Is there any more presenters joining us? We send the emails to them, so I think they are slowly coming. So, F-O. Hello, and welcome to the keynote speech segment of our conference, Networks Mapping Labor in Theater and Performance, brought to you by the Theater and Performance PhD program of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. My name is Mayu Rakshi Sen, and I would like to sincerely thank all of you live stream viewers out there who have been tuning in all day and sending us your questions. Your participation has been much appreciated. In this segment, I would like to warmly welcome the Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Professor of Rhetoric Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, Shannon Jackson, for joining us for the keynote speech of the conference. Her speech is titled Essential Service and the Proximate Labor of Performance. My fellow conference organizers, Taylor Colbert, Rujiao Dong, Alex Vitieri Arturo, and I would like to wholeheartedly thank you for being so understanding and so flexible and making this very unusual conference possible. Before I turn the proverbial mic over to you, I would just like to take a quick moment and tell our live stream viewers out there how they can send their questions for the Q&A session that will follow the keynote speech. There are three ways to do so. First, if you're watching the live stream on our Facebook page, so you can simply comment underneath the Facebook live video and this is taking place in the PhD program in theater at the Graduate Center CUNY. And secondly, if you are a Twitter user and you are watching the live stream on HowlRound.com, you can simply tweet your questions at HowlRound, that is their Twitter handle, and use the hashtag networks2020. Thirdly, if you're an Instagram user, please private message us your questions on our official Instagram handle that is at PhD theater grad center CUNY. One word and all the theaters are spelled with a T-E-R-E and not a T-E-R. So we look forward to having you with us for our Q&A and I will ask Professor Jackson to take it away from here. Thank you. Thank you, Mayu. I have to say, I'm getting a double, I'm getting two. Mayu's introduction is still ringing in my ear so I'm not quite sure. It's a little difficult to talk there. Hopefully, yeah, maybe we'll just take that down. I don't know why it's coming back again. Sorry for that technical. I'm now hearing myself again. Okay, are people hearing me two times? Oh, I'm so sorry. Shannon, we're not getting an echo. Is it possible that the live stream is open on your computer? Okay, let's see. I thought I'd taken it off. Let's, I think it is because the live stream was playing twice. Okay, yeah, I think it is. So, see if that does anything. Okay, let's try that. Does that do anything? Okay, can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Okay, good. And good, because I can't hear myself now. All right. Well, it's a true pleasure to be joining all of you. As you, as was advertised, I have a title called essential service in the proximate labor of performance. And I know that I'm not the first one or won't be the last one to note the incredible prescience of this conference, networks mapping labor and theater and performance are gathering whose people and topics are getting remapped by the re-territorializing effects of COVID-19 right now. The fact actually that we're even gathered here, here together online depends on a few networks. And I know a lot of labor. It depends upon a community of practitioners, including those at HowlRound. And it depends, of course, on the internet and the technology company, such as Zoom, that cement our dependence upon a net that works. And when it comes to labor, I know there's been a great deal, visible and invisible. But it is primarily, of course, indebted to the irrepressible commitment of CUNY graduate students who first organized the conference and then put a second round of labor into making sure that we could gather and pursue these aesthetic, ethical, and economic conversations from the region of the country that has endured some of the most harrowing effects of COVID-19. And from my end, as well, I also want to thank my graduate student researcher, Casey Fourcier, who helped me gather material for this talk up until even last night since the topic at hand seems to change almost every day. So I know we're all muted, but I hope you can join me in offering a private thanks to Casey, as well as to Mayu Rajal, Taylor, Alex, and all of the CUNY students and staff who really offered their labor remunerated and unremunerated once in them twice on behalf of us all. By the by, more on that commitment, on the drive to keep laboring, on the question of remuneration, and on the politics of our own irrepressibility as I continue. So let's take a breath, take a breath. You can take a breath on your own. Needless to say, it's been quite striking and sometimes daunting to keep up with my own commitment to these themes and this conference and to imagine what I would have to say by April 23rd, given the massive social and global shifts of the last few weeks. New stories of institutions closing or furloughing new data on the lives of artists, creatives, gig workers all shifted and morphed in a stable understanding of what I thought I might say, but here we are, let's see what I have to say or more precisely, let's see if I can say it in four parts. What I thought I would do is start by rehearing our conference's terms and charge with COVID's ear. From there, I'll move into two interrelated sections, one on the labor of art, including but not exclusively the labor of the performing arts. And then I'll move to what might be called the art of labor, especially on performance as a theoretical tool for understanding the nature of work in the 21st century. And by the end, I'll conclude with a very mini inventory of how these themes might collide in what is increasingly becoming the labor of COVID art, artistic practices that anticipated highlight, critique, or reframe the changing parameters of social life now that a virus has revealed a shared precarity that was, of course, already there. These are my first publicly shared thoughts on all of these topics, by the way, so be gentle with me. This is a start of the conversation. It'll all likely be dated tomorrow. So another breath, actually I'll even take it further. Humor me for a second. I'm gonna touch my screen.  And just wonder and think about what the effects are, the losses, and the alternate forms of compensation that we have going here at this moment, for those of us who care so deeply about performance. So let's start with net works and read some of the central charge of our conference. If I was teaching, I'd be asking you to read this out loud, but you can read it on your own, if you don't mind. Net works, mapping labor in theater and performance is a conference that seeks to uncover the collaborative and solitary labor necessitated by creative and performative spaces, the labor of working in a globally connected world, and the labor of working at the intersections of the material, the human, and the ephemeral. So first of all, this description underscores with retroactive irony, the renewed dominance of the internet in our lives. That dominance is of course a felt now acutely in our efforts to remain in contact with loved ones across the globe, to stay up to date with news, to continue working online, if of course one has the privilege of having a job that allows you to work on a screen at home. It's also, the network question has also renewed arguably, a renewed dominance for those of us in the arts as institutions close, lay off, and furlough, all while scrambling to move cultural production online. Perched at our museums from home, dialed into podcasts, audibles, and YouTube channels, we encounter virtual exhibitions, symphonies, and plays performed in empty houses. The onliness of everything forces the question of whether the internet is an extension or a deflation of everything we most value about performance. Networks, boy, do they work and they're working for us now and working and working and working and working and working. Let's continue with our reading. Okay, collaborative and solitary labor necessitated by creative spaces, the material, the human, the ephemeral. Two months ago, I thought I knew what these sentences meant or at the very least that the overlapping fields of theater, dance, performance studies, contemporary art, new media art had a general consensus of the distinct references behind some of these terms that say collaboration is perhaps more of a given in the performing arts and something of a turn in the visual arts that solitary was the purported tendency of the individual visual artist and that the material, the human and the ephemeral did somehow refer to distinct domains awaiting our efforts at combination or awaiting us to force an intersection. Now, of course, that word solitary rings loudly with sobering resonance, especially as so much of what once was collaborative in our lives is now experienced in physically solitary isolation. I'm solitary now working collaboratively with you. Moreover, so much of what we understood to be material is now being experienced as ephemeral. Precious objects come to us as screen pieces on Instagram. Too many smiles come to us only on FaceTime. Was it right to think of these domains as distinct or separate or has the virus revealed the intersection that was already there? We might continue to ask that question while our reading continues with more from the charge. What are the theoretical and methodological opportunities and challenges posed by interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research in the fields of labor and the networks of people, places, spaces, objects, environments and even species that become manifest in theater and performance? How does the labor of as performance shape the interrelations among such elements? How does an awareness of such labor shift our understanding of what performance can be and do? Again, the interrelation amongst these elements assumes that they were distinct, perhaps, or for much of my career, I teach and write as if they are. We have so many ways of talking about the people as an element, the bodies of dancers, the bodies of performance artists, the characters of theater, as well as the collaborative forms that gather these people in cast, in ensembles, in assemblies, collectives, rituals, protests, and other highly populated, peopleed forms. What will these assemblies become when they are recursively redefined by the restriction or absence of people as a sentient element? Let's take another element from the charge, places and spaces. Thinking here too about performance's reciprocal commitment to defining and being defined by place. What to make of our experience of, say, spatial emptiness now? We now see online tours of our cultural places, churches, stadiums, theaters without people, already quasi-ruins. Meanwhile, what do we make of the site-specific exhortation now to all of us to shelter in place, to recognize that a home is valued, not currently as a gathering space, but as a basic need? Moreover, that in-place preposition is to be heard as restriction. To be in place in your shelter now means that you do not move. If and when we eventually returned to a public space, staggeringly, tentatively, it will entail new choreographies, new ways to keep our distance from the bodies that occupy a museum gallery, separating desks from desks of office spaces or staggering ourselves in the all-too-proximate seats of our theaters. In fact, of course, we're now coming to terms, we could say, with this network of elements, this network of elements in a different way, recognizing that the viruses effect are reorganizing the relations of the elements and hence repositioning the definition and practice of performance as a shaper of relations. The virus functions as an agent that reminds us of the lack of boundaries amongst elements such as people, spaces, objects, environments and species. And in fact, in many ways, forcing us to feel those lack of boundaries of things that we once experienced as separate from each other, a kind of conceptual reminder of the porous microbial and indiscreet relationships amongst spaces, objects, environments, peoples and species. So with that scene set, let's turn more explicitly to the conditions of labor and work in the cultural sphere. And of course, on April 23rd, that means turning to very fraught working conditions. I know I'm the last person, this is the last group that needs education about the economic fallout of the cultural sector, but I'll just set the scene to be sure that we are occupying the same one. Within the first week of the erroneously named social distancing and the somewhat tautologically term shelter in place, those doomed projections began. The 30% of museums and other arts organizations would close and likely never reopen. Americans for the Arts originally projected losses for the nonprofit art sector at 32 billion. On March 16th, revised up to 4.5 billion as of April 6th. It's hard to keep up. Museums in Europe are reporting losses of 75 to 80% of their earned income each week. Museums in the US were reported to be losing $33 million a day. In the US, this translated to 300,000 full and part-time cultural workers being laid off or furloughed and that number has increased. And then of course, the specific stories that buttressed this doom and gloom started to pour in. There were those institutions who went directly to layoffs. SF MoMA here in the Bay Area laid off over 300 employees. MoMA laid off all educators. The Theater Development Fund laid off temporary and part-time workers. The Oregon Symphony laid off the entire orchestra and half of its administrative staff. And meanwhile, there are those who were committed to paying employees up until certain dates. Say the Metropolitan Museum, the New York City Ballet, Oakland Museum of California. And as those dates approach, as those promises approach expiration, they and more are adopting a mix of strategies. A kind of some, such as the Public Theater or Sotheby's, have furloughed. Some are also others such as the Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts are implementing pay cuts across the board. The Brooklyn Cat of Mia Music announced that it would start with pay cuts at the top before considering cuts to the rest of staff. Most are now facing a hybrid model of all of these strategies as the actuary projections morph and shift. Some, such as the San Francisco Art Institute here in my neck of the woods, as well as Indianapolis Contemporary in the Midwest, have already announced that they are closing and will not reopen. It is indeed hard to keep up. Though a range of sites try from Hyperallergic's Daily Report to the Art Newspaper, to the Association for Performing Arts Professionals, to Playbill, to Create a Capital, to Americans for the Arts, to LostMyDigGig.com to Live for Life Music, and many, many, many other crowdsourced sites. We have different people, different organizations, different sites keeping track of the loss. Just as an aside as someone who tries to keep track of visual arts sectors as well as performing arts sectors, this is a moment of COVID prognosticating becomes another moment of the kind of art siloing. One has to check the stats on different sectors and find an integration. Meanwhile, of course, there have been individual and institutional forms of advocacy starting up. Manuel Borra-Vilal, Director of the Museum, Rena Sofia in Madrid called for a new Marshall Plan to help rebuild society and culture and unexpected use of an international military metaphor. Hans Ulrich Ubrist of the Serpentine Gallery called for a public art effort in the United Kingdom that followed the systems and goals of the workers product of the WPA in the United States. Of course, the United States is now the last country one could look for, for a nationalized artist relief fund. Though some continue here in the U.S. to advocate for federally-based solutions initiated by the MET Congress-Saved Culture, hashtag Congress-Saved Culture, that movement seeks to lobby for non-profit arts failouts akin to those planned for other service industries, including quote, casinos, airlines, and more. As we think about that analogy between non-profit arts and casinos or airlines, it might be worth looking at the discourse of such advocacy programs, take a quote from MET Director Max Holien's statement. Museums, he says, play an instrumental role in our time and have done so for several centuries, by preserving local and international cultures, helping us interpret the many worlds we live in, and convening diverse communities. In this moment of crisis, we almost do what we can to ensure that this essential component of our society will be preserved and protected for future generations. So just as a continued side note, this portrays another moment of tacit art siloing where saving of culture translates to the saving of museums. But that side note aside, I'm more interested now in the language that Max uses for arguing for the importance of culture. He describes the role in preservation and an interpretation as instrumental, a less than typical language that might normally come from a German arts thinker and leader, one who incidentally was recruited from Frankfurt to the United States and who knows his Adorno. And Max continues with language that whether wittingly or not, chimes with language we might hear now every day, calling it an essential component of our society, culture as essential, sidling up to being an essential service, the term of the moment. Of course, in the hasty process of categorizing the essential service, the labors of the arts were not included. Essential workers were defined as those who maintained the critical infrastructure of the country. Looking at its categories, they mostly correspond to a particular definition you could say of basic needs in healthcare, food and agriculture, water, dams, nuclear reactors, materials and waste, water, chemical, a list that expands upon the ideology you could say embedded in Laszlo's hierarchy of needs in which food and shelter constitute the foundation of basic needs of physiology here and safety with the more evolved and paradoxically perhaps more expendable needs of love, esteem or self-actualization on, of course, the less basic top of the hierarchy. Lest this analogy ring too much of 21st century motivational entrepreneurialism, we can also note the concept of critical infrastructure corresponds to Karl Marx's hierarchies as well, one that would distinguish between the basic work of the base as opposed to the ideological work of the superstructure. The US definition of essential service does, of course, have a 21st century ring as well. In addition to services that address the materially physiological maintenance of its citizens, the spheres of, quote, information technology and communication were deemed essential as well. In amplifying on these spheres, the US Department of Homeland Security elaborated, reliance on technology and just-in-time supply chains means that certain workers must be able to access certain sites, facilities and assets to ensure continuity of functions. Here, the cognitive spheres of digital communication and informational technology enter into the realm of the essential, an entrance propelled by post-Fortes discourse that appeals to just-in-time delivery as basic necessity. This, by the way, is one of many places where we find, you could say, the intersection between the material and the ephemeral, between the digitality of life and the material supply chain of life. An intersection assumed here with ideological expediency at the federal level and certainly doesn't need a performance study scholar to force it. Oh, and I actually had to cut an elaboration of this, I would say, sort of recent parody of labor hierarchies. I, student Angela Yu, screenshotted it from Twitter, so I'll leave it there for you to think about and ponder later. Within this context, this sort of clarification of the importance of certain types of labor, we might have some specific questions about the labor of the arts. First off, what would it take for the arts to be categorized as essential? And secondly, would we want that categorization? In answer to the first, it is clear that arts organizations and artist groups, nationally and globally, are all trying hard to demonstrate their and our essential force. The cascade of online cultural content is extraordinary and inspiring and overwhelming and sometimes concerning. Virtual tours even using virtual reality abound in the museum world. Sequestered collections now digitized or available to browse. Films festivals such as Tribeca's this week are all available online. The theater industry is trying out a range of models. I don't know what happened, missed one of my slides. A range of models, whether the Broadway HD collaborations of regional theaters or audible experiments with Williamstown Theater Festival or with small and mid-sized theaters putting samplers of quasi canceled seasons online. The economic sustainability, let's see if I have it here. Okay. The economic sustainability of culture online already a question before. Now we could say becomes more acute. Much of this content is currently offered in a freemium model. Some of it requires paid ticketing or subscription. Some use online cultural engagement to raise philanthropic money for artist relief. Others use a different kind of mix including sites such as Trickle Up or various DIY artist-led crowdfunding initiatives. But all of the easily accessible online cultural program bakes the question. If our cultural life could be deemed essential individually or federally, will people pay for what they also feel should be free? So these questions bring up other ones, conceptual, political, even physiological about the limits and opportunities, contradictions and ambivalences of the essential category. For one insidious line of thought, the online networking of arts organizations bespeaks, you could say, a kind of creative speedup in the midst of economic downturn. It's an inconvenient thought, but the impulse to create and to create and create might not just be an internal impulse but an external compulsion. Even with all our extra time, the just-in-time pace of the digital assembly line has sped up and our artists and our arts organizations have to speed up with it to be competitive, to be remembered and to remain in sync with how this net works. From another angle, of course, we can find an impulse to grant the arts essential status in the enthusiasm with which citizens are consuming cultural production. A belief in arts essential status also seems to be driving heartwarming stories of its appearance throughout our country and the globe. Artists are decorating ICUs, musicians play for hospital workers, and of course, Italians are playing on balconies. Performance is the wet viral with this virus as our hearts bore witness to the irrepressible spirit of human creativity. Art in some of these stories feels like a public service, even a public health service, and therefore essential to the critical infrastructure of the country. At the same time, we might also question delicately this attribution of the instrumental for in these misty, affectively compelling moments of aesthetic eruption. The appeal seems to come perhaps from a luminously non-essential place, a place that cannot be and does not want to be fully integrated into the instrumental, a place that reassures us that our future will not require artistic labor to be exclusively rationalized for its hyper-functionality. If we update our adorno for this moment, we might embrace the essential nature of arts non-essential service at the time of COVID. There are of course other reasons to question our inclusion in the essential category, at least as it's currently defined at this moment and mobilized. The fact is that so many essential workers are proximate performers in the most dangerous sense. What if artistic service was deemed essential in this material physiological sense right now? What if we doubled down as performance people on the real-time, co-present, touchable nature of our favorite medium and advocate for its delivery offline, not just online? Would that be no touch dances on people's doorsteps, pop-up musical performances in cul-de-sacs, theater scenes performed on rooftops with face masks? Those are actually happening, of course. Aesthetically risky, physiologically risky, a kind of almost a kind of inverted sheer hair rizad if we were deemed an essential service where if there was an authoritarian directive compelling artists to be creative on site just in time, a situation that might actually put the artist's life at risk rather than keep her alive. This kind of scenario you could say anticipates or was anticipated by the work of Aliso Grady's edited collection on the performance of risk, even if it perhaps also prompts us to rehear and reframe past aesthetic experiments that delved into the edgy territory of risk. Is COVID prompting us to consider incorporating new levels of risk in performance? Or conversely, is COVID calling the bluff of the avant-garde's risky aesthetics? Let me close this section. I'm just keeping things blank for a second by returning more specifically to labor and economics because the question remains, it seems to me, whether we can square a global citizenry's impulse to celebrate Italians on balconies with their adjacent lack of concern perhaps or indifferent concern to the closing of symphonies. Perhaps this is just another example of the ambivalent mix of celebration and indifference that shadows societal attitudes toward the arts, the embrace and withdrawal routinely endured by those who create art that everyone ultimate kind of wants for free. Will the celebration of creativity's necessity translate into a reinvestment in creativity's institutions? Or finally, and perhaps more provocatively, if the world is going to be remade, whether under a Marshall Plan or a WPA-like plan, not, does everyone believe in the restoration of our current institutions of artistic labor? Is there a power, actually, in disidentifying from a concern about their closure? A recent piece by Regina Victor in eScripted shared with me by my student, Rebecca Strutch, suggested as much, noting that the recommitment to artistic institutions does not necessarily translate into support for artists' lives. I don't have her quotes, you just have to listen. As artists nationally, we find ourselves collectively unmoored, says Victor. The institutions we have sunk so much of our sweat, tears, blood, and sometimes limbs and appendages, I'm not joking, have all but abandoned us because they could not save themselves, unquote. All right, so having got to this inconvenient point in my thinking, thus far for April 23rd, let's try to come at some of these questions from a different direction by imagining the labor of art and how it might be reconciled with the performative discourse of the art of labor. Even with the above focus on the labor of arts, I think I've already been edging toward this discourse around the art of labor, especially as we face analogies between creative work and the work of information technology, communications, casinos, airlines, restaurants. Notably, this is a discourse where the time-based so-called ephemeral qualities of performance are invoked to explain the world of post-industrial service. The post-Fordus discourse here often confronts me and is no doubt familiar to most of you gathered here, but once again, I'll do a little bit of scene setting to make sure we're inhabiting the same scenario. The fundamental premise here is that artistic practices of contemporary performance, both in the performing arts and in the participatory turns of contemporary art and new media are coinciding with perhaps symptoms of a wider turn to the performative participatory and experiential in a post-Fordist service economy. Bojana Svevic and Anna Pojanovic offer one example of how this kind of thought rides in an interview with Jasper Puar, Judith Butler, and others. Here they cite operasmo discourse where thinkers theorize a turn from material production of commodities to an immaterial turn to services or one that values cultural informational content, standards, norms, tastes, and most important strategically public opinion by means of cooperation and communication as the basic work activities. Art thereby gains a new political position and performance has a special role to play here. Workers are no longer obliged merely to get the job done but also to be virtuoso performers, eloquent, open and communicative. But, and there's the tangle, while this thesis is quote mostly taken as promising for the politicality of the contemporary art world, they and many others argue that such optimism is misunderstood or should be or misplaced. They say, and others would say, that performance should be talked about less as a political practice and more as a model of production. Once again, the world of contemporary performance along with the performative turn contemporary art are read as symptoms of a wider turn to service in late capitalism and more of productive labor. The labor of performance coincides with this turn in the performance of labor in offering and counter sociality experiential as a desirable product. Moreover, that turn is buttressed or rather unbuttrust by the increasingly intermittent conditions of artistic and performing arts labor. Artists have learned to embrace the freedom and creativity of a lifestyle that strings together residencies, laboratories and temporary working situations, the festivalization and quote proliferation of small scale projects that lead only, and this is quoting Boyana and on again, to economic self precaritization. So, if we take seriously this scene, what are artists invested in these practices and dependent upon the professional networks to do? Well, first of all, we might notice that the apparent political significance of or irrepressibly expressive significance of creative performance is reframed when we factor its embedding in a changing context of labor and economics. Along the way, performance workers might have to rethink service labor and what it means to display their skills. Or as Boyana and Anna conclude with no small degree of oratorial intensity, the question would be, how to act upon the material conditions to no longer compose or negotiate with them, but to reclaim art as a public good in political and economic terms, which requires reconfiguring relations between the state, the public sphere, and the sphere of private capital. To do this, critical thought from within performance practice itself will not suffice, but in fact, performance practitioners will need to politically reeducate themselves as citizens in the public sphere. So, what would such a public reeducation look like? Well, quite clearly, it would be a reeducation that sits alongside a reeducation on the performative nature of work in all varieties of so-called immaterial service sectors, communications, informational technology, restaurants, casinos, airlines, and just-in-time delivery service. And quite clearly, we are getting this political reeducation now. Let's recall to deepen engagement with this discourse, some of the other key paradoxes of this immaterial turn to service as it's been elaborated in Operace Moe and Post-Operace Moe Discourse and diagnosed subsequently. I'll turn to Ketti Chukhach's contribution to an eFlex special issue that was entitled, Are You Working Too Much? I think there you can find one helpful summary. As labor is dematerialized and the division of labor in industrial production erodes, capital not only occupies the working hours during which products or goods and its surplus value are produced, it absorbs all of the worker's time as well as his or her existence, thoughts, and creative desires. Labor coincides increasingly with the creative maneuvers of a virtuosic performer, there's that word again, with active memory and engagement with knowledge. In this way, productive activity occupies life, social and societal space, the intellect, the soul. In other words, in the post-industrial universe and its fractured gig economy, laborers are encouraged to work like artists, or at least a certain stereotype of the artist to follow their passions and to embrace the freedom of a flexible workplace, one unfettered by, say, job security or reliable wages or comprehensive healthcare. Moreover, the entrepreneurial takeover of the worker's soul is packaged to her as freedom and self-actualization as the opportunity to design one's own life, creatively, flexibly, autonomously. This is a context where the apparent do-it-yourself ethos of crowdsourcing, kick-starting, and flexible self-entrepreneurialism also depend on a do-it-to-yourself ethos in practice of self-exploitation. And it's a context where the flexibility of a digital economy distributes excess risk onto individual workers while extracting their surplus value and where even, and especially, artists and cultural laborers willingly submit to hours of unremunerated labor for the love of their work, a passionately immaterial labor that compensates wittingly or unwittingly for the ongoing gigification of the cultural sector. We are, after all, so irrepressible. So in the midst of this irrepressibility, we might ask, and I'm gonna go blank for a second, how workers, what it means to be immaterial, how workers own physiological experience of their lives, chimes with, or not, the purported dematerialization of the economy. Do service workers, whether in casinos or museums, airlines or theaters, experience ourselves and our labor as immaterial? Is the immaterial labor of an informational technology company analogous to the immaterial labor of a restaurant? Some of us, including yours truly, have been questioning the integrity of the lumpy immaterial category as well as the reductive interpretations of the post-industrial for quite some time. Arguably, that questioning is expedited along with our political re-education in the time of COVID. The fact is that I, one might say, that there is no clear stability in this turn from object to service or in the turn from the so-called material to the so-called immaterial, much less the ephemeral. Even the so-called immaterial sphere of the internet depends upon objects, people, infrastructure, routers and grids. But more insidiously, the apparently unfettered experience of digitally powered delivery is, of course, ridden with an urgent materiality. Recall the federal decree that reliance on technology and just-in-time supply chains means that certain workers must be able to access certain sites, facilities and assets to ensure continuity of functions. These workers, of course, include the Uber drivers, the cashiers, the Instacart workers and the Amazon deliverers, whose contact-heavy labor reveals the risky materiality undergirding the tech-dependent consumers, a frictionless experience of her grocery shopping. The Gabe Worker's collective open letter on the subject reminded us all what it means to be amongst the essentially expendable. The surplus from which post-industrial tech services extract value, here's one quote, Instacart said, one is profiting astronomically off of us literally risking our lives all while refusing to provide us with effective protection, meaningful pay, and meaningful benefits. The definition of the immaterial worker is therefore shaky because immateriality is so impure. You are always touching someone and someone is always touching you. Moreover, the definition of the immaterial category becomes even shakier once one confronts the wide range of economic positions it includes. It's in social group that includes top managers of the highest echelon, white Carlo workers, Zoomers, service industry workers on short-term contracts. It includes Zoomers such as us today and essential service providers that some of us might be tomorrow. It includes the performing artists who used to work day jobs until both their day jobs and their night jobs dried up. So as part of our reeducation, COVID is foregrounding the tacit materiality as well as the economic inequity already embedded in the immaterial class category. So at this point, I've trotted through the arguments and conspiracy theories of post-industrial economic critique. It might be time, I think, to take another collective breath. It might be time to ask ourselves whether we really believe the conclusions of these critiques. They have arguably become sort of routinized in contemporary humanistic thought on labor as well as art world thought on work. Maybe this is a moment to go back to Operacimo discourse and be reminded how much they and especially figures like Paolo Vernau always elaborated the virtuosic conditions of post-fortress services as the same ones that could be productively remobilized on behalf of another kind of digitally formed commons. Says Ketichukov quote, despite all this Vernau believes a positive aspect of post-fortress capitalism can be found in its having created the conditions for the emergence of nonprofit non-capitalistic public benefits. Languages, network-based know-hows, systems for informational and cultural dissemination or as Vernau himself says in the dismeasure of art, the so-called creative sphere yields for political imagining, not simply new content, but new forms. Avant-garde art proved the impotence, impotence, the inadequacy, the disproportion of the old standards through a formal investigation. The common ground of art and social movements is never about content, but about form. This collapse of the old rules and anticipating new rules, even if only formal is where aesthetics and social resistance meets, this is the common ground where a new society is anticipated that is based on general intellect and not on the sovereignty of the state anymore. I see creativity as diffuse without a privileged center as a no matter what creativity, under weak leadership, if you can call it that, having no specific location connected to the fact that we humans are linguistic beings, art is anybody's. So post-fortist virtuosic labor can pivot here and disperse, exceed capitalist and state-based absorption, providing a context for new network-based know-hows, new forms and rules. Now, more specifically, we gathered here might ask whether the network can work on behalf of a different kind of mobilization, even in the midst of a post-fortist takeover of all of our free time. Are we able both to critique the effects of the immaterial sphere, but, as Verano does, find within its network's new capacities to for network-based forms? Here, as we share our know-hows on howl round. I think of that next to what Regina Victor says as her critiqued of institutions continued and e-scripted where she told performing artists not to rely on institutions but to return to their passions. Produce and make what brings you joy. What brings you joy?  There are so many reasons to create an institutional pressure to provide a product or stay relevant does not have to be among them. You chose a lifelong practice of unlocking the deepest secrets of humanity and right now time is on your side. It's hard not to hear this with a conspiratorial ear as if it is just encouraging artists self-inscription into creative self-exploitation using that language of self-actualization. Understand yourself and encouraging the takeover of your free time. Time is on your side. And yet it feels for me affectively inappropriate to level that critique here to marshal the condescensions of a post-Fordist critical routine. Next to that reluctance, I also find myself recalling Liam Gillick's diagnostic comments to visual artists which also appeared in that same special issue Are You Working Too Much From E-Flex? His essay was titled The Good of Work where this hyper theoretical contemporary artist found a generational exhaustion in the routinized argument of the self-immolation of the creative laborer. He toward the end of the essay, he says, the notion that artists are a perfect analog of the flexible entrepreneurial class is a generational concept that merely masks a lack of differentiation in observation of practice and the devastating fact that artists are in a permanent battle with what came just before. That is the good of work, replacing the models of the recent past with better ones. So what might it mean to spy some strategic redirection by engaging in actual observation of practice, perhaps to find some provisional autonomy, some alternate mobilizations and maybe yes, some joy in contemporary forms of artistic labor. So with that network of thoughts in mind, I'm going to come conclude by turning with the hope of eventually thinking about replacements of past models and better ones by turning to a selection, just some very tentative samplings of what might be called COVID-inflected art or labor of COVID art. Here I'm interested not simply in practices of putting extant art online, often art that is maladapted for putting it online, but art that engages in the materialities and ephemeralities of a COVID context. That is art that engages in what might be called COVID's forms and this is for fun, not just its masks, but this sensibility it seems to me can prompt us to re-see past work as well as anticipate new work and surveying one might ask if art, time-based art, media art and a range of performing arts have already been exercising social muscles in anticipation of this COVID moment, redefining the interrelation amongst the elements. If that were the case, perhaps it would get us out of the lockstep placement of post-Fordist critique, not simply casting our field and our artists as neoliberal dupes, but spying instead resistant eccentric practices that have already been anticipating a wider remaking of reality. So to start with this sphere of social distancing, I mean, I just sort of think we might resensitized our experience of proximity from a pre-COVID moment. It's hard not to get nostalgic about this category, but to think about the aesthetics of proximity. Oh, this is Faye Driscoll. As the organizers know, I was hoping to show a clip from one of her works, but we don't have time. But I'm writing about it for another context and it's almost shocking to see these bodies touching each other. We can also think about canonical works in performance art that played with proximity as a kind of risky material. Here, we can also note that in re-imagining this piece and reinstalling it at MoMA in the artist's present, Marina expanded the parameters of, and played with parameters of proximity and distance. Even if all those bodies watching are certainly not obeying physically distanced parameters, she and Heraklaus Biesenbalk are. This is a modulated distance that's just about close to six feet. What can we make of a structure that is actually in her mind and under her vision not deflating the energetic power of performance, but where this modulated form of distance structure is actually animating some kind of visceral or erotic energy? Now, with muscle's exercise, we could find a whole range of current COVID experiments that are also working with modulations of proximity and distance, including, for instance, commissions for six foot dances where the six foot is not, as once again, a deflation of performance or of the parameters of performance, but offering a different kind of structure for reanimating it, similarly with other pieces in quarantine dance forms. Having thought about Marina, we might also recall a whole other category of performance that seems to anticipate this time. The aesthetics of endurance, we could call it here.  So if we think that our lives are monotonous now, we can think more about what the durational experience of committed monotony might be. Next to the extremity of Shea, of course, now at the time of Komet, there are all kinds of experience with duration and endurance as a sort of mobilized resident material in the world of experimental theater. There are performances like Annabelle Dow's 12-hour Durational performances, as well as say the production of 24-hour performances, viral monologues. Here, the pre-COVID commitment to the 24-hour work which they made before is now differently experienced in a context where so many of us are now newly sensitized to the uncanny arbitrarity of the 24-hour day. The mention of this world viral then, of course, anticipates another potential aesthetic category, the aesthetics of virality, wherein artists create aesthetic structures that mimic the lateral relations of dissemination and transfer. We can notice a renewed interest, for instance, in past choreography in a piece like Exquisite Corpse, whose video I'm not able to show you now, but if you recall that video which has itself become viral, choreographers are passing moves in choreography across the screen. It's a viral composition of a viral choreographic composition that itself has become recently viral. We can also recall Trisha Brown's roof-building pieces, roof pieces in which artists passed choreography. Again, a kind of welcome contagion from building to building, a structure that has recently been adapted to respond to the COVID moment, allowing artists to pass the baton, the choreographic baton from the shelters they occupy in place. Of course, Miriam Felton-Dansky's pressure book on viral performances reminds us that the virality of performance associated with, say, both the networked structure of transfer, as well as the risk of contagion is compounded now by the viral potential of the internet. That word, back to that word again, of course, also leaks over into another whole category that is gaining recognition. You can say the aesthetics of the digitally born, the digitally initiated artwork art that was net-based virality of contemporary art. Inevitably, foregrounds, you could say, a kind of new kind of prominence that digitally born works now have at a COVID moment where existent sites such as, say, Mark Tribe's Rhizome First Look at the New Museum have been amassing and displaying, of course, internet-born art for quite a while. Arguably, this work is gaining a new appreciation and forcing new questions about the aesthetics and economics of networked production. More and more often, sites are curating on-line digitally born work with more and more eyes than ever before, including art shows inspired by Skype, art shows that are inspired by GIF exhibition, also here on First Look, an exhibition in China, as well as those that questioned the ease of this work, including, well now, WTF, here at Silicon Valley, valet.org. So now also, there are internet-born performances, of course, that are newly appreciated for their appropriateness, the fact that they're made for the screen. Here, in all of this, the network is working not simply as dissemination, platform for dissemination, but as itself a material of the artwork. So as much as we now welcome internet-born art and performance, there are those, of course, that recommit to the exploration of the physical site, even if spaces, places, as an element, are restricted and less than accessible now. It occurs to me that one could call balcony art, many things, you can call it, of course, a musical performance about community connection, and I would call it that too, but today, I'll foreground instead its site specificity. Its use of the balcony as a safe space up high on the border of private and public, it harnessed and thereby foregrounded the particular architectural function of the balcony, the thrill, we should remember, of site-specific performance, whether in Italy on balconies or in the work of site-specific theater companies, think on guard, think the industry, rests in the surprise and pleasure of happening upon a performance in a site where you aren't used to seeing it. And certainly that sense of sightedness is what was foregrounded when seven European institutions now in the last few weeks, associated with Lantoc-Macinelle, commissioned seven artists in Europe to create 14 balcony interventions. A similar mobilization of site-specificity happened in Berlin where artists were invited to turn balconies into galleries, led by the incredible curator Joanna Wartzow, the curatorial statement, oh, and she quotes Jean Genet, as part of her curatorial statement, but as she continues, the statement shims, it seems to me, with the politics and alternate mobilizations of a commons-based practice. Balconies serve as the public apertures of the private. They seem to be where the house ends and yet not. In their political history, they have both been terraces of openness and hope, as well as platforms for authoritarianism and supremacy. While our freedom of mobility is on hold, they become unique sites of everyday performance or even civic mobilization. Meanwhile, a range of creative expression, workshops and personalized performances are now being offered, you could say via internet delivery, if not exactly in-home delivery. Consider social practice artists Pablo Helguera's free singing telegrams or Liza Liu's weaving projects offered not simply, it seems to me, to express creativity in weaving, but to provide physiological comfort and care. Perhaps this is a category where post-for-disservice models are being parodied or being remobilized for alternative connection. And finally, the aesthetics of service bleeds into my last category. And as some of you might know, it's one of my favorites at the aesthetics of maintenance as its foundation, at its foundation lies the great Merle Latterman Eucalyse, who in the late 60s and 70s became a wife and mother and found herself marginalized by a masculinist art world that celebrated the radicality of the free and unaffettered artist. Oh, as a counter to this pernicious tendency then, she drafted her maintenance art manifesto, arguing that the daily repetitive, work-a-day life of care and maintenance was also an art form, if a model or a know-how undervalued in the art world. She joined that manifesto with a range of maintenance performances, washing museums, museum after museum, in order to foreground the labor that kept it clean. Eventually, she extended maintenance to wider scales, becoming the long-term unpaid, unremunerated artist-in-residence of New York's public sanitation department. In the lead up to that honorific, she created pieces like social mirror or even more relevant now, touch sanitation, in which she shook the hands, the contaminated hands, the ungloved hands, of every sanitation worker in the five boroughs saying, thank you for keeping New York City alive. Touch as material practice. This is an artist who continues to inspire me, writing about her when I started, I think, Save My Life. Looking back at her work now through a COVID eye, a few things come to mind. First off, her return to performance, what was called performance, her turn to performance was bundled at the time inside a wider discourse of dematerialization in the art world. A bundling that always perplexed me given that her performances foregrounded the disavowed hypermateriality of aesthetic objects and their institutions. Touch as material practice persists, no matter how much we wash our hands. Secondly, her work helps us to frame a path, it seems to me, to alternative formal engagement, not simply cross-disciplinary forms, but cross-sector forms. The cultural sector here works with the sanitation sector, just as now the cultural sector is working with the public health sector in mask making, in, yes, ICU decorating, in hospital house concerts. We can also note that this is perhaps art working with our critical infrastructure, finding an essentially non-essential way of reimagining its labor and making visible our cross-sector dependencies. This isn't simply appropriated functionality, it seems to me, but an imagining of new forms. Third, and finally, it occurs to me that her work, the observation of her actual practice, helps us notice that many artists refuse to work like artists or like that stereotype of artists. Those that, especially those tuned to gendered and raced and classed forms of labor, those who never had the privilege or desire to identify with the default masculinity of the individuated, unfettered, autonomous, flexibly creative, entrepreneurial, artistic self. Once we observe actual practice of actual artists, we might spy a range of internal resistances to that post-Fordist conflation. Internal resistances that point us to better models, new forms and practices that restitch the relations amongst the elements of performance, which are the elements of life. If there is a chance of spying these slivers of opportunity, we have to give credit to artistic practices that model this connection, including those modeled in the common space practices of howl-round, including the practice of people, such as our conference organizers and all of you, who used their free time in the service of alternate collaboration and speculation, and who in so doing, provisionally restitched the relations amongst us all. It has been a privilege for me to be part of your network. Thank you. Okay, there we go. Thank you, Professor Jackson, that was really good. And so we are open to questions. You can submit your questions on Facebook, following our live stream on the Facebook page. And also you can find, you can tweet your questions on Twitter, using the hashtag networks 2020. And also you can private message us the questions on Instagram. So while we are waiting for the questions to come through, can I take the liberty to ask the first question? Sure. I mean, it was really interesting to hear you talk about all the aesthetics of COVID art in this difficult time. And one thing I have been thinking about is the temporality during this difficult time, actually. It seems like we are standing out our normal time tables, and it actually creates a lot of anxiety a lot of people without that structure in life. I mean, before the COVID nighting, I mean, when we talk about change and art, especially for the hope, like we're talking about something different. We are hoping for a change. We're hoping for something different that is usual, that is new. But at this moment when we talk about hope in the art, it seems like we are trying to return to that normal, trying to return to that unchanged status of life. So the entire concept of a lot of things, for example, space, temporality, hope, proximity, endurance, a lot of things you talk about, it seems to be reversed in the normal sense. So I'm not sure if I'm making any sense here, but can you talk a little bit more about how, like when we resume to our normal life, do you think that is aesthetic of COVID nighting will continue in the art or this will just go away and we just resume to the normal status quo? Thank you. Yeah, thank you for that great question. Maybe I'll start by acknowledging, from my say, own examples of Che-Cheng Shui, that as tedious and extended and impossible to conceive as some of his one-year performances were, they had a confined temporal boundary that and that they begin as a structure with clarity about time. And it seems to me what you're asking is how we handle a situation where we don't have clarity about how time will unfold. Am I following? Yeah, so that it seems then we could learn something about what it might be to commit temporarily to interim structures and decide that for this, these three weeks, these four weeks, this is how we're working. But it also seems, I'm thinking about things from two different directions. One is how to find variation within what seems like tedium now. I just saw an artist who I follow on Instagram, Paul Ramirez-Jonas, who is a CUNY professor who has a little, he put together like a little game where you mix up what you're doing during your day, spin the wheel and you alternate whether you're having breakfast or exercising or reading or distracting. And it was really just sort of about calling attention, I'd say in a kind of more conceptual and mindful way that you still have agency to construct how you spend your day. On the other hand, I actually think that there is maybe a new art form waiting to try to think about what it means to occupy anxiety or what it means to occupy a temporal space of the unknown without it automatically triggering anxiety or that is the question or pursuit of it. And whether there can be something like an art practice that helps make visible and if not manageable at least available for reflection exactly the experience that you're discussing. And then a third, so really, I don't know if I would call it anxiety art but it is something about, but it's something like that when we're talking about the facing the unknown as a temporal structure. And then I guess the third one just goes back to the total overhaul that I gave to those final examples which is more to say, though we don't do not know what's ahead there might be a whole reams of experiments that have already been happening that are happening now that are testing our muscles, exercising our muscles, creating sort of eccentric unorthodox practices and combinations that might well be creating tools for encounter whatever it will be, whatever it will be in terms of how our performance institutions redefine the nature of proximity, whatever it might be in terms of what it means to occupy space together again in public, whatever it might be to share a meal again with more than people you've already decided are in your bubble. And to try to think that those experiments are testing you, creating tools and are offering a kind of recreational vehicle for anticipating and being if not ready, less unready for the unknown we have ahead. Thanks, thanks for that question. Professor Jackson, we have another question from Deep Sikha Chatterjee. She's also a fellow student at the Graduate Center Program. This is not a question but a reflection. However, feel free to use it as a question. As a theater worker, I sometimes wonder if I am doing too much artistic work through festivals, invitations with small fees in a bid to diversify and for many other reasons. I have wondered if it is time for slow theater. Yeah, and then it's kind of like is slow theater, what is slow theater? Is that a new form that we don't know yet or is that repertory theater? Is that the repertory form that we don't have anymore or barely have anymore? So I think that there isn't a silver bullet answer, but I think there is a way that one can be more mindful of the contingencies of how you answer the question from project to project. Also, as somebody who works quite a bit across visual art forms and practices and performing arts forms and practices, it has been interesting to think about retraining across discourses around this kind of issue because in many ways, the so-called project work, the temporary contract, the singular exhibition, etc. is a bit more a version of a visual art model that of course is supported by a gallery system that we don't have. But it is the sort of notion of project work and the residency and what I was referring to early, the festivalization of the performing arts sphere is paralleling, say, the biennial form in the visual arts sphere where there are all kinds of opportunities for self-exploitation in the midst of all kinds of hopes for fabulous celebrity art world success. I, just as a thought, I'll say, I really started to think more about those questions and about what it is to be mindful about those questions when I had the chance to organize a series of workshops as well as a special issue of art practical, which is an online magazine here in San Francisco called Valuing Labor and the Arts. And I'll just turn, suggest, if you are interested to look at it, we ended up commissioning eight artists who all work at the intersection of art, labor and economics to conduct different workshops around some of these questions about the ways in which mixing it up, finding new opportunities as the questionnaire was asking also seemed to coincide with sort of self-exploitation and a kind of, yeah, the do it to yourself life. And I'll say, for instance, there was one artist, Helena Kief, who put together a questionnaire that she asks herself as a kind of art project before she accepts one of these kinds of propositions, largely to stay mindful about the pursuit that she's entering, right? So I'll turn to that. What I also, after that, I guess I would really love to think with you and others about what slow theater would be because I don't think it's the repertory model. I don't think, yeah, I, you know, as people call for Marshall plans or WPAs or as my former student, your new New York colleague, Brandon Wolf writes about in the closing of the German theater system where there are all kinds of tangles about the repertory model meeting the project work model. I think that the pure, you know, unfettered desire to go back isn't going to be quite as helpful as deciding for a different kind of mix. And I think something like slow theater along with a very different kind of Marshall plan along with a very different kind of WPA are part of what are going to be sort of reinvented, reinvented I think right now in a new context which might be anxious, anxious production, but also if we can sort of play things right, not a return to some of the worst of what we have been enduring, but hopefully a way to pull ourselves out into a different platform together. So, to be continued. Hi Shannon, I might have a question. We were discussing before in one of the panels, we were discussing about the social choreographies that are happening all around the world in a very global kind of way. We're all following very similar rules, very similar commands. And we were thinking about choreography of this system of commands and the government as the choreographer of all of the citizens. And you've expanded a little bit about this, the process and the minglings between art and theater or the visual arts and performance arts. And I was also wondering if you have some thoughts about this mingling also of like now we've all become sort of dancers in the street accepting this social distancing Yes, absolutely, yeah. And Gia Kirlas, the dance critic of the New York Times probably have seen her essay about the dominance of choreography of an alternate choreography where she's also dissing people who don't go single file when they should. Which of course you could say, of course the dictum is coming from on high and at the moment I'm in league with those who generally obey rather than those who are the anti-quarantine people taking over public space and violating those regulations. Even in Gia's piece, which is kind of asking for adherence to restriction, you could also say that she's coming up with a recognition of what it means choreographically that the dictum itself is not specified when she's saying a step to the right when you're here if you're walking in twos and you encounter someone else go single file, that's like a variation that actually isn't part of the dictum. And I guess maybe I'll just use that to sort of to say that when we even think about something like the six foot dance pieces, six feet dance pieces that we're working here to, you know, it's, you could say it's a Foucaultian proposition that it is that within certain kinds of parameters or perhaps it's a dissertation proposition but within certain kinds of parameters we might find variation. And that we might even find variation that does not, as I was wondering before is not necessarily deflate energetic connection but finds different ways of generating energetic connection despite distance. Yeah, tentatively I'd go with that. Understanding at the same time that there are all kinds of opportunities for completely unnecessary breaks on civil liberties also as possibilities here with these restrictions on movement. And of course we've seen one of the most heinous and least thought through attempts to restrict movement in Trump's late night tweet around immigration that was, you know you could say an attempt to mobilize the apparent authoritarian power of his office to restrict mobility in ways that actually had nothing to do with health and everything to do with xenophobia and a false sense of what would help the American economy. So the risk of authoritarian choreography certainly persists. Professor Jackson, we have another question from the Instagram. It's from Abner Dalina and quote to Professor Jackson, what a comprehensive perspective a labor in COVID art. I'm an artist and educator from the Philippines currently focusing on multicultural collaboration for my ACC grant. My question, while mobility is highly threatened now and in the future, how will the practice of inter-cultural collaboration be cultivated? How do we best understand and spy into redirection or repurposing of cultural exchanges now and in the future of a pandemic, climate crisis and a social system collapse? Second, what models are the most feasible in the COVID and post COVID art that may be able to sustain artists' physiological needs? For example, food, shelter, especially for people from the global south. Yeah, well, thank you, Abner. What a great set of questions and I have to say as somebody who worries about her carbon footprint but nevertheless really treasures and finds necessary international collaboration, I feel the stakes of your question and have been worrying about those questions for quite some time. I think about it also even with my students, of course, some of whom who have had to return to their homes in different parts of the globe and we could say per the answer to the first question, the future of travel is actually an unknown too, right? So that part of what we're doing is anticipating different kinds of restrictions but we can also say modifications that might be with us when it comes to international travel for quite some time and to then decide whether that type of restriction or some level of restriction must necessarily mean restriction on international collaboration and to be very clear that it shouldn't. So this is one of those places where the sometimes ambivalent relationship that I might have with the online-ness of everything which you probably heard in my talk certainly comes back to help us think about international collaboration, perhaps also even to get to allow Abner who I think might even be in the Philippines right now to dial in and check in with us. I thought about this, was it, oh, yesterday? Yeah, yesterday I was on a remote panel for the Tribeca Film Festival because a piece that I commissioned and residency that I supported here at Berkeley has been selected there and it was a, the panel included, now that Tribeca was online included work from people, from Korean artists, from Taiwanese and Chinese artists moderated by a curator who was based in South Africa, who was there in her house in South Africa. I was in California. And I'm the last one to celebrate global villages and without really thinking about the politics about moving everything online but it is the case that right now viewers from around the globe are getting to see Tribeca offerings that wouldn't have had access before and it might be that if we get more and more adept about how to make this network work for us, we can create more and more alternate formats for sustaining collaboration with people like you, Abner. The economic question is certainly a difficult one because I think that it makes the question about whether or not we can count on nation-based forms for economic support, international governance forms for economic support in a kind of UN or World Bank mode or whether or not we count on philanthropic forms of support whether we go back to Kickstarter and crowdfunding forms of support. All of these are different revenue models. All of them have their mixed economies with mixed politics and mixed effects but I think we'll have to be really creative about that as well, especially, you know, we have precarious artists here in the northern hemisphere of the globe and when we square that with what artists in southern hemispheres of the globe or global south are enduring, we really have a lot of work to do but we wanna do it together. Thank you. Okay, we have two more questions. The first one comes from Allison Walsh. She's actually just defended her dissertation right before the COVID-19 shutdown. Wow. Yeah, so the question is in a related question, I'm seeking a lot of calls from theater people to not keep creating during this time and what do you think about that? Yeah, no, I mean, you probably heard a little bit of distrust there, you know, so I brought up the Regina Victor idea which is saying, yeah, keep creating but do it on your own terms. We even know what it means to do it on your own terms. Is that part of a sort of neoliberal compulsion to keep creating and to show that it doesn't matter, to show that you don't actually need support? You know, so I definitely have a lot of concerns about doing that. At the same time, and you know, I spoke to Liam Gillick and I can encourage you to look at the entire essay, there really might be ways of making work that are mindful of and seek to challenge or resist incorporation in the framing and models of late capitalism to do this in ways that do not absolutely support that. And so as much as I really actually sort of share that concern, I've been, you know, concerned about the heartwarming stories of irrepressible creative artists, you know, and worrying that that isn't necessarily gonna help artists' lives. And at the same time, if one does it with and even incorporates issues around maintenance, issues around the politics of service in your art forms or in the process by which you make your art forms, and with mindful intention about how you use your time, I think you, we don't have to buy the, you know, assume the complete perniciousness, the complete takeover of the theater person's creative soul. Thanks. Yes, thank you, Shannon. We have one more question from Professor Claudia Horristen. She's currently teaching at the other Hunter College. Hi Claudia! Yay! So her question is thanks so much for this talk. She starts, our practices as audiences, consumers for art are also challenged under COVID. Any thoughts to share or explore on this aspect of the arts now? How can audiences reinvent? How can audiences be reinvented, right? Yeah, I mean, and I'm assuming that Claudia is asking that because you're not in celebrating the fact that audiences are getting to see everything online and having even more access than they used to before. And that, so I don't know, you know, if this is gonna fully answer the question, but I think there's, on one hand, there's an equity question. I think that there's an equity question ahead about what, not only how artists and arts organizations will endure, but in a situation where there has been, certainly in the United States, so little public sector funding for the arts, the burden of making sure that all have access to the arts has already been an economically and classed problem, right? So in the future, in terms of how we go back to a different kind of normal, I think there's going to be a big question about whether or not the, how we mitigate against the economic fallout producing a situation where only some audiences get in and some can never afford to ever again. And whether or not we'll commit to some kind of social contract that allows for actual equity and accessibility. On the other hand, I think that there's perhaps just an issue about the audiences, certainly for those of us in performance, missing the phenomenological experience of being an audience member. I don't know if that is a challenge that you had in mind when you asked your question, but it occurs to me in one of the part of what I cut here was in thinking about these experiments online and thinking about Williamstown Theatre Festival doing things on Audible or, you know, parts of public theater season being online, et cetera, or St. Louis Arts, I mean, Theater Studio. I mean, so many organizations doing this that there seems to be maybe of necessity, a kind of a need to produce a kind of FOMO, a kind of strategic FOMO. So that audiences actually don't get used to only, only experiencing these works online. And so that the quest and desire to be part of an immersive experience again, to be, to think with us, to think with performers, to think with artists, to think with organizations about how they want to be audience members again, phenomenologically, will be part of what we need to figure out ahead. But it does mean to me that right now, that it's a kind of FOMO where everybody's missing out, not just you, but I think almost like we need to cultivate it to make sure that you don't miss out on that experience for the very long haul perpetually, but that we find, we tap and excite the desire for gathering again, albeit in new forms, but audience members will have to be artists and creatives and helping us think what those forms are too. Thanks, thanks for helping think about that end of things, Claudia. Alrighty, is that it? Okay, well, I hope I do wanna just thank the team again for being such great stewards, certainly of inviting me in the first place and of making me feel welcome over my screen. It really is an incredible amount of labor and it is labor that I wanna say needs to be celebrated precisely because my sense is that you are helping us think about how the elements, the interrelation amongst the elements are going to be reimagined together. So thank you for this day. Thank you, Professor Jackson. Okay, thank you. And so I'll leave the meeting as they say. Yeah. Okay, okay, bye-bye. Bye, and thank you to everyone else who participated in supporting us as we worked on this project, so. Great, thank you to all of you. Okay.


Hello everyone, welcome to this session. I am Dr. Asha Thurangi and today we are going to learn Shannon Pano Coding Technique. At the end of this session, you will be able to encode the messages of the transmitter using Shannon Pano Coding Technique. These are the contents of this session. Well, in the previous session, we studied types of coding techniques and how to encode a message ensemble using Shannon Pano Coding Technique. Before moving ahead, recall to which coding technique does Shannon Pano Coding Technique belongs. Yes, the answer is source coding technique. In the previous session, we saw how Shannon Pano Coding Technique is applied to find the code words and the efficiency of a system. In that case, we had no confusion in partitioning the messages. But this is not the case all time. Sometimes, there exists an ambiguity in selecting the position for partitioning the messages. How to deal with such problems with ambiguity is now discussed. Consider this example. Apply Shannon Pano Coding procedure for the following message ensemble. Given is set of messages consisting of messages from X1 to X7 with the probabilities as shown and M is equal to 2. Let us now solve this. As per the first step, arranging the messages with the decreasing order of their probabilities, here we get X1 at the top and X7 at the bottom as shown. Now pause this video for few seconds and think where to apply the partition first. Yes, there are two possible ways to partition these messages. Out of these two, the first approach to partition is by applying a first partition after X1 as shown. This gives the sum of probability of the upper message subset as 0.4 and the sum of probabilities of the lower message subset is 0.6. Consider the second approach. The first partition can be applied after message X2 as shown with this. Now the sum of probabilities of the upper message subset is 0.6 and the sum of probabilities of the lower message subset is 0.4. In both the cases, the difference between the sum of probabilities of two subsets is same that is 0.2. That means both approaches are correct as per the rule. Thus, there is ambiguity about which one to select for coding. Before finalizing this, let us apply Shannon Fano coding procedure using both approaches and see the difference. Consider the first approach. Arranging the given messages in the decreasing order of their probabilities, let us first partition the message after X1. 0 is assigned to messages in the upper subset and 1 is assigned to all the messages in the lower subset. Now as the upper subset consists of only one message, no more partition is possible further. Considering the lower subset, the partition is now applied after X3. This gives minimum possible probability difference between the two subsets. Once again, 0 is assigned to all the messages in the upper subset and 1 is assigned to all the messages in the lower subset. Continuing this process, now apply the partition between X2 and X3. 0 is assigned to upper subset messages and 1 is assigned to lower subset of this partition. The next possible partition is after X5 as shown. 0's and 1's are assigned as shown. This is continued till we get only one message in each subset. Let us see. Thus, we now see each message subset consists of only one message and no more further partition is possible. Thus, the code word is then obtained for each message by tracing 0's and 1's from left to right for each message. The final code words and the length of code for messages is as shown in the table. Average length of code word is then calculated by using the formula of L bar. Expanding this equation and substituting the values we get, L bar equal to 2.48 letters per message. Now let us use second approach. Again, considering the messages in the decreasing order of probabilities, let us now apply the first partition after X2. 0's are assigned to all the messages in the upper message subset. 1's are applied to all messages in the lower message subset. Now, let us continue this process till we get only one message per subset. Let us see how. Thus, we now see no more further partition is possible. With this, second approach, the code words and the length of each code word is obtained as shown. Average length of code word is then calculated again using the formula of L bar. Thus, expanding the equation and substituting the values, we now get L bar equal to 2.52 letters per message. We can now see the difference. Using first approach, average length of code word comes to be 2.48 letters per message. And using the second approach, it is 2.52 letters per message. We know that efficiency of the system is inversely proportional to the average length of the code word. Thus, the best approach to choose among the two would be the first approach which gives comparatively lower L bar. Further, let us now calculate entropy. Expanding the equation and substituting the values, we get entropy h of x equals to 2.42 bits per message. Now, the efficiency is calculated using the lower L bar. By using the formula as shown and substituting the values, we now get efficiency eta equal to 0.976, that is 97.6 percent. Thus, in this session, we have seen how Shannon Fano coding technique is applied for problems having ambiguity in partitioning the messages. You can also try to solve this problem considering m equal to 3 and check out the efficiency of the system. This is the reference used. Thank you.