Diolch yn fawr iawn am wylio'r fideo. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Tekstet av Nicolai Winther I'm sorry. Welcome back to the Expanded Animation Symposium. Good evening to all of our Austrian viewers, and good morning to our next two speakers, who both hail from the United States. Our first speaker this evening is Noni de la Pena, and she's a true pioneer in the field of immersive media. She's created a number of very influential works with augmented and virtual reality technology, pioneer in the field of immersive media. She's created a number of very influential works with augmented and virtual reality technology. And today, she'll be giving us a retrospective on her previous work and a look towards the future with new technologies and potential for other projects. Noni will also be joining us later for a question and answer session, so please stick around. Sit back, take off your VR headsets for a little bit, and listen to the future of immersive content. I'm Nani de la Pena, and I am the new founding director for the Arizona State University Center for Narrative and Emerging Media that's being run out of Los Angeles, California, in the Herald Examiner building, our California campus. And I'm also founder of Implomatic Group. So let me tell you a little bit more about my thoughts on narrative and emerging media and kind of begin at the beginning with me. So let me share my screen and I can give you an idea of what I was thinking. So this is a line from Martha Gellhorn, who was a reporter in World War II and also known for having a relationship with Ernest Hemingway. This idea that the view from the ground was essential to give your reader a sense of being there is something I carried with me in my own journalism work, including working on this cover story, Hour by Hour Crack, where I spent my time in a crack den, trying to give the reader the sense of being there. Obviously, I took this to a whole different level when I made Hunger in Los Angeles. This was a piece where we used real audio of a day where a man who didn't get food in time collapsed into a diabetic coma and nearly died. And by putting you on the street there, even with this kind of crude way that we made this, I mean, I built this for 700 bucks, my own money, and begged and borrowed favors and had to learn to do some of my own unity coding. It actually was a pretty effective piece. It got into the Sundance Film Festival as our first virtual reality piece ever. reality piece ever. But I have to say, it was complicated in many ways, including the fact that at the time, there was only this $50,000 headsets. And I was working at a lab at USC, and the head of the lab said, you can't take that with you. You have to make your own goggles. We had this kid who was like the lab intern kicking around, and we started making goggles and the little black dots on the screen are your IPD, like, you know, where do your eyeballs sit? And he had a big fat head and I had a little head, so it could be a little bit difficult. But the headset that came out was this that we took to Sundance with us. And that kid is Palmer Lucky. He went on to start, you know, Oculus with Facebook. What do you think? Oh, you're crying. You're crying. Gina, you're crying. You can hear the surprise in my voice because I really didn't know how people were going to react. And that, you know, folks who worked on that, like John Brennan, you saw, they were just amazing to work as hard as we did together and find this result. Like people were just very careful to avoid stepping on the body. They would walk around the body. Some of you might recognize that's Alejandro Gonzalez. He's being introduced to virtual reality at that moment. And he went on to make Carre Arena, a project that I worked on and which he kindly thanked me at the Oscars when he got the first Oscar for a virtual reality piece. But when Palmer actually went on to make a headset, it was a sit down only headset. It was the Oculus DK1. I mean, obviously they wanted something they could distribute, but I wanted something you could walk around. First I put trackers on my Oculus. You could see it's number 154, but that kind of made you nauseous, so we had to start making our own. And we began to 3D print headsets out of my mother's garage, and then we made actually these trackers. If anybody knows V vancouver slumperiti she did a great job on that to help uh put this experience um into a full sense of being embodied there um at that time we were using a face-based system uh which was like a hundred thousand dollars uh uh to get your hands on a new one but i found one in a big bankruptcy sale for seven thousand dollars and that's where I got started. But why? Because I want to tell stories about people like this. Anastasio Hernandez Rojas. Anastasio was brought to the United States as a young boy. He was a construction worker. During the big downturn, the Great Recession, he stole a bottle of tequila in his stake for his wife on Mother's Day. He got caught. They arrestedquila and a steak for his wife on Mother's Day. He got caught. They arrested him and deported him. And he tried to sneak back in the country and again was caught. But this time they really roughed him up. And people captured some incredible audio from it. We made a piece about him. And this is a trailer that was was done by buzzfeed after they came and experienced it I don't even know what these are. I guess cameras. It looks like somebody's going to shock me. That guy's holding a lightsaber back there. I think virtual reality really is like the next big thing. I think it's the new video game or whatever that means It's so weird, there's like all these people and I'm like What is about to happen? How's this look with my hair? Pretty good, right? Oh got it. Whoa This is gonna simulate a cell phone. So it's gonna be when you press this button here Yeah And you hold it up in front of you a cell phone appear, and you'll have 60 seconds to record whatever you want until before your battery dies. Oh, I see. Oh my God. That's even crazier. All right, so there's a bunch of cops here. They're like standing around, something's going on. Oh, right here. Oh, that's not cool. On the other side of a fence, there's all these people just like kicking and beating this man, and he's screaming. Look at this. And nobody's doing anything about it. Of course nobody's doing anything about it, right? Of course. Because that's what people do. They just watch. It's kind of's what people do, they just watch. It's kind of messed up. Oh, here we go. I couldn't tell before, but I think he's handcuffed. I'm looking above. I'm seeing the horror. Hey, we're recording you. Already not moving, but there's like five dudes beating him. Same thing, they are not stopping. So that piece on BuzzFeed, you know, where you saw these people really fully engaged with their bodies, even though I couldn't show it and distribute it everywhere, it ended up getting almost a million views. And this is the story of a man who barely anyone had heard of. So there are ways to get these stories out in virtual reality, which even surprised me. um there are ways to get these stories out in virtuality which even surprised me um and north pages and pages of discussion about race in america uh in that video which i thought was extremely important um and please remember this is back in 2015. i think you should know that was interesting about this was this young woman who who managed to capture this video from above which showed how many officers were involved in the beating. And, you know, he was handcuffed, right? And she came down and was willing to be shot on our right stage and put into the characters herself and actually recreate in a motion capture suit what happened to her that night so that the witness itself would no longer be just a distant person in the scene, but rather somebody who's there next to you recreating the story with you, with her whole body. So why did volumetric content and spatial computing work? I think we're hardwired to adopt representations of ourselves as real. You know, if you look at this piece, you saw how rough these characters were, and they were mostly donated. But people said extraordinary things to me. This woman in the red, she, she, she steals food in the chaos. And she was, I was told that she had, you know, heroin marks on her arms, needle marks. Somebody said that to me. And the seizure victim, while he had scraped up knees, they could tell he fell all the time. But these were just donated characters. So people really put into the scene what they wanted. And I presume that everybody here can tell that that's the Virgin Mary in a tortilla. This actually made the news here in Los Angeles, the Virgin Mary in a tortilla. Amazing. But this is a study that was being done by Duke where they put this guy in this suit and then tried to use a headset to have him imagine moving that equipment. He was paralyzed from the waist down. And they're trying to get him to imagine moving his legs. And what they found with 12 people like this, that even though they couldn't get up and walk, they actually started returning synapses in their brains just by imagining their body, not even about the equipment, but they could now control their bowel movements, which is a big quality of life issue. So let's talk a little about duality of presence, being here and being there at the same time. This again is some pictures from hunger. I was amazed to see all these people trying to get down on the ground with the seizure victim. You know, they weren't clunky equipment. They could see from either side. And yet they were trying to get down and be there. And in another situation, we use this for a piece on LGBTQ homelessness. 40% of homeless youth come from the LGBTQ community because they've been thrown out from their homes due to their sexual orientation. After I gave my talk at TED Women, the actress Sada Ramirez approached me and she really wanted to make this piece about homelessness in the LGBTQ community. In collaboration with the True Colors Fund, I was lucky enough to begin working with them on finding the right material to tell the story. We ended up using the audio of Daniel Pierce, who was thrown out by his own family, and he happened to record the terrible confrontation that ensues. Get off of me! What's wrong with you? Bring it! What's wrong with you so by putting the audience in the middle of this physical moment you know using the motion capture putting on digital characters and then making it life-size so it happens all around you it's so startling suddenly seeing you've heard which is disturbing enough um and maybe you've watched videos of this type of scene but if it's there and you feel physically vulnerable you connect to Daniel and to what he's going through in a way that I don't think any other medium affords it it is a really significant and powerful moment to be there with Daniel when when he's that vulnerable when he's surrounded by people who hate him just for being who he is. You're twisting my words. You are a completely different person. Let me tell you something. We also use new technologies, something called volumetric capture, which is with a company called 8i, in which we film from every direction around a person and it creates a hologram. And we use that moment, that technology as kind of a postscript to offer messages of hope, be able to give people some ideas of, you know, how you can get to the other side. I also use the sense of, you know, being in two places at once at Art Basel in Hong Kong, where I took an artist who'd let people pick up the bricks and make a brick wall, even with the cars coming, etc., just like the artist had. And this was a recreation of his piece that was done in collaboration together, and the idea that a piece of performance art might be embodied rather than just witnessed once. So a little bit about cinematic versus kinematic. So cinematic people know I'm sure all the different 360 cameras. I've shot some stuff of refugee camps. This was shot in the mountains in the Sudan. And this is an interesting piece where we use macro filming where we were down in the plants. So we bring you down in the, you know, down as like a little creature, like an ad to the plants in the Amazon Spheres, which is in Seattle. It's kind of a plant zoo trying to make sure that there's something from all the world saved there. But it was a very interesting project. I seem to have it twice here, but it's really rather beautiful, and you can see that in the headset, it's pretty amazing. This is a project that I worked on recently with Lenovo, also a 360 project. And this, again, is cinematic. And this is a trailer of a grown person. Whoa, for this. Whoa, for this. The hardest lesson I've ever learned? I was eight years old. It was the lesson that we are going to lose people in our lives. And that we don't have to get used to it. But to understand and accept it when i lost my father i was two months old my mother had been arrested so i lived with my stepfather i was raised by him until i was eight years old he was like a father to me when my mom had been out of jail for a week, my stepfather was killed. The lesson is to accept that all of this is to make us stronger. So let's talk a little bit about space and place. I think of space as where you're creating this content, like where you're where a recreation of the environment what's the environment um places you know when when a space has meaning because something happens in the place um and in this case the space is um with them with photogrammetry of a actual of a actual military department scout frontline documentary series, yet frontline, and we don't access to this military department scout, and it's not a gramatory, it's not a video, but actually recording of somebody walking around and trying to get a patient to the cell and tried a reservation cell. And it became a place when we put a person inside of it using... And I walked into my cell. I didn't realize that I would be spending five and a half years of my life in solitary confinement. I look fine, but I'm not. 18 years old, I was new to the system, never really been in trouble before. As an adult, the solitary confinement and the sensory deprivation, years of it drove a relatively sane young man insane. I cut myself thousands of times, I drove a relatively sane young man insane. Cut myself thousands of times, just over and over and over and over. I acted out. I assaulted staff. I committed arson. And I did a lot of bad things. But that's what solitary confinement does to you. It breaks you down and it turns you into an animal. I also worked on a piece for the Women's History Museum in Washington, D.C. that's being started about a woman publisher. She was a newspaper publisher and postmaster. And what happened is when the revolutionaries created the first Declaration of Independence, they didn't sign it at first, and then they had her print one with their names on it. And at the very bottom, you probably can see that I should blow that up, but it says printed by Mary Catherine Goddard. And that's the very first time that she'd put her full name on anything. She essentially signed the Declaration of Independence. And also when she died, she gave all of her money to her slave and freed her slave. And if you're gonna make a piece like this, well, you got to have, you know, a revolutionary era printing press room. But I had no budget for that. And instead, we did photogrammetry of a museum and then to tell the old words. Then the term I use is called embodied digital rhetoric. How can we use these embodied technologies to tell persuasive arguments? In this case, we strapped a 360 camera onto a helicopter. And then we had a model of that helicopter, and we put the video on the exterior, so when you're in the helicopter, you feel like you're flying over Greenland, right? And here's a trailer of that piece. When you look at the glacier like that, from the vantage point of an helicopter, it looks like it's going to be here forever. How could it possibly go away? The glacier retreated more in the last 15 years than in the previous 70 years. We'd like to know why. We're trying to water here. This is the part we need to know why. Why is it moving? is so what was you know interesting about that was that by giving people an opportunity to be there, I mean, you know, you could drop a thermometer down the back of a toilet. You know, you'd understand that. We did have to do a little bit of special work to take some images that were not recorded with photogrammetry and give them volume in ZBrush. But, you know, then you could put the characters there so they look good. But ultimately, what mattered was by feeling like you were there like feeling like you could be under the water or dropping the thermometer down it really demystified the science um and it was really important for us to be getting this piece out there around climate change um another embodied digital reddit piece i told was one about um uh domestic violence the the United States. Like three women a day are killed by their domestic partners. And I work with these two sisters to tell this story about the moment when their third sister was killed by an ex-partner. Hello, this is Charleston County 911. We received a call from this number. Is everything okay? My nephew's on the phone he just called i asked us to come come to your house because my sister baby daddy has a gun on her the deal was that the sisters um each called 9-1-1 and their uh audio was live and i was able to intercut the audio and recreate the dates with their help and um uh while you're not in the house when Kia is killed, you are with the sisters when they realize what's happened. It's a very powerful. Similarly, did a piece on Syrian refugees. And the deal was like, why? Why, particularly children, why were there so many Syrian refugees? And so we tried to make a trailer to help people understand by putting them on a street in Aleppo. And here's a trailer. And this piece ended up at the Victorian Albert Museum in which the response was incredible. The largest number of guest book comments they had, absolutely fascinating, a real feeling as if you're in the middle of something you normally see on TV news, believable, frightening. And the one that was most important to me was, this was a very difficult peace to experience as a Syrian whose family is still living in arms. Although I felt the peace was inappropriate at first, I've certainly changed my mind after experiencing it firsthand. It's important for the world to bear witness to the situation in Syria, and this is a powerful and effective way to do that. I hope you're able to grow this technology further. So let's talk about the future, right? Combining duality of presence with spatial. This idea of photogrammetry, which is pretty limited, it's not going to be limited for very long. All the LiDAR cameras not going to be limited for very long. All the LiDAR cameras are going to let you start capturing your world with dimension. Google has been releasing data set for 3D object detection. And photogrammetry, videogrammetry has gotten much better. This is a couple, she was an Olympic fencer who had to fight this guy when she was 10 because there was not enough women. And then they battled each other in college. And then they eventually ended up getting married. My suggestion is this is probably the first volumetric kiss ever captured in history. This is a piece we've been working on more recently. How do you deal with trying to uh use this kind of technology to help patients understand um port placement for chemotherapy so does witnessing people like this work better than working with honor health and microsoft research and also not just witnessing a conversation but um being a participant you're going to have a court placed what is the port so the port is a round device with a thin but being a participant. We also did a little interesting thing on virtual production, which was done for a brand called GCDS. Of course, in the height of COVID, there was no Milan Fashion Week, and so we built a piece for them. Thank you. do you see there's a lot of camera work but all done the game engine right now we're working on a game uh once you get to emulate great artists as they go through and destroy hotel rooms. You know, I live in hotels. I tear out the walls and I have accountants pay for it all. It's very funny and a lot of fun. But really, you should know that the next decade will require technology advances that radically democratize creation so that everyone can create. That's what Satya Nadella said. And I really agree. I mean, we need to democratize creation. Right now, if you have to do some coding in Unity, it's not a lot of fun. I don't know about anybody who hates no reference exceptions as much as I do. But it inspired us to create a no-code solution, which is Reach. And it's kind of a authoring tool and a viewing platform, but all with Dimension. So it lets you make fully immersive content easily. It's button-based. You can do it on, and then you can share it on your computer, your phone, or a headset. And, you know, this idea of, you know, democratizing the immersive creation is so important. And here's a trailer, I believe. Introducing Reach, the first web platform for creating and sharing extended reality, including augmented and virtual reality, using real people and places. using real people and places. Built by the pioneers at Emblematic Group, Reach is an easy-to-use, browser-based solution that makes the power of walk-around spatial experiences available to anyone. Reach lets you craft your own volumetric stories in three easy steps using a no-code, drag-and-drop solution. First, you access a library of 3D locations, many of them captured using stunning high-resolution photogrammetry. You can also upload locations you've created yourself. Then, use our simple tool to add your own real life video interviews, volumetric characters, or 3D assets. Finally, you can share the results via a simple web link. Embed your finished story just like you would a video. No need for downloads or dedicated apps. Reach eliminates all the distribution barriers facing room-scale VR. Viewers can navigate stories on a smartphone, tablet, or PC, or put on a headset and walk around for full immersion. Sign up now to discover how far you can reach into the future, where the stories we tell are as vivid and three-dimensional as the world we inhabit. So how have I used Reach? Well, we've been working on a story that was at Tribeca, and it's actually going to be showing around the world, about a young kid named Stanley Hayami, working with the Japanese American National Museum. Stanley was an incredible artist and a writer. He was brought from high school to one of the Japanese American concentration camps in America in the 40s. And we took his drawings, we brought them to life using Quill, and we scanned a barrack. And what we did is we made a trailer that ended up in the Guardian, because the way that we publish it's just like an embeddable URL. And this gives you an idea of like how something like this can just go into a website. And you can actually just click on it and enter the room with your keyboard from the web and WebXR. with your keyboard from the web and WebXR, or as you're starting to move around, if you actually have a headset, you can also click on just the headset button, and you can walk around the space instead of just watching it through a phone or a computer. Finally, just a little wrap-up about our new program at ASU. The master's program will start next year. And the idea is how do we build new storytelling futures with creative technologies? That's our new building. It's super exciting. And I just want to say these are some of the main themes we'll be addressing. Education, research, innovation with an ideation lab, community engagement, and public good policy leadership. How can we take all these things we've learned and be a force for policy changes around emerging narratives? Thank you so much for your time. Bye-bye. First crisis and putting this particular talk together for some reason, I just felt like, wow, I'm seeing. Yeah, we're back. Your talk just finished and we're very, very thrilled to have Nani here in person today, which is definitely not the easiest thing since there's like nine hours of time difference to Austria and such, but she's here with us this morning. And first off, I want to say that it's really an incredible honor to have you here. We talk about you in our research group, Playful Interactive Environments, all the time, because your projects have been very inspiring for us. And it's even more of a privilege to not only be able to share in some of the experiences and learn about the projects you've done, but to be able to ask you some direct questions. And so we're going to definitely take advantage of that today. One of the things that I think is very remarkable about all of your works is the sense of realism. You're using real stories, you're using capture technology, real audio, et cetera. And this is a little bit different to a lot of other immersive experiences in the sense that there's not as much agency as you would expect, for example, in a computer game. Do you think that this maybe is more powerful for this type of content to not have that sense of agency? Or do you think that that's sort of the next step for immersive content to have more agency? I think when you're asking the question about agency, you have to frame it in two different ways, right? I think when you're asking the question about agency, you have to frame it in two different ways, right? When we move through the world with our bodies and we experience stories or events, the agency is really just about how we feel that story, take the story in, not just with our eyes, but with our whole body. I talk about that a lot. And the sense that we're moving through a space, but the context of what's happening turns it into the place, right? And I think that was one of the things that I was really trying to capture. How can we experience story with the agency that we have in our normal lives so that the stories themselves have a resonance that's more akin to what we might feel if we were really there. You know, agency allows you to affect the way events occur. And if I'm going to do a nonfiction piece, you know, we all know that no matter what you do, you're going to have some effect on how the story is, you know, laid out, right? Every documentary has got editing choices and et cetera. And certainly I wouldn't argue that these are any different, but what I would say is that by not letting people affect the timeline, then you kind of make sure that the stories have a certain amount of veracity and stick a little bit closer to the to the real thing um uh when i made hunger in los angeles which is really one of my first big pieces um i had it so initially when you walked up to the food bank woman who was running the food bank she would turn and yell at you because i had so many clips of audio of her yelling at people standing in that line right she was so overwhelmed and then the same with the paramedics they were so nasty to everybody that when you would go to the paramedics they would turn and yell at you because I had these dialogue lines right and then just before we launched I took them out I think we actually launched with it and then I thought that's not journalism how am i affecting the story and i took that trigger points out now i look back on it and think well should i have so i'm not sure i've totally answered these questions myself but it does this distinguish this from you know a gaming experience in terms of you know agency you know with trash which i briefly mentioned in my talk you know you get to emulate great musicians trashing hotel rooms and um that definitely would give the player a lot of agency and it's very playful but in that case even though it's a doc it's a doc i'm calling it a verocumentary it's a documentary game you know uh uh uh but and and and there's a lot of it's, it's hard to keep the real story and historical underpinnings anchored into the piece. But we definitely are letting a lot more agency happen in that because there's a lot of play, it's a play, it's a game. One of the things I really liked about your talk is that sort of highlighted some of the, the technology from the very beginning, because it's really easy to forget just how clunky and cumbersome and expensive all this stuff was but at the same time also very empowering today you know you can buy a pretty good vr headset for a couple of hundred dollars and there are distribution platforms that are online do you think that this has really made these type of experiences accessible or is there still something that needs to be done? Well, I think we're in a bridge moment where we have the standalone headset without a computer. It's still easier to just pick up your phone or your controller, right? And just hit and turn something on. And I think that still there's a little bit of friction there but compared to the way it used to be um you know and i think once people actually put on a headset and start playing games um or playing with it or experiencing things they see the power of and and the reason why to do it you know i'm still very bullish. I obviously have started this whole new center around this. I mean, I think we're going to see all kinds of interesting work in virtual production and, you know, obviously AR VR and other emerging technologies in the way we might use AI for narrative. But I'm wearing my Bose, you know uh glasses that had the bone conduction audio on her bluetooth and i can talk through my glasses these are the early one the earliest pairs um now we know facebook announced a relationship yesterday with an american sunglass company i don't know if they're american actually who make who make Ray-Bans. And people are a little freaked out because it's Facebook, but they're competing with Snap and Snap has new glasses out, right? So like, everything's gonna move to here. We're gonna finally get rid of tech neck of looking down like that. But that's the next generation coming. So I think, I got a hair caught in my glasses, but I think that we're gonna, that's still, we're still in route, but I think things have made a big difference. Right, somehow I think I've got a haircut in my glasses. There we go. Sorry. Speaking of sort of the next sort of steps, I had a look at Reach after your talk today, and I even signed up as a beta tester, so I'd like to try it out. What would you say your intended audience is for this particular tool? So the whole point of WebXR, right, that the reason why I did a platform in WebXR was A, because even when you make stuff in, you know, Unreal and Unity, Because even when you make stuff in Unreal and Unity, and even though those tools are now widely available, they still are very difficult to learn. And I feel like the people who get to tell their stories, the demographics have been frozen. They've just been frozen. And even despite a lot of efforts, it's really only the VR for good community who often bring in, you know, more diverse storytellers and creators, which is sort of ridiculous, right? They should be across the board. So I really wanted to make it easier for anybody who wants to tell their own stories to start making content. So Reach has been a very much a labor of love um we haven't had any financing for it but so please be kind to us when you come and try it and you can actually just start playing yourself at beta.reach.love now we've just kind of opened it up um uh and so the idea was really let people play let people go let people tell their own stories they shouldn't have to learn how to use uh unity and how to code and they we've got to get was really let people play, let people go, let people tell their own stories. They shouldn't have to learn how to use unity and how to code. And they we got to get away from this idea like, you know, everything's got to be built on a film strip, right? Everything's got to be cut that way, shaped that way. The way the content is made, we have to start thinking spatially as well on timelines. And I think that that's what I get excited about. And I really hope that it's going to be useful. And, you know, you can look at it on a computer or a phone or a headset, and that should really help ease some of the distribution problems. Okay. You've started this new Center for Narrative and Emerging Media. Could you tell us a little bit about sort of what the plans are for that? Could you tell us a little bit about sort of what the plans are for that? So super exciting. You know, the fact that Arizona State University and if there's people out there looking for professorships, that we're going to be announcing a lot more jobs. And Arizona State University, Michael Corral, the president has gone all in on immersive. I think we're going to have the largest number of people working together in this immersive space of any university around. I think we're going to end up like 16 positions altogether, something insane, right? Plus a lot of local different people who are in the industry who want to come and also help. So the idea with this is that, you know, also so many programs in the United States are very expensive. And we wanted to, again, democratize the ability for anybody to get an education in immersive and start creating and distributing their own kind of content. So the center itself, at its heart its hardest education, as I noted, but we also plan to have a really great research project and an ideation lab. And then I talk also about, we'll certainly be doing community events anchored in downtown LA, but I think we also need to be a place that takes a hard look at what should the, what should the policies be in the future, right? Shouldn't we have technology boards in the United States? I don't know in the system there, but in the U.S., we have these big boards for education, for water, for power. But at this point, technology has to be a right. We know with Zoom that that's how people are going to be educated in other kinds of crises. This has to be a human right that we also consider. And I hope that we'll be part of that, shaping that future, that narrative for the future. Okay. We have time for maybe one last question. And I know everyone's expecting this question in every different symposium that we have, but it's basically how has the pandemic affected emblematic in terms of, I know that you guys are always very present at festivals and museums and all these types of things. Has it had significant impacts? Has the direction changed because of it in any way? Yeah, you know, I have a piece that's literally, the opening event is tonight at the Japanese American National Museum for Peace Step premiered at Tribeca this last year, and it's traveling a bit around the world. And, you know, the, the, it's very small who can come in or how they can come in. So that's sort of a shame. I really was hoping this piece would be seen more widely and we had to make a 360 video of it so that anybody could see it. So that was a shame. On the other hand, we did some really interesting virtual production work. I showed you that DCDS piece that totally came out of the pandemic. And in fact, I feel we've got more work going on right now than almost ever. So I think people start to realize that these type of technology solutions, you know, are going to be very useful for the future. So in that way, we've definitely been very busy, but I'm starting to, we close our offices and we're distributed everywhere. And I'm starting to really miss being able to turn to a team member and say, oh, wait, I was thinking we should try that. Or, you know, oh, that's what you were talking about. Or I'm starting to miss some of that. So I am looking forward to our center being fully opened up at Arizona where we can be together again. It's a fantastic building with fantastic resources. And it's really going to be a mind blowing place for us to integrate everything together. Well, we'll definitely keep our attention focused on the center. and we look forward to seeing some of the things that come out of there in the next year or two. I'd like to thank you again for participating in the symposium and also in the question and answer session. Everything worked out just perfectly but we're starting to run out of time a little bit. I hope we can stay in contact. Thanks again for participating and best of luck with the new program. Thank you so much thank you bye so uh we're going to move to our next speaker peter burr pretty soon we're going to take about a two minute break but stay tuned for more information about the future of immersive media Thank you. Thank you. Well, welcome back after a short break. Our next speaker, Peter Burr, is an artist and animator who's created complex works within the field of immersive cinema. He has produced literally hundreds of live multimedia exhibitions under the name Hooliganship, and he's recently been exploring and endlessly mutating Labyrinth in some of his works. In his talk, Dream Buckets, Peter's gonna examine the various influences and projects that have influenced his own path in his own sort of private Labyrinth. And we'll also have an opportunity to ask some live questions following the talk, so please stay tuned. Feel free to join our YouTube channel and ask some questions. So without further ado, Peter Burr. Hi, everyone. Thank you to Ars Electronica for inviting me to offer this presentation to you all about dream buckets. At the core of this presentation, we'll be looking at some of my work over the past 20 or so years and exploring some of the ideas that I'd like to dig into behind it. So I actually want to start off with a quote by a gentleman named Stephen Duncombe about dreams, something that I've been thinking about a lot lately. He says, dreams are powerful. They're repositories of our desire. They animate the entertainment industry and drive consumption. They animate the entertainment industry and drive consumption. They can blind people to reality and provide cover for political horror. They can also inspire us to imagine that things could be radically different than they are today and then believe we can progress toward the imaginary world. The latter part of this quote is interesting to me because lately, and when I say lately, perhaps I'm talking about the last 20 years of my life, I've had a lot of really dark dreams. I think about dreams as something that's a really natural thing that human beings do. Most of us all do that. It's like breathing and that there's a part of dreaming that we control. We can actually influence our dreams. And some people put energy towards being able to actually loosen dream. But there's a big part of dreaming that we don't control. So in the same way that I can modulate the way that I'm breathing, I can be really mindful about my breathing. But as soon as I forget about breathing, of course, my body breathes anyway. And in a way, I think about dreaming as part of my body breathes anyway. And in a way I think about dreaming as part of the imaginary that has this dual function. It can be in some ways a bridge as we as we investigate our own dreams and start trying to assert some sort of agency over that. It allows us to explore that bridge. At the core of this presentation will be an artwork that I made that is participating in this year's festival called Dirt Scraper that's a dream of the future. And so this is something that I like to think about a lot as well, how our dreams can actually integrate into something social and function more largely. And I think that particularly the dreams that we have of the future do have an interesting way that they can influence the reality that we live in, this room that I'm in, this room that you're in, the thing that we're going to be doing after we listen to this talk. Nowadays, most concepts of the future that I encounter are kind of hard for me to relate to when they start having like an optimistic valence. I think about a lot of fiction that I've been consuming lately that feels like children's entertainment, and so therefore perhaps a little too simplistic to actually know how to integrate into my real life. therefore perhaps a little too simplistic to actually know how to integrate into my real life. I consume a lot of visions of the future that feel like these wild escapist fantasies. Last night before I went to bed, I was watching Starship Troopers, which in some ways I can understand it as a political allegory, and I can understand it as this interesting dystopia um with these kind of shiny elements but it's it's primarily this action flick and there's this kind of escapist fantasy element that again makes it kind of hard to integrate it into my life um the other envision the other visions of the future that i encounter and this is probably more prevalent are notably short-termed more prevalent are notably short-term. And this, for me, has particularly increased during the pandemic. The term doom scroll is something that I've come back to a lot these days. The way that our social media feed kind of operates like a waterfall of such a wide variety of these world visions that I kind of feel this thing operating where the future and the present seem to kind of meld together in this continuum or this constant change that when I reflect on how that influences my imagination or my dreams, I feel a sort of disabling to envision anything beyond this immediate reality. And so a question that I have, that I have been thinking a lot about a lot lately as an artist is if it's possible for this kind of grim, current short-term worldview to be overcome to make space for bigger, brighter visions. So I'm gonna rewind a little bit and what we're looking at right now is some footage from an old art project that I created about two decades ago called Hooliganship, performing in this case, performing at a music festival in a rural part of Washington state in the United States. And I wanna kind of talk about this idea of the part of dreaming that we actually control. Now, as an artist, I think a lot about aesthetic forms, the ways that things look, the way that sort of things feel in an aesthetic way. And I think that it's really important for us to be able to consider how aesthetic forms and social formations can be spoken about in the same breath. I think it's really important as a way to understand that bridge of how these fictions that we create or these experiments or perhaps a cathartic expression can actually organize and have this social, this larger cultural effect. Now, of course, during COVID, this has been one of the really hard things about making, about making work and participating in an arts culture, is that social formations have become highly limited. And so something that I've noticed is that aesthetic imaginations seem to have similarly been yoked. Around the time that I was making work as part of hooliganship, this was right after I graduated from art school 20 years ago, a place where I learned how to translate my interest in painting and drawing into animation. And that was through learning and having access to computer systems, computer programs that were at the university I attended. When I graduated, I didn't own a computer and I didn't have money to buy a computer. And so I discovered making comics, making zines, making artist books as an interesting way to address some of the same interests in world building, in time-based storytelling or time-based abstraction that kind of scratched a sort of similar itch. And I mentioned this as particularly in this moment, I think about my role as an artist. And for those of you in the audience who are artists as well, one of the things that I think is really great about this job is that we have to find a way. This is kind of one of the most essential things about being an artist is that making must happen regardless of resources. And so there's a certain kind of scalability that's important. And during these times of crisis, like I can speak to this moment of living through a pandemic, this is a really valuable time to be asserting this type of workflow, this process. Now, eventually, of course, I'm here with you today, showing you a bunch of digital work that I've been making over the past 20 years. I did eventually save up enough money to buy a computer. But through this process, I encountered this project called the Bookmobile Project, Projet Mobiliv, which was a project that ran between 2001 and 2005 that I encountered when I was living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. These guys showed up in an Airstream trailer to my university in Pittsburgh and opened their doors and invited me in to check out this exhibition that was a yearly curated collection of zines, artist books, independent publications organized inside this Airstream trailer that was transformed into a gallery. I was really inspired by this work and I think perhaps to note one of the things that really struck me was that it exposed me to these visions of the world that I'd never seen before, these objects that were really powerful. One of the core pillars of what the bookmobile project was interested in was challenging the way that most zines and artist books do not leave their communities. This is kind of part of the medium. It's one of the affordances of what this art form offers is that it's necessarily small scale. And so it is a tool that can kind of lubricate this excitement within smaller communities. But because of the nature of that small scale, and a lot of the distribution networks of zines, those things are necessarily limited. And so book will project was a project where a really diverse group of artists and activists and community organizers brought this yearly curated collection around North America, Canada, the United States, offered workshops, and brought this work to communities outside of their own. So this was a project that I joined from 2002 to 2004, and really influenced me in the way that I thought about the relationship between aesthetic forms and social formations and what was possible to do as an artist. This led me to think about a project that I began shortly after my work with Bookmobile Project called Cartoon Express, which in retrospect I sort of think about it as an animation label. But at the time I thought about it as this touring roadshow of animation, where I thought about animation as this living framework of performance and installation. At its core, Cartoon Express was an engine, an organism, an entity that released bi-yearly DVDs of experimental animation. But when we went on tour to actually show this work, we always put it within this living framework. And so here you see some images of me and my collaborator, Christopher Dolgeris, kind of performing as these sort of bookends to the show and transforming these spaces, whether it be a basement or a punk club or a cinema, transforming them into something new, something that felt like it had some symmetry with the work that we were presenting, something that felt vibrant and living. And of course, always containing the possibility of failure, which is, I think, an interesting component of live events that I've really missed during this pandemic. Case in point, this presentation that I'm pre-recording to share with you guys, I of course have the opportunity to edit out any ums and ahs if I wanted to. That presence of failure, being around something live as it's emerging, as it's being dreamed, I think is something that's really powerful. And so it was during this time going on tour with Cartoon Express that I really was thinking about what the value of live events are, especially as an animator, as a moving image artist. While the first time that I went on tour with Cartoon Express was in 2005. This was just before YouTube was being born. And so the birth of Cartoon Express really paralleled the birth of online streaming and what would become Netflix and this kind of a digital hellscape that we all live in now during a pandemic. And so I really brought Cartoon Express forward as something that asserted its value as this live event, as this thing that was an experimental, evolving, living art form. this thing that was an experimental evolving living art form. And so I want to sort of stop looking at the past, my own personal past right now, and share with you all this artwork that I made that was actually featured at Ars Electronica a few years ago called Descent and thinking about these kind of living evolving forms. I want to share with you this piece of malware that I made that in some cases is an animation but it has this other component where as you see me here launching Descent. This is this moving image work that when I launch it and I invite you you all to download this and launch it as well, it can run on your own computer. especially inspired by the painting Triumph of Death by Peter Borgl, the elder, inspired by this worldview from the 16th century of a landscape and a society that's sort of been vaulted into this post-plague environment. Now this sort of landscape or this world that I'm articulating in between this piece of malware taking over your computer, it surfaced to me as something that was interesting to penetrate. As I mentioned that my background is in painting and drawing. As an artist, part of the reason that I got into animation in the first place was as a way of kind of pushing the capabilities, the possibilities of the sort of work that I could make with drawing, with painting these sort of images. I was always really attracted to books that I grew up with in my childhood, like Where's Waldo or these paintings by Peter Vargaal the Elder that showed these sort of dense landscapes that almost felt like these comics that in a single landscape or a single tableau were able to show a multitude of these different stories. Particularly with Bruegel, I was interested in the way that some of his work articulates these sort of social upheavals. In this case, when I think about the painting, Triumph of Death, that first inspired this work that we're watching, to me, when I first encountered it, it felt like it was perhaps this vision of the plague, of the Black Death from the 14th century. But of course, Bruegel was making these paintings years after that. This is not an image of the plague as it literally happened. It's an image of society struggling with death in a way that it kind of emerges from the vacuum that comes out of a pandemic or out of some sort of death or apocalypse. And envisioning these kind of social peoples that have a relationship to death. Now, thinking about these living forms, these experimenting, evolving art forms, when I think about Bruegel and the worlds that he depicts, and I think about these social upheavals, and I think about the moment that I first had the inspiration to make this work, which was in 2016 when the United States' former president was elected into office. I was thinking about, as an artist, how do we make things where it actually feels like something is at stake? And so this was one of these experiments that I came to at that moment, one in which the health of your computer is actually on the brink of collapse as this vision of this world is being told to you. And so this brings us to the core of my presentation which is the artwork Dirt Scraper which is participating in this year's edition of Ars Electronica. And I'll talk a little bit more about its genesis and its construction in a moment, but I wanted to start with this particular view of it, which is an adaptation of the work that I built for the affordances of COVID. So this is something that I built last year as an online live stream of the work meant to be lived with in virtual space. So knowing that a lot of us are in these relative quarantines, I was interested in making a version of version of dirt scraper that can sort of stream to you in cyberspace now i use the term cyberspace really pointedly um that when i when i first encountered the internet in the 90s this was the term that i learned to kind of understand what this landscape is um And to perhaps return to this idea of dreaming, I'm really interested in the dream of cyberspace as it was introduced to me in the 90s, as this kind of modern or then modern equivalent of the American western frontier, a place where land is free for the taking, where explorers could roam and communities conform with their own rules. where explorers could roam and communities could form with their own rules. I really, while it was confusing in my little portals logging in on my 56K modem to America Online at first, was there was this kind of strange friction. Beyond that friction, I had this dream or this vision of an endless expanse of space where it was open and it was full of possibilities. I'm interested in how nowadays I no longer dream that dream. Cyberspace feels like an antiquated term. It feels like something from the 90s. These days, when I think about the internet, when I imagine my life in this virtual space, I much more dream about enclosure. I think about conceptions of private property that have felt really prevalent. I think about shopping malls. I think about perhaps a virtual bank vault for virtual identities or virtual currencies. What we're seeing here through Dirt Scraper is an artwork that draws inspiration from this dream, from this vision. While its genesis form existed as an actual installation for people to experience together, I'm excited about how the affordances of this moment pushed it to actually have an element or have a form that could exist within this space that it really drew its initial impulse from. Now here we see a video of Dirt Scraper as it was installed at the Sundance Film Festival in 2019. You can actually see this spatially as it was first conceived as an artwork that, you know, I was thinking a lot about virtual reality at that time and the affordances of virtual reality, which when I think about in some respects a logical endpoint of where that technology leads me, it's very, it's a box that I strapped to my head. It's very isolating. It's very individuated. And I was excited to try to come up with some forms that exploded that, that inverted that, that flipped that inside out so that a group of us could collectively inhabit this virtual space in real space. I like the idea of human bodies collectively experiencing the same thing at the same time, the way that before this pandemic, you used to go to the cinema and watch a video file with a group of strangers. There's something really benign about it, just saying it like that, the actual act of just collectively watching a video file together. But in that act, there's something really special. There's something that engenders a different type of potential or different type of experience that feels a bit more alive than one in which I'm sort of strapped off in my own universe. Now, of course, in this moment, COVID times have drawn their own boundaries on this type of dream. And so perhaps I want to take this moment to shift gears a little bit and actually dive into Dirt Scraper and some of the themes that I was trying to give birth to in this artwork. Now I've mentioned a few times during this talk this term affordances, which I want to take a moment to kind of step back and define because I think this is a really important term for some of the ways that i'm thinking about making work in this moment um so affordances is a term that actually borrowed from some of my research in design discourse design rhetoric which can be really simply defined as affordances are the properties of an object which show the users the actions that they can take. And so to put another way, to offer an example of this, one of the first things that comes to mind when I think about an obvious affordance that I interact with every day, I think about a door handle. I can think about going to the McDonald's with my Happy Meal in my hand and going to leave the McDonald's and there's this big bar that I try to pull because it has like a pull quality to it. It's this bar and I can imagine myself wrapping my hand around it, but it's actually supposed to be a push bar. This is a classic example of a really badly designed door. supposed to be a push bar. This is a classic example of a really badly designed door. Now, as designers, we might approach that solution of being like, okay, how can we redesign that push handle so that I would never think about trying to pull it? You know, that we've all certainly, I imagine, experienced that moment where we get stuck at a door and then we're like, oh shit, it's kind of embarrassing. Now, as an artist, I find that moment of that failure, that affordance of a poorly designed door to be really rich. And I think as an artist, hopefully we can approach these sort of moments of failure, these moments of rupture, these moments of poor design in some cases, and do more than simply pushing and pulling, but turning that object into something to point at and ask a question. Now, as a digital artist, this concept of affordances and pointing at things that are perhaps poorly designed or have these moments of failure, it really influences the type of work that I make because as an artist that works with computers, I really like to ask questions that can't be interrogated in any other medium. I like to really ask myself what's happening within this medium, within this ecosystem, within this cyberspace, this virtual world, within this computer that allows me to offer questions that can't be talked about in another way quite the same. And so this leads me down a little bit of a detour around the idea of software aesthetics writ large. And I want to talk about this, what we see here as an image of a user interface for the first digital art tool that I ever used called MacPaint. This was back in the 90s. This was a tool that was on a computer that I grew up with that I approached as a video game. It was, you know, I could play SimCity or I could play MacPaint. And it was something that I had a lot of fun spending hours making these images, making these patterns, making these designs. And it was one of the first places where I really started embracing that disconnect of the abstraction that software provides of a material tool using the metaphors of code. So here we see this image of the spray can highlighted. I remember when I was first using Mac paint, how interesting it was to me that this did not feel like spray paint at all. It was this other thing, but of course, was asking me to think about spray paint. So there's something in that fusion of using this tool that kind of offered these speckled dot patterns while thinking about what paint can do, particularly spray paint, that allowed for these kind of new images of these new ideas to kind of emerge. Some of the other elements that I think we actually see still alive in the work that I'm making today that kind of emerged from the affordances of these early moments of rupture, these abstractions gone askew, is the infinite fill, or in this case, the paint bucket. The way that the paint bucket worked in MacPaint is that because this computer that I was using was a black and white computer. There wasone patterns, but also just drawing from the limitations of the memory, of the monitor, of the CPU of this actual computer to kind of create something new to explore. Now, these moments of rupture that come from the metaphorical disconnect between real life and the simulated tool are something that I've been exploring for a number of years. And here we see an older artwork from 2012 called Special Effect, the very first artwork where I tried using 3D computer graphics to explore and to break and to see what sort of affordances that ecosystem or that tool could offer me. But importantly, I also find this kind of moment of rupture within these tools to be a really rich space to draw inspiration from as an artist that's interested in storytelling, or at least working with stories that bridge fantasy and reality that traffic in this dual nature of dreams. and reality that traffic in this dual nature of dreams. So thinking about designing with failure in mind, I'm going to bring us back to thinking about Dirt Scraper and where some of those ideas come from and the action possibilities, the affordances of systems that are clearly failed designs. Here we're looking at some images of the architect and artist Paolo Soleri and his designs of the arcology concept. Arcology is a term that Paolo Soleri, who is an Italian architect who lived in the United States, came up with that is this portmanteau. It's a fusion of the word architecture and the word ecology, really thinking about buildings as these living systems that could perhaps coexist more peacefully with the natural world than the type of architecture that we live in today. I came across Soleri's work as I was doing research on Dirt Scraper, thinking about labyrinths and thinking about dungeons and thinking about these hellscapes that are cloaked as utopias. And I came across his, what I find to be some of the most beautiful drawings of spaces, much like a Bruegel painting or a Where's Waldo book. Coming from these good intentions of trying to think about the ecological impact of architecture and how to make these more sustainable spaces for humans to live, I can't help but gaze upon these drawings and think about what a dungeon, what a labyrinth it looks like to actually exist in this space. So Soleri did start construction on one of his arcologies that you can actually visit in the Arizona desert called Arcosanti. I went there a few years ago and visited myself. And really interestingly, I found a construction site that hadn't been built up since the 90s and sort of been stalled out at what they sort of speculated at four percent complete and it made me realize that in some ways perhaps the best way to manifest utopia is to leave it in this constant state of not becoming it's one of the tensions that i find in these drawings and it really inspires my imagination but in actually thinking about the way that concrete decays, the way that people actually use space, the way that the natural world is pregnant with chaos, is full of all these diversions. It's really different than simply world building on paper. But I was interested in that. And so here I'm going to bring you guys over to the roadmap or the drawing that first laid the foundation for what the dirt scraper would become it started as a drawing and here we we see it on my wall as a drawing comprising 72 sheets of a4 printer paper taped together that i created in my studio intuitively over the course of a couple weeks one sheet of paper at a time so in a way it was sort of this drawing game where I had a general idea, but I was interested in the constraints of my drawing, of the sort of intuitive drawing process that would become this virtual space, become this playable video game that contained simulated inhabitants who dwell inside of that drawing. And those simulated humans, they have their own motivations that I would program with a programmer. And the motivations of those virtual characters and the constraints of this intuitive, imaginative, dreamlike space would create a friction that would develop these kinds of plots, these kinds of narratives, a story that in this case is decidedly uncinematic. Rather it looks at these narrative systems that I encounter playing some of my favorite video games. And so here we see some images of a few of the games that I was playing and looking at as reference and research in making Dirt Scraper. In the upper left-hand corner we see an image of Dwarf Fortress, which in some ways I think is one of the best games, but also one of the most opaque and crazy and difficult games. On the lower left we see a a roguelike dungeon crawler called Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. And on the right, one of the classics of the genre called Rogue, which for some of you all who play video games, you may be familiar with the roguelike genre. This is an image of the OG of the original Rogue, which was a generative dungeon crawler where you go around to try to get this idol at the bottom of many layers of this dungeon and get back out. These are all examples of a form of digital architecture that's really common in video games called the generative death labyrinth. They use rules to generate these surface forms for underlying abstract structures. As a gamer, one of the appeals of these structures is that it's this emerging living thing. So within a single game, I can go in and always find a sort of new iteration, new adventures, new narratives. These are structures that are known for creating something called an emergent narrative, which refers to situations in games that emerge from relatively simple game mechanics interacting that result in a kind of meaning or a story or a situation that's not created by the player and it's not created by the designer it's kind of created by this third thing i think of it as a sort of phantom of course it's the technology but it's the interplay of all of these things creating this emergent narrative technology, but it's the interplay of all of these things creating this emergent narrative. Dirt Scraper was built using game-making tools. I used Unity to build the system, and here we see me launching into Unity to kind of show you a little bit of behind the scenes of what this thing looks like when you're not offered the audience's perspective, that portal. I'd like to talk a little bit about what Dirt Scraper is thematically that offers some insight into what that emergent narrative is, so that tension between the game narrative and the cinematic narrative. I approached Dirt Scraper out of an interest in creating a portrait of this decaying underground labyrinth, this decaying underground megastructure, and the communities that form inside of it. hundreds of these little Twitter-sized, these bite-sized fragments of text that kind of synthesize into a fabric of multiple stories that illustrate a multitude of different perspectives and different worlds inside of this world. Now, technically, I talk about video games and I talk about cinema and thinking about the bridge between video games and cinema, I thought it would be really interesting to build Dirt Scraper as a zero-player game. And so that's a game that plays itself. Zero-player games are talked about as if artificial intelligence is playing the game. So the outcome of the play cycle of Dirt Scraper depends on the consequences of the program itself. And in this case, what that program is doing is essentially establishing a sort of battle royale between four discrete artificial intelligences in this fiction, in this game world, that sustain this building like a body, the way that Paolo Soleri conceived of buildings like bodies. You can think of these four discrete AIs as being these different regulatory systems. And so in this case, we see an industrial regulatory system, a recreational regulatory system, a commercial one, and a residential one. And so narratively, I think of Dirt Scraper as a sort of smart building that's designed like this human body and these different ecosystems or regulatory systems maintaining themselves the way that Siri or Alexa tries to maintain a certain sense of progress or certain upkeep. Dirt Scraper is hardwired to live its entire life to illustrate a sort of narrative arc of decay over a discrete 48 chapters. And at the end of those 48 chapters, it loops back to its sort of mint condition state. And so while this is a piece that when it plays, it plays infinitely, there is a credits and a title page to kind of mark that return to its mint condition. And so each of those loops within those 48 chapters is about the length of a feature film. And of course, as a sort of generative death labyrinth, each time it plays, it reveals new details, new perspectives, new outcomes. So there's an element of it that's infinite, but are organized around this spine that is decidedly cinematic. There are these sort of chapters that return you to a sort of a similar outcome. That decay is inevitable um so to perhaps offer one final thought around uh this idea of emergent storytelling or this kind of friction of uh thinking about the stories that are perhaps readily accessible or the affordances of cinema or video games offer particular influence on. I want to talk about the relationship between something that I've been investigating lately, which is the idea of world building and how that relates to storytelling. At some point when I was working on Dirt Scraper, I actually worked with a really wonderful artist and filmmaker named James Keenitz Wilkins to think about how does Dirt Scraper adapt to something that's more conventionally a feature film. And as part of that process, we broke down a framework for understanding storytelling into kind of three component parts. That is plot, narrative, and story and how those things are different. So I'll define those really briefly. Plot, we thought of as just a really basic organization of data or like the material quality of a situation. I really like thinking about plot and story plot or soap opera plot, but also thinking about plot spatially. So in at least in English, I don't know how this translates in other languages, a plot of land is a spatial geographical thing that's defined by its boundary markers. There's no correct way of walking the boundary of a plot. And so that's where narrative comes in. I think of narrative as the telling of the data, the telling of this organization, this plot. So a narrative in some ways is choosing a direction given the materials and the limits of the telling itself. And so that leads us to the third component of this triad and the idea of story, which I think about as applying a value to the telling or a moral or meaning or why it all went down. Stories often provide resolution and a sense of comfort, like there's a good story. So with Dirt Scraper, one of the things that I was trying to do and thinking about this breakdown of story and narrative and plot is actually literalizing this framework through its shape, being an actual alternative world, it's spatial. So there's a load of plots like city blocks. There's a load of narratives as paths and hallways, and there's a load of stories as Porpentine offered these voices of these people that kind of come together. So the act of watching an entire Dirt Scraper, which I invite you to at the festival, it's about 75 minutes to watch it in its entirety, a multitude of different stories emerges. And so I want to leave it on a quote, thinking about Dirt Scraper as a system, as a video game, as a film, as a story, as a plot, it's designed to offer a story that emerges that's not so moored in an individual psyche, like a lot of cinematic stories that I watch, but instead asking audiences to confront a more sociological story. So this quote is by a writer named Zanette Tufetchi in an essay that I came across right around the time that I was finishing production on Dirt Scraper called The Real Reason Fans Hate the Last Season of Game of Thrones. And she says, The hallmark of sociological storytelling is it can encourage us to put ourselves in the place of any character, not just the main hero or heroine, and imagine ourselves making similar choices. If we can better understand how and why most characters make their choices. We can also think about how to structure our world to encourage better choices for everyone. In a historic moment that requires a lot of institution building and incentive changing, we need all the sociological imagination we can get. Now I'll leave it there, but I look forward to having a conversation with some of you and digging into this a little bit deeper. Again, thank you, Ars Electronica. So we are back to our question and answer session with Peter Burr. We just finished an excellent presentation. Thank you again for participating in this symposium. And we also have some questions from our live audience, but I'd like to start off with a question basically about the machine aesthetics of Dirt Scraper. So typically with like generative arts and deep dreaming and all these approaches that use machine learning, they're trying to approximate sort of what we would call art as humans. And in your project, at least I see this attempt to have sort of a machine aesthetic. Could you share with us sort of how you go about creating that? Sure. Yeah. I mean, I talk a little bit about the idea of design affordances or the aesthetics that a tool contributes to the thing that we make. And when I think about, gosh, we can talk about Deep Dream, Google Deep Dream, you have a corporate name on that. It's a tool that's built from this whole system that is not built from an independent artist, right? That these tools are built from a lot of other people's knowledge. As a digital artist, as a software artist, the machine is a thing that we're collaborating with. And so I think one of the things that I've been really excited about in using real-time technology, using game engines to make work, is the way in which I can get into these spaces where something surprising emerges, where I'm designing something, the same way that I would approach making a painting or a drawing, but that the tool itself responds in a way that allows me to kind of speak back. And so in a way, when I think about generative art, I would say I am critical of work that emerges explicitly from the vision of the machine, because machines are built by people, right? Underneath that, there are people. So as someone who's had a collaborative art practice for many decades, I always find it to be a much more interesting process when that practice gets layered. So there's a person who builds a tool and then a person intervening with that tool and the tool intervenes with the person. And so with something like Dirt Scraper, which is really at the center of this talk, there's so many different layers of responding to the computer and vice versa that sort of generates this aesthetic. In some ways, I feel like it comes from neither me nor the machine. So many layers of dirt so to speak. Digital dirt baby. We have a question from our online viewers that sort of relates to this in a way. Do you see as an artist the obstacle as a question? And if you see this question and is that to the recipient or how do you see that? I mean I guess in what way should I interpret that sense of an obstacle? I mean, I know that in this presentation, I talk about an obstacle being something like COVID or this pandemic, right? That there's a way that I can approach the loss of civic space and the adventuring into this digital virtual space that is Zoom, that is Twitch, that is Instagram. I could be bummed about that. I could try to exploit that and see if I can make some money off of it. Or I could approach it as a question and ask like, okay, what does it mean now to no longer be a person in a space where this is an actual room that I share with other people, but is this other thing where I have to have a virtual body. And so I find it to be a bit more generative and leaves room for me to be a more optimistic human being to approach an obstacle as a question. That's not to say that all obstacles have answers, right? Not all questions have answers, but I have found that to be a really useful way to kind of keep buoyant in these times where there've been a lot of obstacles, there's been a lot of friction for my art practice. I had the privilege of course during your presentation to ask some questions to you while you joined the Zoom chat room, and we talked a little bit about your design of spaces for multiple people, this idea of sort of co-located interaction. And you mentioned that this installation is sort of a zero player game. Could you touch on that a little bit? Yeah, sure. I mean, so when I think about interactive art, something as a teacher, something I like asking my students a lot is as viewers or as museum goers, have you ever experienced a work of interactive art that you actually thought was a really good artwork? So this is to kind of differentiate interactive art from something like a video game, something that has a maybe more explicit mechanic that's about play. when does art actually feel like something that kind of speaks to something soulful, something subconscious, something that elicits the unknown, that makes us excited about being humans as opposed to these bags of dopamine and endorphins that can respond and vice versa. And so when I think about, like, for example, with Dirt Scraper, my interest in initially making this work was to create a sort of moving emergent painting, story, film, this thing I'd never seen before, to think about how virtual reality is this really exciting, immersive technology, but has this affordance, this sort of design necessity that it's only one person at a time that isolates you, it silos you. at a time that isolates you, it silos you. And so it felt really exciting to think about what happens when we kind of invert that and create a space for us to kind of share this experience with each other, to create an environment, to create a background, to create a platform for that, that is part of the piece, but it's not the piece. And of course, with the pandemic and the emergence now, this isolation that has been necessary to then return to this thing and to ask, okay, what is it actually like when Dirt Scraper becomes an individualized experience that doesn't give a shit about you? It happens, but you don't get to control it. You're not God. You're just one of the people inside of this space. Cool. Is there any way that you can communicate that to the participant though? Because I think one of the things is they're always they know nothing about it they go into the experience um they're seeing this reacting to them in some way um and um either they exert control over the system or they're not able to do that um um is there any way to sort of show them yes the system's reacting to you but you're not in control in any way yeah yeah i mean i think i'm gonna since we're here at an expanded animation symposium i'm going to talk about expanded cinema because i think that when we think about the kind of psychedelic hippie roots of gene youngblood's discourse around what expanded cinema is um i think about like flicker films and stroboscopic work that is explicitly phenomenological. If you try to watch a flicker film the same way that you watch the new Matrix movie, it's going to be awful, right? Because you're trying to read it in this particular way, but the cross your eyes and to let the kind of flickers operate on your eyeballs, not as information gathering mechanisms, but just these sort of biological things. And so I think that there's a similar way that when we're talking about a zero player video game, I can offer a strobe warning before a flicker film, which I should, right? I can offer some writing before you enter Dirt Scraper that this is a generative piece but that you don't control it um but at the end of the day i think just the nature of artwork like this it's not built for everybody right there are some people that are going to see this and they're just going to be frustrated but that there's another tribe of people there's another group of people that can maybe soften into that and that's where the work kind of dilates right and in a way in these moments that i've been living through in the past year during this pandemic, I've constantly returning to this feeling of lack of control and powerlessness where my ability to be an observer, my peripherals are my eyes are my neck are my body, that that's actually a really powerful place to get rooted into. That's another good point to touch on. I mean, you've described how the pandemics influenced your process a little bit and some of the content. How has it influenced your work in other ways? Because there haven't been as many festivals or exhibitions and those types of things. And how have you used that period? Yeah, I mean, it's been a bummer. I would love to be out here at IRL with you getting to share. I mean, one of my favorite things about having an art practice is getting to experience what people people are making in person to actually meet those people and so feeling siloed off has felt really sad. While I've noticed a burgeoning of digital technologies we can think about NFTs we can think about Instagram becoming this insane shopping mall, social space. I've actually found myself being more interested in returning to making images, making paintings, making prints, making objects. That's not to say I've abandoned making digital work. I still have that. But there's been some kind of added component where during this time, the value of actually making things has reasserted itself. And so I've started doing that with a bit more energy. We have a bit of a technical question on the YouTube channel regarding malware, which you showed in your presentation. Like what technology, what language did you use to develop that? Yeah, so really that was a piece that was built in Unity. And it's Windows only. We have not developed a version that's Mac friendly yet, although that's kind of coming down the road. But it's really just a piece of software that's built in a game engine that has some kind of peripheral elements that are able to speak directly to the operating system. So it's actually really quite simple. It's a piece of software built in a game engine that's packaged up in this bundle. So when it installs itself, it does so in a way that it puts itself in the right place on your computer so it can do these other things and it's benign it's a benign it's a friendly piece of malware but that you know thinking about making something that has something at stake to help your computer is at stake felt like an interesting place to play very interesting you talk about the presence of of failure in your works to a certain extent. There's a general culture at the moment of sort of celebrating failure as well, which is perhaps a little bit different than it used to be maybe 10 or 15 years ago. Is that something that you'd like to continue including in your works that you think, okay, this, I don't know, glitch is maybe as a term that might fit, or is that something that has also become its own trope and you're trying to avoid it entirely? Well, there's so many different ways to think about glitch. I'll return to the conversation that you, the question that you brought up around generative art and thinking about, you know, me as an artist is making work that simulates what a computer does or vice versa. In some ways, using software, using computers, using digital technology as a tool, there are these things that emerge, maybe they're a glitch, or maybe, you know, like with Google Deep Dream, are those glitches? Or are those just these kind of interesting things that emerge that actually have value? Maybe they're not a glitch. And so, yeah, I suppose, yeah, I suppose I think about, I think about those marks that are being made by the machine, by the computer as something that has a lot of value. And so, I don't know, when you talk about during this pandemic, the idea of failure being embraced, there's that saying, you know, keep failing, keep failing harder, that that's where a lot of the learning happens. I mean, I think that failure exists within a framework when you're trying to succeed, which is different than trying to play. Like there's this adage that play is not play if you have to play, right? If you're being forced to play, you're not actually playing. So being able to think about failure as existing kind of outside the thing that you're doing, and you're just kind of playing with the material that's there, perhaps you can then go back and understand this as like the failure of a tool or the failure of a society or the failure of your body. But I think there's another way that you can think about this is just sort of generating material that you can make work from. One thing that I've noticed with our projects, we often say that, you know, the bug is a feature or something along those lines, is that in a context where you have like a live audience of participants is that you have a certain type of participant that's always looking to break things. They're looking for the mistakes. They're looking at ways of sort of breaking the rules and such. And it can be a really great source for emergence. Is that also something that you sort of intend in your works, this idea of emergent behavior or emergent interaction? Yeah, I mean, you talk about like the live performance at the moment when we're here in space. I definitely admit that I'm a type A person and when I'm actually performing, I really try to control things. And so I think it feels really healthy to get into that space where chaos can be present to like provoke that tendency that I have. I tend, as an artist, I tend to do that in the safety of my studio, where it can kind of play with those failures and then integrate that. I think as an animator, I'm constantly compelled to cook something back into a video file so that it's inert, right? We can capture that glitch, we can capture that failure and kind of codify it. But I do think it's really exciting in these moments to think about these apocalypses or these revealings of a failure of society or a failure of whatever system you're participating in as being an opportunity to just look at what is actually happening and to address it. Well, I'd really like to thank you for spending so much time, not only in preparing the video for the symposium, also the discussions that we had the entire time before we did the entire time before we did the record and answer session, which we should have recorded as well. And also this discussion too. Thank you so much for participating. It's a little bit late to say this, of course, you had a performance in Deep Space yesterday. There was a performance of your work and what I've been told it went really, really well. And I hope they're able to show that at some point again. If it's okay, you can certainly stick around for a little bit. I can maybe show you a little bit of the studio before you head off. But we're going to end our session for this evening. I'd like to do a little bit of an outlook for the next couple of days. So we also have some deep space projects ourself that we'll be showing tomorrow. And there's some other artists that are part of theself, that we'll be showing tomorrow. And there's some other artists that are part of the symposium that we'll be presenting tomorrow, basically in the timeframe from 1030 until 230 in the afternoon. But the expanded animation symposium also continues tomorrow at 10am with a talk from one of our graduates Sabina Leimer, who's been working at Weta Digital, and then followed by anna graduate eric and then tobias so there's there's quite a few uh very interesting talks so we'll be starting at 10 a.m um central european time tomorrow please stay tuned thanks for staying with us this evening and have a good night thank you very much thank you guys Thank you. Thank you.