Hi everyone. Can you hear me? Welcome to the visual art forums. Just I'm going to hand it over to Elizabeth in a minute to introduce our speaker for this evening but I just wanted to welcome everyone and mention that we are gonna have a break from the visual art forums for a few weeks and the next one will be on February 23rd with Peter Von Teasenhausen at 6 p.m. in this room again and a couple of other events I just want to mention this week we have a gallery talk with Trish Kelly on Wednesday at 6 p.m. and then Friday evening at 7 p.m. we have a talk with Jeffrey James in conversation with Michael Jackson who is not that Michael Jackson who is a prison rights advocate or prisoners rights advocate from UBC and they're gonna be talking about Jeffrey James' photo project on the Kingston Penitentiary so those events are all posted on the website but just wanted to mention what was coming up next so thanks for coming and I'm gonna hand this over to Elizabeth oh I just wanted to mention as well we're gonna be at the hotel bar after this for a drink with Elspeth if anyone wants to join us it's open to anyone to come and say hello so I'll hand it over to you I was just sharing with David McMillian my irrational fear of giving introduction so here you go it's all scripted Elspeth Pratt is an important artist and educator here in Vancouver she's being committed to making abstract sculpture for several decades has shown widely taught and influenced generations of artists including Emily Carzone, Kathy Slade and Patrick Anderson rumor has it that Patrick became interested in art after a friend convinced him to join Elspeth's sculpture class do you know where that was at SFU surprise with the recent spike of interest in abstraction her work is especially relevant to the current generation of young artists Elspeth's work demonstrates her interest in architecture and social spaces she uses a variety of prosaic materials from plywood to bed beverage containers to comment on how architecture structures our lives I first met Elspeth ten years ago when I moved to Vancouver and into this space adjoining her studio Elspeth and her work are a constant source of inspiration to me from watching her work over the years I have I have observed that she never settles into rote decision-making though she's consistent in her approach to materials and art making she's constantly inventing always with surprising and curious results her preference for wall-mounted work brings her sculpture into dialogue with painting recent exhibitions include nonetheless at the Cooley Art Gallery in Portland Oregon that was the second iteration of the exhibition she had here at Charles H. Scott second date a large-scale public art project at the Vancouver Art Gallery's off-site and outside in a Diaz contemporary in Toronto she was a 2014 recipient recipient of the Vancouver Mayor's Art Award in 2011 read books in conjunction with the Cooley Art Gallery in Portland published a beautiful catalog of Elspeth's work which includes essays by five different writers Elspeth is represented by Diaz contemporary in Toronto she's currently a professor and the director of the School of Contemporary Art at Simon Fraser University please join me in welcoming Elspeth Pratt okay so I have to apparently I'm double-miked here for some thanks very much for that introduction pretty much said at all okay so I'm I prepared a paper sorry but I'm I'm not the most comfortable public speaker and I think if you're coming out at six o'clock you might as well have something prepared so I'll preface this presentation by explaining that for some images I will provide specific details for others only show the images as they relate to ideas and influences in the paper and additionally additionally the work does not adhere to a chronological order so you won't be able to say well I like her earlier work better than her late work you know so there's there's a reason for that when I asked to when I was asked to give this presentation I considered how best to sorry about that I don't think I'm okay how best to organize the talk that would elucidates my practice articulates and references the importance of the slow process which allows for ideas to develop through reflection resulting in the three-dimensional objects I heard Michael Talsik an unconventional anthropologist who is known for his provocative ethnographic studies speak at SFU several years ago there were several there were several ideas he spoke about that I share an affinity for the notion of the mastery of non mastery and ideas around slow I have my own understanding of these ideas however I will begin with an example he cites I swear I saw this drawings and fieldwork notebooks namely my own in this book he reflects on the fieldwork notebooks he kept through 40 years of travels in Columbia while traveling in a taxi in Madeleine Columbia's second largest city he sped into a freeway tunnel spotting a homeless couple at the side of the road caught between the traffic and the wall of the concrete underpass in that momentary glimpse it seemed as if a woman was sewing a man into a nylon sack when he asked the driver why they chose to be there he responded because it is warm Talsik drew a quick sketch and scrawled underneath it in red pencil I swear I saw this the rational explanation is that most likely these were peasants driven from their home by paramilitaries who under the pretense of hunting down terrorists in Columbia are helping the landowning cocaine barons and biofueled mafia get their hands on potentially rich agricultural land for Talsik this explanation is not sufficient for he is concerned with the significance of the vision the inexplicability of the woman sewing the bag and the absurdity of the taxi driver's explanation it is in the spirit of celebrating his non-mastery that Talsik spends some time considering his sketches but this is the point the sketch and the note are both in enigmatic testifying rather to the anthropologist's form of intention attention than to the scene itself like Talsik my research is informed by this quality of subjective attention and serendipity I was struggling with the work titled done deal which is constructed from cardboard plaster bandage and then covered with a concoction of hydrocal and wild weld bond glue and which is followed by paint while looking at enclaves of residential dent densification the solution for this project presented itself when I was speeding along a highway in Baja Mexico this area has undergone an unprecedented amount of growth each visit you are surprised by the significant changes that all are a result of densification for tourism local villages have been transplanted to make room for marinas and golf courses the practice of forcibly evicting people from their homes and settlements is a growing global phenomenon and represents a crude violation of one of the most elementary principles of the right to adequate housing as defined in the United Nations home settlements program which states that people should not be forced to move to housing that constitutes a worse situation the new replacement housing for displaced locals is often an outlying locations in the form of nondescript densely group three story developments surrounded by vast tracks of empty land the question that is left on the table is who determines what is better what caught my attention in one development was the use of the feeble gesture of introducing orange stripes on the buildings in the hope hopes of making the living situation more hospitable Michael Towsick describes interstices of notation that lie at the outer limits of order as representing this chance collection this is an app description for what happens in my sketchbook yet on the floor at this in the sketch which serves as a polymps for my research the sketchbook is open to chance random notes with the sketchbook each mark reflects a thought without one leading to another these notations writing drawing color start studies calculations are all part of a search or investigation without a resolution in mind yet out of all of this randomness I discover a continuity the research is critical to my process for without it I could draw and develop a model I need to start with something that is tangible it is essential that the decision-making process in the creation of the work is evident I understand this is not merely as the making marking of the form by the variability and texture of the process but as an overriding aesthetic it is a method that relies on an inquiry inquiring interpretive attitude premised on experimentation this process and the aesthetics of the work are as significant as the final work I have included some older work an example of an influences to help contextualize my practice this is really old this is a slide of the third exhibition of the Society of Young Artists from 1921 early inspirations include a fascination with the ethos that surrounded the Russian constructivist for a very brief period 1917 to 1923 the work contained on heroic building materials used in the raw state that were assembled in an idiosyncratic manner that suggested a distrust of sent of surgeries and centricities of authority importantly I was interested in the role they were accorded within society perhaps this brief moment may be compared with 1968 when throughout the developed countries student protest and the emergence of a counterculture appeared to announce the rise of a new class capable of grasping power this new class consisted of administrators scientists engineers educators social workers and artists this is the sitski's prown room for 1923 prown is a term coined by Russian supremacist artist elu sitski in the early part of the 20th century prown does not have an exact definition low says low the sitski stated that it was the station where one changes from painting to architecture while researching turbulent historical moments I learned of the situation is I was intrigued by their notion of the everyday and appreciated their desire to transform everyday life through a process of deterrent I have three different definitions each becoming more strident past and present here's a first one past and present artistic production were integrated to produce new and startling works the integration of past a present or past artistic production into a superior construction or a milieu or the theft of our test of aesthetic artifacts from their context and their diversion into context of one's owns to design devise I identified with their technique of the derive an engaged but indeterminate passage through public spaces a cycle geographical drift for its ability to map how the built environment particularly public spheres affects the emotions and behavior of individuals I just found this recently this quotation that I was kind of amused by in 1924 Winston Churchill said there is no doubt whatever about the influence of architecture and upon human character in action we make our buildings and afterwards they make us they regulate the course of our lives there has been a long-standing threat of recognition that the way people live their lives is directly linked to the designed environments in which they live whether the explicit intention to influence behavior drives the design process architectural determinism or whether the behavioral consequences of design decisions are only revealed and considered as part of a post occupancy evaluation or by social scientists or psychologists studying the impact of a development there are links between the design of the built environment and our behavior both individually and socially in my sculptural practice I have continued to explore how forms of spatial organization evolve into naturalized forces within the urban environment curiously I've been very reluctant to become involved with public art until recently and it was not an opportunity that I actively saw but I'll return to public art later on I investigate public spaces recreational buildings transportation centers and cities undergoing mass urbanization for example this is a really old lucky me draws upon the image of a roulette table that a commissioner was in the process of seizing during a period in history when gambling was illegal casinos as places for gambling delineate a connection between behavior and space their physical boundaries completely obscure the routine activities of everyday working life involvement occurs as leisure and during a time when one's basic physiological needs are satiated the participant independently and voluntarily selects the game as well as their mode of participation risk and uncertainty are always present and contribute to a cognitive emotional and physical arousal which can symbolically reclaim a sense of mastery over one's destiny for cultural cultural critic Norman Klein the scripted spaces of Las Vegas casinos are the epitome of urban design within a financialized culture he describes the slot machines as turning risk into a consumer thrill yet their main function is statistical control scar the um that's the name of that piece um the form references the game croconel the idea in forming the work is that events cannot always be understood in terms of causal links possibly there are fissures eruptions and then life proceeds from there this is arsenic and lace looking to mass produce puzzles that children play with i wanted to reinvigorate the idea that living is bewildering strange and sometimes wonderful another reading for this work is that the fake pearls are draped across the absent portrait of the precisely cut cardboard frame spin evokes camera apertures and specifically refers to the window treatment of Jean Nouvel's institute of the Arab world in paris thinking about who is shut out and by whom and sonnambulant this work reference the blank walled elevated enclosed walkways in mauled america um other scripted spaces that i'm interested in are spaces of containment prisons furniture architectural forms Michel Foucault speaks about security apparatuses effective security apparatuses is not to impose anything or anyone but instead to select the most favorable elements from the spontaneous behaviors of a given population and then shape an environment to optimize them still further until the very predominance excludes unwanted traits outright repression continues to exist but it is reserved for dangerous elements that could perturb the system for this group of work i considered what constitutes regulatory apparatuses i was not familiar with the people's mic or the human microphone until the occupy movement it is a means for delivering a speech to a large group of people where people gathered around the speaker repeat what the speaker says thus amplifying the voice of the speaker without the need of amplification equipment it was first used by the anti-nuclear movement in the united states during the 70s and 80s so as to make sure that a speaker's every word can be tested in one in one's own body i strive to assemble works that touches one physically through tenuous idiosyncratic assemblages abstraction enables my constructions to embody an act of uncertainty the work does not necessarily represent specific urban spaces or buildings but denotes a gesture that responds to the social dynamic that plays out in each space and how we comprehend through the surface materials we experience my work keeps the connections to us reference informal and material threads i want the viewer to have this uncanny sense of knowing what the forms refer to without being able to name them the production value of the objects is kept low through an emphasis on everyday materials and construction materials i prefer to engage in the production of three-dimensional objects in a modest quotidian and non-celebratory way i value the non-specialness of my materials they are everyday building materials we tend to think of these materials relevant to their ability to become something else and overlook their aesthetic properties what i like about these materials is that their meaningfulness comes out of a relation between their aesthetic properties their general use and specific applications for instance you cannot delete any of these qualities from your understanding of a two by four the universalizing characters of the architectural references that are drawn in my work are cast into doubt by the fragility of the building materials and the incongruity of their design it is essential that the industrial logic of production be revealed through the use of prosaic objects that are almost exclusively manufactured to be concealed when the construction process is complete i see them as a supporting cast necessary but overlooked objects existing for no other reason than to play a support role in the execution of the assembly logic of modern building technology i explore these quotidian objects in their most raw and utilitarian form to create idiosyncratic and tenuous assemblages gene randoff is a psychoanalyst cultural theorist critic art writer and performer describes the phenomena that arises from and defines the exigen exigencies of capitalist production as a blueprint for human activity or the technological ethos it is with this ethos in mind that i pilfer in glorious objects to engage with what i perceive as loose ends and exectrances in insecticities in the forms that define social convention as gene randoff states if the arts do not insist that technology be perceived as a found object malleable revisable unfinished culture will have abdicated its power okay um this is like one of donald jugg's works from 1984 where he referred to one thing after another as essential for minimalist work to reveal its logic of assembly it is almost impossible for a viewer to fail to understand how a work constructed according to the principle has been made he had made he had his works made in a factory in order to obtain a perfect finish without having to rework the material in this way the minimalist module can essentially be seen as a means of ensuring legibility avoiding this kind of certitude my work offers an interaction where an inherent part of the reading of the work is the subjectivity with which it is constructed where the provisional indifferent mutable construction borders on the observe and interrupt and interrupts legibility this is um cloistered and um the physical partitions function to reinforce social economic and professional hierarchies the image that i was actually looking at um was a cafeteria they're the cafeteria partitions that were designed by frank geary for the kondinast headquarters this is um this work is like a tiny proscenium is made from blue polystyrene and a cardboard canopy wood grain curtain panels are stitched together with a chain that is usually attached to your bathtub plug the wood laminate leans on the foam rather than hang suspended from above knowing the weight of the laminate we know we understand that the canopy cannot take the weight the private space behind is suspended in anticipation this one's called world traffic and while making world track traffic i discovered how extensive the theoretical writing is on airports i'm interested in how entry into an airport is an entry into a non-place where you relinquish control of subjectivity on one level airports can operate as buildings that facilitate escape an escape however whose terms of engagement are dependent on gender race class and which passport you're carrying i was interested in the way the wing shape informed architectural decisions worldwide from the inception of air travel modernist architects made the metaphorical connection between airflow airspeed the streamlined section of the wing and the determinants of functional design at the entrance to the airport there's a certain level of finish and architectural attention but as you proceed further into the airport as you lose more and more of your rights and your personal freedom it becomes bereft of any design humphrey osman primarily known for his research into interesting and useful applications for psychedelic drugs also explored aspects of the psychology of social environments he began a line of research into what he called social architecture to improve patient settings coining the terms social fugo and social petal to describe spaces which drive people apart and together respectfully our airports are often among the most social fugal spaces this project lucy house started when i saw a project that royal studio built in mason's ben alabama their challenge was to build low income housing using surplus carpet to carpet tiles they devised a technique to layer the tiles so that when compressed they form the walls of the house this work is lift and it is in it's informed by kibbutz's drawing of a house intended to be mass produced of inexpensive standardized materials the structure consisted of six slender pillars standing on a broad flat base and supporting two other floors or areas that may be interpreted as an upper floor and a flat roof the stories are connected by a free standing minimal staircase the ground floor is raised on six blocks this is a movable feast a can a pellegrino pellegrino can holds the components in their spatial position although fixed for the moment it still relates the object to instability and informality the use of these items for everyday life embeds the reference to social reality into the symbolic poetics of the object it is provisional or does it belong to the object the precarious moments within their making are revealed alongside architects and other artists i became interested in projects that focused on informal economies and modes of living self-organized communities in urban areas of developing countries in the global south at the time i was able to travel to um several south american countries the interest in informality was premised on the assumption that models of urbanism based on modernism had failed interestingly the term precarity has surfaced in recent years in both academic and activist circles to describe the unique conditions of employment specifically the prevalence of part-time work temporary contracts self-employment the absence of union representation and at the most abrasive edge of precarity informal work by undocumented migrants in a neoliberal economy by contrast to classic forward disemployment conditions where you had the same job for life a stable identity rooted in one's permanent employment pierre bourdeux a socialist anthropologist and a philosopher refer referred to precariousization of employment as a mode of domination of a new kind based on the creation of a generalized and permanent state of insecurity aimed at forcing workers into submission into the acceptance of exploitation precarity in art is political in that it signifies a kind of resistance through its very form rather than exclusively through its content it is not to be confused with something immaterial or ephemeral rather it signals a fundamental lack of stability and this indeterminacy is part of the structure of the work um and some of the definitions around precarity that relate to art is that the work is conceived without an end in mind into relationship between the viewer and the object held by a doubtful tenure precarity is a tactic to open up a space for questioning and to respond to a dominant culture that cananizes that which is stable complete fixes a means to corral and contain difference this precariousness is based on alternative forms of spatial organization and on a spatial concept that links the understanding and experience of space with a subject's agency recently my focus has shifted from actual spaces spaces that propose social conventions to areas where precarious alternate structures of power lie in seeming opposition to this existing hegemony that something like architecture or social spaces and cities is precarious implies that its future is hinged on unknown conditions that are neither certain nor stable favelas burials are communities that are built and organized from the ground up we're buildings and public spaces are founded on principles of assemblage and alternate social organization this research informed a body a work that focused on the seams where internal economic and social systems collide through this indeterminacy i question what is suggested embodied and represented in our constructed environments it is a challenge to the integrity of constructed space a means to destabilize a to destabilize singular readings and question his power to regulate this was a project we recognize the contemporary art gallery beginning in the eighties with an exhibition in an unsanctioned church in Rome I have actually sought opportunity to exhibit in spaces that did not conform to the white white cube the challenges allow for possibilities that would not have occurred otherwise um Godford Semper a founder of modern architectural theory is known for theorizing the relationship between structural and representational concerns through the idea of tectonics in his book style in the technical and tectonic arts he argues that architecture's most fundamental fundamental task is to resist gravity and that is primary aesthetic goal is to represent symbolically the drama of this internal struggle for Semper architecture possesses a visual language of structure that is purely symbolic and entirely independent of material conditions through the deployment of new technologies buildings that appear to defy gravity entirely emerge in the form of spectacular gestures that are so complicated that one loses all sense of structural integrity I view this as a resurgence of ornamentation based on material developments and technical agility where ornamentation is integral to a building's construction and is not based on external references as a movement to substitute standardization with the celebration of the unique according to how I've defined my practice through process experimentation gesture that responds to the social dynamic that plays out in space and precarity and precarity you can foresee the challenges that public art presents um so I'll talk about one of a project that I did with have your campbells and we worked on this project for the Richmond Olympic Oval the project was sponsored by the city of Richmond to create an integrated art design landscape piece that would operate as an integral component to a larger art and landscape experience across the entire Richmond Olympic Oval site our site was along the bank of the Fraser River between a walkway in the Oval it sparked our interest for we observed that the path was heavily used but provided no reason for people to stop and enjoy the space it kind of resembled a conveyor belt for efficiently moving people along site works responds to the fact that unlike the other two arms of the Fraser River the middle arm was not industrialized due to its relatively shallow depth accordingly the iconography of the project is an abstraction of the geological processes of the middle arm of the Fraser River the the deposition of alluvium as well as the inexorable slow downstream flow of material and accumulation in the form of logs and debris along the water's edge the project is comprised of four main elements a long low alluvial concrete wall and three viewing platforms the 385 foot alluvial wall is oriented along the edge of the pedestrian walking path mimicking the deposition of the pattern of alluvium and prospectively distorting the measured the measured distance as it diminishes gradually in both height and width over its entire length and then the viewing platforms are oriented perpendicular to the walking path and have been constructed to reflect the decretion of material that accumulates along the riverbank each of the three platforms bridge river and shore have been oriented to focus on the component parts of the middle arm of the Fraser River so and then um this this was um the project that Elizabeth mentioned called second date that i when i was invited by the vancouvert gallery um it's kind of an interesting it is public art but yet it's like exhibiting within a gallery and it's a much more it's kind of interesting because you know of the duration it's only there for like four months or six months or whatever unlike there's so much pressure with public art over you know that it's going to last forever or at least 25 years so in two in 2011 i was invited by the vancouvert gallery to propose a project for this offsite location beside the Shangri-La this architectural space is of special interest as the surrounding forms embody our relationships with societal power as well as expressions of the industrial logic invested in the material production that underwrites our society i recalled an image that depicted a luxury high-rise apartment in i can't find the image so it might have been in Rio or could have been in Sao Paulo i can't quite remember the location was particularly egregious as it bordered alongside a large favela each floor contained a single apartment with a swimming pool on its balcony in order to ensure sunshine for each floor at the balcony supporting the pools were staggered on the face of the building studio gang used a similar strategy to provide premium views for their aqua tower project in chicago so with this architectural in mind i built this model for second date the programs used to design the buildings are referred to would have been algorithmic in conception i disrupted the process by maintaining the regular hand cut edges in the machine fins the mirrored surface proposes a psychological and physical form of spatialization that is at once open to all and uniquely privatized this is a slide of users that actually meet so the viewer in this project were encouraged to participate but at the same time understood that their participation is not entirely necessary and then there's more a couple more images okay so public art funding through civic programs ensures that there are artworks included within new architectural developments yet these projects are often viewed as primarily cosmetic in contrast to the logic and construction methods that create architecture i propose deceptively simple architectural or simple sculptural gestures that reorient our perception of urban space and simultaneously work against the imperative to stand to standardize our built environment and the proliferation of the seemingly unique that belies us very logically so it's currently well it shouldn't be currently because it's supposed to be finished but it's not i'm working on a project in richman for a senior residence owned by koanis so the more i looked at the plans i realized that this public art space is really not intended for residential space or for residential use there are many more there are many kind better alternatives within the development and only the rare individual individual would choose to sit amongst the fumes and enjoy the traffic sounds so this space is not about providing outdoor living for the residents the space has several access points and they're all fire exits um so um so this is um like i'm now working with an architect because i'm really only interested in the conceptual stage and then i'd just like to walk away from the whole process which doesn't make you popular necessarily but um so this is how the project has kind of evolved um and interesting are you things have been flipped a little bit because the piece originally that i envisioned that would be cast in concrete was going to be like prohibitively expensive so we flipped it around and so what was originally going to be made in wood is now concrete but i'm kind of fine with in fact i thought it was probably a better solution that's the one thing that's fun about public art is you get to work with lots of different people sometimes they have better idea often they have better ideas than you so um so this public art opportunity is on the east side of the development far away from where residents enter and exit from the buildings so and i wanted to resist the kind of anality that historically frames decisions with respect to a senior's residence and then here i think there's some architectural renderings and um what the pieces are kind of looking like now at first of all i was in trouble because they were convinced that everyone was going to think this was a blade like like some kind of like weapon but we seemed to have we've seemed to got that one by um okay so um the work is so the work is oriented yeah so the work is oriented to address the residents on the inside and on the second and on the second story outdoor area and on yeah on the second story there is a really quite nice outdoor area so the the tips you'll they'll see the tops and um so um with public art you're continually challenged by formulaic solutions that the city and the developers adhere to and that do not address the particular conditions of the site the city of richmond has agreed to pull the trees to the edges and to clump them rather than you know how they like in the city to evenly space them and leaving the space in the middle open to kind of a wilder raw kind of garden with year round experience that that it will have potentially evolve through the seasons with color texture and form so okay so i explore aspects of architecture that go beyond function and the generation of spaces it is the possibility of rethinking built forms as symbols and models of organization and the body meant a political demand that interests me can i get rid of at least one of these so if anyone has any questions we're just going to pass hi elisabeth thanks thanks for your talk um i have a question about color sorry about the color oh and and my question is i guess how do you how do you make those decisions and how do you see them functioning in relation to the structures that you're building because i would suggest that your choices are quite i was going to say eccentric but subjective and how does that come about in relation sorry to the structures well they're subjective in that whatever i'm thinking about it in terms of the the spaces or the architectural reference that they definitely have reference to what i'm referring to in order to conceptualize the work and i mean it's interesting that i um don't really mix my colors i rely on benjamin moor quite heavily and um because um i used to think and i'm you know elizabeth's influence is coming through but i used to always apply color so that it there was no evidence of me as if i was painting a wall you know what you try to do as perfectly as possible so i was really thinking very much in terms of architecture but more recently i have been uh interested in in my presence like leaving my mark and like this is a fairly recent piece and you can see like there's some really nice brushstrokes in there so i'm learning to paint i i noticed just to follow up for example in the off-site maquette you had one color on the ground on the water where the water is and then in the actual final version my memory is the it you shifted it to yellow and yeah i what would lead to those kind of decisions um i mean for i've been quite interested in works that are sort of acidic and colors that are acidic and so yeah i can't you know i to be perfectly honest i can't actually remember why i made the ship but it was it was driven by the ideas around of the kind of of that particular space why i made the ship from the orange to the yellow it was it was a pathetic there was like you know a reason i have a question about the the forms that you use in your work and um how you arrive at them and whether or not there's elements of perspective or like perspective perspective space that inform the shapes that come up even in this in this one here it seems like it references depth or some sort of architectural space well they're always referring back to i think pretty much definitely referring to used to be more so to a particular architectural space but i'm not so much interested in that maybe anymore but i'm more i have things as i've been quite obsessed with prisons and different ways of containment and so um and then by um first i i use perspective quite a bit because i my um sculptures are really the right low relief and so um using perspective is a is a great tool in order to manipulate the space but it's not using perspective in any kind of you know two point or three point way it's kind of it's invented but it takes for me to figure out the pieces that they're built many times starting with the drawings and then moving to cardboard and then they often um they'll be in quite a few different scales in the studio before they can make sense for me did that answer your question yeah thanks i have question landed thank you for that talk um it's interesting where you decided to start for instance you didn't start with a lot of the objects that i've known in the past that had like styrofoam or tin off the side of a building type of things where you really seem to always have a lot of really privileged the um sort of unusual building material so that people always look twice when they're at Windsor plywood again or that that kind of thing often was very influential i think in my experience of your work early on but tonight you decided to start the talk with a narrative about columbia making sure that we didn't enter the work thinking formally that you you brought a very strong very heavy sort of narrative of people and distress and complicated um relationships to an underpass as an architectural or urban form why do you think that that kind of narrative beginning of a talk which serves i think to derail us from thinking of your work formally or in terms of any kind of formalist discussion might be useful um yeah no it's a definite strategy because it's really sometimes in the past i found it's really easy to oh yeah um yeah step in and obviously it was a definite strategy because um sometimes in the past i felt when i've given a talk that it's really easy to just try to pigeonhole the work is only it was being purely formal which for me it's it's not you know it's about all of these other ideas and so i thought it was kind of a more honest way that it might kind of what the way that i really approach the work which isn't necessarily obvious to the viewer when they come at it cold though i have to say i'm always like pleasantly surprised that when people actually are standing i mean there's one thing to look at sculpture up there and another thing to stand in sculpture in a gallery and people are pretty amazing in what they do understand when they're actually physically standing in front of the work yeah i mean you know when you give a talk you try all different strategies hello um thank you for your talk i had a question about uh your material choices and you had mentioned halfway through your talk about the uh aesthetic of materials being overlooked often because of their function or the way that you use everyday materials because they have sort of multiple layers and um there's a narrative i guess that goes along with that and my question is how important is it to you that someone say viewing the work kind of on formal terms sees the connection between um where those materials are derived from or or perhaps the reference for site or location and use does that make sense um so how like you're wondering how important to me is that that a person reads the materials as like a two by four or they read it as a piece of plywood that and and how you kind of go about making that decision i mean is it important for you that the materials are viewed as building materials or if it's or if it's more about their aesthetic qualities um no it's important that they're viewed as as everyday materials and that these are the kind of materials that i think as i said that are normally hidden or used in multiples you know like you know if you see plywood it's you know when it's brought out of the building site you know it's brought in by the crane you know they're they're bringing it in whereas i'm using it kind of lovingly and very kind of carefully um in a singular way so so i'm kind of interested in in uh yeah breaking apart those kind of notions because i think it's maybe it's symbolic of like other things within our within our culture like if we have the same kind of care and attention to lots of things that we just sort of take for granted or like yeah so that's that's that was part of the early rationale why i started to use the building materials but you get you know it's really with like with everything in art making you're so particular about like every kind of decision so now it becomes like very particular about i mean i fell in there's a you know the maple ply what is it i think i oh it's a baltic birch that wins or ply wood that artists have been using quite a bit and it's really nice because of it's doesn't have a lot of grain like it's pretty so you get very particular but depending on the piece of what kind of grain you want even you know and like i was looking at someone's work today and i think i asked you about your plywood your source of plywood because i saw oh yeah the the gridded paintings because like i'm really want that kind of plywood you have they caught my eye you know because they're the piece that i want to cut out next i want that kind of because it and you'd found it in the back lane but it has uh it's it's red it's kind of reddier and it and it kind of seems rougher like it has a less finished yeah so it's all kind of everything has a very particular decision and even with the painting you know like if it's and i know this is like so obvious for a painter but for for me to have to start to think about it you know if it was like if i was using a stain or if it had glossy or if it's flat you know like all those those are really quite important for me building like kind of building elements that i have to think about no like occasionally i make one because it just makes sense about the drawing or whatever but originally like when i went when i went to school like a little while ago um there was a very particular way about how sculpture was taught and sculptured and there was all these rules and so i kind of methodically went through breaking all the rules and one of the rules was that sculpture had to be in the round you could not so i didn't understand and and the color didn't need there was just i mean it was just ridiculous so at first you know i had the wall the wall i sighed a little work up to the wall and i wouldn't even like screw it in or take the liberty i felt that it wouldn't be called sculpture if it actually couldn't be free like freestanding on its own which is like it's so bizarre like so many so but then i i found that once that i kind of sidled the sculpture up to the wall that the wall then started to be this kind this like the picture plane and and because the sculptures always read a little bit like drawings it just it increased my vocabulary and also having the picture plane of the wall to play against it really increased the prospect the ability to use the perspective in the work so yeah my preference it does seem to be to still to use the wall they they used to be really big they used to be you know quite quite large and i couldn't make them small and it was sort of a nuisance to tell you the truth um and they were always falling down and and and then i i i don't know i just learned i wanted to have a scale there's something more it's like ridiculous but when you're making really really big sculptures really limits where they can go or who even can actually have them right so i wanted it to be more democratic in a way and not limited that so yeah they are quite small now or medium size so yeah i should try to make a big one again hi um yeah actually my question follows up the last question about scale mostly in terms of public art in opposition to pieces that are in a gallery space it seems like they obviously scale changes a lot of things and it seems like some of your pieces in the gallery seem a little bit more flimsy and fragile and kind of um you know they're kind of balancing and you talked about i don't know if you talked about the ephemeral but about some things like that indeterminacy and it seems like in your public art pieces these things are not as present or something has changed would you agree or or what has changed or what changes between those two kind of scales well i think the one at the vancouver art gallery still managed to appear not as um not not flimsy you know you disagree it looks solid oh yeah it was just gator board yeah yeah and if you were standing in front of it you could see um because the way that when i cut the model in the studio with just a knife that was all translated into the gator board so it wasn't machined or anything it had the look as if i'd just been at the site carving it with you know my little knife it's pretty difficult given the limitations of public art within north america to make anything that really is flimsy because they just they just won't they won't fly right but then does your approach changes or does it's just not really not because like i'm really spoiled i make i put the idea together and then i walk away and my partner's an architect it becomes his problem and and then um the vancouver art gallery introduced me to these amazing people local people who actually built built the piece um i mean i i work closely but they actually machined it the piece that was installed at the shangra law and they're working they're actually making the project for richman as well and um they actually are all architects but they actually prefer to to make things and it's actually it's pretty amazing to work with them because they try to get into they don't try to impose upon you the right way to do things they try to figure out what you were thinking about and why you made those kind of decisions so yeah i'm not sure i would be interested in public art if i had to take it from beginning to end some people do things better than me you know i didn't show all the public art projects that i haven't won i only showed you the successful ones any other questions for elspeth thank you for your off the hook thanks so much elspeth


Hey, so I'm audible right? Yeah, I think it's perfect. Awesome. So yeah, basically, I just wanted to start off with setting some expectations about this talk. So this is going to concentrate more on the why instead of the how. Hence, this will probably not be a very technical talk. Also, this is kind of a evolving talk. So as things proceed, things may change over here as well. With that, yeah, I think joy pretty much covered up everything about me. So yeah, let me let me start with that. So this, you can pretty much use that report of this book called implementing service level objectives. That's where I got this idea of this talk from and lots of ideas which I discussed over here, right? They are discussed at depth in the book itself. Right, so with that, let me set stage for this thing. So when we talk about SLIs, we are talking about service level indicators. So after that SLO is service level objectives SLAs are service level agreements, right? Have you noticed something interesting over here? The term service keeps popping up, right? So what do we mean with this term service over here? But to define this service, I'll first have to define a user. So for the purpose of this, I'm going to define a user as a user is anything or anyone that relies on a service. Yeah, so I think this is where we left off like service level indicators, service level objectives, service level agreements. The term services is very common over here. So what do we mean by service? So, yeah, to define a service, first I define a user. User is anything or anyone that relies on a service being a paying customer or an internal user or another service also can be a user in this case. With that in mind, a service is any system that not users. That's how I would define a service for this talk. So what we offer to our customers is a service, right? They give us money and we provide them some infrastructure as a service. In the next slide, let's try to explain how to think about these services. So reliability means not just availability, but also many other measures. Such as quality, dependability and responsiveness. The question, is my service reliable? Is pretty much the same as asking the question, is my service doing what the user needed to do, right? So the first truth is, yeah, I'm going to take it in terms of like three different routes. So the fourth truth is a proper level of reliability is the most important operational requirement of a service. The second truth, how we appear to be operating to our users is what determines whether we are being reliable or not. It's not about how things look from our end. It's what the customer sees that matters the most. It doesn't matter if we can point out zero errors in our logs or perfect availability of our metrics or incredible uptimes. If I use being reliable, then they are not. Third truth, nothing is perfect all the time. So a service also doesn't have to be perfect all the time inside. Not only is it impossible to be perfect all the time, but the cost in both financial and human resources, as we keep closer to perfection, is very, very steep. Luckily, it turns out that our software doesn't have to be 100% perfect all the time either. Unless, yeah, unless it's like a very system critical, hard pacemaker or something like that. But that's not what I'm going to be concentrating mostly on here. So then how do we manage this situation? How should we think about the truth side? So what I want to do is introduce people to this reliability style. Reliability is the most important requirement of a service. It's okay not to be perfect all the time. Hence, we need a way to think about these truths. We have limited resources to stop. Be it financial, human or political. And one of the best ways to account for these resources is why what is called a liability stuff. And the basic liability stuff is service level indicators or epilogists. So let me start there. An SLR is a measurement that is determined over the property of a service. What this means is an SLR means any metric of a property or service which can be measured. And I measure measures or service from the perspective of our users. It might represent something like if someone can load a web page quickly enough. People like web pages that load quickly, right? But also things don't have to be instantaneous. But that's what I mean is most of the pages, they have that thing where you can click and expand into like more information about whatever is initially presented to you, right? So in that case, a good SLR would be the initial presentation and like how quickly things are brought up, the initial things are brought up. The things which expand and then they can be filled up later, right? So, yeah, that's what I wanted to convey at this point. SLR is more often to use useful if it can result in a binary good or bad outcome for each event. That is to say either yes, the service did what the user needed it to do or no, the service did not do what the users needed it to do. And this is the reason why. Once we have a system that can turn an SLR into a good or bad value, we can easily determine the percentage of good events by dividing it by the total number of events, right? So, yeah, this is why it's important. So, to drive the point home, here's an example for let's say 60,000 visitors to any website in a given day, we are able to measure that 59,982 of those visits resulted in a page loading time within two seconds. And here's how we end up over there. So, you take the measurements of those good events and divide them by the total number of events and you'll get this ratio which will always be less than 1. And you multiply it by 100 and you get this percentage of 99.97% of good events, right? So, yeah, after getting our SLRs, we can climb the next ladder which is SLRs. So, the SLR is the proper level of reliability targeted by the service. So, what I mean over here is let's say we continue with our example, right? Let's say we didn't hear any complaints about the day when we had that 99.97% of page load. So, we could infer that users are happy enough as long as we are hitting that 99.97% metric. So, in this case, the SLR, right? That 99.97% that figure. And what do we mean by error budget? So, an error budget is a way of measuring how SLRs perform against our SLRs over a period of time. It depends on how underlives are permitted to be within that period and serves as a signal of when we need to take a corrective action. So, I think it's clear so far. I'll take that as... We do not have any questions right now related to this particular talk. I'll just take you to, but I think, yeah, we haven't received any burning questions. I had a question on SLRs. What do we do when the SLRs are dependent? So, in this specific case, you said the page loads within two seconds are not. A number of bad events by a number of all events. What if page loads are not necessarily entirely in our hands, for example. But there may be other SLRs that are more out of our hands. For example, in the case of payments, there'll be customers that don't want to make a payment. They initiated a payment. What if the SLR is not under your hand? I didn't understand that. So, the service level indicator we took was, okay, page loads within two seconds are not. But the customers that are loading these pages may be on a 2G connection. And as a consequence, does it change in any way? Does it change how I approach my SLR in any way? Not clearly, because you take decisions based on the SLRs. So, how you form that SLR is completely under your control. You keep taking into account the fact that SLRs are not something under your control. So, when you derive SLRs, you can have a standard operating procedure where you say, okay, if we are over a critical level of whatever, this is what needs to be done. And that may be going and talking to the third party. Or if you are given a way to tweak that, you can tweak that. Or just it can also be just informing them saying that, hey, we noticed that these were the number of bad events and we didn't expect them to be there or something like that. So, SLR is just an indicator. It indicates whether things are good or bad. It can be something which you are in control of or it can be something which is a third party is in control. I'll give you an example. So, latencies, when I talk about latencies, I'm talking about let's say as a home user. I'm trying to talk to AWS and there is latencies of it. Suddenly, there is a spike. I do anything personally about that. But it's still better to know that that is the reason why and that latency of better is the reason why my returns are being bad or something like that. So, SLR is just an indicator. It's an observation. What you do with an observation is you can take like a connective action or you can inform other people or you can manage your customers as well. So, when a customer comes and complains, you can say like, hey, this is the third party. We've informed them and take it from them. Did that make sense? More curious like when I'm setting my SLO, the variance in the SLI that I have at hand for whatever reason, the SLI of number of payments completed makes sense. For example, an SLI of number of transactions completed versus number of transactions total makes sense. But the variance over there may be too high for me to easily set an SLO. Because Let's do one thing. I probably need to ask you more questions to come up with like a more logical answer. So, you want to ask this question towards the end? Yep. Cool. So, error budgets, you can, yeah. Some of the answers you'll probably also find later on in this presentation as well. Right. Next, I wanted to like drive home a quick differentiation between this error SLAs and SLOs. So, an SLI is very similar to an SLO, but differs in few key ways. SLAs are business decisions that are written into contracts with paying customers. And SLO is a target percentage we use to help us drive decision making. While an SLI is usually a promise to a customer that includes compensation of some sort if we don't hit our targets. SLOs should always be higher than SLAs, please some amount of margin between you start paying your customers. So, the main differentiation over here is SLAs are something which you will have with a third party or like your paying customers. SLO is something which you'll have internally. SLAs is something which your lawyers will draft and it'll be like a written agreement kind of SLOs are something which you're meant to be tweaking. So, as in when situation and things change, your SLOs will change. Since lawyers are involved, SLAs, it's kind of hard to change the values for us. So, as engineers or people who are looking at metrics and things like that, I think we should mostly be concerned with SLOs rather than SLAs. So, like a quick recap. A good SLI can also be expressed meaningfully in a sentence that all stakeholders can understand. For example, 95% of our requests to a service will be responded with the correct data within 40 milliseconds. So, something which can be very clearly defined in a single sentence. SLOs target for how often we can fail or otherwise not operate properly and still ensure that our users are meaningfully upset. So, yeah, there's some extra information I'll give about error budgets. There are two very different approaches we can take in terms of calculating error budgets, which is event-based error budget and time-based error budgets. The approach that is right for us will lastly depend on the productivity of the data available, how our systems work and even personal preference for that model. If it approaches eight to figure out how many bad events we might be able to incur during a defined error budget time limit without our user base becoming dissatisfied. Time-based approach focuses more on the concept of bad time intervals, also called bad minutes. So, I see people having difficulty grasping this second concept, right? So, I thought that I'll spend some time defining this second concept. So, time-based approaches. So, here also, let's take an example. Let's say we have a 30-day window and our SLOs say our target reliability is 99.9%. This means we can have 0.1% failure or bad events over those 30 days before we exceed our error budget. However, we can also claim this as we can have 43 bad minutes every month and still meet our target since 0.1% of 30 days is approximately 43 minutes. Either way, what we are saying is the same thing, right? We are just using different implementations of the same philosophy over here. So, what is the point of all of this? So, if you say error budget means shift more features. So, if you are not hitting your error budget, that allows you to concentrate more on shipping features or doing something else and if you exceed your error budget, you have to focus more on reliability. So, basically, you can use your error budget to take decisions. Things to keep in mind, SLOs are just data, right? Don't treat that as gospel or don't use SLOs as something which is written in stone. SLOs are not a project. It's like a evolving thing. Once you set your SLOs, you will probably want to iterate over it. Take over like a half-year period or whatever and iterate over your SLOs, see what went bad, what was good about it. If you want, you can tweak it because everything is iterative, right? Like, iterate over it, which is the most important aspect. The world will change. So, your SLOs will also have to change and evolve along with the world because in the end, we are indirectly interacting with humans. The preferences will change. Maybe your preferences will change. The way you interact with your customers will change. So, just keep that in mind and whatever you are monitoring or whatever you are measuring, right? Even that has to change based on the same, because of exactly the same factors. Quality is a meaningful SLI, right? It can be easy for us to get caught up with our day-to-day lives and quarterly OKRs or various other business needs while forgetting what it is that our service actually needs to do, right? It might also end up being a side effect of linking a user's primary focus. If you make your primary focus, invariably, you will end up with happier users, right? Thinking in this paradigm might not be easy. Initially, we will probably get some resistance from our engine side. That is something which I wanted to point out. If we can develop meaningful SLIs, the only reason we have to wake up someone at like 3 a.m. in the morning or whatever is when our SLIs are not performing correctly, develop good SLIs. Our engineers have a single thing to point out in order to determine what constitutes an emergency. So, basically, if something is led, then it's an emergency. I'll go ahead and pick up other people in the middle of the night. Or if it's green, then no, it's not. Or if it's something yellow, then hopefully there is some documentation which the engineer can look at and figure out what to do because everyone is going to be groggy and easy at 3 o'clock in the middle of the night. Right? Because our engineering organization can now better align with our product, business, and QA organization. Because everyone is going to be on the same page, right? Everyone is going to speak in the same language. So, which is invariably going to lead to a happier business. This is something which I've seen happen like over a period of time. So, if you bring everyone about, everyone is trying to speak in the same language, then it just ends up being that the business is happier because Indian business also is people. Yeah, there's a reason why I put up all of these questions in the same slide. We need to be collecting at least six metrics so that they can be analyzed and examined by us when needed. However, not all of these metrics help inform in a meaningful SLI directly. Even if we have many things to measure, we can often get meaningful SLIs by measuring only a few of them. Let's start with a question at the bottom of the list. Are the payloads of the responses actually being requested? It turns out that if we can figure out a way to measure this, we are also measuring, are the responses in the correct data format? From a user's perspective, we can't possibly be receiving the correct data if the data isn't formatted in the way we expect it to be. And if we know that the data is both the data we need and the data in character, we can also be sure that the responses we are receiving are also and not just errors. If we are also receiving responses at all, we also know that the service is bought both up and available. We are just going from measuring one, measuring five things with just answering that one question. It might be the case that we have to calculate latencies via second metric, but even if that, we are still measuring six things by measuring only two of them. So it doesn't have to be like a very complicated thing. That's what I wanted to share over here. Good SLOs generally have traits in common. If we are exceeding the SLO targets, our users are happy with the state of our service. SLOs have to be reviewed periodically. Are we overachieving or underachieving? This is a question that you have to ask, basically. Problems with being total are... For an example, let's say we have done our due diligence and we have chosen an SLO target percentage of 99.9%. As long as we exceed the target, we are going to be able to do that. 99.9%. As long as we exceed this 99.9% users, 99.9% users are complaining. They are moving elsewhere and our business is growing and doing well. However, let's now imagine that we are routinely being 99.9%, hitting a target of 99.9%. Our SLO is published and discoverable by everyone. We make our target most challenging. In this case, what have we given? This is a question to the audiences. If we change our SLOs from 99.9% to 99.99%, what have we given? Audience, if you want to answer that question, please raise your hand and we can actively participate in the conversation. Or you can ask on YouTube as well. I'll be there. If you want to answer folks on YouTube, please do answer this question. I know what comes in the next slide and that's pretty surprising. This is a great question to try and answer on your end also before you actually see the answer. I do not think someone is... We'll leave it there. By doing so, we have given ourselves fewer opportunities to fail but also fewer opportunities to learn. If we are being too remote, we are missing out on opportunities to experiment, to perform chaos engineering, shipping features quicker than we have before or even induce structure of downtime to see how our dependencies react. In other words, we have given up a lot of ways to learn about our system. This is the trade-off in this case. This is another thing which I've seen people do. There's a problem with the number 9. When people talk about SLOs and SLAs, they often think about these in terms of 9s. The most common numbers we might run into are things like 99% or 99.9% or 99.99%. Even generally are not attainable 99.99% of time. These targets are so common. People often refer to them as just like 2, 9s, 3, 9s, 4, 9s and 5, 9s. This is what it actually means. Hitting these long strings of lines will be more difficult and expensive than people realize. Picking the right target for our service involves thinking about our users, our engineers and our resources. It should be an arbitrary constraint in this way because it will actually be more difficult than you here to hit these kind of percentages if you're just trying to do this right out of the game. What I propose is use this instead. The difference between 99.99% or something similar is often much greater than people realize at first. Start with a comfortable number and go from there. Sometimes it helps to start with a number rather than a percentage. This is what I recommend. Starting off with a number instead of a percentage. Choosing targets, past performances are good way. Now that we have established, we shouldn't try to make our targets too high. How should we calculate that? The best way to figure out how our services might operate in the future is studying how it has operated in the past. This is a very good way just to look at your past and figure out what SLOs you should be setting from there. Before I get to my next point, there's some basic statistics I wanted to dive into. Anyone here knows what these are? I think two of them are easily definable, right? I'll let people guess what all of these five mean. I'll wait for five more seconds and let's see if anyone is able to respond. Let's dive into the definition of each of these terms. Mean is just the term average. I think we all know how to... I think we all know how to talk in terms of average. It's much easier at least for me to talk in terms of average rather than mean. I intuitively figure out what is the average of something and when I have to figure out the mean, I think I have to go through this entire calculation. Medium is the middle number. The point to drive this home is medium of four, one and seven is four because when the numbers are put in order, one, four and seven, between the right parenthesis and the left parenthesis, the number four in the middle is the median because that is the thing which is right in the middle. I have a graph which shows all of these concepts pretty easily. It's the most frequently occurring number. If you take all of these numbers between the parenthesis, two is the more over here because two is the number which happens which occurs more frequently. A bit of practice. When you're dealing with statistics, generally it's a good idea to arrange your values from the minimum to the maximum. Also, this is something which I didn't cover previously. Over here, out of those five, minimum would be 0.7 and maximum would be 21 in this data range. I already made a slide to point that out. This is what I meant. I wanted to write this point home and a friend of mine helped me make this slide for me. This is a graph of 100 data points over, I think, 10 minutes. Mean is the average number found by adding all the data points and dividing the number of data points. In this data, we know that minimum is 10 and maximum is 99. The average duration of the 10 minutes of data we analyzed was 53.19. This can help us pick better thresholds. If you look at your me, you can probably figure out where your threshold should be in a better way. Medium is the number found by ordering all the data points and picking out the number and picking the number in the middle. For example, like you see over here, if there are two numbers in the middle, then what you do is you take the average of them. I think this graph should be labeled in a better way. Anyways, one of those two red lines is 53. The other of those red line is 56. So 53 and 56. So we have to take an average of 53 and 56. That's how we end up with 54.5. So that's how you end up with the median and if there are two values, then if your entire data set has an even number of values, then you'll have two values in between and you'll have to take an average of both of them. Mode is the most frequently occurring number, right? That occurs the highest number of times. When we have two different values occurring at equal frequencies, the data is called multimodal. So in that case, this example would be countered as multimodal. When there are no values which happen more frequently than others, then the data has no more ranges. So the difference between minimum and maximum is called a range. Another important basic statistical concept is the range, which is simply the difference between minimum and maximum. Range gives us a great starting point to think about how varied our data point is, right? Like how spread out you are. This is also a concept I struggle with a lot. I'll take a second. Just give me a second. There's someone at the door and they've been ringing insistently. Pardon folks. I think we haven't walked from home interruption. As always happens with a lot of our workplaces these days. Anyone wants to raise their hand and in the meantime, ask any questions? Okay, Gaurav is back already. Yeah, bye. Yeah, percentiles is also a concept which actually I struggle with. When developing SLOs, percentiles serve a few important purposes, right? They give us more meaningful ways to isolate our outliers than our simple concepts of median scan. We get the same data set and analyze the P90, P95, P99. By P90, I mean percentile of the topmost 90%, the topmost 95% at the topmost 99%. We even have a graph which is coming up next. I particularly learn well visually. This was a concept which I had to spend some time thinking about this. If you are struggling over here, hopefully this graph can help you. When we talk about, let's say, for example, the top 95%ile, this is what the top 95%ile looks like. When you arrange your data in an ascending order, you are talking about only the top 5% because there are 100 data points. The top 5% would be the top 5 data points. It's important to concentrate over here because the ways in which, let's say, you have an SLI of monitoring latencies. If you are concentrating on top 5% or top 10% which is 90th percentile or 95th percentile or something like that, most often that is the largest contributor to your latencies. Serving those kind of problems can help you gain a lot, basically. Is this concept of a percentile clear? I will repeat for five seconds if anyone has questions you can go ahead and ask. How to use error budgets? We have come up with this well-established definition of SLI in a simple error budget, but what's the point of all of this? You can use error budgets to decide whether you want to release new features or not. Beyond just deciding whether new features should be shipped or not, we can also use error budgets to derive the entire focus of our project. If we blow out our error budget, it might mean that we can't release any new features and the entire team has to concentrate on stability instead of just building up instead of the entire project. Basically, you can't release new features. There's something objective which you can point out to. You can say that till my error budget fills up, I will not release any new features. Measuring error budgets over time can create insight into the risk factors that impact our services. For example, the frequency of incidents and the severity also. By knowing what kind of events and failures are bad enough to burn our error budgets, even if momentarily we can better discover what factors are causing most problems over time. What do I mean by this? Let me derive that by an example. By analyzing our error budget over a year, we might determine that approximately one in every five release causes some amount of terrible. This could help point out to the fact that we need a smoother release process for better testing. We can use this as a way of discovering failure modes we may not have been familiar with before. Any kind of experimentation which would bring down the production infrastructure for a known period of time, the key point over here is for a known period of time. Error injection is another great option in this phase. Load testing and stress testing are like a technique to learn more about the reliability and robustness of our system. But they are also by design procedures that can break our services.  This process, of course, works better if you have confidence in our ability to hold back the changes quickly. These are some examples of how to use an error budget if you have some left over. Now, let's say, like, great. Everyone is sold on this idea. You think it's a very good thing and you actually want to implement this in your organization, right? Like, how would you get buy-ins? So, SLOs increase both reliability and feature velocity over time. These are some points you can take back to your engineering team or your engineering team lead or manager or whoever. This will help you convince those people about trying out this experiment in your company. SLOs give engineering license to take more risks and to be subject to fewer launch fund states because engineers and engineers want to ship more features, right? So, if you reduce the amount of constraints with which engineers can ship more or newer features, the happier they will be or they should be done. But the principle exercise of error budget policies make people better software engineers because it creates a real and rapid feedback loop for the users, your product managers. Reliability is the first class feature of product. In fact, it's the most important feature. SLOs will eventually increase the feature velocity of the product because they remove much of the friction from the product release cycle, right? They tend to try in with the engineering thing as well. Modern PRDs or like product requirement documents include user tools. What I mean by PRDs is I'm not 100% sure of. This is just like a point I stole up. I stole from the book, right? Because I'm not a product manager. I don't understand that requirement document very well. But if anyone else over here understands that better, you can enlighten all of us. SLIs are excellent ways to measure and ensure that the user journeys in the PRDs are being monitored and reacted to. So these are some features which you can take back to your product managers just to get some buy-in from them and get them on your side as well. Operations. SLOs and error budget policies put them over and even fitting with the engineers. So you can use SLOs and error budgets to actually bargain when to shift new features versus when to concentrate on stability, right? So it gives some amount of objectivity for operations people as well. SLOs and error budgets also allow operators to remove some of the deployment friction between ACIM, which has been accumulating over some of the OAPDs of yours. Leadership. The biggest objects in senior leadership often most of these people often say that they want 100% customer satisfaction, 100% downtime, right? And I've presented some of the reasons of why 100% uptime or 100% satisfaction might actually be something bad, right? In fact, there's nothing human-made which has like 100% reliability over any reasonable period of time. Also, there is the leadership that we already have buying from all the other teams, right? Which helps to convince the leadership in a better way. This is also a very, very key point which I've seen. When is the first test of this entire process? When we adopt SLOs, the most important moment is not when everyone agrees or when you decide your first targets and policies. The most important moment is the first time you exhaust your budget and need to enforce your policy and see if everyone helps is on board or not. Yeah, this is basically all I have. Awesome, thank you for the talk, Gaurav. I think this sort of should answer the perennial question that we have, right? The understanding of what is DevOps and what is SRE, right? And I guess this is a question I get asked a lot. I think Gaurav also probably would have encountered such questions out in the wild, which is we have started calling everything as DevOps and everything as SRE and there is a weird intermix of the word. But I think this talk clarifies what is SRE. DevOps creates a pipeline to have sensors monitor your applications and get data from them. SRE is what you do with that data. And SRE is about ensuring the inferences derived from the data get pushed back into a feedback look into the whole system. Whether it's an engineering system or just the DevOps pipelines, it doesn't matter. All the inferences from an SRE practice has to get injected back into the org. So I think this sort of clearly defines that boundary between what we consider SRE out in the wild versus what SRE actually is. So yeah, I'll take up a couple of questions that we have on. We have two questions, I think on Zoom. There is one question pending a bit of clarification. I would kindly ask the person to ask again. So Anirudh has two questions, okay. How do you design an SLI that is both user centric and realistic for development? I think this again speaks to that whole, you know, what tradeoff thing, what to trade? Yeah, God of you do want to answer this maybe. What I would say in this case is this is something between which operations and engineers, I guess both of them have to sit and come up with something which works, right? So this is something which is not something which I can point to and say, this is the answer to your question because the answer will be different for different amount of people and it will also depend about what are you trying to monitor, right? Yeah. So the biggest point I can point out to over here is actually as inclusive as possible. If possible, try to get support and even business and sales people also involved when you're defining this kind of an SLI, right? Fixing which everyone thinks is comfortable and move on from there. Of course, this is something which you'll have to look at. I'll give you an example of a user centric SLI which is slightly off-pit, right? Like if your application or your website has accessibility options, right? You can actually track an SLI there on the drop-off rate or how many people who are trying to use your accessibility features, at what point are they facing an issue and at what point, which page are they dropping off, right? Which particular workflow are they dropping off? And then you can set an indicator or a budget on that, right? An SLO on that. That, okay, this particular app should have this much accessibility percentage and then we'll put a barrier there. If it falls below that, we need to, you know, invest from our UX site on accessibility, right? Or even on the UI site, both cases, right? So that's sort of like an user centric SLO that I personally can think of if you want to design it that way. Realistic for development, again, it depends on for that feature. If your current front-end team is capable and invested in building accessibility features, right? So you'd have to make that happen. If you do not have that bandwidth, maybe then you need to reschedule it at the right point of time in your lifecycle, right? But it's, again, you know that it's a trade-off, right? If you do not get it solved, people who need accessibility features are going to drop off from using your site and it sort of, in general, gives the org a bad rib. But that's where you make the trade, right? What sort of user base you're going for and that I think will clarify your decision. Gauram, was that a good analogy, maybe, from user centricity point of view? Look, you're answering questions like a pro, right? Yeah, basically, this was the entire point of this presentation, right? I want other people to answer these, basically come up with answers and see what they think. Because I've seen so many people answer these kind of questions in a different way. I think there is no one right answer. This is basically just meant to get the conversation started, right? One person answers the other person's question. So yeah, what Joy says is right, there is no direct way to figure all of this out, right? This is something which you will have to look at and iterate over time in the sense that when you see too many users dropping off or when you see too many errors or something like that. So again, that has to be a slider which you have to tweak and it's not something which you'll set and forget, it's something which you'll have to tweak. As you correctly said in the talk, it's a constantly morphing sort of metric, right? Each and every SLI and SLI is constantly morphing and aggregating upwards, right? So I think Aniruddh that I hope, you know, Gaurav was able to answer that question and maybe the analogy I made helped. Again, he has also a second question as a tag along. When thinking about spending the error budget to develop a new feature or set of new features, is it better to think about spending in smaller intervals? For example, only allow spending up to the monthly budget instead of the annual budget. Oh, so basically do you sandbox error budgets within a time frame or not? I would answer this question by asking you, how comfortable are you? How comfortable are you with spending your annual error budget at a single period of time? If you're not comfortable, then again, you have your answer. If you are comfortable enough spending that error budget on a single instance, then again, you have your answer. Cool. I think that's a legit answer. See, again, all of these practices are, as I think it's very subjective. It depends on your current bandwidth, your team's maturity, ability to, you know, pay off debt and error budgets. So if you have that sort of a team where you are only able to spend, let's say, monthly error budgets and refresh it the next interval, then go for it. Maybe in a couple of iterations you find out, you know, it doesn't work. Then you reset it back to your larger interval. Maybe you go from monthly to six-monthly blocks, right? And even if that doesn't work, go to, you know, annual intervals or scale it back down the other way. Maybe start with annual and a very large error budget of only, you know, 99.9% uptime.  It's like a game, right? You're just raising your difficulty level as you go, right? But you do not start out at the, you know, hardest difficulty level unless and until you have the best possible gamers, right? That's, I think, an analogy that comes to my mind, that you start off at a made or a low difficulty level and then you increase the difficulty, right? So, yeah. So another thought which I had, like this is a question I've seen other people also ask is start small, both in terms of your spending your error budget and start small in terms of your implementation as well, right? Get everyone to agree on like one single SLO, right? If you say, if people are comfortable enough, you can set multiple SLOs, but don't go overboard as well. So again, the reason I have to be vague over here because the right amount will differ and depend upon different kind of teams. The only advice I can give you is start small and as your confidence matures and as a trust in other people matures, take it to like whatever heights you want to.


Everybody forced here ripping three boxes for Drew are he's got two boxes 2022 absolute baseball hobby and one box of 2022 top Sterling the sterling at the end start with the absolute good luck drew that's exactly right the salary cap is set based on revenue. That's why after the 2020 season and like projected revenue for 2021 the salary cap barely moved and it was like that like ever like you just barely moved a Lot of teams were like a crunch that year wander rookie to 999 nice start Got Carl your strengths get a 149 Drew waters dual Jersey Otto out of 78 78 Eli Morgan rookie dual Jersey Otto to 199 Brian Anderson dual Jersey to 199 Yeah, once you get those new untapped markets Major league baseball is gonna spend everything is major league baseball is not doing so well It's like just because they're not the fastest growing do like every professional sports franchise in the big board is making money Even the NHL got a big ESPN TVB on TNT all that stuff By storm Jonathan India to 99 got Steve Carlton out of 199 Turner Randy Arosa Rainer, Buxton and Lewis dual Jersey six to Sanchez Edward Cabrera to 199 Chronicles Mostly Chronicles is 35 points. Sometimes you get Chronicles has a bunch of different size cards a lot though Colton Welker rookie material booklet signatures to 50 for the Rockies If it's the new Chronicles tomorrow, I truly have no idea. I would assume 35, but I Think Chronicles draft picks. It's not new, but there could be some thicker cards than 35 point for sure Probably are Some 30 or some like 75s It's like last year will be primarily be 35, but there'll be some patch cards as well some potential thicker cards One more absolute for you drew and you'll want to get penny sleeves and top loaders Don't put a card in a top loader without a penny sleeve ever Guys show how tiny to 199 angels Robert Auto manager auto AJ Hinch to 199 Chronicles soccer Curtis Terry rookie dual Jersey auto to 199 Greg Deakman rookie Jersey card to 299 So there's only two there's only two sizes of sleeves. Thankfully, they're standard and there's thick so thick is for like the thicker cards And standard is pretty much like anything from what like 25 up to like 55 pretty much There's sleeves a haul worthy Clayton Kershaw to 99 Brandon loud at 25 Chisholm on the insert Rookie force Jersey card Cal rally to 49 and nice one here one Yippe's to 60 rookie dual Jersey auto book Nice Yippe's Top Sterling now. Good luck drew one box of 2022 top Sterling Standard sleeve in top order be 35 points leave 35 point top. All right got world series champs and Hall of Famers Star Hall of Famers Nice start here a Nolan Ryan dual bat relic auto Number eight of 25. I won the Nolan world series champs Kiko there were 130's God Pedro Martinez triple Jersey auto 10 out of 10 Nice Pedro you go Drew good stuff there for you man a couple of the best pitchers ever That'll do it. We will get those right out to you


Welcome to this edition of Abled in an Air, the one and only program in Vermont and beyond that focuses on the needs, concerns and achievements of the dip in the able. I'm Lauren Seiler. I'm Arlene Seiler. And on this exciting edition, we speak to James Kavanaugh, the creator of the third annual Vermont Civil Policy Conference as part of Green Mountain Support Services. We have Casey Dewey, the development coordinator of Green Mountain Support Services of Vermont. And James or Jim, tell us a little bit about you and your story and why you decided to create the Civil Policy Conference of Vermont. Well, I was born February 20th, 1940, and I'm 75. Wow, you're going to look it.  And my mother and father wanted to put me away, but they said no. And thank God they said, but I cannot read, so I have to read books. Okay, go on. So, and I came up here. You came to Vermont from where you were born and from where you were born? I was born in Connecticut. You were born in Connecticut? Yeah. At first, I could not talk, but my grandfather said, let the kids talk. And they were quite surprised because he said, let the kids talk. And I've been talking ever since, but I think it was very good to be an advocate because I like to help people. How does Green Mountain Services help you? They help me write my own story. They help me speak very clearly, okay? Do they help you become more of an advocate? Yeah. They teach you advocacy skills? Yeah, I know about that. They think they can help me out. What are some of the things the agency does? What are some of the things that they help you with? Well, that we just talked about. They help me get out into the community. So what type of services do they help you in the community with? Well, I get out. And I feed myself. So they teach you daily living skills? Yeah. And I live with my friends. Oh, so you live in an independent living facility? Yeah. I live with him. Do you live in an apartment? I live in an apartment with him. So does Green Mountain Support Services, they teach you daily living skills? Or they teach you how to live on your own? Yeah. Okay. Thanks to Casey. As a matter of fact, I have a book on it. Okay. So we're going to see a little bit about your story. Let's take a look at James Cavanaugh's inspiring story. Let's take a look at this. My name is James Cavanaugh. I was born February 28, 1943. Yeah, I got that one. I need to take over. At this day and age, the mentally disabled were severely overlooked. Jim dealt with a lot of discrimination through his younger years. He never let that get him down, though. This has encouraged Jim to advocate for those with his disability and other disabilities that exist today. In 2014, I wanted to start a survival party. This conference was going to be specifically designated to advocate for those living with cerebral palsy. He reached out to his case manager, Casey Dewey, and explained to her what he would like to do. She started to try to locate where one of these meetings were held. She expanded her search, but still the closest one she could locate were in California and England. She explained this to Jim, and she traveled to Massachusetts where the United Cerebral Palsy Association is located, but no conferences are held there. To meet with one of the groups to see what it would take to start a new conference in their area. I gathered a group of my peers, and I said that I wanted to start a survival palsy conference. They started meeting weekly to discuss the challenges that they were going to have to overcome. The group consisted of other members that have been diagnosed with cerebral palsy also, and other disabilities as well. They brainstormed and planned for about a year, and finally held their first annual cerebral palsy conference. It was a great success, tons of information. And resources, from different doctors to different types of physical and emotional therapy. They also showcased a comedian whom herself lives with cerebral palsy. After the first conference was held, it was agreed that this would be an annual event. Jim has managed to join the many other groups that advocate for cerebral palsy now. The event continues to grow year by year, with it starting at an open local venue, and it has now required larger venues with breakout rooms and meals. I'd like to thank my team for helping me to start my first conference. Living Vermont with the case, his name is Josh Bowles. He's not here right now. Okay, so does the agency help you with support services? Yeah. Okay, so what type of support services do they help you with? Jimmy's very lucky. He has a young man that is his shared living provider. Yeah, would you. And they're really close. Yeah. They have a bachelor pad in town. Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. All kinds of parties. Yeah. Well, sometimes he brings his dog. I have to live with somebody in the city. John Cook. What? So does the shared living provider, do you cook for yourself? No, he does all the cooking. He does all the cooking. Well, I'm watching TV. You watch TV? What type of programs do you like to watch? I like the media. I was watching that today. Oh, wow. And sometimes I listen to the news on the TV. I know this is Jim's interview, but in terms of the conference. Oh, yeah. What type of activities usually happen at the conference? So maybe it would be helpful to know how the conference started. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So Jimmy came to me one day, and he shared with me that one of his lifelong goals was to attend a CP conference and share his story. Yes. And after some significant research, we found that there weren't any CP conferences. No. The closest one I found was in California, and the second closest was in London, England, which I was voting for, but Jim didn't want to go. He didn't want to go on the airplane. I would have gone if somebody had picked me on the plane, and somebody had to go with me. Right. No, I was volunteering for that. But so we decided that we couldn't find a conference close by, but Jim still had a dream to share his story at a conference for cerebral palsy. So we decided to create our own, right? Yep. How long of a time did it take you to research? I mean, I'm sure there was a lot of research involved with that. For which piece? Trying to search out a conference? Yeah, to see, well, in terms of doing venues, like which venue would host you guys? So we did not have a budget for the first conference. A lot of it was generous donations, right? From local businesses. And the first two conferences were held at our local VFW, and they donated the space. VFW is what? Veterans of Foreign Wars. So they donated their space, so that made choosing a venue very easy. And then it's a great space, but it does not have different sections or rooms, so it didn't allow for breakout sessions. And the police made calls. So what we did was we had some presenters come in, but everyone at the conference participated in all of the same breakout sessions, so to speak. And the breakout session is in different workshops that happened during the day. Yep, so the workshops were sort of there for everyone because it's one large room. Now is the conference, is it mainly for staff, providers, or people with cerebral palsy? How is the conference set up? The conference is actually geared toward everyone. Community members interested in learning more about individuals with cerebral palsy. People who have CP, professionals who are helping individuals with CP. It's really for everyone. Anyone could come in. What made you get on board with this? I was Jimmy's service coordinator at the time. And the one thing that we did find was between the first and second conference, we actually tripled in size. Which means what? We went from about 40 people attending the conference to about 120. Wow, that's a lot of people. And that's why this year it's at a bigger venue. So that's why this year we have chosen to go to the Stoflake Resort. Not London, England? No, not London, England. We have a lot, sorry, we have ten breakout session options with spaces. Including ours, because we're going to be doing... Including yours, yep. And we have a lot of exhibitors coming to display different things. Yeah, it's looking like it's going to be a pretty big event. Is it going to be like technology? In other words, like you said exhibitors. So is it going to be like tables with information? And products and that type of thing? Yep. I do have cats in my hair. So do we hope after this conference, of course, there's going to be more conferences scheduled? Is this going to be a yearly? It's an annual event. Yep, it's an annual event. So you... I mean it's not strange, because people start from basically nothing. You started with no budget. Correct. The first one. And then just got an outpouring of support. Yep. From other agencies? Yes, we had a lot of service coordinators coming from other agencies the second year. Other agencies sending people that they serve within their agency to attend. Okay. So it's a Stoleflate Resort, which is a much bigger venue. Yes. It's the third annual Cerebral Palsy Conference. To learn more about the Cerebral Palsy Conference, you can contact Green Mountain Support Services Incorporated. It was GMSSI, right? Support Services Incorporated.org. So that's www.gmssi.org slash CP 2018. It's hosted by Green Mountain Support Services. And it's October 5th. We will be there with camera. We will be having a workshop there. It's located at the Stoleflate Mountain Resort in Stole. It's from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Stoleflate Resort in Stole, Vermont. And it is also sponsored by the Morrisville Cerebral Palsy Group. Again, go to www.gmssi.org forward slash CP 2018. Empowering neighbors with disabilities to be at home in the community. Yeah. We would like to thank you for joining us on this edition of Ableton on Air. But I have two more questions to ask you. One. Obviously there's going to be more Cerebral Palsy Conference. Every year. How do you see, in terms of future Cerebral Palsy Conference? It's going to be as long. Is it going to be just, I mean, will it be more throughout the year, or is it going to be only once a year? Once a year. It'll be in one year. Okay. Well, thank you for sharing your story. It's a wonderful story because you're a very powerful person to know. Yeah. Any questions you want to ask? Okay. We would like to thank you. Thank you, Casey, for joining us on this edition. You're more than welcome to come back. Okay. Okay. Thank you. And again, more information on the third annual Cerebral Palsy Conference. You can learn more at www.gmssi.org, CP 2018. Again, April, October 5th, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Stove Lake Resort. Host of the Baji M. Green Mountain Support Services and the Morris Bill Cerebral Palsy Group. Thank you for joining me on this edition of Abledon On Air. See you next time. Welcome back to Abledon Air. I'm Lauren Seiler. I'm Armin Seiler. Over the last 22 and a half years, I've had the pleasure of being a humanistic journalist focusing on issues of importance to the special needs community, both in New York and in other states. And I've interviewed organizations that are superheroes in their own right. Let's take a look at a culinary segment of superhero proportions. Let's take a look at this. That puts an end to this superhero edition of Abledon On Air. I'm Lauren Seiler. I'm Armin Seiler. See you next time.