I when I first got my go I was playing this fishing game for literally two hours but I started it when the sun was off streaming into my room and then over the course of playing the game the sun went down and when I took it off it was the streetlight coming in and the socks that I've had strewn around my room were just sort of glowing and just and I just was like it felt really dystopian that when you come back to reality reality feels like the wrong place that you're in and and and the VR world is so much more beautiful so I really wanted to capture that sort of dystopian aspect of returning back to this place that is kind of not recognizable because you've been away for it for so long it's sort of what it feels like so so you can see there that how the partitions get moved into different configurations and so when when the audience is outside of the goggles they're guided through a series of meditations and visualizations where they're asked to imagine in detail a beautiful ordinary day and then they are later than asked to share that beautiful ordinary day that they've imagined in detail with another audience member and then even later in the show they're asked to share what they've heard of one the other audience member to yet a third party so you share it you hear somebody's then you share the what you've heard to to somebody else and you can see there you little sharing sessions a little bit challenging with the COVID restrictions but we had these sections and so over the course of the show you're meeting other people who are you you're supposed to think of sort of as potentially the people that you will be spending the rest of your life with on Mars if you were one of the astronauts and so finally they're asked to the audience is asked to combine all of their beautiful ordinary days into a beautiful ordinary day object they're asked to imagine to hold out their hands and beam all of these beautiful ordinary days these banal days that are that are beautiful because of their banality into their hands and and and at one point as that as that happens and they visualize this organic object that represents this then we have this party sequence where we basically claim to steal them all back the astronauts take them back and and claim that these objects will now be planted on Mars so the generations from now the Mars colonizers might have a chance to have their own beautiful ordinary days which probably won't happen for a while on Mars. Also throughout this plot line there are a series of ethical questions that are posed to the audience during the meditation sort of beautiful days plot line there's also these ethical questions questions about the future of humanity whether humanity has the right to colonize other planets like that questions like that whether we should send a diverse crew to Mars to save humanity that includes disabled people or should they be our so-called brightest and best people that we sent to Mars I call these questions the Thunberg questions after Greta and finally there's also another plot where where when you don the goggles and you return you're into the space the empty space that I mentioned there's over the course of seeing being in the goggles suddenly within that space there are three of the astronauts who who are entering that space and they they they come up to you and they in in the VR goggles and they claim that they have them they've got them they've got your things they've got them they don't they they didn't manage to take them and maybe that's not so clear what's happening but they are holding the box which you maybe recognize as the as the beautiful ordinary day object box and then eventually at the end of the show they enter the space in real life and grab you and take you outside and then outside your returned the beautiful they're given the beautiful ordinary day objects which are these they're called roses of Jericho they're little or little plants that if you add a they look dead but if you add some water they spring back to life so they give those back to you and say you must take them take them take them we didn't we and it's clear that these guys have abandoned the mission and you've learned that that that there's been some people who've abandoned the mission and that these people are now being hunted and they're they're you know persona non grata and then what they spray fuck Mars on the side of the theater you can see them the objects are in the foreground there that and our audience members taking them back so they spray fuck Mars then cop car screams up and this cop jumps out and screams at everybody that they must leave I've asked the cop to play it as if he was scared as if his life was at risk by these people getting here and the youth run off and and he screams off with his car again and the audience is left sort of by themselves to to deal with the show so the end so that's that's the show so now I just want to go through the conception of the show and and take you through behind the scenes and how we worked in particular with the youth so the the the project was first conceived as the final project in an umbrella project called Teen Talitarianism and Teen Talitarianism is a is a festival within a festival of work that is created by and collaborated with teens for an adult audience that happens over the course of a festival and the last project within Teen Talitarianism is called Ask for the Moon and Ask for the Moon is a project that features the team that we've been working with usually over the course of a month say and and asks them to present a set of demands to the the festival to mammalian as the as a collaborator in the festival and any other stakeholders that are there I mean we we we ask them to to give us a set of demands about how they want to continue to work with us in the future and in front of an audience we negotiate with the teens about what might be possible in the future and they'll do things like for example the Milan teens one of the first things was that they wanted to Skype with with the mammalian team they wanted to Skype with us once a week and I assured them that they do not want to get on Skype once a week trust me might sound like a good idea now but and we agreed to Skype once a month and so we did that for a bunch of months after and this project came out of it and it was they wanted to do a project about interplanetary space travel so that was that was that was the first idea so then that evolved into the premature that that evolved into wanting to do a project where where where we would create a stage-based work in which a team of young people would basically share what they were doing at almost every moment of the day during a predetermined period so the idea was that they would carefully document a two week two week period of their lives I was thinking during the summer you know when things are chilled a bit and basically get on stage and share this so I wanted and go hour by hour describing a two-week period in the life of the teenager and I wanted to capture sort of that excruciatingly bored but still sort of luxurious feeling of of being bored in the middle of summer and and not having anything to do and what that feels like and and Mars in this case was understood to be what was happening elsewhere it was a bit of a FOMO kind of metaphor that there's this assumption that all these great things are and exciting things are happening elsewhere that's what Instagram you know all of that sort of shit that way that that throws up all of that and and but yet your your ordinary life is just quite dull except I wanted to really look at the beautiful of that the beautiful aspects of that so so what we did first was we did a test of this with the Milano teams to we got we all basically got them we got them to fill out this survey on Google docs which we made a survey for each of them that had all of the times for a 72-hour period every hour we got them to fill this out and myself and the producer Alice Fleming also did this so you can see there yeah it's a basic mindfulness survey where are you describe where you are what do you hear what are you doing who you with how do you feel what are you annoyed about what would you change what are you grateful for so a little bit of a mindfulness kind of survey and then you can see at the bottom there's the um that's the line that then was developed for the script and you can see that's 4 p.m. we've got that happening or that's Alba that's what Alba was experiencing then at 5 p.m. this is she's in the same place now she's listening to BTS and she's she's um she's got her new $40 40 euro earbuds she's tired doesn't know what she cooks for dinner so what we did was we took so 72 hours of this times six performers turned that into a script and then threw them up on stage and for a little workshop presentation of going year by year or sorry not year by year hour by hour um through their lives it was interesting I have to say that it was and it might appeal to some a certain kind of audience that really likes sort of high concept kind of stuff but ultimately it was kind of boring I got to say um so that's when we decided to make the the decision to film it and this idea of the beautiful ordinary day archive started to develop and we approached Konstantin Bach who's a filmmaker we work with he suggests we do it in 360 um 360 uh video so we prepared that by interviewing all of the youth about their favorite spots and there's the Duomo in Milano where we did that's obviously some filming we did there so we we interviewed them all on WhatsApp talked to them about the project and their favorite spots and then and then um we shot that a bunch of footage in Milan in October of 2019 with the Milan youth we're supposed to keep on developing that but of course COVID came now our approach to the 360 video was again ordinary places just sort of ordinary places that they would miss on Mars not fantastic roller coasters or swimming with sharks which is often what the 360 video is about we want to look at the really the the sort of beautiful ordinary things that you take for granted and I think the project has become more poignant because of COVID because we took so much for granted that all disappeared on uh on in March we worked in Germany we worked with Storylab from Dortmund University to create the video there are research lab working in these immersive forms and some sort of technical stuff so you guys just to share this stuff we we we did the Milan footage in stereoscopic which requires a very large camera you can see there that's Konstantin in the water he will do anything for the shot so it's a very large round camera with six fish eye lenses essentially three sets of two eyes it produces a 3d image with with depth and parallax so when you move you know things that look like they move behind it so there's parallax and so it's more real but ultimately in Germany we decided to go with this GoPro fusion camera which has only two fish eye lenses one on either side of the camera you can see it there it's quite quite surreptitious you don't really see it's in this it's quite discreet and and you can put it on a bike and stuff like that and there was no depth to this but there's a 360 obviously the two big differences for our purposes was that this is not at all intrusive but more salient the stereoscopic requires so much data that you have to manage and and so that's wrangling all of that was very very difficult and we had a month turnaround to do this so so to do this to reproduce this is not easy so we went with that with the fast turnaround I see the difference between stereoscopic and monoscopic some people actually don't even perceive it or even can't even notice it some people find it even the depth to be a little bit disturbing it could be a bit hard in the eyes in terms of audio stuff we used a zoom h3vr for the sound atmosphere and had two sets of sennheiser ew 112p g4 gd band for the nerds out in the out in the house I don't know what any of those numbers mean but that's what we used to get the dialogue in terms of how we chose the shots we just made the decision for the shots by asking the performers the same question posed to their characters if you were lonely and isolated on mars and about to you know considering killing yourself or whatever where on earth would you like to visit and what are your happy places and who are your happy people and this was inspired by this this is interesting I think it's a it's a nasa 2016 nasa evidence report risk of adverse conditions risk of adverse cognitive or behavioral conditions and psychiatric disorders and that they rate planetary travel you can see down at the bottom the planetary travels rated quite high and you have what the l up at the tops decides for likelihood and then c is the consequences on ops operations what is the risk disposition of that and likelihood and consequences on long-term health and four in both cases means death so they would and I find this slide also kind of funny here this is the I mean it's just risk management one on one but it's really funny so exposure to radiation may affect central nervous system which may affect sleep which may affect individual performance which may affect team performance yeah no shit so it was just a funny nasa report that's stayed in the obvious but but just the fact that isolation was one of the big things that they're concerned about and just how we've all been experiencing that so we had the basic shot list here you can see the performers on one side and then the various places so everybody had to shoot a quite an ordinary place everybody had to shoot a beautiful place in their life of your nature something like that two people had to do a scene with family three people had to do scenes with friends the party sequence was everybody but three people were had to appear reluctant and there was a scene of them sort of bored at the end of the party because they were the people that were leaving and the renegades and then one of the renegades just sitting at the end not going to bed while the others went went to sleep and the voiceover tests the voiceover texts that we made for the 360 which were performed live were created by interviewing the performers while on location so they're on location and again a mindfulness exercise where we ask them to to what they feel there what they're thinking there and what they what they do there I'm focused on this this being in the present and that sort of thing here's Chris's text which I'm going to ask him to read for us so you get just as a whiff of the brilliant Christopher Rockwell in his performance anytime you're ready Chris he would normally do this in German he's going to do it in English for us that's okay kind of him right when I come into the store I go over to the table with the novelties and look if there's something new for me then I go over to the action stuff and fantasy then briefly pass the erotic department and over to the comedy stuff then I do another round here I bought Comey can't communicate in Comey can't communicate has Comey communication problems and cannot speak to strangers but actually she's quite popular her goal is to get 100 friends on Mars you either will quick click with the people or you won't if don't that's it your communication problems will be forever there I'm not sure how I feel about that so the highlighted text is is what what I wrote to start to lay down the plot that that Chris is not very much interested in the mission and so adding lines like this and character stuff is always obviously in negotiation with the performers as they're for the most part they're playing themselves for all intents and purposes in some ways and we never proceed without their content which without their consent for the content which in any case is very difficult to do when you're working with kids and teenagers if there's something that they don't want to do they just simply do not do it it's pretty hard to muscle kids I have to say so that's that's the script that is that is done as voiceover the script that the performers perform live to the audience which is the not the voiceover stuff but the the sort of more meditative stuff had had two threads the audience's beautiful ordinary days that they had to imagine and then the Thunberg questions about interplanetary travel and colonialism that that stuff was in response quite a bit to to conversations I had in real life and on what's up with with the Milan youth Sarah Ben Haruda and Sarah is deeply from Thunbergian youth and very passionate activist and and and and that's her there during it looks like it's during the pandemic at a at a protest that that's a picture from what that's her profile pic from what's up and then also I was inspired by a special issue of the future's peer reviewed journal which focused on the ethics of human colonization in the context of the 2018 social and conceptual issues in astrobiology meeting in Reno, Nevada and there's lots of interesting stuff in this journal I met with one of the authors a blind ethicist who insists that those with disabilities should be part of any colonizing mission I found that interesting and I asked her if she would feel comfortable putting her children on an airplane piloted by a blind person she laughed and said no that that but noted that the technology is very close and that by the time we start sending people to Mars all systems should be ago and that sort of thing. Then with the youth we had two script writing workshops where the performers basically rewrote aspects of all of this stuff so all of these questions ethical stuff they rewrote it they retooled the ethical question so that it was more in line with what they were thinking and so that it made sense for them to change the script and enlarge swaths so to sum up the performers involvement they chose meaningful locations through an interview and writing process they provided a voiceover that they that we did through interviews they rewrote sections of the script in particular aspects that were rated related to the Thunberg stuff and then Pascal who's a drag artist he made designed makeup for everybody and he did everybody's makeup to take you through this the schedule with working with the performers obviously there was a pre-production schedule meetings and stuff like that but we had one Zoom meeting to introduce the project and get them thinking about the locations two days of writing with the youth one week of shooting all the locations one on each day and then some days for pickups and the party and stuff two weeks of devising rehearsing while stitching and editing was happening one week of the tech preview with an opening on Friday so total together with that was a month so so now i'm just going to chat a little bit with Chris and just um i just want to ask you Chris a little bit about your experience of us examining your life in this way and bringing a camera into your life can you just describe how to that feel we did was that an enjoyable experience that you feel is an imposition just tell us what that was like for you it was very interesting it's kind of like you making your life a little bit more actionful more more more stuff is happening kind of your imagining sometimes you have these moments where you just imagine going to the moon or for example going to the Mars and actually kind of doing it was it felt a bit odd but also was kind of fun and and sharing we would interview you and then share this we would speak these thoughts that were as if your thoughts like the what life was like going around when you'd go around Nemo that comic store um and do you feel comfortable sharing you know the fact that you walk i guess it sounds like you walk past the erotic department you never you never pause into the erotic department ever i guess you can say no comment yeah i mean i look at it i i know a few things from there also my sister recommended one okay all right um and what was it like having to us come to your house and hang out with your family because there's a scene where we hang out with your dad um that we we kept in the in the project was that how did you and i did you prep for that at all mean a little bit you think about how you want to present yourself do you do you want to show the audience how you really are or do you want to maybe address something so that you don't want to share so you kind of have to think about what you want to share and what you don't want to share did you did you did you want something to share something in particular is there some way that you framed yourself in a way that was that you highlighted something about yourself i think i thought about it a lot like in the process with the places that i choose but while i'm i filmed it and did it i didn't really think about it anymore i just did it right okay cool all right all right thanks thanks and people can ask questions and stuff like that so i'm at the end of my presentation and just now leaving some time if people have any questions and want to chat about this at all happy to happy to engage with anybody or whatever we can any obviously feel free to leave now but that's all i have also if yana is here too if you have any questions she directed the 360 video stuff on the ground because i was unable to be there and and i guess yeah so that's yeah i mean i'm not gonna say anymore except to say that the plot the plot of the youth abandoning the mission yana doesn't like that she thinks it's not in the million enough and it's it's it's it's it's too drama-rama and i think in the end i agreed we may and the thing we didn't have any moment with the audience spent any time with the um with the with the youth getting to know them they've seen them in the goggles but they don't spend very much time in the show talking to them and i want to figure out how to do that covid poses a big big problem for that but anyway any are any questions for anybody or comments or anything from anybody yeah feel free to turn on your cameras and do whatever you want hey yana yeah go ahead i have a question yeah um i i'm kind of worrying what what was your like what was your gateway in into this like what made you say ah we need to make this tell this story and and and this is how we're gonna do it with 360 video i'm curious to know what that path was like sure sure so so one of the things when you're working with when you're working with young people when you're working with anybody who's a who is a non-artist obviously you have to create a very solid formal container for their fairly at times loosey goosey content to work so here here's some scissors cut some hair as in haircuts by children it's very clear what the what the goals are there and and the more you get towards more sort of dramatic stuff the more difficult that is to do without working with with pros and one of the things in in this work that i've discovered is that obviously one of the one of the forms that is the most formal in some ways is is a film right so you can you can you can interview or you can do a bunch of work with young people and then you just edit it down to something that is really succinct and great if you throw a bunch of young people about stage and you're trying to be spontaneous on stage especially when you're looking for spontaneous spontaneity film you can record spontaneity chop it down so that's why we were moving toward film as somehow incorporating film into this project and then and then it just was i had been looking at vr just because a friend had it said and i was interested in vr in general constantine suggested doing that and then it was like oh that let's let's do that just it was mostly like the youth will find that interesting we'll all find that interesting we've never done that um and then that's when then we went once we had the the 360 idea it was like oh then we're in these places for real why we're doing this oh we're making this archive to take to mars i did research oh wow isolation is going to be a big problem for these interplanetary dudes so this is a solution to this isolation problem so that's the that's the path toward that cool thank you for sharing i i love origin stories oh yeah yeah cool why don't i show i'm going to show you a video here of the uh i'm going to share my screen and i'll show you just the the trailer that we made i forgot to do that um and you'll get a sense of of what the show feels like um um yeah i mean i think the the trailer is more interesting than the the show needs some work uh they just mostly in terms of that that that plot that feels a bit like an imposition yana do you want to say anything about it and and the and that plot yana saw the show i never saw the show so so what what what do you think worked what do you think didn't work we we've yet to debrief we're going to debrief this week but yeah what are you what are you saying many things that really work well i think the meditation part and also um when the audience talks to each other about their beautiful ordinary days that works really well um also watching the videos spinning on your little chair and all of that works really well and then at some point we're trying to and you already said that i don't like the bit where we're trying to um add a bit of a fiction story um where the estrons are having a big party before they leave and then the renegades don't go on the mission but they stay here on planet earth and there's a police cop like all of that happens like in the last 15 minutes so um that yeah just confuses all the people but yeah yeah i think i think when we go for what going forward for me it's going to be really about how the young people who are astronauts we've we've spent the whole hour watching them and getting to know them but but i do still want to keep them away from the audience a little bit and then have a moment where they come together and basically wish them well and thank them and send them on their way kind of thing and maybe talk to them a bit i mean covid poses so many problems with that kind of thing just i really wanted i mean i wanted some hugging to happen you know when you're saying goodbye to these kids and you but so there was all of these problems that covid presented but that's where that's where i'm hoping to go from it and figuring out how to have a conversation between them that's spontaneous we considered having like almost like a press conference was one idea but if the audience started to ask them well so how do you you know what food are you going to eat on mars then the youth are going to have to improvise in a way or the performers are going to have to improvise in a way that's going to be you never know what kind of thing and it's going to be hard to control that so you have to come up with a way for there to be an interaction at that point but then an interaction that has some has some formal constraints on it so that the audience can knows what they're supposed to do the performers know what they're supposed to do but yet we can honestly get together and get to know each other in that final goodbye moment is what i think where we're going with it like i feel like going at this point yeah we're all we're heading toward almost like a few minutes before we got maybe time for one question if anybody's got anything with them i'm just curious if you could share if you have a ballpark figure of what the budget was for the whole kind of like everybody from the consultation like youth programming and then the final yeah great question um diana what do you think uh i oh yeah we were were we like 30 thousand 40 thousand maybe euros or euros or dollars from euros yeah euros i think and it was a little bit less but due to some projects that got cancelled due to corona we had some money that we could shift to this project um but in the end we thought the VR goggles would be the most expensive part but we were able to rent them for half a year and that was a pretty good deal so it was less than expected i mean i could if you if you want i could get an exact or is that close enough i guess as a figure i mean i could i could find it out for sure you is that good yeah i can probably also look at actually i'd be curious if you if you were able to share that yeah sure we can i'll put that in the discord or whatever are you in the discord yeah thank you and and just and and there was obviously there's money that was going into like the idea the way we work is we develop um a project that is considered to be a model that we will then tour so the first you know there's a big investment off the talk or you know all the time we spent in melanne and we'll go back and as we figure out exactly how do we do this thing then we try it once and then and then eventually it gets like with our other projects like all the sex i've ever had now is in a really great spot where where it's a model that multiple people can direct and we just go and we have a schedule we know what we do every minute of the day this is not yet in that state eventually it'll get into that state so we're still working that out so that that involves a larger investment off the top yeah and we also we paid every perform performer and we had to translate so there were a couple of costs um yeah that might differ in the future how it has a question about when do we decide on the performance space the performance space it's a place it's a space called zesha eintz which is um a new space that has been taken over in bohem by youth it's an and the bohem schauspielhaus is using the space to to run all the youth oriented stuff and the community oriented stuff i guess and then it's just that's what we had to work because we're working with that that team um and so that's i mean it can be anywhere i mean it's just an empty room i mean black box without risers is is is yeah is what it looks like we're at time here so thanks thanks everybody for coming in for questions feel free to ask me on discord or get a hold of me wherever wherever you want appreciate the opportunity thanks adan for letting us do all of this and thanks thanks chris and yana so great big up yeah cool so cheers everyone for coming out here uh obviously we have one last session going on if you're interested in hearing conversation about spatial design in xr you're gonna head over to presentation room b if you're interested in the other conversation that's happening ah cultivating audiences you're gonna head over to presentation room a thanks so much we hope to see you back in vr otherwise enjoy your day again thank you so much team a million from wherever you are in the world thank you all right cheers take care thanks those squamish slave with tooth and muskim nations what logics are involved in crafting spaces for digital performance interaction leading us into this conversation is ian garret and toaster lab fame hello everyone i mean just one second i realize i have our live dream on too and i want to make sure that i have turned that off because i wanted to thanks everyone for joining us i mean we have a really great panel here um especially in terms of um actually coming up and figuring out what exactly we're even talking about here well that's what we've been talking about backstage so i'm gonna do uh brief introductions i'm gonna bring everybody out they're waiting in the wings i love that we have this ability to completely construct optionally our our desire to gather into a theatrical space but we'll talk a little bit more about the things that we can and cannot do in a moment so first i'm gonna invite beth gates to the stage beth is an award-winning lighting set projection and mixed reality designer she started in rock and roll at 14 and has been doing lots of work associated with this part of part of staring this event going on you may have been with her workshop right before this as well um she was most recently the virtual world lighting designer and virtual stage lighting designer for uh double i studios vr theater performance findings and door x at the venice film festival a theater piece in the film festival which one best immersive vr experience and just recently completed her mf a at uh u calgary uh where she's been doing research between drama and computer science uh looking at vr a r and live performance she also sits on the advisory board for toaster lab which she chairs um next i'm gonna bring out frank lucas a mixed reality designer who has a company it's called restless reality yeah interactive uh his background is in quality assurance but now he works with companies to consult design prototype and ultimately bring to fruition mixed reality applications and experiences and we're talking a lot about how he's been doing that with hollow limbs recently um in the uh outside of this space again weird that we're talking about being outside of places uh for consumers enterprise and manufacturing with a lot of experience also within the video game space and then i'll also invite uh uh david rockby uh who uh is has it i could go on uh right now serves as a lecturer and associate director at the bima lab at the university of toronto uh he's been creating interactive sound and video installations uh since 1982 uh his early work very nervous and has acknowledged as a primary work of interactive art translating physical gestures into real-time interactive sound environments uh which uh without getting too far into um just everybody's accolades because of the limits to the time that we have here thanks everybody for joining me on stage um i want to use that sort of as a bridge because we were talking about backstage again weird to think about this metaphor in this virtual space doing backstage about how that is a mixed reality practice um like before it was co-opted uh by microsoft as a trademarkable property of what extra reality is uh and getting to this question of what is what are we talking about when we're talking about designing spatially and we have like a preconceived notion well we all share a bit of a notion of it in like if we've been at this conference for a few days of of a spatial practice because here we are in a virtual space but i'm going to turn it to our panel making sure that you each have the megaphone um uh to ask you what when you're asked uh when you're asked uh when you when you were asked to be on a panel for a spatial design um what did you imagine that actually meant so i'm going to i'm gonna make sure that you're all on air and that you've got the megaphone as you're up here on stage uh david we'd start with you first because i i i short changed a bit of your uh uh your introduction um and you're like you've got like just a story by up there but you've been working in different aspects of the space for a long time and now are uh directing or associate director of the bimo lab which is looking at this in a different way as well like what are the different ways of defining virtue of spatial design that you've that you've uh left yeah so i guess the strangest thing for me is that i started doing something that i guess you could call augmented reality with my interactive sound installations like very nervous system and in that case what it was is not so much spatial design as redefining new behaviors within a given space so i was often going to a gallery and i'd have to put it in a gallery or i'd pose it on a street corner by pointing a camera out a window or something so i was often interposing a new behavior on existing space or something like that and in that case the spatial design was actually very pragmatic um it's not even worth going into where you point your camera how you orient the space except to consider questions of of actually how people move around and that became very much i i guess a question that's relevant also in this context but how do you design an installation right i would have defined myself as an installation artist in the 80s and 90s and there you're an artist who's not working with a sculpture or an image on the wall or a sound but you're working with the space and redesigning the space to mean something so i spent a lot of time thinking about what it means when you walk into a space what you confront what barriers are there what do you see and what don't do you see as you enter and as you turn a corner what's revealed and how does the order that things are revealed speak to you so there's kind of a architecture through which meaning was generated and so even just us coming back from behind there has a certain story to it that architecture and that our movement through space in the way it it guides us through space says something about that but i would think about that in the context of the installations i was doing since then i've done other things involving space using things like the connect or the azure connect now to construct to design behaviors in space sculpturally so where i can use my phone app walk into the middle of the space choose a sound for example and then press a button and say that sound will be here and then choose another sound and say okay that one's going to be on the underside of that sound and then we're going to be so i would build a three-dimensional volume of sounds in say a 60 by 30 foot space that you explore reaching through it so that's that's a very different spatial design sense which i'm actually changing the character or behavior of things in the space and designing it again from a sculptural or installation perspective and then it's really then space becomes story in a funny way like how you encounter sounds what sounds you encounter what order changes the narrative you're spinning for yourself as you encounter them so then it's kind of like sound possibilities as as story space that you can move through so those are some examples of ways i've thought about spatial design yeah i think i might come to you with the the same question coming up those from a very different practice especially in terms of using the color lens and ar and how those are blending two different types of spatialization like what what how do you approach spatial design how are you thinking about that when you when you come into this conversation yeah so it's it's it's actually really interesting because you know when you're here in virtual reality you're really only dealing with the digital right you can sort of make anything any size and kind of like you kind of have a little bit more you have a little bit more freedom with what you're allowed to create when you're in augmented reality with something like the hollow lens if you don't know it's it's kind of like this vr headset but you can still see the real world so you're designing on top of the existing reality which makes it a little bit more maybe difficult because you can't just go crazy because you still have to conform to the sort of physics of the real world but i think a lot of a lot of the sort of principles you get with normal sort of set design and for me as a video game designer my background is in all level design so you're kind of having those same thoughts in your head you know you're thinking okay well what am i going to have my audience looking at at any given time and what are they allowed to touch and what are they allowed to kind of you know can they do anything or are they just in this server in this world and a lot of times they are but my sort of most interesting experience was i got you i got to help with a theater production and it was it wasn't really a theater production it was more like an advertisement but we got you know real actors we had people come in for auditions and wear the hollow lens and see how comfortable they looked with it which was really interesting but the most interesting part was when they put the thing on and we were doing the shoots they weren't just acting out you know well this is what it looks like and this is what it feels like they were actually using the technology that's on their head to you know really sort of interact with what we were filming so you look at a lot of old movies you know i'm a big fan of like Mortal Kombat you know you watch the like behind the scenes and you see you know Luke Kang he's like fighting with this lizard that's not really there right and he has to pretend like it's real but here we got to see these actors who have done sort of things like that before but they were actually doing it you know it wasn't like in my head and in their head and we're you know it was real to them to us to everyone so that's like another interesting thing but at the same time if you're doing something like a installation or a demonstration you can't give too much so one of the sort of biggest takeaways for me was giving people things to play with when you're trying to tell them something they're not going to listen to you so that was like one of my early learnings making all these prototypes in in in augmented reality HoloLens headset because people are going to want to reach out and touch things right so yeah you got to find that balance yeah that's that's actually a really interesting way to say way into asking this question of Beth because you just came from a workshop in alt space where people were using the tools for devising performance spaces like doing in the customizing sonography within unlimited space as long as it's available in alt space as well um how did that a how did that go and d how does that relate to like the way that you approach thinking about spatial design and sonography okay that's a great question um i think it went really well um it was it was really fantastic to see what was created by more or less new adopters to the technology and with very we did put some pretty significant limitations on but to watch the inventiveness with manipulating space and we had everything like there was everything from live piano to curtains that opened right without without there being animations available to anyone it was using the tools um to create the space using the tools that existed to create space um we had a like a promenade piece so people really um got inventive with the all the dimensions of the space so both playing with scale and um and the lack of physics and so this is so in terms of approaching spatial design it becomes really interesting as we hybridize these worlds and and um uh i would say that since i started working in vr i wonder how much my approach has changed because because we're liberated from physics here we can do anything um the things that have become really interesting for me to like frank mentions like um the gamification of space is something that is um requires an enormous amount of consideration and and has started to factor into approaches and in spatial design like how how do you introduce things that you do want interaction with in telling the story of the space without it getting in the way of the story of the space um and so spatial design starts to become this like super multi-layered a web like creature that is far beyond the flats and drops and uh trucks of of yesteryear um which which actually for me that the work that in vr has opened up my brain a little bit in terms of how to approach those more analog pieces because there are no limits here and so um i haven't had trouble encompassing that like including that in my thinking that like i haven't had trouble letting go of the analog way but trying to figure out what can we bring from what we're learning in in vr into the analog space becomes really interesting um and sorry go ahead yeah no no no no finish your thought because i haven't i have to follow up okay i was just thinking too about what i witnessed of of the groups um only in so there for people who weren't there there were four uh what i called sonograph formers or sonographers or terraformers who had the ability to construct space and then they were working with other people in the group and there was a wide range of of new adopters old adopters actors writers whatever's people who were who are makers um and uh and and to watch the the really um incredible liberation of exploration of physical space and then the placement of the sonic space and there was actors distributed like it was really it was really inspiring um and it was really wonderful to see let's hope yeah um and on this subject of limitations i think that my the question that i that i have to follow up to this that i had i had well for the second time both times which have been as a result um uh of this conference uh i have i have run into somebody um earlier before this session as i was um as i had helped people get into the um get into your workshop uh beth i had um sorry i'm gonna pop up uh that's one of the awesome things about this space there is a message floating in front of me um um so i don't like that happening and i'm gonna ask this question so i ran into rain and got introduced on the main concourse and like last week as i was moving through the central room before coming to the presentation rooms i uh ran into Liam from from single fan and i ran into people and every other interaction that i've had since march 13th has been pre-planned um because of the limitations that we have in what you're seeing in terms of thinking about the the way that limitations have been opened up i would open it up to everybody here who's been experiencing these like limitations of the way that we interact with people and how might that have changed your idea of thinking about in whichever way that you're coming into thinking about space and programming space and the storytelling that goes along the space how has that changed in this time when we don't really get out much i think this is uh this is something that um so there's a guy named Kent by and he's um a vr philosopher for lack of a better word he runs this great podcast called voices of vr and he and i have talked about this idea of and he's talked a lot about it on his own too but this idea of that that um the hallway conversation right like we've all been to conferences before and you do that bumping into to people and and so in in these kinds of social spaces find thinking about the traffic pattern right because as we're porting we're just leap making these leaps from one place to another what can we do then with that spawn point that allows that that kind of crossover how do we how do we guide um how do we guide people through without having to take their hand and go okay follow me um how do you create those spaces where the hallway conversations happen in a place where you can just zap around it's it's really interesting and and having been at several vr conferences in vr now um it's not being thought about um we're we're there there are very traditional approaches to creation of space and like actually may remaking conference rooms like which is yeah which is not exciting um yeah that was something that that really strikes me as we're talking about the absence of limitations we keep imposing familiar limitations on ourselves and for obvious reasons it's familiar etc but i find myself wondering you know there's a there's a long history in computational arts of before you had nvidia and amd rendering engines when it was all software to generate sense of space it was relatively easy for an artist or an artist and a programmer to come up with alternative representations of space and right now conventional brunelleshi perspective two-point or three-point perspective is pretty much baked in and in fact if you look at medieval art the artists had the opportunity to say well this person's really important so i'll make them five times as big and i'm gonna collapse this space because it's not important and so i wonder if there are ways for us to explore given the fact that we have the freedom can we come up with ways to you know like maybe maybe social space should bend around me like like gravity like we we we have gravitational waves around us and so when i spawn somewhere initially everyone's far away from me because i've created a kind of distortion and then people come to me slowly like maybe there's you know how can we uh marry the potentials that this does which opens everything up to the fact that we still want to be able to have those encounters so being able to bump into someone is important but but you know i was struck actually the other day the first time i was in this room and i had to keep maneuvering to be able to see what was going on i'm going why do i have to maneuver in a space where it's possible why or is that good like or is that actually a good thing is it you know it was a funny mixture of experiences and so i i you know there are artists that for example went as far as rendering inverse perspective where everything is smaller the closer it is to you it's pretty hard to deal with but it's pretty astounding to challenge the sort of middle of the road reality that we tend to reproduce in spaces you know to add to that really quickly um so i've been in vr a long long time right the oculus i'm sure you've been in longer but oculus day is not oculus but when i first started getting into it i used to like i'm a gamer right so i like try all the new sort of experiences and one of the ones that i tried was a massively multiplayer online or g and when i first booted it up and went into the world everyone has an open mic and everybody is everywhere and you can hear everyone almost all times and i hated it you know i was like oh i don't want to hear these people it's it's too much right like but as the world changed and um you know the social interactions became less and less i actually find myself gravitating more and more to those experiences and of course they've really improved it a lot with things like you know the the uh the problem and things like that so you don't have to get sort of that sensory overload um but i just thought that was interesting the way that my sort of mindset changed um that's all that's interesting because there's a there's a uh dico nidsviki who's um part of cohort um who will be is presenting at multiple times throughout the conference he and i were having a conversation about like what the idea with all the streaming even just streaming performance as all of this is going to be online like we've one of the things that we're missing is like the audience's ability to ruin a performance because you don't have that open world like anybody could say something at any time something and you know that's one of the the conversations over the course of this this conference that's happened too is like do we use to mute everybody i think that the first opening like we're like yeah we're going to mute everybody so that people could speak but then it's just like everybody's stuck it gets stuck in like a dead silence so that it's like well let's leave it open and and and people will sort of like navigate that space i'm also really interested in this idea if it can be anything for the total presentation we did last week um like we just didn't want to do a power point and we did not get so far and alt space does not let you get so far from reality that it's not like recognizable space that you can occupy but we decided to do the presentation in a different way where we put it up as banners of three objects in space led people around as opposed to like come and see a screen like let's go into vr so you can watch me present virtually on us on a screen um which is like an interesting like you know we're very early in that um there's another thing that we were talking about backstage that i also wanted uh to bring up in terms of thinking about like ownership of space that we're gonna there's gonna be a conversation later in the conference about ownership of uh of like product or or ownership of the types of projects that you make but we started talking about it stated like half of us are on are on an oculus um half of us are not around five pros and we were talking about it because like sometimes weird things happen with hands and the tracking is sort of like calibrated to different things especially um you know there's a couple of people that i've interacted with in this who are on like um the first oculus rift which uses external trackers it's very easy for a hand to wander away if it's not like if the calibrated or the occlusion is weird um but we're also like so those of us who are on an oculus are on a facebook platform and we're being tracked through space right like we like for it to work that literally has to happen like we can't participate on an oculus without allowing facebook to track our movement and the oculus too which is announced like in various creature headsets they talk about like other like essentially bio information about our movement and the way that we interact with it which is meant to improve our experience but also like opens up this question of what's going to happen with that data so i think that my question for that is is we're thinking about like space what do we think about uh like the ownership of that space it's something that's easier to and more obvious perhaps at times when we're in like carbon space like we know who owns a building maybe or when you know there's a clear definition between corporate or public or private land um but now we're in this like weird place where we feel very free we feel free to move around but ultimately you know to make that happen we have to give up some of that like our movement through space and the ability to track the way that we move um what are your thoughts on on that and knowing that those who are aside from the fact that they're being tracked by everybody who's on an oculus those who are not an oculus might have different thoughts about that and that you have a little bit maybe you have a little bit more freedom to move what do you think they're uh florian rhodes are a german theorist wrote um way back at the early in the early days of vr that um the dream of sort of infinite interaction and infinite freedom in virtual space comes at precisely at the cost of infinite surveillance you cannot separate into and that's a profound you know and so there is uh this extreme contrast between the the freedom in theory that one has in this space but you but to get that freedom in this not in this non in this spatial non space or whatever you have to give away something uh at the same time so it's a it's a sort of central paradox in most interactive technologies the freedoms they open up carry with them these trade-offs and so questions about privacy the whole battle between you know um tracking the value of tracking data as for for machine learning for example the value of tracking data for um for the for the commercial and sort of selling of advertising etc versus the you know i guess it's there's a sort of an apple google model there of privacy these are i think these are really fundamentally important questions as you spend more and more time in these spaces and um it's really it's we have to be the camera really aware i think of then the uh the motivations of the the motivate the motivations that each of the the platforms and the operators the platforms and the people building the software have and consider the implications somehow i mean it's a real mess really we have to figure out if frank is without asking you to violate any potential nda is knowing that you're working in a more corporate space um how how is this in it has has this factored into some of the ways that you're working or or yeah i'd love to hear um so this you know full disclosure uh i don't work for any of the big companies the facebook's microsoft do contract work so i'm not you know 100 affiliated with any of them um and it's not something that gets into my sort of day-to-day so much but i will say that uh as the hardware manufacturer they they have to kind of add these new features which are things that people are a little bit concerned about things like eye tracking and you know the space tracking um but i can say that at least from the microsoft perspective that i saw it wasn't something that um you know that was uh kind of like a high priority target gather all this data to used for advertising and things like that it was more for um make the product better make the hardware better so while certain things were being collected it's kind of like the windows can you know like opt in opt out do you want to send us sort of like your usage data things like that this this kind of thing you know is being collected um but as far as i know none of these things were being sort of used for you know money gaining things like that so when i was sort of part of the project uh it didn't it didn't really enter my sphere you know i wasn't i wasn't you know they weren't telling me that these things needed to be done or anything like that um yeah i i don't know how much actually have to add to that conversation um it wasn't really part of my kind of yeah sphere but i can say that using a facebook headset i definitely am sort of cognizant to the to the concerns and i feel them too especially once we start adding things like eye tracking i you know and these companies could not only see where my head is looking but where my eyes are looking um which is another ammunition towards you know the the ad concerns and things like that so i definitely feel it um yeah there's a different feeling of like some sort of threshold after they know that well with the elimination of oculus name moving to like facebook connect and sort of like daring that and like the requirement for the facebook account and and those things like that where it definitely feels like we've moved on from like a novel display technology even though like to interact with a lot of these platforms we were you know signing up for accounts and things like that but we've crossed over to like here we're within a specific like corporate ecosystem in which we are you know a user Beth i wanted to give you an opportunity i didn't mean to stomp on your oh that too not at all i mean it's like how do you fight the the many-headed hydra like it's um the thing that as a theater maker that the the oculus and like and like how many of you are wearing them now the thing that the oculus was like this great hopeful piece of technology that finally all our poor theater makers were going to be able to start to engage with these incredible things that i was seeing and that colleagues were making and and and knowing that it's always been a facebook product like it's always had that that um coating to it um and now it's really troubling um and so like i don't know is it that we make subversive work with it until they shut down all our oculuses like i i don't know it's really it's troubling and it's certainly like you know it's been identified by people like jaren lanny for years right how problematic social media is and it represents you know the the destruction of what the hope for vr has always been um but maybe like and this is why this conference and other conferences similar to it is really uh encouraging because maybe there's a way we find to break the system from within a little bit or or subvert it or um or or make art despite um uh these things and and and um yeah i don't i don't know and we need regulation right like that's what it comes down to these monsters need to be regulated so that they don't devour all of our eye tracking um and uh and there now i won't receive any funding from oculus so there you go it's been recorded well it's been recorded on my headset so obviously if you think your phone's tracking your head's had like come on uh you gotta believe that it is and it's true the uh anderson pre who is part of toaster lab and uh i'm not sure if he's in the room right now but i know he was in your uh workshop earlier so he's been in out through the day he um we've been talking a lot about this recently and um before he came over to to to spend a lot more well he did his phd and has been doing much more art like art focused projects been many years at ibm um doing design research and they put a lot of money into developing things in second life and so we've been having this conversation around like what was the flexibility of that world versus this world like what are the like there's an infamous incident of an a second life uh events where people would just like flying penises uh like the zoom bomb in virtual space and that's not something that's possible in in this platform as free as we are where we're sort of still limited to to the tools that are given to us um i want to open it up to the audience for uh um conversations and i know that we could continue to talk about this but um you know especially people who you know you've been in this space it may be thinking about these things and they've been weighing on you for the last uh uh week uh in the three days that we've been together other questions from the audience and sort of considering any of these ideas uh of space and how we start to work with space uh um in these in these different types of virtual environments i can also add another shark to the room if you'd like me to but no float but no floating penises but no that's not i mean i guess we could break into unity and not break into unity but we could go over to unity and design one and put it into a kit and i upload it like it's not impossible but it seems like we don't have a lot of work yeah the shark is pulled out of an available kit um okay so i'm gonna pull open uh oh all right so now i've turned on hand raises if you look in your lower right hand corner aside from the hand raised emoji that you have this is a different thing lower right ah yes i'm gonna turn on uh uh for a two-spirit trickster here you're on the air you're on air oh amazing oh there she is there you go yeah hey yeah um i wanted to ask um as people who've worked in the gaming industry and in this industry in general for a longer period of time um what your thoughts are in relation to uh i guess like the girl gaming universe as well as uh anything that engages in uh eroticism in general like uh i've been chatting about uh stuff like dating sims and the way that they're not necessarily respected uh despite that being a huge uh industry that has its own economy and brings in a lot of money so you think they would understand that language in general um as well as like what it's like to create uh work and find audience and space to present work that is more queer more inclusive uh or more sexually liberated that's an awesome question if i may yeah i'm so yeah uh i think uh the more that we kind of like mature this medium the more we're going to start seeing much more representation but i think the the kind of for me at least um i think we've seen a lot of kind of like accessibility options for people that maybe don't want to you know be exposed to so many people like the bubble you know um the fact that you can make your avatar however you see yourself i think is a really sort of uh is a kind of maybe liberating experience for a lot of people um and as you know as i said before i think as we mature we're going to start seeing way more representation as people sort of understand the medium and can kind of like build for it because you know a lot of people uh are making games still in few dimensions on a on a computer screen for people to only consume in that one way um so as things just take time i think we're going to start seeing a lot more of that and i think it was just this weekend i was on steam and i was just looking and i found uh like i'm a big fan of visual novels um a lot of japanese visual novels i play in you know 2d i saw a 3d version like in vr where i could actually fully experience that experience you know i could i could have that experience in full 3d which i thought was really cool and that's the first time i've ever seen that personally so i thought that was you know really interesting yeah but i might i might ask you to respond next because the one of the thoughts that occurs to me is like the the and this relates also to what frank was just saying in pandora x like the idea of avatar as costume and the flexibility there and sort of the relationship there and talking a little bit about that that process it doesn't quite get quite as far there as we would that we would like but there was a lot of social there's a lot of like social contract building around the way that character design especially as it was animated by a live performer as opposed to an mpc worked in that space um that it seems like there might be a lot of still be a lot of flexibility on a platform like a social platform like this or even more so on vr chat where you guys were creating that yeah and i think that um and so so finding pandora x was a live vr theater piece that happened at the venice film festival um that had three live performers and then a whole bunch of other performer managers and then the audience also inhabited an avatar which became a really interesting piece because we the that was the chorus and so everybody was made the same um and was kept pretty gender neutral um was and was kept um i mean we were we were a little bit spooky we were there were it was really evocative of a feeling um and then there was playing with those with the visions and it's interesting because i'm reading my son from the greek myths right now and all of the the iterations of all of the gods are white blue eyed blonde haired um whereas in pandora we really played with that and worked with the avatar designer and so the hair was pink and Zeus was blue and and started to really um dig into what what else is possible like because they don't have to be the blonde blue eyed white version of these characters and and it and then the ability to shift um midstream to the ability to inhabit these other embodiments of character becomes a really really compelling place to start to create from and open up things like like a different modes of expression and different ideas of sexuality and um in in real time like it's it's super fascinating and i do think i agree with frank i think the more we adopt this and the more we expose people to working with these tools the more stories we will begin to see the more modes of expression we will begin to see that explode those previous notions like um you know i i've said it a bunch of times like the vr liberates us from the physics of of the carbon world it also then liberates us from the the world views that we hold and allows us to actually go inside like you did in that novel like that's extraordinary um and to go inside and to to to find those places so i do think yes it will it will increase um and and as we keep playing yeah yeah i think there was having uh getting the chance to see pandora x i also think about sort of some of the examples of different ways of thinking about space that david that you brought up like because there were times at which like characters to change like uh to change like just their presence like took up different amounts of space to change scale we as a chorus change scale and that allowing people like even those simple things allow us to like sort of dissociate from like we are we are fixed in one form we can also tell story through the those changes that we can control from one character to another remanifesting into another avatar and making the dramaturgical connections there yeah i find i find there's a there's an interesting i find myself thinking about how we tend to imagine aliens in science fiction and how much of a failure of imagination that usually is and when i think about the same thing in terms of our inventing of our our avatars i have the most banal and boring avatar possible because there was not an interesting enough range for me to actually want to pursue further um uh and yet the possibilities are enormous but what we run into is the same thing we run into in terms of designing space to the degree that we have a familiar space we can leverage all our existing social behaviors to the risk to the degree that our avatars conform to a certain set of expectations we can code them in very explicit ways encode ourselves to to to to speak in the language of the normal space and so there's this always this tension between how much do i want to take on all the freedom that's available here to do to be anything and what do i lose in terms of any sort of presence in other people's imagination if i do that and i don't know how we negotiate that it's it's it that thing which exists in the real world doesn't disappear here just the nature of the constraints is different right and so um you know this is a this is a fairly boring interesting gathering in terms of the visual presentation of it although people have put some admirable attention into making their avatars a lot more interesting than mine and i applaud those but this is this is really middle of the road reality that we're experiencing here and yeah and we do that for a reason and and i wonder how we can find new ways of negotiating the space between the familiar communicative space that we already understand the rules of and being able to jump out of that space completely at times like i don't know there must be a way because there's a whole space of potential locked up in the fact that we're so figuring that out yeah it's really i know that i spent oh sorry go ahead oh no i was just gonna say i know we're getting close to time but it's really interesting um in one of the other metaverses that i that i go into it's a place called neos and in neos is a lot of really like heavy gamers um and they just build worlds and it's it's an incredible place and nobody nobody has uh an embodied avatar like this there are lizards my my my closest friend in neos is a piece of toast with jam and that's how he's known to everyone medre is a piece of toast with jam and uh nobody is is humanoid in any way and some people are particles and it's it's such an incredible way to engage it and it feels like being in star trek right like in next generation managed to get beyond the humanoid alien sometimes and so like there is a giant ball of jelly that changes shape and uh and that's who we get to talk with and that's it's awesome it's so great um yeah there's a lot of early a lot of early star trek that my my mother referred to is just everybody had a different skin condition and then some character design came into it it was like let's let's get to be on this there is a question that has been posed i'm gonna invite that to have it in a post uh session conversation because we're at time i apologize for that this has been really a great conversation i will admit uh i will admit that i spent the first month of being in alt space uh very much a uh a typically huge person you would have been able to easily identify me in alt space as a person that you would have met and then at some point i'm like there's no reason for me not to be blue and i was like well you won't be able to tell i have fingernails unless i make them more so uh it became more of a design question and moving on there so um thank you i want to move it into a conversation i think that they gave us like like think about all the limitations as we move into the last day of of this convening and we're thinking about the opportunities that you have for here as we've introduced a lot of people to this platform who think about space in this way like also be please be thinking about how you can break it um both as a as a as a a virtualization of physical space and as a corporate space um and as like an embodied space thank you thank you thank you thank you somebody after