for the meal. So they have very graciously offered to have both lunch and dinner with people. So I have a sheet with the lunch and the dinner parts. So sign up for one or the other or both if you are available and I'm just doing that. All right, so I'm going to hand it over to one quick other announcement today. We are going to be starting the regular time. We're not changing the start time, but we are going to be expanding particularly the breaks during the seminars and the little seminars so you have a bit more time to go and get a coffee, that kind of thing. So that will start today. All right. So it is my real pleasure to introduce to you Ashley Farrow-Marie who as you can see is the associate curator of theater and dance at MPEC on the Renssela Polytechnic Institute campus. She has her undergrad in dance from Cornell, right? And her PhD in performance studies from Berkeley. She's also been the Andrew Mellon post-doctoral fellow for curatorial practice at Creative Time in New York. Thank you very much. I worked really hard on that. And really, I mean, I've talked about projects that have come through impact. I think it's an amazing institution. It has a relationship of course with Christopher Donk as well as temporary distortion that I've talked about among others. And we'll be bringing some really important and major artists that that Ashley has commissioned. So I'm excited for her talk and her perspective. She comes at a lot of these issues from the perspective of dance and choreography. And so I think that this week in particular, right, as we sort of start looking at mediated performance in a different way, last week was highly semantic in certain respects and and a lot focused on language critical and otherwise. I'm really excited for the discussions that that sort of revisit and return us to the body. So thank you very much for coming here for week two. I think this week is going to go by unbelievably fast and a big welcome to Ashley. Thank you so much. Hello, I'm Ashley. As Sarah said, first of all, huge thank you to Sarah and David and Jason and everyone else who I don't know about as Intimately, haven't been as much in direct contact with but I'm sure this like takes a little bit of a team on various levels to get off the ground. So I really appreciate it. These sort of summer theory camps have played a very instrumental role in my own coming of age as an academic and creative person. And so I'm really super excited to get to be here, especially now since in my role as curator, I find less and less time to fully pull back and to get to really talk and think through my practice on a more meta level. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to do that and to sort of bounce it back and forth with you this morning. So as Sarah said, I work at a place called M-PAC, which stands for the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center. We are housed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which is the oldest technological university in the U.S., and this is it. It's this very like space-agey Starship-looking building. When you walk in, you're not sure where you are. It was designed by Grimshaw Architects, and it was originally supposed to mimic a viola. If you can kind of like cross your eyes and see that, the wooden hall there was meant to be this sort of string instrument-esque thing. More or less successful, I think it looks like a spaceship. But so we have three curatorial programs at M-PAC. I'm in charge of theater and dance. We also have a curator of time-based visual arts who comes out of the visual arts field, focusing mainly on visual arts and film especially, and then we also have a curator of music and sound. So between the three of us, we run the curatorial program at M-PAC. And today I'm going to talk a lot about where M-PAC came from, why it was conceived, how it's been implemented, both from a sort of conceptual and administrative standpoint. But first I do want to share a little bit about myself and where I'm coming from to give you some context for the curatorial projects and vision that I've had for M-PAC. I've been there for just about two years now, so I feel like I've finally gotten my feet off the ground and I'm going to share with you a trajectory for some projects I've been working on in the past year that will take off in the coming year. But as Sarah mentioned, I got my PhD in performance studies from UC Berkeley, and there my research was really focused on dance specifically, the relationship between dance and technology. And I was interested in looking at the way that that subfield had been historicized and where and why that was coming from. In particular, I wanted to think about expanding it a little bit. So I'll give you just one example of how I was thinking about that. This is John Byrne, who was a choreographer in the 80s. David Geer, who's a specialist in AIDS choreography, has named Byrne one of the or the first AIDS choreographer in 1981 he made a piece with his partner Tim Miller, where he started to talk about symptoms that he was having but he didn't know what they were yet. And a few years later he made a piece called Surviving Love and Death, which again was a deep dive into his hospital experience with a sort of unknown illness that he was experiencing that we came to learn. Was HIV AIDS and he later passed away from AIDS related causes, but made work up until his passing. And he has an incredible archive at Harvard. Also recently, Ishmael Houston Jones and Miguel Gutierrez restaged or kind of re-envisioned a series of his works for Dance Space Platform Lost and Found. And Surviving Love and Death played a really large part in that. When I was in graduate school, I started to look at this work and kind of appropriately Peter is going to talk about dumb type a lot later, who also has worked a lot in dance and technology and the topic of AIDS. Specifically within a tech focus, but when you look at the history of AIDS choreography, it's not typically situated within a dance and technology frame. It's kind of seen as its own subfield of dance. And I had a lot of questions about this because within an art context, a fine art context, biomedical, bio-arts are really housed within an electronic arts, electronic media arts platform. And so I had a lot of questions about why this wasn't happening in dance. And in close reading, some of John Burns' works, you start to hear his language and he's really talking about things that he's putting into his body. He's imagining new agey concoctions that might cure him of his ailments. And it really begins to be this sort of like DIY practice of a sort of bio-art intervention into his life and his health, which I was reading kind of as a querying of a dance and technology moment and wondering why it hadn't before been read in this context and how we could sort of begin to expand this frame of what we have thought of as relationships between dance and technology and how they played out. So that takes me to MPAC. I was writing this dissertation and really thinking about these historical moments and then wondering in the future how to begin to shift the discourse around some of these topics and experiments. And I felt like curatorial practice was going to be a really good avenue for me to actually have money to put toward artists who I felt should be counted within narratives of dance and technology experimentation. And lucky enough for me, I then had this opportunity to expand my practice into theater, which was kind of perfect because I was coming out of this performance studies background, working with Shannon Jackson at UC Berkeley, and most of my close peers were actually working in theater. So I had kind of personally already begun to flex those muscles and now I get to do so a little bit more freely. So what do we do at MPAC? MPAC is this kind of funny place because Rensselaer, as I mentioned, is a technical university. We don't have a dance or theater department. We do have an electronic media arts program that's a cross-disciplinary program, but as far as kind of academic programming goes, it's more limited along these lines. So it's this funny thing because we're actually a professional arts institution who is at and funded by a university. And I'm going to talk a little bit about why that is and where that comes from in a second. But just to give you a sense for what we do do at MPAC because we don't teach classes. We do have an original commissioning program, so we commission new works from people. Sarah mentioned that I'm working on commissions now with some people that I'll talk about later, like Maria Hasabi, Andrew Schneider, and Alayna Demyanenko. I would say the bulk of our work at MPAC is in our residency and new development program. So we have an open air program, open artists and residencies, which any of you are welcome to apply for, spread the word about. It's on our website, it's an open call. At any time you can submit an application to come and do a residency at MPAC. We also have curated residencies where I kind of develop relationships with artists and invite them to come and do developmental residencies. Our residency program is somewhat unique in that we don't have a standard set of time, like MPAC residencies are two weeks long and you come and do X, Y and Z. It's all project specific. So our residency could be two days. I had Pig Iron Theatre come and do a two-day residency to build an LED light board and some video effects with it that went into their new opera that they premiered a couple of years ago now. Has it been that long? Maybe a year ago. And so that was like quick and dirty and out. Or you could have somebody come for two weeks. Usually that's around the longest that we do at MPAC because they tend to be more high-intensity residencies. And then oftentimes we do stage residencies where people will come once they'll leave, they'll do other types of residencies, think more on things, come back, continue development with us. And our team of engineers is in contact with them kind of from start to finish and I'll talk more about that in a little bit as well. And then we do have a presenting program which I would say is kind of the smallest program for me. So we will bring in touring productions. Typically this happens when those performances I think are just like instrumental to what we're doing at MPAC and need to be there within our archive, within the kind of discourse of our engineers and our students and our local audiences. And a lot of times those things are also a way for me to get to know an artist better and start to think about like, okay for me this was like crucial to what we're doing, what are your next works going to look like and and how might we have some conversations about those. So to give you a sense of what our venues are because the building itself is kind of an experiment in technology. So we have a concert hall that seats close to the 2,000 people and at first glance it looks like a fairly typical concert hall. But within the architecture of the spaces there's a lot of technological experimentation happening and that becomes crucial to the type of work that I'm able to do with artists and what they can envision. So sometimes it might not be about developing a robot on the floor but it might actually be about utilizing the robots that are built into our building and how does that support the conceptual weight of a work. So in this concert hall it used to be the only fabric ceiling concert hall in the world. I heard recently that that may not be true anymore. But so this is acoustic tiling on the ceiling and it holds certain sound down. The building was designed with an acoustician very closely related. Also our director Johannes Gerbel who was the founding director of the center is a little bit neurotic about these sorts of things. He comes from in Germany and has a background in sound and music and has an extreme attention to detail. So as you can see there are like these runway pathways between the panels. This means that we can rig anything from back of house to back of to upstage. So unlike a typical concert hall where you could erect maybe some um you know some lighting and and truss around the stage itself we're able to rig anything so we can hang a stage in the middle of the audience or we can turn things on its head. We can stage dance and flip the space. We can do lots of other things that a typical concert hall wouldn't be able to do. Each seat has its own each back handler so that you can't hear the room sound. The exit signs have been specifically researched over the period of two years so that they're not bright orange and staring you in the face when you want to make the theater really dark. They're a really really light green that just meets the um the code and you sort of see these these technical details throughout our spaces. This is our theater which is like our traditional kind of play house for dance and theater. It has about a Broadway side stage and seats around 500 people um traditional fly house but all robotic rigging so rather than the ropes behind the scenes everything is controlled robotically and has a lot of precision. When we're doing film shoots and things like this we're able to like rig a camera to the pipes and really carefully control things. I'll talk about that in the context of Maria's work a little bit later. And then we have these two flex spaces. This is the smaller of the two. It's called Studio Two and it has these light acoustic panels on the walls that sort of absorb sound. They can also be covered up with black fabric that's built into the room and can be brought down. This is our most basic space and then similar to it is Studio One which is larger. It has a 34 foot tension grid so you can walk across the grid. We have performers playing up there a lot. It's also a fly space so you can fly people. You can also fly robotic cameras and the like so making say a dance film. You can move a camera around without having a rig of 10 to 20 people trying to follow a dancer. It sounds great. The technology is still a little bit wonky so unless you want your dance film to like really be about conceptually the movement of this camera it's probably not worth the time. But we're working on it. But so so M-PAC was conceived around the turn of the century and it opened in 2008 and it was made possible in part by a donation from Curtis Arpream who is famous for creating the first graphics card for PC and he played the cello I believe and at the M-PAC opening made a really lovely speech in which he kind of talked about how he felt that he couldn't be up here in front of all of these people talking had he not had his kind of arts education and he really wanted that for our Rensselaer students. So a real part of the drive of this kind of center was how can we take this technological university and kind of diversify the type of instruction that our students are getting. And this goes along really well with Rensselaer's somewhat infamous president Shirley Ann Jackson who had a real vision for M-PAC and I think her kind of vision for what she calls the new polytechnic is really interesting. So I'm going to read a quote from her. She says collaborative it's a collaborative endeavor across disciplines sectors and global regions using advanced technologies and uniting a multiplicity of perspectives so that large multifaceted challenges can be considered and confronted. So it sounds really simple this idea of a collaborative endeavor across disciplines sectors and global regions using advanced technologies and uniting a multiplicity of perspectives so that large multifaceted challenges can be considered and confronted. Basically the hope was take professional artists put them with the professional research engineers who teach at Rensselaer and see what they can make together. And this was all kind of being conceived between say 2000 and 2008. For me it's a kind of familiar narrative right one that we can look back to nine evenings and see a similar kind of experiment. 1966 Billy Cleaver a research engineer at Bell Labs works with Robert Rauschenberg and a team of artists to set up an experiment that pairs an engineer from Bell Labs with an artist. People like Yvonne Reiner, Deborah Hay, Lucinda Childs, Bob Rauschenberg, John Cage, Robert Whitman, Alex Hay, the list goes on. Female choreographers played a huge part in this though it's often remembered within a sort of arts context as well. So this experiment was like revered when it came out right. 10,000 people came to the opening, the New York Times wrote about it, the artists went to Washington DC, from it came eight experiments in art and technology which was a whole institution that kind of carried along this work of pairing artists with engineers. It was also humongous failure. Critics tore it apart because the art sucked according to them. When you read documents the archive for this project is extensive it's at the Getty and when you kind of go through the personal correspondence between artists and engineers or artists themselves reflections they all filled out surveys after it was over. It was very scientifically documented and the feeling was this kind of mixture of yes this was a failure but here's why. Also failure is a part of scientific experimentation so wasn't it actually productive then from the art side the feeling of well but the artist can make much better work without any of this stuff. So why did they do this to begin with? Robert Rauschenberg felt, quote, it is no longer possible to bypass the whole area of technology. We have no assurance for example that buildings will have walls for much longer. Artists should be the first to sense this sort of climate. We can't afford to wait. We must force a relationship with technology in order to continue and we must move quickly. Billy Clover also said their aim is to start a revolution to overthrow old concepts to reach into the unknown and to produce artworks that will combine the most advanced technological discoveries with the most daring and most outrageous creative ideas an artist is capable of dreaming up. So they have these kind of like lofty hopes and dreams that ultimately were actually much more complex. There was supposed to be this kind of like floating box that was a part of Lucinda Child's vehicle. It didn't float the vacuum motors underneath it, failed, so they ended up just kind of pushing it through space. Alex Hay had to stop the performance in the middle and unlike your traditional theatrical practices of the show must go on, the engineers came on stage and everybody sat and waited while they tinkered with the toys on his back to try and figure out how they could work. So there was this constant push-pull between the temporality of scientific engineering development and artistic practice and production within live performance. For me, I struggle a lot with the relationships between Nine Evenings and MPAC. MPAC is constantly, you know, when you read Dr. Jackson's writings about it, it's this commitment to the future, which is really important and exciting. It's a space where researchers, quote, researchers and artists are expected to make their way into new territories where failure is a risk. So she comes right out and she acknowledges that from the get-go. The partners work across disciplines that have different approaches as they work together toward project-based goals. They inevitably share their own skills with each other and grow. So it's this hope that like through a Nine Evenings kind of failure, we can then create growth. But I still have this remaining question of like where is the growth? So is it on the side of engineering research? Is it on the side of the arts? Is it in the hopes that we can grow a sort of, you know, overlap in that Venn diagram so that there is more collaboration between the two in the future? But I just want to bring up for a minute that for me, there's like a real distinction between this kind of experiment and something like, you know, electronic arts like the NS Matrix and the Feminist Manifesto, where, you know, they were using the internet to like explicitly move away from the body to have this feminist intervention. And it was the medium of the internet was like, you know, later we'll talk about like dramaturgically important to the work. The work, the conceptual content of the work was really calling for the medium itself. And I think that with these more calculated pairings between engineering and science, oftentimes that conceptual linkage is being either rushed along or forced or, you know, there's some like misstep. So this is Deborah Hayes solo, which was one piece in my evenings. And again, the robotic boxes, which were a part of it didn't quite work. I have lots of theories about why that failure was actually ultimately really productive, which I won't go into today. But I do want to again draw the links back to MPAC. This is a project by Pauline Bodry and Renato Lorenz called telepathic improvisation. This was actually curated by my colleague Victoria Brooks, who's our curator of time based visual arts just last year. And for this, our research engineers at MPAC actually built replicas of Deborah Hayes boxes that were meant to be in solo in my evenings and use them very successfully, I might add, in the filming of their project that went on to be a film on its own and a film installation. And so at MPAC, there's this interesting relationship between engineers who work at MPAC, who are part of our staff, and then engineers who are researchers on our campus and who we might pair with artists or who have their own research endeavors that they're pursuing at MPAC. So this is an image of a research setup in Studio Two, which is one of our performance venues. And for a large part of the year, it's actually used by the Cognitive Immersive Systems Laboratory, which is a research arm of MPAC, where faculty collaborate with professional engineers in the industry, and they're developing a lot of interactive technologies for a more business context, like interactive projection software where you're trapped by connects as you walk around and your presentation can kind of be controlled by where you're pointing. They're also working with our 360 degree projection screen, which was developed for the Worcester Group at the beginning of MPAC, and they're thinking a little bit about how that's interplaying with their ideas for the business world. And so then we also have this team of engineers who work at MPAC for the artists. We have three video engineers. We have three sound engineers. We have a master electrician, a master carpenter rigor. We have a director of stage technologies. We have three network and IP engineers. So we have this full team of professional engineers who are not on faculty, not researchers per se, in that sort of academic sense, but who are engineers on our staff working with artists within our professional program and also supporting the works of people like the Cognitive Immersive Systems Laboratory. So they're this kind of like in between type of engineer, right, where they don't all come from the arts, especially being in upstate New York. It's not like New York where every person in your institution has like a 10 year long history in the arts. It's much different from that. Our video engineers come from television, for example. They all have really different backgrounds. So now that I've laid out a little bit more of this kind of situation of where MPAC has come from and the ideals behind it, I want to dive a little bit into the practicalities of what I see really happening in my day to day life and experience there, bringing artists in. So even though we have this research arm of MPAC, we also do have a lot of pedagogical involvement with the Institute, though there may not be an apartment of theater and dance. I'm constantly thinking through how the artists who are coming in can serve our students, how their work can widen the views and perspectives of our students, how they can have workshops or classes come in, you know, various kinds of partnerships around campus with specific faculty or groups like our LGBTQ task force and different entities on campus who might have overlapping interests with the artists that we're bringing in. But my particular focus is on the professional curatorial program. And one thing that I've kind of started to draw a line through is to see how the research arms of MPAC, like the Cognitive Immersive Systems Laboratory, the kind of temporality of that research and of the research of our faculty engineers is different from that of our working artists and vice versa, right? So the temporality of the work of our professional artists is really different from that of research engineers because of granting deadlines, because of reporting structures for those grants, because of the tenure clock, because of touring schedules. All of these kind of really practical benchmarks in both of these professional paths don't always match up with one another. And, you know, it's like within artistic practice, as we all here I'm sure know, and I'm preaching to the choir, but within artistic practice, the most efficient technological method, path might not be the most desirable one. And that's really hard to fit into lab research on the university level at Rensselaer. It's like these brief moments when the two things align that are really amazing, but in terms of a daily practice to pair people together doesn't really work. Not that that was necessarily the full intent of MPAC, but I do think that like in the spirit of it, there was this sort of hope, this utopian hope, right, that it could be this building that's bustling. And when you walk inside, there's all of this big open space. Ideally it would, it would be this building that's bustling with all these people doing research from all different sides. And as you bump into people in the hallway, you're exchanging ideas and they're influencing each other. And it would just be really lovely. And it dates way back and people have been trying to do this for a long, long, long time. And it just, practically speaking, it doesn't happen. And if you have any ideas for how to make it happen more, please tell me. I love you now. But so, so because I don't see that happening, I've been asking a lot of questions about, okay, well, what is happening? What can we use this building for? What, what are we doing here? And that brings me back to kind of my initial research questions also about where do we widen the lens of the relationship between dance and technology, theater and technology, performance and technology at large. And I've been thinking a lot about sort of also where we're at with like digital arts and media arts. And, and Shannon Jackson, one of my very close mentors pointed out in her book, Social Works, that, you know, she says theatrical performances that do not call themselves new media are as affected by technologies as those who do. And for me, that's like a prevailing feeling that I have across contemporary performance right now, that like we've reached this moment, I would say globally, though, you know, there are also a lot of access questions to be asked, which I'll explain, I am really looking at also with the kind of curatorial work that I'm thinking about. But within this world of contemporary performance, I feel that where we were at in 2000, when MPAC was conceived, where we were at in 2008 when MPAC opened, is really different actually than where we're at with this now. And it feels like this sort of techno theater technology, dance technology realm. I almost want to just throw it out at this point, frankly. Claire Bishop, who we were actually just talking about last night, has said, quote, especially when this art declines to speak overtly about the conditions of living in and through new media is how contemporary art depends on kind of revolutions in the future. Right. So, so what does it look like to start moving past some of these assumptions about what it looks like to pair scientists and artists, and what it looks like to make electronic art? MPAC originally stood for electronic media and performing arts center. And the name was changed, thank goodness, to experimental media and performing arts center, right, switching out the electronic for experimental. And so that is what I've really been holding onto. What does it mean to take this technological building? Anything you make in this building is technological without doubt. We do documentational shoots of every single piece to do that. We use four robotic cameras. Every single time I curate something, I have to choreograph where the robotic cameras are going to go, how they're interfacing with our video production room that's four flights upstairs, how those people are calling down to us just like any theatrical production all the way back to the history of time. We can conceive these things conceptually as technological, right. So this brings me to the to the work, the work that I'm really interested in thinking about and starting to include in this bubble of of the history of the relationship between these things. Ali Mohini is an Iranian choreographer. He's based in Paris. And he does work with a lot of things that we think of as like interactive digital technology sensors and projection and all of that. But this piece, my paradoxical knives, is one that I've really been been quite interested in. It's kind of a performance art-ish piece that happens in public spaces. It's installed on a large square of metal sheets that have a roomy Sufi poetry written in circular motion in Arabic and English actually. Ali, the audience sits around the platform. Ali enters. There are knives laid out with straps that have little clips on the end. He comes out dressed in this strappy looking attire and clips the knives to the straps. And then he starts to turn and sing and the faster he turns the more the knives, the velocity lifts the knives and the knives point out at the audience. And it's this really extremely poignant and beautiful work that questions both formal theatrical properties of how close can my audience be to me, how much can we share perspective, and then also larger cultural questions. Depending on where the piece is performed, it reads really, really differently. I curated the work at MPAC because to me, the costume was really reading as a kind of visualization of networks. And Ali was talking a lot about kind of cultural, global relationships between people and the conceptual makeup of the work. I couldn't get the sort of like images, networking images out of my head as I was looking at the content of this work and thinking about how conceptually, though he might not name it as such, the content of what he's dealing with is absolutely the politics of global digital culture. And so what happens if we kind of name it as such? And by bringing this into the lobby space of MPAC, how does it all of a sudden situate it in the context of experimental media and performing arts? And how are we reading it differently? I was not able to bring Ali into the country because of current lovely immigration policies. And so we staged the work with Ali on Skype and me kind of imagining, okay, Ali's knee would be around my hip, so I'm going to drop the knife here. And so we kind of staged it that way as if Ali had just finished the performance and left. And then we did a Skype conversation with Ali in the same space actually and Ali's collaborator, Fred Rodriguez, who's Australian, who was able to come to the US and do a residency remotely with Ali toward their new project. But so we kind of did an event around it with this installed alongside of a Skype conversation with Ali to hear about his new practices. And so, you know, for me, I could have chosen to curate one of Ali's more technologically advanced works. But conceptually, this one actually read more in the context of a digital culture aesthetic for me than a lot of his other projects. Jamil Aloe Kosoko is an artist based out of Philadelphia. This one's really grainy, too. So Jamil's work is, he has been a longtime curator, thinker, maker, who in the last few years has gained a lot of attention in the US and European context. His piece, hashtag negrophobia, is depicted right here. And he also, more recently, has made a work called Say On Serves. They're both coming out of the same world. Hashtag is a piece that looks at Black death, mourning, ritual, theory. And there's a moment in the work when the performers use a live cell phone feed to film the audience, and it's projected. You can kind of see this image is really bad, actually. I need to get other images of this piece. But it's projected, and the staging is in an X. So the audience sits in these X pockets with these two crossed runways. And it's a really, like, kind of expansive installation across the space. There are books. There are photographs. It's made into an alter of sorts. The stage is, there's live DJ music going on. And as you see the cell phone footage, it's obviously reminiscent of footage of Black death that's perpetuated across all media platforms right now. And so while the kind of imagery of maybe a live cell phone feed is not that technologically advanced, for me conceptually, this piece cuts straight into the middle of digital landscapes in our contemporary culture in the U.S. and how they're being thought of, perpetuated, and lived from a very specific embodied perspective. The other thing about Jamil's work is that he takes cinema imagery as, like, a huge inspiration for him. And so when I started to talk to Jamil about the work, we had conversations about what would happen if, okay, so Jamil has translated cinema imagery into live performance, and then also taken news media imagery and played on that with his technological presence in the work. What would it look like then to re-translate this live performance back into cinema? So this is the type of conversation that I'm often having with artists also because it's very nice for me to just curate work that may not be super technologically advanced, but also at the same time, I want to ask the question, you know, why are certain artists making work with experimental media, however you want to call that, and why are others not? And sometimes it's as basic as I didn't have the resources to do it. So an example, like, nine evenings, you need to collaborate with Bell Labs, right? A lot of people who are making interactive technology performance have some kind of connection with a research university where you can use lab facilities. A, you need to access to those spaces, and B, then oftentimes you have to at least adopt some of that temporality that I was talking about earlier of being in a research lab and having to work around or within or in relationship to or bouncing off of a different project. And so for me, I want to ask, like, what does it look like to make M-PAC that lab, but that lab for the arts, where the arts are kind of asking the questions and then we see what's bouncing off of the scientific work that's happening around it and within it. And so part of that is me having conversations with artists asking, like, okay, well with the resources of M-PAC, what would that do to your work? Would it help it? Would it not? And a lot of times it's inviting artists in to have a creative residency where you play with a lot of technology to just see what sticks. And then you go away and you have a residency at somewhere that doesn't have any technical facility to just think about it and then come back and say, okay, so none of that stuff is actually appropriate for my work anyway. Let's do this other thing. And this is what I'm interested in. So it's like this balance between giving into the desire to just use all of the tech just because it's there and then also being really critical about what you end up using and that's kind of where we get more into the like, okay, you know, what I know Peter will talk about is a more kind of dramaturgical approach to new media performance and why we're choosing the devices that we're choosing to include. But there does have to be also a moment of not having that, right? A moment of just having access, of just getting to have three video engineers sit in a room with you and you say, I have these ideas and they say, like, well, okay, here's how that would happen. And even within our with our MPAC engineers, though they work within our kind of like art house, right, and are more along this like artistic timeline, there's still a lot of translation happening all the time. And for me, I feel like 50% of my job is to help with that translation process. And, and personally, I'll say I pull a lot on my own experience making work, I was a choreographer and worked with interactive sensors myself and learned a little bit about programming, to do that kind of work. So it's pulling on that path, it's pulling on my academic history, it's pulling on my curatorial focus. And, and really kind of like spending just a lot of time talking, talking between and within and alongside of people. Another example of a project that I brought into MPAC is Oakley Ackpuck with Celie's Poor People's TV Room. Oakley is an incredible performer. She's performed for many, many, many years in New York City with people like Ralph Lemon. For the past few years, she's been making her own work. And in this project, can you see the, I feel like the light is not very good. Projection mode. Okay. So as you can see in this performance, so Oakley was responding a little bit to the kidnapping of 800 Chewbacca girls that inspired the Take Back Our Girls movement, which was a social media, became a social media hashtag that blew up and the likes of Michelle Obama were retweeting. And Oakley was really struck by the speed with which that happened and how very, very quickly the movement gained such distance from the Indigenous women who started it via the social media spread, but yet also it gained a lot of attention. So kind of thinking about the tension of the speed of social media. And Oakley wanted to kind of work that through. So she was thinking about Nigerian women's movements as a whole, not just this one. And she staged this work that's a cross-generational project across, I would say, like three-ish generations and all women performers. And she wrote with her collaborator, Peter Bourne, a script for it. And as you can see here, the aesthetic for the work is based off of Nollywood Cinema, which is Nigerian cinema, widely popular, widely watched productions. And Oakley kind of mimicked the tone of that and the aesthetic of that. Here you see that there's a platform that's built, the performers lay horizontally. There's a bird's eye camera filming them from the grid that's then projected onto a screen that hangs over them, right side up. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. So playing with translation of live mess through media in a kind of real context. And this is an interesting one because Oakley and I fight all the time because Oakley is like very adamant that her work is not within the technological realm at all. But actually it's like, you know, it's not technologically easy work to produce. Like sometimes these sorts of questions are far more of like, how am I going to get the live feed to be responsible? And how, I mean, you're watching it live, right? You can see them talk and then you see them on the screen. It has to be synced very well. There can't be too much lag time. You're working in a big theater. The camera is in a grid that's 40 feet above. So where are the cables going to go? Like it's, you know, these are actual questions. But, and the conceptual content of the work is all about Nollywood Cinema and the social media movement. Like, what? And, and so I have this big question of like, why, why doesn't she see her own work within this context? What is that? Does it have to do with the way this field has been historicized? Does it have to do with the current politics of the field? And she and I have kind of talked a little bit about it. And I don't think, you know, I don't want to speak for her. And, and I don't want to make assumptions for the work myself. But, but just kind of asking these questions feels really interesting to me. Are you a cobra? Are you hypnotizing me? Not hypnotizing. Not hypnotizing. Just to give you a sound. The other thing about this work is that behind the entire set is an L shaped frame with a large plastic sheeting covering it. And in various moments it's used as a backdrop, but it's also used as a kind of representation of a barrier between real and spiritual worlds. But also I see it so much as a screen. So you have, you know, a woman upstage and a woman downstage of the screen, they're moving in relation to each other, they're singing, they're vocalizing, and, and eventually there's a break in the sheeting as well. And so alongside of the live feed screen that you're looking at, I can't help but read it conceptually as a sort of material physical instantiation of screen representations of presence, you know, transmission. And so they're all of these like little ways in which I see digital culture, media culture kind of coming through in a work like this that I find really interesting. And then what I love about this piece is that it broke impact. So the, because our lighting technologies are so specific, and I'm going to, I'm not even going to try to say actually technically what happened right now, but essentially because Oakley and Peter designed the work with a lot of LED specials that were just, that they travel with and that were interior to the piece, because our lighting controls are rigged to our more technologically advanced digital systems, they lacked the ability to fully dim and fade the, the practical lighting that was within the piece in those, in the same way that the piece was able to function within much lower tech black box settings. And so for me, this is also a really beautiful way of showing that like, there can actually literally be, you know, technological incompatibility between a more high tech staging and kind of like lower tech interaction or you know, intervention into this world. And, and, you know, for Oakley and Peter, it really changed the work to not be able to have that lighting look. It, it, it didn't serve the piece in the same way. So there are all of these things that we can do. And then there are also these things that we can't do. And I think acknowledging that and staying really present with it is super important to the work that I do and unpack. Maria Hasabi is an artist who's also working a little bit with the temporality of media, which is why I was interested in, in working with her. She kind of grew up in the choreographic world in New York. She's Greek. She has been taken on lately as the darling art world. She's producing her work live in museum spaces all over the world right now. She was just on the cover of Freeze magazine. And she, she's really interested in slowness. I can't remember where I put the video. Is it here? We'll go there. But so her, she stages dancers who move extremely slowly. And again, within a kind of culture of speed, of new media temporalities, I'm really interested in this response against that. And Maria has staged work, oh yeah, there it is. This is museum context and for the stage. So recent, Hermal's recent pieces, staged question mark and staging are two separate pieces that happen on this big expansive pink carpet that you've seen. The first clip that I showed you is from the installation version. And this is from the, the like more proscenium performance version. So you can see it's lit very differently. It's durational.  Whereas when in the installation context, obviously you're coming and going, you might happen upon it. When we had dancers filming at M-PAC, people actually were worried that something had happened to the person on the floor, right? So you encounter it in this moment of like, what's wrong? Like really? And so, you know, she's recently been interested in the context that her performance happens in and how that context changes the work. And I was really interested to talk to Maria about the medium of film. And so I commissioned her to make a piece that we're working on right now that will premiere this fall. And it's a film instantiation of these two projects. So it's still happening on the expansive pink carpet. It includes documentary, documentational footage of these prior performances. And in talking to Maria about the medium of film, she has this interest in, okay, in live performance, I try to make my dancers move as slowly as they can, or as slowly as possible, and what with film am I able to expand beyond what we can do in live performance. So again, kind of approaching an artist who has not traditionally worked in media really at all. She did make one small dance film, which was also, I was like, I saw that and I was like, you should be making films. But, but so I'm really curious, like what this medium of film will give to Maria. So we brought Maria in and did a full film shoot with her. And again, this was a process of an artist who had really had no experience, didn't know any editors, didn't know, you know, I mean, our early conversations about this were really amazing, because it was we had to actually find the language like she would say, animate when she meant something completely different, or she would say, you know. And so it was really like finding the language for what she wanted aesthetically, and then working on finding her collaborators within the arts. So this was a matter of pairing an artist with engineers, but it just looked a little bit different from an I need names like artist and, you know, industry engineer, it was more like finding her film collaborators. But like, what if we start to think of these collaborations also within the same vein of the historical intentions that started some of these, some of these projects and conversations. This is just the lights that were above her performance. So we're going to install Maria in studio two. And I just kind of wanted to mention that also so that you can keep the building in mind because the building has such a presence for me in the type of work that we're making. And so, you know, like, a lot of the conversations that I have with people is okay, which space serves this work. And that's actually a long technical conversation of placement and of feeling. And with Maria, it was like, okay, we want it to feel like it can be installed in a gallery. But, you know, she kind of wanted it in a public space. But the film won't really work there. And so which one of the impacts we can't make it feel too cavernous. So these are conversations that we all have all the time in theater and performance. There's nothing new about that. But just to kind of keep bringing it up as a presence that's always constantly there again and again. And again, for me, I constantly come back to the building to its capabilities, to its shortcomings, to what we can do where we can push it, how it can help support. To flip things around a little bit, Andrew Schneider is an artist who would like really traditionally be seen in a theater and technology context. I commissioned his latest work after, which premiered at the public in this past January, the Under the Radar Festival. After is kind of comes after Andrew's last piece, which is called You Are Now Here or You Are Now Where. It can be read in either way. Andrew worked at the Worcester Group. Half of his collaborators worked with the Worcester Group. Andrew is a master at soldering things, building his own technology, his sound collaborator on this project. Bobby McKyver. I always call him McKyver, like McKyver. So funny. McKyver is also just like an extremely adept programmer. Andrew programs his own lights. They do extremely high, high, high precision interactive light and sound interactions that create a spectacle that makes the audience feel like they're in a different universe that begs people to ask the question of where am I and how did I get here? And their process is really, really interesting because actually though Andrew from the outside is seen as like the theater tech kid, a lot of the conversations that I have with Andrew are exactly the same as the conversations that I have with the other artists that I've talked about and other artists that I have. It's really no different. And Andrew has a lot of the same questions and concerns of like, why am I incorporating this technology into my work? What is the conceptual grounding of this project? I only want to use media where it really feels necessary within my production, within the experience. For him, it's really often I find about the experience of the audience. And this is an example of a project where we did really use a technological cutting edge research practice at MPAC. So this is an image of MPAC's wave field synthesis system, which is a sound spatialization system that was developed by, well it wasn't developed, the technology exists in the world. But this particular system was developed by our director, Johannes, and our lead sound engineer, Todd Boss. And it's a speaker array that consists of 495 micro speakers.  And it's run on a program called Dante, which essentially it's, we've developed this in close partnership with Earcom in Paris. And also we do a workshop, if anybody's interested, we do a workshop every July. And now it's a collaboration also with Stanford, where we kind of, we, not me, but people come. And essentially like this come for a week or two attend seminars and also do sort of like practice based experiments with this system because there are very, very few in the world. There's none like quite like this, where the speakers are quite as close together. And there are so many of them. And essentially with Dante it's like an iPad interface and you can literally place sounds around a room and then with your finger move them around in real time. And so imagine if there were like a taped X on the floor right there, you could place a sound there and it would sound like there's a violinist standing there or at least a speaker that's right there.  And then all of a sudden she moves over there, right? And you can do multiple sounds at the same time. And so Andrew and Bobby came in wanting to do this piece that was kind of like a terellian, wait, where am I? And the light experiments just didn't work. We spent two weeks trying and trying and trying and trying. It wasn't working. So then we were playing more with sound. We were playing with hyperbolic speakers moving them around and it was really super clunky. You could always hear the wheels of the speaker moving even in the dark. And so we realized with our audio engineer, RJ Osconi that actually wave field was perfect for this.  It could probably do really cool things for sound, music, and maybe theater and dance and all of these different contexts. We can't tour it really. Who's going to make work on it? We don't want to like force people to come in and make work on it because that makes for not that interesting of work. So here we are with artists who are at M-PAC, who we're already working with. We're making a piece and we're like, oh, we have the perfect thing. It's our wave field synthesis system. And it's a match that really like the work called for it. This was a huge research endeavor on the part of M-PAC and Rensselaer. And it was just like the stars aligned and it worked. And what Andrew and Bobby did was they actually rigged it in a way that had never been done before. So rather than in like a concert type setting where it would be facing out at the audience and you would like be hearing sounds move around you there, they actually rigged the boxes above on a rake, above the audience. And we worked on a complete blackout and the sounds moved through space. And if you're in a space that really is truly completely dark and completely quiet, you have this experience of feeling like somebody's moving the bank of risers that you're sitting in through space. And you can't see anything. And so you can't really tell where you are. And what was beautiful to work about to work on this piece was that in fact, body worked very, very hard on the sound of design, which was so important. But actually, as equally important was just getting the space really dark and going up into the grid and taping over every single little LED light that could shine through and sitting there for two hours to make sure that even as your eyes adjust, you can see every little ghosting in shadow and then realizing, oh, I can see a ghosting here. Let's play with that. Let's turn that actually into a like surprise scene or whatever, right? So kind of using these moments of technological research and implementation, allowing them to push other theatrical practices that have nothing to do with it. And just like that's why I said at the beginning, kind of getting rid of this like technology weight and just letting it all be about theatrical experimentation and implementation. So another kind of nice example of this that I'm working on now, playwright Yara Traviasso.  And you can kind of see the work. This is a piece, La Medea. This was a big piece that Yara did more recently. Ladies and gentlemen, Audiencia nocturna, life in our studio, we bring you the mother, the warrior, the foreigner, La Medea. Which is like hugely exhausting, also figuring out battery life and all that, super a lot. And Yara's also a filmmaker. She writes, she directs, she performs, she wears those hats. She has a lot of really incredible collaborators. She makes this incredible, really big work. And this piece was, you know, the cameras went backstage and the audience was standing all around these different platforms that functioned as different stages. But then there was a large screen that was behind it. Also, you could also see the live edited footage as you went to. And so for me, I saw this piece and I was like, aha, this is work that could really go with MPAC's concert hall. So again, this practice of like returning to the building in this quest of curatorial fumblings and feeling like A, artists who maybe could be considered within this field and haven't been before. Be artists who are already in this field and then giving them space to push their work in a way that's fully supported and also not always necessarily it has to be about the tech when it has been before. And then be watching out for works that I feel like could take full advantage of the capabilities of our spaces. So the concert hall, again, being a space that's designed mainly for music performance, it's not that often that we fully take advantage of its theatrical capabilities.  Her work is often looking at the female psyche from various theatrical perspectives. She's doing a Wild West version of Macbeth right now this summer from female, the perspective of the female characters. And then this fall, I've commissioned her to make a work for the 10 year building anniversary of MPAC in October that she's going to develop over the summer but that will kind of turn different zones of MPAC into different sections of a single woman's psyche. And so the balcony will become maybe a zone of like humor and the side gallery might become a zone of tragedy. And playing between these spaces, we're going to project on the entire ceiling of MPAC and use that as a projection surface. She's going to develop with Sam Crawford again, sound design for the space. And so kind of, you know, allowing my programming to hit on these different levels is something that I'm hoping to explore more in the coming years that I've sort of just started to get my feet wet into and want to keep pushing in all of these directions. So not necessarily allowing it to be one of these strands and not saying like we have to change the definition of what say dance and technology or theater and technology is and has been, but instead just looking at an opening up of it and thinking about, you know, where it's going to go in the future and how we can leave it, leave the box open for people to push on it where they need to and for kind of like culture and politics also infiltrate it where it does and to let that kind of be the thing. I have like so many other examples of things that I could show you and I'm going to kind of just scan through them because I've also been talking for a really long time and I would love to hear your questions about things. And I'm happy to talk more about them in whatever capacity later. Some things we could do this afternoon and one of the things we talked about was also going through a little bit more in depth into the practicalities of a particular project and I thought my work with Tragil could be interesting to talk about in that context. So I won't go too much into it, but we've been playing again with the temporalities of spaces and different disciplines. This time not between engineering and art but between say fine art and theater and Tragil's next piece is going to take the temporalities of his work that he's been exploring within museum context and maybe bring it back to the theater and we're talking about working on that and residency impact in the spring. And with that, let me say thank you. So we have about 10 minutes for your questions. Absolutely. I just wanted to ask real quick, since you say you don't teach classes in the theater program can you talk a little bit more about what students do, how students interact? So one thing is that we're, I think we're the largest, maybe that's not really true, but we're one of the largest student employers on campus. We have a not mentorship, what's it called, when you like train people? Apprenticeship process. But so like students will, ideally students will come into us as freshmen and work with us. We have a huge lighting staff, really amazing students, two of the, well one full-time staff member and one kind of over-higher who's there practically full-time at this point. We're former students of ours who have come on to work with us. One of them worked at the Whitney over the summer in the kitchen. So they're doing like really amazing work and we have these students who are coming to us who are like unreal engineers and they're learning theatrical technologies and frankly like if I could take all of our students and make them the future of Back of House Theater, I would, they're phenomenal and I often put them as leads when I'm working with professional residencies and they are incredible. We also have clubs on campus that are really active. We have an RPI players, super traditional theater, they have their own theater. I cannot speak highly enough of them. You should all check them out. You know, they're doing like really traditional like Rocky Horror Picture Show kind of theater which is amazing. Essentially in your normal university context where your professors make you do wacky contemporary performance or sorry where professors make you learn theater history traditionally not our universities but like you know way back in the day or whatever and you would have these like student groups come up and make really interesting device work rentslier and find it kind of happens the opposite way. So like MPAC is doing all of this really experimental work and our students are holding down the traditional theater side which I think is phenomenal and they run this theater on their own in an incredible way. They have a costume shop, they paint it, they do the lighting, they are and it's a fully functioning amazing local community theater and they do productions. So I try and draw them in whenever I can. We have a dance group and so one thing I'll do is like for example Andrew Schneider wanted to try out some choreography. He wasn't ready to pay people to come up from New York City yet so we asked the dance club if they wanted to come in for three or four hours every night for a week and do the thing with Andrew and develop it and then they actually performed in the premiere at MPAC, the world premiere that then went on to the public you know a few months later and so we do that sometimes. A lot of times I collaborate with professors in information studies, communications and media studies and electronic arts architecture to come in and do workshops or for artists to do to do classroom visits and then our student attendance to production is really high which is great so you know our students are getting exposed to this kind of work. We also have a really active and alive debate on our campus about what the hell MPAC is and why they're making the work that they are and like why won't we just bring Drake and it's an easy conversation that I love having and to have like again and again and again and it sometimes feels like the most honest and real you know engagement with this kind of work so it's like on the one hand we're not teaching classes on the other hand it feels like my whole entire practice there is a big pedagogical mission. We're working with our student paper to figure out like why do we do what we do. It's like this big conundrum on campus like why did they put all this money into this building that has nothing to do with us? That's the like old school critique of it right and I think we've made incredible progress over the last 10 years of really building these inroads and I have to say I think that speaks really highly to Dr. Jackson and Yohannes' vision for original vision for the building. Like I can I can kind of critique it's easy for me to build a critique of you know oh well it's harder than you think to pair artists with engineers but actually just the practice of putting a center like that at a school like Renssel here is revolutionary and incredible and it has sparked conversations with our artists with our students with faculty with visitors we have a lecture series so scholars come in and see it and and one thing Yohannes has wanted to do from the beginning that I hope to also do is you know how do you also create a culture of like bringing scholars in to do residencies and have more interaction between scholars and artists how do you support publishing in the field all of this kind of stuff so it really like what do you what does it look like to take a center and make it its own research institute and in that sense all of the work that we do is a pedagogical endeavor so yeah I'll just yeah you can do it yeah so I'm so jealous right now are you hiring no I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm a city um we actually are hiring a music curator and a bed app in here um this space is phenomenal and what you're doing the work you're doing is it's breathtaking thank you I mean I was like thank you I might see it the whole time and my question um kind of goes along with how the interaction with the local community of Troy because Troy tends to be a very is it is a little bit more of a conservative town so I'm Troy's largest cheerleader yeah well I just think that's anybody in the arts that I walk around people are like how are you and Troy I love Troy oh my like my knowledge of Troy is from Bellelles yeah from Bellelles around 2008-2009 when he was moved to this and I was sanctuary for independent media and RPI actually was like get out and yeah exactly and so I look at this list of performers and you know they're using some of them very kind of divisive and I love it incredible and I'm just wondering how the local community reacts to some of these pieces yeah so just the context is that there's this amazing independent arts center in Troy called the sanctuary for independent media you should all look them up you should donate to them if you can they do a really important incredible work um it was kind of started by a group of arts faculty Brenna Miller Kathy High now Gusto Monte was really involved when now is at at Rensselaer um uh cool I don't know it's it's an amazing center they have a radio they have a sanctuary performance space they bring stuff in that um it just serves a niche of like socially engaged work that frankly impact has not that has not been a focus of impact um or there's just like the aesthetically the the missions have been a little bit different um they also do really interesting work they're located in a very kind of class-divided area of Troy called Lansingburg they have um like taken over a lot of different properties around them now so they have a community garden they host community dinners they've built an outdoor performance space across the street um so they really like community integration there is is you know strong and not unproblematic but but very clearly steered in the face um and yeah they do great work and and there used to be like a lot of separation between impact and historically you know you're citing an example of something that was actually not allowed to happen at impact that was able to go to the sanctuary and um yeah and and traditionally there hasn't been a lot of communication or there was we tried to have how am I going to talk about this so the the very first events that happened at impact happened before there was a building and they all did happen in Troy and it was all about public art at the beginning because that's all we could do um and then when the building opened again it was like the building was lit up uh a few years after the opening Jennifer tipped in did a light installation around the building and you know um I see Don is smiling because I know she knows that history of impact um and and so like you know there has been a history of impact doing public art but the institution has never been read in that way um and and one of the things that some of my predecessors have done a little bit of work on and that I've really tried to pick up in the last two years is kind of bolstering the local conversation around impact and opening our doors more widely and figuring out what that looks like and means we've done some workshops um also Troy's has changed a lot I will acknowledge upstate New York is getting gentrified beyond belief we were just talking this morning about Hudson which is 40 minutes south of us and I go to Hudson and I feel like I'm in the Hamptons um it's changing a ton right now uh so many artists are moving upstate the lumberyard just opened in Casco which is a half an hour from us um so there's a lot going on in upstate New York and Troy has shifted it's gentrified a little bit we don't have a train station so not as quite as much as some other towns around us um but you have your Brooklyn restaurant tour is definitely coming in opening restaurants Troy's super different now than it was when we opened a decade ago to our benefit frankly um there's also more choreographers Hannah Vander Kolk is an amazing choreographer who lives and works in Troy Jack McGuy also amazing choreographer who lives in works in Troy they're doing incredible work at the local level to bolster our local community they come to impact events and vice versa and so there's just like a lot more happening um Adam Weiner is in Hudson he's a choreographer who works in media and dance film um he has started something called the Hudson Arts Coalition where a lot of small performance venues in the area are kind of coming together to meet once a month and talk about how we can help connections between our local communities and the institutions sharing resources so yeah I hope that answers your question a little bit yeah and yeah just a follow-up uh you kind of hinted at this in the first question that you answered but what are some opportunities for external scholars to engage with impact in the work there I'm not right now okay um I mean yeah it's something I this is a question I would love to talk to you all about I can't figure out what the right way to do it is to be honest um and it's something that I just haven't gotten to explore yet that I plan to more but you know it's like again to pair an artist in a scholar feels really superficial just like pairing an engineer and an artist and like when artists come in for their residencies we're talking like full on 14 hours a day like so intense it's a huge opportunity you have resources you never get and you need to take advantage of them there's not a whole up space for other things so then it's I don't know I'm having a lot of I could talk literally for an hour and a half about that so maybe over lunch and dinner and this afternoon and we talked about this like maybe this afternoon we can get into the nitty gritty of some of these things also like writing as a curator is a big question that I have too and how that looks uh where there's space for that how that gets supported so these kinds of bringing scholarly endeavors into our institution and into these practices sometimes to me it feels as complicated or even more complicated than bringing engineering and the arts together in some ways um so happy to talk about that a lot more I have no good answer right now maybe one more question yeah take a break sure I'll let you choose so this was so fantastic and exciting to hear so thank you and I really appreciate your focus on how can how can the art lead the dialogue you know and I sort of I have one story and one question about that so the several years I've been collaborating with the people that made virtual art at USC at the Institute of Creative Technology in Los Angeles you know and to make a play with uh maybe a designer and a director and you know it's been a multi-year process and as part of that you know one of the things that I noticed was that we would go there in short periods of time to learn about the stuff and they would give us their immense resources you know with this great generosity but we we had such fundamentally different ideas of what we wanted to do with the stuff you know we were interested in things like the Iraqi characters had no shadows you know and the kind of instrumentalism of those figures in the landscape and they were interested in how is this going to help veterans get better from PTSD you know so yeah so that was interesting in and of itself but I'm really thinking about what you're saying about how can you make the artists be empowered in dialogue with the technology rather than trying to fit in with what the technologists do and one of the most sort of simple obvious things that I think about as a playwright too is how often the artists are the ones that come and go and have insecure livings and the technologists and the curators and the dramatists and the administrators are the people who have real jobs and that has a tremendous effect on the way that the culture evolves and the way that the technologists learn so my question is whether there might be ways of structuring or thinking about longer term yeah resonances or jobs actual jobs where artists are there shaping the culture too because I think I think there's no way to sort of overcome that with artists always being visitors you see what I'm saying yeah absolutely I think it's an employment structure yeah absolutely thank you for that it's so true and I mean a couple of things one is you said you know they were so generous with their resources and I think we need to also flip it and realize that actually you had a lot of resources to give them as well and how can we realize that actually you were also very generous with your resources with them I imagine um and really acknowledging the use value in both practices and also the importance of the arts in say something like PTSD rehabilitation um or you know whatever it is uh that but then also thinking about because of my students I often think about how like what is a world in which we don't have to go to an end and go to an engineer what is a world in which the engineer is already a part of our arts community and so and and you know yeah like we've lots of people have already been doing that for a long time first of all there are many engineers who are already part of our arts communities I talked about a few of them today and so but like but like really envisioning that future and and really empowering our engineering students that rents the leer to to not go to industry and instead go to the arts which is hard because as you mentioned the technologists and curators are the ones who have jobs the artists not jobs but like consistent institutional money thank you thank you yeah money but but so so my engineering students have the choice um and and art students the choice is less clear so my engineering students like how do I encourage them to like not just for the first five years after graduation be in the arts and then go to the job where they can make a full on monies but but how what does it look like and then we need more money in the arts in order to be able to like really fully do that long term that also I want to say Judy Hussie Taylor at Dance Space is a curator who I really look up to a lot and she's been kind of shifting her curatorial platform over the past I don't remember how many years actually the last and found platform that I talked about where they restaged John Burns work that was Judy and what she's been doing actually to not only give financial support but also curatorial power to other artists is to like delegate her so she has platforms each year and she and curates artists to curate so she's shifting things of course that doesn't solve everything or anything but at least it shakes things up so I think there are people who are thinking through what future models might look like and how to shift the power dynamics and the money politics of the vast distinction between this work and then just really really quickly to say that like then again it's easy to conceptualize the inequities but then also practically speaking you know of course what I'm about to say you have to be a really successful artist whatever that looks like to to be in this position but in order to like fully tour it's really hard to hold an institutional linked position and so the artists that I talk to who are struggling the most are the ones who are pulled between their practice and their job or whatever that does have the money and the stability so actually what's a world in which the artists don't have to have the full-time employment that technologists and curators have but instead what does it look like for an artist to be able to continue to be a touring working artist and actually just make more money so okay wonderful thank you so much


Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome. My name is Richard Barrow, and I said I'd like to make a very brief introduction. So we're really going to do a brief course at the outset, and we're going to begin with John.  Both of my almost 30 months off. And the day that we're going to do a talk, shark, remember, we're finished. And the initial press is obviously on the record of their author. They're after the channel has rolled a plight, and they're all responses, and they all deliver. People can use the information, of course, but they can't actually. Okay, my name is Richard Barrow. I'm an abandoned wandering civil servant in the Park of Communications Office. I deal with internet policy issues, and the two minors have security, bits and pieces as well. By the way of introduction, I just wanted to point out that the Internet has changed a lot of things, obviously, in more than a few ways. There's been more confounding and challenging, compelling implications of the insecurity. In many ways, it's really changed the social contract. We've all come to an understanding of the state's role in the security. Historically, we've also seen the state hold the borders to our modern space, to our airspace, to our land borders. Right now, which is in the wake of the large technology companies and the Internet, are leaving borders, institutions, companies, and infrastructure. That's the same reality as the whole of the state's security. As a professional developer, following the needs of the state, the Internet has become a spatial. And in that kind of situation, we're not going to have any reliance on companies than we ever have been before, which takes us neatly to Johnville, where all of this Microsoft, obviously, and very core Internet is very foundation, and on some of the areas that they've ever happened despite their best efforts. Johnville is the vice president for e-government affairs, and he's the Microsoft across the box. Previously, the vice president of the Department of General Counsel for Digital Trust and Security, two foods of all importance with the national security of Microsoft. So that's an extremely probable understanding of history and space. He also, obviously, goes here to seek out their Microsoft's own work in developing a new global framework for cyber security and presumably an extent of what we'll also hear about how states should react on the Internet, which I look forward to doing so. I think we'll come as a group as well, so Johnville. Thank you for the introduction. Thank you for the opportunity to interview me today. I'm going to try to talk about, I guess, this is not meant to be a particular policy discussion, right? This is just a broader awareness about some of these topics, because I do think that this is a 20-year issue. In fact, I think it's a permanent issue that we're going to have with us as long as we have the Internet. Our offices in Brussels are right next to the European Parliament, and just in the other side of the parliament is the European House, which is a museum of European history that just opened last year. There's a room with a single object in it on display. It's a pistol, no bigger than my hand. It's the Brown pistol that was used to assassinate Archduke Ferdinand on June 28, 1914. And of course that was the spark for World War I, which ultimately led 21 million people dead. Now, the lesson of World War I is that I think our industrial capacity to produce weapons that could kill exceeded our statecraft and diplomatic capacity to manage war here. I don't think anybody value to it any idea of a magnitude of the losses that would be created in the disruption. But today we face issues inside the security where our capacity is not yet developed to deal with threats that are all too real. And so June 27, 2017, in the Ukraine, a small piece of code was launched that propagated quickly throughout the Ukrainian businesses. It was done through the update software to a software program called AndyDoc, which was essentially everybody came to for BAT compliance. So it's on virtually every business's computer. And the code was spread within hours. Virtually every federal agency in the Ukrainian government was ground to a halt. Hospitals, the banking system, and businesses. And this was, we later find out, launched by the Russian military. And just, if I can digress for a second, we'll talk about these things in retrospect. We can sort of precisely say what happened. But, you know, people talk about the model of war. Well, in cyber war, the fog seemed greater because nobody knows why it's happening. They just know, my computer's got this weird message that is reformatting my hard drive. And suddenly everybody in the building has the same message on the computer saying their hard drive is being reformat. And so for us, when these things happen, we've got this response center. We can pull together engineers. And we're constantly wanting our hands on one of these computers. From the local team, we can observe the code. But if you're about a malware that is causing the hard drive to encrypt, you don't know what the code was executing. And so you have a harder time just figuring out what's going on. And for us, the question is always, would a fully patched machine be vulnerable to this? And for, there's vulnerabilities in software. We call zero days. That is, those are vulnerabilities in software, but they're not coming to us. And so, even if we know about it again, there's no patch for it. And so when there's an attack using zero day, computers are specially vulnerable. In this case, it was not a zero day. The potential exploit has been disclosed to us. And there was a patch. So fully patched machines were protected. So we also realize in the Ukraine, we don't have a means to provide customer support simultaneously to the whole country. It's a special problem. You've got everybody, you can't use their computer. So you can't push out information that way. And these hard drives are encrypted, and he's trying to figure out what to do about it. I think there's a lesson both for governments and for us. At the lunch discussion, there were some very good points about governments and private sector will be cooperating more and more on this. You know, the government's back to the public citizens, the corporate sector, we call them customers. And when customers have a problem, they call us. And so we're all in this. The not patched attack didn't just stop the Ukraine border, though. And whether this was intended to impact every western business that dared to do business in Ukraine, or it was accidental, it spread around the world. There were several major corporations that announced or disclosed that they had issues. It would be pretty hard to hide from most of them. The world's largest shipping company operates 74 ports around the world, and 20% of the shipping fleet of the world. And there are operations ground to a halt for about two weeks. And so the ports, the port of Los Angeles, a large part of Cuba's got stuck and couldn't be moved. Now, there was other companies that acts merit the pharmaceutical company, Saint-Gobain and the French construction company that was bought into us. So there's a large spillover effect. The total cumulative cost of this attack, probably about $10 billion. And it was about six, it was more like eight months later, the United States led a group of governments to announce an attribution of this to the Russian military. And so they did that just before the Union Security Conference last February. Interestingly, no country, though, called this a violation of international law. There's consensus that international law applies to cyberspace, but what rules apply and how do you apply them? We gathered a group of Louisville experts who published a review of the story that date before the Union Security Conference in Munich. And we got 12 international law groups there. And we asked to look at the facts, as best we could tell, from a non-petra attack and the one or cry attack that happened the moment before that most of them took down the UK National Health Service. And the lawyers discussed, debated, took a vote. The non-petra attack, they said that would be a violation of international humanitarian law because it indiscriminately was launched and affected civilians. It wasn't just targeted, they've just done the federal government for me, but it was indiscriminately against civilians and it was destructive.  And so, but I want to cry attack the group split 50-50 because there was a sense, an argument that you weren't in a situation of armed conflict with North Korea. And so when they launched a cyber attack, is it, you know, does international humanitarian law apply below the threshold of armed conflict? And the sense there's this gap or soft space in international law that exists. Now, the Red Cross, they take the position called the first bullet doctrine. So the first bullet fire, the humanitarian law is applied. And there are more about the first block. Something else, but as a practical matter, the way international works, it's done by customary application. And again, the Red Cross may say it's a violation of international law, but they don't do that, but countries have. So we've got this sort of system that allows for great destruction of civilian property and we don't have adequate protections. Now, we've called for two years ago, we called the Digital Sheet Convention as a means to deal with this. We set out saying the convention should do. We've got three pillars to our plan. We need binding norms for government behavior. They need binding, not just the like-minded countries will follow. Because right now the situation is we can kind of get consensus among Western Europe, North America countries, but if adversaries don't adopt those, recognize those rules, what's the point? So we've got to start. So we ultimately think we need binding rules. We also need to increase attribution. We need governments to call out other governments when they do this. Up until now it's been this world of intelligence where there might be a news story or somebody, or a quarter's got a source saying that somebody believes something and kind of pointed people in the right direction now, but they were going to change behavior. We do need to maintain the chain, and we need to build a customary international law. We've learned a significant amount about our capacity and the private sector capacity to assist with that identification of who's behind an attack. We get several billion data points a day from all the devices in the world. We've got a pretty good sense of when things happen. Now governments have other means, signals intelligence and other human intelligence, and they have access to information we don't have. We think that together our information is going to be very useful to helping governments more accurately or more robustly attribute attacks. We have learned the process of the nation-state state attribution as a statecraft, not a scientific term, and we have learned that people talk about attribution, but we're going to talk about accountability and not attribution. We want to have a new non-governmental organization, and I expect that next three months we'll announce one that is broad funding that will be a private sector organization to work on cybersecurity resilience and provide assistance to countries who are under attack and can be a means of private sector coordination so that we can perhaps work not just on our individual products, but on the collective ecosystem of the internet and the corporate networks that we operate in. So we have taken steps by gathering some industry groups. There's a group called the Tech Accord, the Global Tech Accord which is now signed by about 60 companies. The Siemens has something roughly analogous called the Charter of Trust where private sector companies are trying to do more collectively to enhance our security and really resilience. The older model was if you build a big wall around your computer, you'd keep it from getting in. Now you realize that's not going to work. And so you have to assume that people are going to get in and how do you think through that scenario and minimize damage and maximize your ability to rebound. So resilience is the key concept that we're going to be working on with other companies. The Charter of Trust company does take some points of view about we're not going to do offense against private sector. Now at Microsoft we've committed that we're not doing offense for anybody against anybody. We're not working in big ways. Stop it all. But other companies do work for militaries which have worked in the space that have been technically considered. And so the Charter of Trust, the Tech Accord group of companies is important. The international process is kind of broken, just to be honest. The UN has been in the forum and they've had experts appointed for a few sessions and they did make some good progress. So the basic affirmation that international law applies to cyberspace was there was a consensus which was announced in 2015 and there are some new arms that are being developed there. So in 2017 the group was unable to reach consensus and there were a lot of things going on but some governments were essentially blocking it. And we do have some very fuel-hot disputes at the moment that are just as practical about it. The Russian interference in Western elections is a significant complication in how you talk about cybersecurity in the National Forum. And last month the new General Assembly adopted two resolutions. One appointing a new group of government last words with a very limited mandate and then the second appointing adopting the Russian resolution which will have an ongoing working group in the different parts of the UN. And our part, going back to the private sector, we're the ones who own and operate the internet. We operate the corporate networks. It is our developed technology that is operating not just in the private sector but in the public sector and largely in the military as well. And so we have a state and we want to see it at the table. So we had some discussions last summer about what can we do. And President Macron was convening the Paris Peace Forum in connection with the Sampdonaire of the Armistice and that was last November 11th, just three weeks ago. And so I was given the assignment of filling into the other day and pitching the Macron administration on a joint declaration that was made by governments and by the private sector and civil society on the importance of cybersecurity. And so it eventually became the Paris call for trust and security in cyberspace. You'll reach out a copy at the end. But it's important because it brings together previously recommitments and puts them in one place. It's also important and kind of strengthens that. It's also important because it is multi-state order. When launched we had 52 governments that had signed about 200 corporations and 100 civil society groups. You know, we've got very good each of the EU 28 in the end sign. And so there is opportunity consensus in Europe to advance this. The question is where to go with that. There's some sense that it's easy to define norms and easy to write rules. People shouldn't do that. And you know, as Moses found out in the Ten Commandments you can make rules, get people to follow them, that's part of the thing. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't make the rules. But the right now is in the international community the discussion we want to have is how do you have rules that people will abide by? We think that is increasing accountability, attribution and development of greater means to global power. But in a sense, we all know who's doing these things. We know it was Russia that produced the war cry. We know it was North Korea that did the war cry. We need to actually have real discussions with the Russians about some of these issues. There's a disagreement saying well they want to control content that goes into Russian on the internet. That's the issue they care about. And we only go there. We're in a standoff situation though and I think dialogue is essential or we're not going to make progress on this. The Russians, they're not trying to be subtle there. We need to figure out how to work with Russians. The Chinese have significant capabilities we need to work with. And we're going to need to figure out a broader system. To support not only this, we've also helped support a broad-based campaign. We have 100,000 signatures now on digital peace now. We've also got a copy of the presentation. But it is trying to reach out especially to the young people in the interest of civil society groups to raise the idea that digital citizens want digital peace. And we do need to devote time and attention. And I know government's agendas have lots of important priorities on it and our pitch is this should be one of them as well. So with that, I think we'll turn to the discussion. And we'll take on some questions.