we'll i'll get a gig at the next musical let's see hi and uh welcome to the the fabulous stone theatre in brighton which is uh currently hosting unreal city which is a wonderful collaboration between dream think speak and access all areas um i'm colin hambrook i'm an older white man wearing glasses and a heavy black overcoat i'm founding editor of disability arts online which is a a journal which supports uh disabled artists and um really really pleased to be here for this panel discussion on access in immersive technology and performance and i'd like to start off by introducing our our panel we have emma selwyn who is an actor with access all areas and she's taking part in unreal city and they're here with lucy andrews who is access manager at access all areas and on my left is the wonderful tristan um sharps who is artistic director of dreamthespeak which uh which you set up in brighton in 1999 and um we also have with us uh james um james turnbull who is creative director at frolic working across theater festivals and digital innovation um james previously spearheaded the tom tech for the old market arts center and more recently led management audience management for rsc's dreaming online project um as part of the future project and last but by no means least is glenn boddington uh who has background in performing arts um works as a curator presenter and consultant uh glenn is creative director of body data space which is a very innovative collective she's presenter for bbc world service reader in digital immersion at the university of greenwich and a member of the dcms college of experts as well as a trustee for sternette futures and so to kick us off if i might go to you tristan and tell us a bit about unreal city uh yes hello uh my name is tristan and um i am wearing a black fleece and a blue jacket and um unreal city came about through a series of workshops with um access all areas and with emma and her colleagues access on aries her other performers and we did these some workshops in and around various locations in london to begin with and one of those locations was liverpool street station and anyone who knows liverpool street station will know that that's an extremely busy hub and also a very difficult place to navigate your way around and that's something certainly that we discovered it's got about 12 different entrances and or exits into it and the way it relates to the the roads all around it and the way it relates to the pedestrian pathways all around it is really confusing and there were road works at the time i think i think the elizabeth line was in the process of being built at the time yeah there were there were a lot of roadworks around there and that's made it even more confusing and it's um and i think every town or city has got those very confusing moments in it and it's often around a railway station because they just don't connect really well to the infrastructure all around and one of the things that came out of that was the difficulty of navigating your way through a city going from a to b and even coming into rehearsals for the workshops you're bombarded by so many different sensorial stimuli there's so much sound pollution light pollution uh there are signs that are being very clear there are conflicting messages in the architecture around you about how you can get from a to b and that was one thing that came out and the other thing that came out was um online worlds and how living through an online world can can can offer you the protection but that being quite vulnerable trying to work your way around a city doesn't necessarily give you and um out of that came the idea of creating unreal city which is basically the the premise of which is a brand new smart city district that is completely accessible for everyone but we built it purely in a virtual space so it only exists in virtual reality and that was basically the that was the birth of the show and that unreal city has this kind of fabulous kind of um presentation of being a hybrid between online and virtual and um and live performance and emma you're acting in um unreal city um and um i wanted to ask you what your understanding is of how autistic communities are engaging with online life and and what it was like for you creating an avatar for the show okay um okay give me a moment to think um [Music] sorry i could have questions again please yeah so what's your understanding of how autistic communities are engaging with with online life i mean like mainstream society i guess every um every community has its own hubs every interest has its own hubs people might go to uh what interests them [Music] and [Music] in some ways online spaces can teach people about things they want to learn learn about in life um i suppose maybe one massive question to ask for another space and time is whether is whether there could be a potential for bias to sway people towards certain things like maybe people's content can be changed through algorithms without them realizing it so on some level like with pretty much everyone on the internet you get um community um some of these communities can be incredibly positive but then other communities can also be extremely enabling encouraging people to keep hold of any toxic behavior they've chosen to inhabit and it's it's a minefield even if you do try and be as neutral as possible and i'm not talking about autistic people specifically i'm thinking for all i'm thinking for all neurotypes and you've also got to bear in mind that there are many many people autistic and particularly learning disabled people who just cannot access those online spaces at all whether that's due to having curfews on their online habits through being in supported living and or living with others who monitor them or whether those people might end up accidentally bypassing monitors intended for their safety there are there are lots of positives and and negatives aren't there and i think one of the important things about unreal city is that it's sort of opening up a discussion yeah and can i ask you what what was it like creating an avatar for the show um well it was just creating an avatar do you remember working at the very beginning emma with the workshops you were doing and we spoke about that um oh yeah i know what you mean now um so basically um each of the actors has uh an avid has a couple of avatars um and i worked on creating an avatar for each actor for part of the show so i try and get so i'd ask the person what they look like or look at them um because all these people who i created avatars for initially i know quite well and have known for a few years and i tried to find features um that either went with what they actually looked like at the time or um or i went with features that they wanted for example um uh the for example miss anonymous the astronaut um she's got silver hair in the avatar whereas the actor who plays most anonymous in real life has black or blond hair depending on what they do with it um and some people may choose to have um accessibility aids if they use them but then not i don't know how many uh platforms actually include them and i don't know whether all of them do some people who do need aids mobility aids accessibility aids they might want them in for front and center or they might just say no i want to look normate as much as possible i i think one of the um one of the great things about it is you can you can play can't you you can play with identity and yeah there's some very flamboyant avatars um in in unreal city and galen if i if i might turn to you i um as as an expert in immersive experience um can you tell us something about what it is about immersion that why do humans like it what what is it that's that that is appealing to us about about it yeah definitely so angry len um um white woman in her 50s and i'm wearing a teal um polo neck jumper and shawl so um yeah immersion it's it's it's one of those fascinating things isn't it and we've probably all got our own reasons why we kind of want to go in there and delve in there but it's not something new it's not just coming from the digital in fact if you think about cave paintings they were definitely part of immersive experiences with probably singing and dancing and fireplaces and food and everything while they they drew the paintings on the walls and cathedrals are a really good example of early immersion moving towards that huge portal which actually go in the light comes around you from the cut with the stained glass windows and there's smell of frankincense and the echo of sound and so i think that we have a human need to immerse ourselves in something bigger than us something greater sometimes it could be more spiritual for some people sometimes be more psychedelic for other people and what we're doing with the digital world is actually finding way to make that a parallel world a virtual world for us so and as emma says the other really special thing about that emma explained really is how you represent yourself within those virtual spaces and the choices that you have with your avatars to have silver hair or be eight foot tall or use have your accessibility tools with your knot yeah and choose to be totally different and people have multiple different identities in different worlds that they work in you know different whether a work world or a gaming world or whatever but i think there's something very important about the escapism of it from our kind of drudgery everyday lives for many people and also during this last two years of course the escapism into communities as emma mentioned yeah which where we when many of us have been in lockdown or in solitary situations thanks and um tristan if i want to turn back to you and um virtual reality events you know it's very much in development the whole kind of field isn't it and but they usually mitigate against um access and i i wanted to ask you how you've reduced um inaccessibility for for um this production in particular and um if you could say something about duty of care for audiences for unreal city yes absolutely i just wanted to mention that um emma there was also referring to avakin life which is something quite interesting i think that that was something that emma introduced me to and introduced the us to the the company too and that was definitely quite a big influence on on unreal city and how we how we work that um yeah i mean i i often find that i think vr still feels to me like um an event experience and i think that although uh of course there are people who have vr headsets in their own homes and they'll use them in their own homes um it it to me it's the the it still feels like it's an event and i think that when when i tend to go to those events um you know if it's a if it's a very curated bespoke event that is one particular production uh one particular example i went to i found myself being pulled and pushed in every single direction and being shouted out and being thrust into different sort of spaces and i felt very kind of um certainly for me when i'm creating work i like to have a space as an audience and i found that quite challenging or you sometimes go to vr events which are big open plan spaces and there's lots and lots of different hubs where there's a a vr experience happening and um there are a couple of people are fitting a vr headset on you they don't ask you if you want to check the sound level or if the lighting level is comfortable um once the headset is on you they're both they're often they're the people who are helping you put the headset on are chattering away about something or chattering on the phone so you hear them outside you hear other people talking and walking past and phones are going off and then at the end of it somebody asks you immediately how did you find that how did you find that would you like to write down your your feeling and i i just it's a big sensorial bombardment putting on a vr headset uh yes actually leaping on about accessibility things um i'd just like to apologize for not having done an audio description of myself before um due to uh inaccessible presentation i'm white i have long dark brown hair um i'm wearing blue purple iridescent glasses a red tie dye cardigan and a bright blue jumper and back to what i actually wanted to say tristan leaping off from what you were saying is one accessibility thing that i personally have come up with come across even and i maybe you have james as a yeah just i'm just looking to you um or colin just because you're wearing glasses um like some people find um vr very challenging um because um if you're an a if you're a stigmatic for example because each eye is showing a very slightly different image it can make you feel a little bit sometimes it can be very um disorienting and also for me personally alone i cannot speak for anyone else with some vr headsets that i've tried so far i get like if you've ever seen a person on tv wearing stripes and they kind of shimmer in a sort of rainbow pattern this is known as the moire effect uh m-o-i-r-e acute um i get that and um it makes things very difficult for me or you might um end up bumping into things because your proprioception is thrown off by not being able to use your real eyes as it were potentially any access stuff that you think's come up could come up for users okay sorry i i think with unreal city you've done a lot to kind of explain to your audience what's going to happen before um before the show which i think is really helped useful yes i mean we're trying to strike a balance because there's quite a lot of secret we try not to give away all our secrets of what exactly what you're going to experience but certainly on the physical aspect about what's going to be happening when there's a headset goes on you and then you're given a choice about the sound levels and lighting levels you have a range of hearing options that we that we offer as well things which i i personally have very rarely come across when i've been to an a a um a vr event and gareth fry our sound designer is really good on this he's got he's done a lot of research on this and actually on his website there is a lot of of information free information about exactly what to do with various different hearing options and it's not expensive and it's not difficult it's something that we can all do and it's something that we should all be doing i think and that can help mitigate against the the disorientation that i think can can be quite common in experience with especially with the oculus headsets absolutely yeah i think there's always going to be some uh disorientation but i think that helps to mitigate it definitely yeah thanks and uh james can i kind of move to you now to kind of ask you about the kind of the wider implications of of this this hybrid of it i did some it's certainly kind of it's the first time unreal city is the first time i've experienced it and um i'd you you've sort of been working in the with this hybrid of live and virtual performance and and kind of finding audiences for it can you can you tell us a bit about how you make it welcome to a wider audience i think that and there's so hello i'm james and i'm wearing greyjoys blacktop and my brightest shoes which are blue with the striped pink on them so i've worked a lot with sort of commissioning work with artists making virtual reality but also with audiences seeing it and what their experience over seeing it and i think what's re there's an opportunity in that we have to reinvent the theater and the building in which we see the culture as well as the piece you're watching so uh in this piece here tristan's team and actually there's a built in environment in which for you to experience that with the technology in the middle of it i think that's a huge opportunity so these buildings i mean frightened does wonderful work but these theaters up and down the country and exhibition halls are quite inaccessible in their location or the way that their toilets aren't balanced between genders or whatever the reason might be that you can't access that building at that time the opportunity with vr is you can reinvent both those things so if those problems existed before we can take them away and a lot of that is centric on the idea of um although it can be a shared experience and lots of people can experience a similar thing it doesn't have to be the same if you come and sit in this 2000 seat auditorium you have to watch the same thing as everyone else in real time and if you don't process like that don't operate like that or need some time out you can't join in with the work again so that's what the opportunities with vr is uh but it's i mean i say it's new it's not new but we're it feels like we're still at the very early stages of how we build these big worlds and explore these worlds and what we ask our audiences to do when they're in headset it is really emma stuff you said that was really um profound and clear like it's very discombobulated when you put something on your face and you're taking senses away from your audiences more than we do for any other art form i imagine where we sort of asked for that level of trust i always compare it to when you're a kid and you get a tea towel wrapped around your eyes and taken through the woods holding a string it's that level of responsibility your host or your actor working with you to do that or maybe or maybe a game of pin the tail on the donkey great example that hybrid point is really important in this piece isn't it the actual um move between the virtual reality and the physical back to virtuality in the physical and i'm long time been interested in that blending of the virtual and the physical and and i think now with the last couple of years for most of us have been at points just in the virtual a lot apart from physical in our homes yeah and now we're slightly emerging here in the uk not necessarily worldwide yet but in the uk into what i believe should stay hybrid actually because hybrid is one of the most inclusive things there is um because there's been so many people have been able to be involved in things that they weren't able to at all before during this lockdown period and the numbers of people that have accessed conferences or events or talks or being able to see things like that and not not just linked to disability i think here we need to make the point why didn't because actually there's so many people who are caught at home because they're carers for children or senior they're called at home because they don't have the economic ability to be able to travel to get on a plane or even just to go to the next town or whatever to see that event or pay for it so i put a plea out here for absolutely everyone continuing to work in this way as you have been doing on this piece to explore these new hybrid formats of virtual physical which is so important for inclusivity but also which i think younger generations are very able to deal with and um when we were talking yesterday with that the important thing that you emphasized was that the development of of these kind of virtual worlds that they be led by inclusion absolutely um we've got a very clear i mean you know in the uk we're not doing badly inclusive by design or you know design-led inclusion yeah and um is now coming in at the at the base of all training around design and where i work at university of greenwich the school of design their leads with diversity and inclusion into every single course it does and i think just a bit like tristan with this work you're bringing in your team body experts and you're all working with the body into this because it's about the body and it's about the essence sensory enhancing the senses we need the the inclusion aspects to be brought in absolutely at the beginning of any idea whether it's hardware software and experience or whatever and that i think we've learned that now and it needs to be absolute from this point hybridity and and design by inclusion from the baseline point i i think especially for so many disabled communities um who i know lots of people lots of artists who uh have haven't been outside their door for two years and so that opportunity to take part in culture is is is really important yeah we can't just go back to what it was because we just leave out loads of people yeah so exactly because again people might not necessarily have the economic ability to access an online space or they might not um have the autonomy to because of others in their lives and i think no one online platform whether that's vr or discord twitter um or any other number of social networks is gonna be perfect that it just isn't real life isn't perfect virtuality isn't perfect therefore therefore let's just combine the two hybridity you know and emma why do you think it's so important for disabled people to experience this um on unreal city um i think i think it's important for those who aren't disabled to experience unreal city um because it means they'll be able to see disabled professionals in a capacity they might not have expected before if we do get disabled people in as well maybe they'll see others in um similar boats to them that might have similar lift experiences to them and that might have different lived experiences to them absolutely absolutely and i i think that opportunity to see disabled professionals in performance is is is something um is really exciting about this show in particular and um you know there's this there's some beautiful moments in it where the kind of that blending of of uh virtual experience and and live performance kind of really take you by surprise um without giving too much away yeah i i think that um that that uh hybridity and that mixing of different technologies i think is is is really interesting and i think that the piece you know i i think working virtual reality i i find it fascinating not just because it's um a new way to tell a story it's actually completely a new way of thinking about everything it's even a new way of thinking about reality you know it's i think maybe we have to alter what our what our notion of reality is it's a sort of thing that um philosophers have been talking about for for centuries an astrophysicist for for decades maybe centuries or a century or two as well i don't know but um that there are uh there are many different kinds of realities and i think that i hope that one aspect of the show is also um a way into what could be a very a very complicated um argument but just gives you a very very strong sense of what it's like to be in a space where you're not sure if it's a real space or an unreal space yeah and yeah that's something that i think is is very uh is very strong and something as well emma that just made me think when when you were talking to us in the rehearsals about about avocado life i'm not not specifically just that particular platform but just that sense of like being an avatar you can in a way you can escape yourself yeah or so you can reinvent yourself yeah that yeah so it's creative as well it's not just uh you know it and that's something we all do we all yeah and also even if it's not um on avakin life or whatever if you think about um well this happens a lot for fantasy and rpg video games nowadays but way back in the day like i'm going to majorly stereotype here but if you were i was going to say if you're a boy but if you're a kid and you were into wwe games with many of them you could create your own wrestler i mean the options might be limited and you might end up with really strange looking morphed figures um limited colour palettes etc but you could have a go at being someone different and if you didn't want to be that you could pretend to be seth rollins or um the rock or hulk hogan or andre the giant or whoever for a day you could be someone else even if you couldn't necessarily create your own thing and i think uh yeah and i think even being able to take on someone else's persona can be interesting absolutely and it can even potentially help you figure out stuff about yourself or remind you of stuff that you used to experience but couldn't etc so much potential it's definitely an area that vr's been exploring this point of view it's called isn't it pov point of view standing in someone else's shoes and actually bystanding in the other shoes maybe seeing around the corner and actually recognizing what that other person is going through so there is some work being done um nvr and trauma around this with um domestic violence with um uh conflict scenarios like palestine israel etc where you know trying to help people understand the other's point of view yeah yeah and there's not a lot of research results on it yet in terms of like real total proof that this is working but there's some very good and deep research happening in this yeah and can i just say that there's also been vr research projects about um about jobs like um i've seen or heard somewhere about a fly is very distracting about a fly in a vr simulator i'm joking about a vr simulator where you could be a barista um like i've heard sometimes things like that can be used for teaching um um autistic people how to do jobs without the bustle of um uh customers um uh karen's going you know my latte wrong and um other stuff in and out around the um but again enough but again i think it's also important to consider the converse like could it potentially be the the the vr could be used to encourage people to assimilate to being one specific thing because i think i don't know this is just honestly there are so many complicated topics and stuff you could talk about if you think about sound we use sound to chill out for an ambient reason we use sound to dance for joy but it's also used in torture yeah and vr has that obviously that edge too so there's a whole set of ethics that needs to be placed in into you know all making of these new environments etc and we don't have the regulations there's no rules and regulations it's very very open as yet because technology goes so fast and governments are so slow in responding to it so but there's definitely a set of morals and ethics you're completely right in terms of actually how this work is used in the best possible outcomes yeah can i mention just something that emma was saying there which i think is quite interesting that we perhaps touch on in unreal city as well is that unreal city where um everything is designed to be fully accessible it has so many um good things going for it but on the other hand i think there is an issue that it takes out all the messiness of life that is also a kind of an important and important part of life as well and i think it's sort of it this is my own view but i think it asks that question around um is it good to have this very utopian perfect world or actually is it sometimes necessary for us all to grow that we do have the sort of messiness that that that um that that world outside of unreal city sort of brings in and i think the question the the piece doesn't try to answer that it just tries to pose that as a question yeah and james if i might turn to you this point i know you've done a lot of work especially with the tom tech and through frolic of of kind of reaching out to audiences and finding out what audiences think of this and um how how what what are what are your reflections on i think broad so trying to think about coming to talk about the idea of like accessing immersive so thinking about it like a bolt-on which we've done for years in theater and we're very slow at it so if you're um if you require subtitles or certos when you go to theater or bsl translation you get to pick two shows if you're lucky out of the run to go on so you have to go on thursday at two o'clock i don't wanna go thursday at two o'clock i wanna go on wednesday whatever so the opportunity is there to redesign that in a way that you can really support people through that uh that uh idea access isn't in this sense access isn't a bolt and it's a commercial decision because the more people that can access your work and engage with your work on different levels then uh the more people ultimately going to pay for it or you're going to get in so i think it's a real opportunity because there isn't this uh the government will take years if they ever come up with a strategy around what safety looks like in an immersive space or how we interact i think we're gonna have to find out ourselves the commercial uh sector largely comes from a united states silicon valley they have a very monocultural view of the world they come from one sort of look on it and so the innovation won't come from that that's why these projects are really really important and the work you're doing now even in r d stages like this is asking those questions going is that too empty and what is that level of what we put in and how does our work affect the people that watch it more so perhaps that we would ever pick up from uh if you were touring as a concert or as a theater show your audience is if you know you've got a couple of star show and really they're not enjoying it you can pick it up you don't get direct feedback with vr you get immediate feedback from a user they're either not reaching out or engaging or you can even track using the data systems inside so you know where their gaze is looking so you know how much they're engaging with your work so i think there's a lot to learn and i i just really advocate that i think the answers are going to go from arts and cultural projects like this that look at being genuinely accessible and i think the uk is very very good at that actually we've got a really strong creative industries and i think the uh yeah it feels like we're in a good place to be driving a lot of those conversations thank you um a couple of comments from our online audience um at this point uh imogen roberts um says what inspiration the performance can be like a fantasy and um sarah pixel says i love the blending in this show and i i feel it's the dramaturgy and the performances that make it so powerful fueled by lived experiences it's not trixie it's a revelation it's alarming and touching too and a third comment from kate allen we think hybridity is the way to go great discussion does unreal uh virtual reality city have smell um so that's one of the things we're sort of going to experiment with a little bit more but there's something very wonderful about a kind of a a this city being so pristine that there is no kind of grit or messiness from the from the outside world so we were thinking about introducing there's a moment i don't think it's a spoiler where you're in a cafe and we were thinking oh maybe we'll have some coffee smells and maybe various other smells and i thought actually no that's the one thing that you you miss when you are in our unreal city is that kind of lived real slightly slightly gritty dirty messy real kind of tangible the kind of viscera visceral things i guess and the things that you experience maybe at a later scene when you're you're which again i don't want to give us a spoiler but there is a scene where you are in in in close contact with a much more um a beautifully organized messy world shall we say we're not far off e-sense there's a lot of work being done on smell and virtual smell for a number of years and some really good people in that scene and although it's not available for all of us yet we're not so far off that becoming part of the next set of you know mass availability from touch from you know as all our senses become pulled into these worlds so um although we also need to be aware all our data is pulled in too and that data um of the biometric data the behavioral data that james mentioned is very important for feedback for all of us yeah to learn how to improve our our our experiences but it's um in in the corporate business sector it's much more about behavioral economics and we've got to be very careful again we get hit a data ethics point there on what we're allowing to be released out beyond our decision as participants in these worlds and how are the industries responding to to the ethics around well we've seen you know google ethics committee which kind of came and went and i think it's still there but had lots of problems and um to be honest in the corporate and business world dni or edna is absolutely at the top of the verticalists at the moment so it's like women in tech tech for good dnr yeah but we all know that we we might have a talk we need to see the walk yeah so but i think um you know without doing a long list of names and stuff we are seeing some of the bigger corporate platforms um doing lots of research grants out there around inclusivity around women around autism around you know into different universities etc linked to virtual reality linked to augmented reality um also now of course linked to the metaverse yeah which is the full immersion scenario um and there are some groups like special effects and pop play and even xbox that have made really clearly xbox have their adaptive controller which actually they really can work with people who have got mobility issues for playing games and pop play and special effects really do look properly at needs for physically disabled or for autism or for and even class and obviously things like race and other other issues too so but i think the key point here is we can have as much hardware and software as we need it does need to from the baseline be designed with inclusion in mind of all types but i think this is where this comes into this being a very special piece it's the content that matters and if we don't have content made by a diverse set of people and if we continue just to have content made by mainly like like you said it was james you know white men in silicon valley we are one it's a very boring world and two they're losing a lot of customers yeah so particularly if you think about all the different types of customers who are saying that's not for me it just doesn't work for me many different types of people yeah i think we also need to make sure there's gateways to those sort of individual artists who are wanting to experiment with this technology and it's quite quite you know the they don't necessarily have the the doors open for them the cost is certainly an issue there are some really interesting artists out there jane gauntlet i know is someone who experimented a lot with point of view and is sort of very much an early an early adopter of that and i think it really is a lot of i think there are a lot of artists who i think would really love to climb into this but maybe don't have the opportunities and that's something that is needs to be thought about as well i think i think that comes from that it's getting better from that technology point of view that you can buy a headset for 300 pounds which is a lot cheaper than it was five years ago perhaps if you need a computer but also the vr creation tools so enabling people you know the vr's built on one of two massive computer game packages which can take 10 000 hours to learn and all that you know a lot of business but now you can create an object using your a scan from an instagram photo and import it into a world so i think those words really excite me of how you can co-create and make work with people in a vr space so yeah i'm excited for the future but i agree it's not quite there yet but yeah one of one of the things that occurred to me um i do a lot of poetic description um in in the artwork that i produce as a disabled artist and um i kind of occurred to me that there's room in unreal city for thinking about describing the scenarios you know incorporating those descriptions into this the script so that people with different kinds of visual impairment will have kind of more of a clue um but there you know there are creative ways of doing that yeah we're actually working on a audio described performances um which will be starting next week and dai langford who's leading on that for us um she was in today and we've been sort of planning that with her and because the hybridity of the piece there are moments where she'll have to move from being in front of the monitor being able to literally live describe exactly what she can see the audience member is seeing because she'll be seeing exactly what they're viewing and it's going to be different for each audience member and then having to to take off her headphones and move away from the monitor and slip into a room where she could be audio describing live while the scene is happening in person so that's throwing up some really fascinating challenges but we think we've found an interesting way that's good absolute hybridity for her too and um and actually proves the point about how all this all his immersion work needs the physical and the virtual together um and that blend of the human and the computer it's the interface between the two that's absolutely imperative the integration yeah yeah no definitely there's just one sorry one thing as well well i'm just thinking there's another artist math jay alvarez who's who's based in brighton and yes she's really keen on on saying look everyone can learn unity and yes it's not so yes yes it does take a long time but actually there are certain basics that you can learn and it's really possible and it's really encouraging people especially people who don't normally uh go into the in internet world and i think that's um i just wanted to mention her as well because she's doing a lot of good work in that area and you're absolutely right it's free to download you do need a good computer but you can teach yourself and youtube's a fantastic house yes i think there's yeah it's really good there is other support out there i don't think we're quite there in the uk with a knowledgeable network who can support people like individual artists going how do i get into this i think that's still really fractious i think the university is getting a lot better at it and there's some really fantastic universities and some arts organizations and festivals are good but there's a we sort of need a bit of a bond to help share those funding opportunities and that sort of thing is it's different to making a dance show or a community project or a theater show it's just a slightly different format and different budgets it's just addressing those different budgets yeah and that needs to be understood in arts funding definitely for evolutions around this access work particularly yes and i think some of those funding programs that are around really are designed for companies that already have a certain amount of heft behind them and a certain amount of infrastructure and finance that they can afford to do that and it does mitigate a little bit against those individual artists sometimes the good news is arts council very keen so they will they'll accept applications for immersive so it's seen as an art form stands up against theater and dance and music so that's something this is quite recent though isn't it in the history of this because we're only 10 years off from cutting all digital art creative process totally in the mid 2000s so but it's good it's bad it is yeah it is very good um but we've had have had some ups and downs there definitely so it's on and up but there needs to be more funding for it and particularly i totally agree for independent artists who are experimenting because that's where the innovation comes from so we can feed you know those kind of ideas and those new types of formats and thinking about new worlds and new crossovers and blending with funding and and get them supported by some of the larger institutions and which have got the back end help and support that would be great rather than everybody reinventing the wheel again particularly the larger institutions yeah definitely i i should actu actually that the it's true that the arts council now were much more open to applications for this they funded this particular project so yeah it's great uh and tristan there there's another question um from our online audience web we're we're being live captioned as as we speak and um and we will add um sign language interpretation um to to the recording as well um there's a question from um mourner mcgilch asking about access for hearing impaired audiences and i i know unreal city is a work in progress but she asks you know is there room for sign language interpretation and captions within the the production itself yeah i think that's something that we need to explore more i mean we're sort of looking into that there's a lot of captioning and um i think there's still yeah there's still definitely more we can do in that in that in that regard i think this is the the next stage of the of the piece is where where where i think we'll probably take it out of a space and embed it within a within a city district i think we want to really push forward all those options um including how how we um you know how we design the bsl elements around it as well yeah so we still have more we still have much more to do in that in that regard yeah and live captioning for zoom and that that's pretty much it i mean zoom's kind of in its infancy as well but live captioning in general that's in its infancy because you've got to bear in mind that with something like unreal city that um that some parts of the show are virtually the same across all artists and then there's one part where every single artist is showing different things and even if they're showing the same things for their character or their arc they might express it in a different way they might focus on a different element of um each thing last night so um i'm going to name myself as an example try to keep it as spoiler free as i can so um one thing i talk about is a cd like i might say i like this track i might do a little bit of performance from the track [Music] and there are foreign words as in non-english words in my bit of the piece so how would they be translated so if there was say english and someone was talking about that time they went to an izakaya in nagasaki izakaya is kind of like a traditional pub thing and nagasaki's in southern japan um would izakaya be written a k-a-y-a or would it be uh or would it be written in the native japanese uh hiragana katakana or kanji and how would that work for other scripts as well like amharic or whatever else or hebrew you know the mind boggles um fantastic um we have a question from our online audience about architecture from robert fillery who says basildon in essex is going through a huge change at the moment it's being rebuilt and millions invested and already the design and what's been built is not fully accessible advice on how to make change frustrating when everything will be brand new and state of the art little consultation has taken place with disabled communities if architecture accommodated those most in need everyone benefits so it's kind of occurs to me as a real opportunity with unreal city to kind of pose something that that that you know architecture architects could kind of follow on from in terms of learning definitely yes i mean i there's um there's a very interesting as a neuroscientist uh called arachelli camargo who does a huge amount of work on this and i think she is is really keen that um architects and developers really should be working with with neuroscientists amongst others to really think through carefully about when you are designing either redesigning a district of a city or completely rebuilding an area of a city to really think about it from the ground upwards about exactly how you're going to make it accessible for the person who has the most access needs because if you do that of course you will make it accessible for everybody and those conversations need to happen you know right at the drawing board stage even before the drawing board stage and they don't often these people are brought in when it's too late and um you know the main infrastructure the physical infrastructure has already been planned or even being developed so i think that's a that's a key thing architecture gives us a huge number of implicit signs you know when you are walking into a venue or when you are walking down a street or when you want to cross the street there that you're being bombarded by so many things and architecture can be extremely good at streamlining that and saying this is what you need to do in order to get from here to here and i think it's um there's a huge amount of work to be done on that would have been great if you'd have had architectural students there at liverpool street station at the very beginning yeah i think they would have just wanted to clear it all away and sort of start again architects in the main are using um you know high level 3d visualization tools and vr often on sites now big corporate sites etc immersion tools so it does seem rather ridiculous that they're not actually looking at that at the base of it but i think what we what we're at overall is we need content and um ideas to be led by community yeah and actually that means that art architects artists all of us have got to go i'm not the author yeah and actually let go of that and actually this whole kind of creative user side of it that needs to come right at the base like you say at the beginning of it so some sectors um i mean there's a lot of good community-led architect practice happening but there's still a status kind of pedestal scenario happening too yeah there's uh there's a project that i know called um that sarah pitfall is involved with as well actually this disordinary architecture was led by jos boyce i believe um and that's very much about kind of introducing our ideas of of inclusive design at at the very beginning um there there's a question here from ama tai who asks um what sort of research would you see coming off this particular project um uh tristan have you got any thoughts on that uh research coming coming out of sort of after the project coming after it yeah yeah uh well i i mean it's an evolving project so there's a huge amount of research went into the project certainly there was a lot that emma and the other performers contributed to i should add also by the way nick llewellyn the artistic director of access all areas is the co-director of the of the project and so a lot a lot of research went into it it's a constantly evolving and i think it's going to evolve as the the um you know the world of technology and the um and the the the the big sort of utopian vision we have for how technology is going to transform architecture and the the whole world of city development and i think that will it will evolve in line with that i mean i'm i'm an absolute magpie when i'm when i'm sort of i spend two hours very early every morning just looking online and absolutely everything that i possibly can i've got a massive library of things and it's just the amount of information that is out there is is huge and um yeah i think things are gonna i think things are evolving and the project has to evolve as as has the um you know as the different methodologies are evolving there's another um audience focused question here um from heather allen who says went to the show yesterday thanks and went to the fabrica today to a show that was based on a lot of tactile experience and um heather asks um if walking in their feet might be might be a part of the unreal city experience no it isn't in short not at all as front of house i could definitely say no shoes are kept on i think um i remember blast theory blast theory who everyone knows i'm sure they did a piece called desert rain this was probably 20 years ago where we did walk through sand and through a rain storm that was made but um actually it was there it was a kind of immersion it was an emotion scenario with projection etc before walking into the next rooms and the different journeys they're typical journey adventure scenarios you know so i love being in bare feet so i definitely go for it it's not long is it until you know that there's the the technology is moving with the gloves and and being able to kind of experience tactile experience of um virtual objects i've heard about um sorry i'm not quite sure where to start with what point i'd like to make um tangentially related to feet and walking um i was with another artist yesterday and they were telling me that there's kind of a walking simulator somewhere like basically it's from what i remember of them describing it was like a sort of dipped bowl with a treadmill on it and the person's feet weren't actually walking but it kind of simulated that i think and i also remember going to see an immersive piece unfortunately i forget the artist now i seem to remember they were canadian and it was basically a story about them and their mother who had cancer and there was one point where you were tucked into bed like the artist was as a kid and there was another moment where the artist i.e you as an audience member and the mum actor would hug and you wouldn't know what the actual physical actor looked like you'd just see in your vr that it was your mum it's called hold me close that's it thank you yeah yeah yeah national theater commission really i think it's true joshua yeah joshua yeah that name sounds about artists you're absolutely right canadian artist um and wasn't by any means the first physical um vr work but it did very very important work and particularly because it was around that loss of the loss of someone yes so and bereavement dealing with those those issues so very special work yeah draw me close hold me close draw me close you're right draw me close yeah you were talking earlier with elaine about the you know the use of this work um for people who have experienced trauma and yes and um i think there is you know the two sides of this what we what most of us have missed during lockdown in our multiple zooms and different other spaces that we've all been using which i get completely confused and go google now and now it's teens now it's you know but what we me most miss and you've seen it written everywhere from quite early on is um but i i you know i can't find intimacy here you know i've i lack presence there's no presence we can't how can we build trust with people that we didn't know before physically because of new people coming in the team or you've changed jobs or whatever you know and these are these words and empathy um and then dealing with issues um such as trauma you know the other side the whole gradient of emotions are still very complex in this immersion scene scene because in some ways we're going into a hyper-enhanced state yeah our senses are put into hyper-enhanced state and in different works or different environments certain senses are pushed forward further but you're you're heightened hyped up in a way and therefore you can be taken to you know extreme joy or you know special places or to to to difficult places yeah so it's actually how we do the reverse engineering on that and actually how do it could could this help phobias could it help people to understand that if you're if you're very aggressive in your stance um that you're you're you're putting across a violent situation if you're faced with that yeah and could it help you understand racial bias if for once you were actually the person that was of the different race the other yeah the other dealing with otherness and dealing with liveness and presence and we've still got a long way to go on that and the gaming world has recognized that probably the last five years or so they suddenly realize that presence is the big issue and that's why i think i'm going to say it's really performing arts and anyone with performing arts background body knowledge of any type really should be at the center of all these developments and there shouldn't be any new products or services developed now without live live experience people right at the we're saying at the baseline of the group actually part of the core members of the group and that's where i think we do need to be a bit braver um from the performing arts sector and go you know you need me actually you you know whatever size the corporate is whatever company it is whatever if you find equipment hardware software platform and new virtual space that you want to work in go in and say actually you need me too and i've got ideas to work in here because it's all a big experiment for the next 10 years so there's space for us yeah there really is could could it even be that in that space that i think they're called oski or something basically an actor becomes a healthcare patient could it potentially be the osce examinations um or um tests for health care professionals could it potentially be that they're done with um a mix of physical life actors who would be in the performing arts hopefully or could it be also that they'd focus that they'd work on vr headsets i guess i know there's a question there and i know there's a point i just can't articulate it very well there is emma there is a history of of um using the arts for training in healthcare settings um as especially working with learning disabled actors um and there's there's something there isn't there to think about in terms of this happening remote and immersive health and well-being area and there's quite a lot happening around mental health in this area too um again one that still isn't completely tested out so we do have to be careful in the research question actually i'm with utristum that's the base of all of us on our research but ultimately the research that proves these things and gets stuff through um to the next levels is the you know pre-during and post-research which is data-led and which is also soft data led by questionnaires multiple questionnaires and multiple data coming through and those go through the data ethics committees and it's often universities that are the best to lead on that yeah and then they're writing up the papers you know so so another you know partnerships between university researchers performing artists and platform developers is the key is key to this and actually james you've got experience on this we were talking about it earlier how complex that is yeah well it is but that's the partnership you need to build this sort of work so it sounds complicated but you need to work with people who aren't the same as you so you in theater you want to work with theater people all the time but you can't do that because you need to bring in specialisms for elsewhere and i think that's a real testing but wonderful process when that works well because you're bringing you don't know each other's specialism you have to have a lot of respect for each other and you make good work and you bring that across it does give you the scale to go from working on a very small scale to working with some you know really big international brand names who are who've got the technology but don't know how to use it properly or what they're you know and i to reiterate your point it's really critical that we don't feel like this is not for us because we do stage stuff the the processes you already processed and you had to make work beer to work or stage work performance um fits into this world really really well so i think we just haven't quite found as a country the confidence to go like we're actually really good at this we can do it but there's a lot bubbling under and i think this is a wonderful example of that of that sort of um innovative working i'd say we agreed to be even tougher than that say we've nearly missed the boat yeah and that i would say this in the dance sector which i come from and i'm known well known for this but you know we kind of did miss the boat in the late late 90s actually no no body technology development should have happened without body experts in the middle of it and we've had now 22 years in the last 12 years has just been literally technology is about the body it is literally everything that comes out so we've got to get on with it so brave thanks be brave we're going to have to um b
2022-01-31