Salon 38 // Steve Miller & Lee Day

Hello, hello, hello and welcome everyone to our Techspressionist virtual salon here on March, the second of 2022. It is a, I guess kind of a probably chilly afternoon here in Richmond, Virginia but we've got attendees from all over attending today and we have one person actually that just flew into New York from Australia, New Zealand.

Unattributed

What are those two that general area. Australia, okay I couldn't reach one. But yeah, so that's the kind of group that we are here we are all over the world in 30 plus countries at this point. And we are an eclectic bunch, I will say. And of these eclectic bunch we have two presenters today that Steve Miller and Lee Day.

Unattributed

If you are if this is your first time attending a one of our virtual salons, the general format pretty much goes as we have our presenters present. And then that's shortly followed by a q amp a session and then general discussion generally falls right after, and usually goes right back into talking about presentations.

Unattributed

In the interest of time I don't want to hold anything up so presenters Are you ready, Stephen Lee. Ready to go. All right. I'm going to hand over the mic to you, verbally.

So much. And Colin thanks for inviting me to come here today. And I think the, the subject I hope it's certainly related to technology and actually, my work is, I would say qualifies as a Techspressionist so we'll see some of that. The, the, the context of which I'm presenting is around.

Steve Miller

Publications, a three book series. And the third book is coming out. In the fall. So I'm going to do a screen share here. And there we go. See if we can get a try to get a strategy one more time. Yeah, I'm losing my, my. Yeah, I'm losing my, my. We may have to go with this with this bottom is try one more time.

Steve Miller

Okay. This is the way we're rolling. So, the, the first book is a project that I did in the Amazon in Brazil. And the project was called health of the planet, and was fortunate enough to have a few museum exhibitions around this subject one at the National Academy of Sciences. This is in Washington DC. And the idea was is if Brazil is the lungs of our planet. Then I would give the planet a kind of metaphorical checkup by taking x rays of the floor and bottom of the Amazon. And you might kind of wonder like how does one get a book deal like this. And the fact is that it's a was a completely random set of circumstances. Okay. Where the publisher of this company, Glitterati, saw my work in a furniture store in Hudson, New York. So it can come at you ways that you would never predict.

Steve Miller

And she wrote me and said and saw this work and said, you know, why don't you have a book? And I said, yeah, I'd love to have a book. And we kind of started out. Now, her initial idea was this, you know, x-rays of the flora of the Amazon. And in this case, you're looking at a banana flower. So that big flower coming down at you gets open, you know, opens up, gets pollinated. And you can actually see the small bananas before they, you know, go grow into the bunches on the stem of this particular banana flower.

Steve Miller

So in the. Let's just get this out of here. I don't know if you see that or not. So what I did was to start with plants. And again, you see this banana flower here again and taking actually live animals. So this was done in Brazil and Belem in the Amazon. It's a live bird. We actually worked with animal handlers and the vets from these places. And they helped organize bringing the animals to the hospital every night. And then we would x-ray them. And this is the result of what those x-rays are. And another part of the project was going to the fish market in this town. And I got the fish. It's all outdoors, by the way. It doesn't happen inside. It's like everyone puts their fish on an ice bucket and the sidewalk. And then you go around and look. And I got these one vendors to go out and catch me piranhas.

Steve Miller

And what you're looking at here is. An aerial view of the Amazon as seen from a satellite. So the white geometric shapes, those are actually satellite maps of Amazon land clearing, which I combined with some expressionistic pain handling to lay in the piranhas to give the sort of, you know, you get the story right. The land is just being decimated and eaten away by development. So I was combining this stuff.

Steve Miller

I was lucky enough to have somebody else curate a show that put this piece up on a billboard in Los Angeles. So this was a company called the Billboard Collective, and they had artists billboards around L.A. So that image went off to the billboard. And what I did was I convinced the publisher to move beyond just those x-rays and work into paintings and sculptures and then include my surfboards. And you see this banana flower again. And I started getting into the surfboards for a couple of reasons. One, water is a really important resource. Two, there's often this notion that which you'll see surfboards are trophies. And a lot of hunters go and kill animals and stuff them on the wall. And my idea was to make this sort of perhaps more friendly to the animal trophy and mount them on surfboards.

Steve Miller

But these are three images. And I wanted to make sure that I was not just showing the images from actually just Amazon plants. So, you know, if the first book was about the actual problems in the Amazon, the second challenge was to get this stuff out into the real world. And I really wanted to get the notion that I could escape the art gallery. I think NFT and technology is just another way that we think about this. But I was thinking about it. An actual. You know, analog objects that were in the world that would contain the imagery. And that imagery would then, you know, theoretically communicate some of the themes that I'm thinking about. So, you know, you see these alligators on the wall, right? And so this is sort of my Itho trophy. And it was about getting this message actually back into the water.

Steve Miller

So obviously you've got an alligator that lives in the water and a surfer. And this is, you know, a surfer. And then I started, you know, surfing that board and sort of completing the cycle of imagery in a non-art context world to make it accessible. And when I was in Brazil and I went to this town called Belém and I went to a benefit for the Brazil Amazon, the Brazil Foundation. I start talking to this guy. And we have a conversation. I find out that he owns this fashion company. Which is a really high end. And he's a fashion company in Brazil called Asclan. And I said, I got a really great idea for you. We're going to put these, you know, these images that I've got on the Amazon. And we're going to put them into fashion. And so I did a surf line for them. And in this case, one leg is black and one leg has the piranhas on it.

Steve Miller

And the piranhas are sort of like moving towards your genitals if you wear it. So it's wrapping around the back of the shorts and then coming around the front. And so part of that surf line, you know, there was T-shirts and bathing suits. And then I started, you know, making my own clothing line. And getting skaters in this case, they're wearing my fashion. You've got that iguana that you saw in an early painting. The female skater has the alligator on her leg. There's an X-ray of the snake you saw on the billboard in L.A. Iguana on the right. And then I got a little bit of a black and white. So the idea was really to get this imagery in motion and out into the world. And this I include because this painting in the background is going to be in the show in Southampton. And part of this surf skate idea was lifestyle, fashion, accessibility, try to bring this conversation into the world.

Steve Miller

So that's actually the X-ray of a pineapple sitting there. And then behind me, those pink forms on that painting are also satellite maps of Amazon land clearing. I got lucky again and somebody asked me to do a skateboard for a skateboard company called Always Timeless. So this is someone skating with one of my boards and my T-shirt, my leggings. Those leggings are plants that we saw in another painting earlier on that I just put onto these leggings. And so surf skate was kind of. If you're a skater, you're going to have to have a lot of experience with that. But if radiographic was about the project of giving the world a medical checkup, surf skate was like, how do we live and move through the world? And this is in my studio in Long Island with again, you can see the satellite maps. The Purple River is actually the Amazon River seen from the satellite.

Steve Miller

But this is what the work looks like if you actually had it in a context other than a gallery. The vases are Neolithic vases from 3000 BC Mahjong. That's an Ashley Bickerton early piece from 1986 in the foreground. And then obviously my images in the background. And one of the things I did was I was lucky enough to do all the windows in Bloomingdale. They wanted to do a surf theme and I knew the right person. And I did actually over the course of the years, three sets of windows for the Amazon. So you've got three windows. You've got these turtles that we x-rayed. If you can see where my cursor is, those are eggs inside the turtle right there that we saw, which was just a surprise to all the radiologists, the snake.

Steve Miller

And eventually incorporating the surfboards into the painting. So that's an x-ray of me. You can see my teeth here. These are implants, dental implants, swimming with a fish in the Amazon. And then the idea was that somebody would take this surfboard. And surf it. And then put it back in the rack. And beat it up. And it would look more like the sort of surface of the painting and kind of integrate that. But that will be the choice of the buyer of that. So the third book, the book that Colin asked me to talk about is obviously about energy and the environment. And it's called Surfing the Cosmos. So when you do these book deals, you don't have. Control of all of the variables. And the publisher makes a lot of decisions based on market surveys. So they asked me to do this book cover. This was my first choice for the book cover.

Steve Miller

It was rejected. It was like too confusing. And, you know, I said, okay, I'm going to bring some more clarity to it. So this was book design number two. And what they do is they take the book. They give it to their distributors, the image. And they see like, is this something you can sell? And then they get feedback. And the feedback I got from this was.

Steve Miller

It looks too much like a textbook. So energy and environment is. A kind of a contrast between low energy use and energy made from necessity and immediate need. And high energy use of particle physics. So this, this cover. Was based on. Obviously this painting, which is the wires and the favela. And Rio de Janeiro.

Steve Miller

Now, this is the actual cover of the book without the type. Because I. Limited to the number of slides I could show about the book, but this is the basis. And I included also because it will be in the show. In South Hampton. And you can see. You know, sideways. The background of the favela and then the wires, which I then silk screened on canvas. And. And it's a really interesting process to get into the favela because. You have to kind of pay off the drug dealers. They give you someone sort of like a guide. Slash bodyguard. To sort of let you know when you can take photos and not take photos. And, and this book I was lucky enough to get Neil deGrasse Tyson. To write the forward for the book. So. Hope everybody will look out for that when it comes out. And on the right, this is a typical alleyway.

Steve Miller

You know, in the favela and you just see like these crazy wires everywhere. You know, this is a straight shot. So what's happening is. This. The favela is this uncontrolled place of growth, right? It's there's no zoning laws. There's no police. It's run by drug Lords. They, they decide, you know, what the social structure in a lot of ways. And. And the, they create the. The police force of this place. And one of the things that everybody does is they tap in. To the electrical system at will. And this is what it looks like. She's crazy spiderwebs spaghetti view. And it. It caught my attention for a lot of ways because one. You know, we talk about expressionism.

Steve Miller

And, and, you know, Colin and I'll speak for myself. I'm a great fan. The Pollock. I'm a great fan of the Pollock. And here, you know, with the vision of Pollock, I'm seeing. The, you know, the vision of that kind of energy and gesture. And this case, it's a collective gesture. Based on necessity. And I just couldn't stop, but like photographing these things. And one of the elements that.

Steve Miller

You know, the, the publisher sees this book as a photography book. I see it as a painting book, but I do set up this situation where you have image. Source and then the painting that follows. So the painting that follows. So this is like a straight shot, right? It gets digitally printed on canvas. Then I try to, you know, mitigate. How much of the background I want to allow to reveal. And then I match it up with a story. Another story about energy. Which I'll get to. In a minute. And this image on top. Is a. A. A mesh version of human protein. That is made through x-ray crystallography. Which is. A proton beam. From a large Hadron collider. That at lower energy speeds. Is pulled off the, the energy beam to. Shoot through crystallized forms of human protein. I'm going to get out. So this is one of these more complex versions, but.

Steve Miller

So this is the energy in the body, the human body. So proteins. Carry ions. And those ions. Move across cell membranes and then they zap the cell. And they tell the cell what to do, you know, grow, destroy, make another. And so here we have this sort of crazy need for energy. Sourced together with the actual energy inside the human body. So another expression of these models. Is these.

Steve Miller

Ribbon models they're called and. All the models were made by. A guy that won the Nobel prize in 2003. A guy named Robert. And I was able to work with Rod. And uses imagery. And so the story of the energy starts with. This. Show that was. Brandeis university. And these are Rod's images. So this. X-ray crystallography. Goes through the lattice work of the crystallized protein. Makes dots on the screen. Shoot different algorithms. You can make these. Ribbon images that you see above or an image below, which is called the surface image. And these are more of these. You know, these mesh images.

Steve Miller

That you can see here. I just can't get rid of this thing. All right. So while I was, these were made at Brookhaven national labs. And I got very interested in kind of, again, The graffiti nature of the scientific notes. And I started photographing the notebooks and putting them in the. The. Filming them together and silk screening them on canvas. So, you know, this is sort of the expressionist statement. The Techspressionist in his statement. And this is a large scale painting. That has, you know, the ribbon. This is probably, I don't know. 15 feet across. So you have one of the expressions is bubble images. The guy's notes that for which you won the Nobel prize.

Steve Miller

And it was just a really. And then also. I started. I started getting interested in these wires. So the chalkboard and wires. Of the next book come into place. And we get into the favela now in Rio. And we're sort of looking at this. Wire drawings in space. Of a collective energy. Based on necessity. And I love this idea. That this was a group aesthetic. So the favela looks like this. It falls down the side of a mountain in Rio. The houses are all on top of each other. A lot of them. They don't have plumbing. They certainly don't have garbage collection. And I got really fascinated by. Just the drawings in space. Now there's sculptures. Their paintings and, and I would take these images. Like this one again.

Steve Miller

Kind of blur the image a little bit back. Create the story of the wires and the fact that this human human energy starts inside the body with this expression of human protein. So these are the kinds of images that express the low energy use that's going on in Rio and expresses the one bookend of the human condition.

Steve Miller

And I just saw this great piece of garbage that was so beautiful in the upper left-hand corner of this painting with this beautiful drawing of wires in space. And this is kind of the collision that I made between my response to it and what was pre-existing. This is, again, one of these crazy wire finales that you see in every alleyway. It's Byzantine, it's spider webs.

Steve Miller

I also kind of looked at the daily life inside the favela, which is maybe what this is more about. So the favela is full of graffiti. And I actually, this is my number one book cover that I started before I did the other one, rejected out of hand because they said it would look like graffiti, wouldn't mesh with the concept of what the book was, which was about energy. So here we are now. And this is a research facility that at the time that I was there in Geneva that was searching for a particle called the Higgs boson. And the Higgs boson was a unifying particle that put the standard model together. And it was a particle that gave all other fields mass. So this photo is 30 stories underground. You can see that figure in the background. That's the scale of this thing. This is eight stories tall.

Steve Miller

This is the beam line going through the center. They put these two ovals together on the right and left, and then they collide the protons across two opposite beams. They pass through all of these detectors and they measure the energy. And the energy that's measured lets you know whether a particle is created or not. So this is a little bit of a summation, right? You've got the human energy inside the body with human protein. You've got the white energy inside the body with human protein.

Steve Miller

This is part of your oscilloscope of energy at high speeds and wonderful flow as well as higher intensity alpha Starting point D where yourkonworking keeps yourself alive as well as faster energy curve at higher speeds and faster electron Cliff presupicker starts moving around your aura at higher speeds and faster electron Endpoint E's back here. Endpoint F's back here. Endpoint V's back here. Endpoint Z's back here. Endpoint Z's back here. Collision now of the two bookends of high energy particle physics and the crazy need for energy for human use. And the book is called Surfing the Cosmos. So I just really love the idea of using these chalkboards as a vehicle for making them both accessible and they're just really fun to make. And one of the things in CERN are these ridiculous posters that are everywhere and I just fell in love with the vocabulary.

Steve Miller

Electroweak theory, you know, heavy quark physics, perturbative QCD, neutrino physics. It just, there's a whole kind of section on the book about the posters and this language that they're using. And on the left is one of Rod McKinnon's bubble protein models with a picture of a telephone pole in the favela.

Steve Miller

And so, you know, the end of the book is called Surfing the Cosmos. So these are a painting that I'm working up now and it has the chalkboards in CERN. This is, it's going to be the size of the surfboard, but I'm just getting my chops down before I work in that scale. I want to have a better idea of what I'm doing. And you can kind of see the size of the surfboard. And I'm going to get in a little deeper on the surface and see kind of how I, what I keep, what I take away, what I obscure. And then this is not the last page of the book, but the last page of the book is a surfboard. And this is the Andromeda surfboard in, you know, that is one of many celestial surfboards that I'm starting to make. So, you know, that's sort of the journey of a trilogy of books about, you know, environment, energy, getting art into the world.

Steve Miller

And thanks for your patience and letting me have this opportunity. So we got a, like a sprint question, if anybody has any. Oh, we got one from Deanne almost immediately after you completed that. How does it work to use the intellectual property of the scientists in your paintings and on your surfboards?

Steve Miller

That's an interesting question. I never, I mean, I would go in and I would say I'm shooting these two, you know, I was an invited artist. I gave a lecture to the theory group. That's how I got in there. And then with that lecture credential, I talked about how, believe it or not, how scientific, you know, advances in science changes consciousness.

Steve Miller

And so I was already kind of accepted as an invited guest. I was there as an artist. Yeah. And I had kind of free range to shoot the chalkboards. And funny enough, like these physicists do not get a lot of attention. People are not interested in their work. Nobody knows what the Higgs boson is. So they were very, very open about letting me photograph and use it for my artwork. So I never had a question about intellectual property.

Steve Miller

It is quite rare for scientists to actually use intellectual property. So I think it's a great question. You know, I think it's a great question. And I think it's a great question. I mean, I mean, actually, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of those like rockstar scientists. So I was really lucky to get him to write something, you know, for me, because I thought about some other scientists. He was my number one choice. It took a year to get him and the book was going to press. And the day that I was supposed to deliver, he says, I'll do the essay. Yeah. So we had to like stop everything, redesign the book and have it go to press. Actually, it hasn't gone to press yet. We're just in the final stages of sort of waiting for the, you know, the technical specs. So, yeah, the rock star scientist is sort of an oxymoron, right?

Steve Miller

It just doesn't make any sense. That could change one day. Maybe not anytime soon. You know, I think, you know, the thing about Techspressionism, it touches this area of science and technology and this idea that we're all fascinated with it. And we want to get it out into, you know, into the world and have this as a content that people can discuss and decide, like, you know, is technology, I mean, artists, it's always, well, this is too long a discussion. I think I'm just going to like, shut up. But if I would submit it in one word, it's the quality content issue facing accessibility.

Steve Miller

So I think those are, you know, some of the challenges of all of us in this pool of expressionism. Oh, we got, I know, I know you probably have to be leaving soon. So I guess I can, I can be two minutes late, but I run a technology company called Arternal. Yeah. We're having a branding exercise today.

Steve Miller

Oh my God. This is, this is, this is really great. So obviously Colin was my studio assistant. I think this is probably 1983. I can't remember. Robert Barton. 92. 92? Oh, 30 years ago this year. Okay. All right. I'm brain, I'm brain dead. And the guy in the background, Robert Barton was Andy Warhol. Warhol's silkscreen printer. Kathleen Madden is a curator and she and Colin were my studio assistants that summer. And we had a lot of fun. That's a great photo. Thanks. Thanks. That's a piece of art. Couldn't resist.

Steve Miller

That's great. Oh, Holly. Holly has a question really quick. Sure. Oh, you're muted, Holly. Still muted. Okay. There you go. All right. This isn't. Oh, we got some double feedback going on too. It isn't a question. Okay. I think. What's happening here? Do you have two speakers next to each other? I have no idea.

Steve Miller

I think that. I think that. Steve, I think you should either design a tie or a vest and send it to Neil deGrasse Tyson because you started a relationship. Keep it going. And every time he's on Colbert, he has ties and vests that are astrophysical or whatever. Great idea. Do it. Thank you for the suggestion. You're welcome. Free marketing, right? Yeah. Yeah. Always. Always branding. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This branding thing is also an interesting discussion, which is why I did the surf skate book because it's like, how do you get the work out there and get it accessible? If you can get Neil deGrasse Tyson to wear a vest, that's awesome. But this was like to make art accessible. They cost money, but a lot less than most analog artwork.

Steve Miller

It's a challenge to figure that out for everyone. Right. So I hope you'll forgive me. Thank you so much for listening. And I'm off to learn about branding. Have fun with that. Thank you, Steve. Yeah. I'll let you know what I learned next session. I'm actually a fan of brandy. That was one of my first beverages. All right. Let's talk. Thank you.

Steve Miller

All right. That was Steve. And he had to go because busy, busy. I just wanted to interject one thing really quickly for those watching. Techspressionism website, Techspressionism.com. And I put this in the chat, but you wouldn't be able to see it if you're watching a recording. It actually launched from Steve's porch on August 22nd of 2020. And he was one of the people that really inspired me to develop this into a group project. Prior to that, it was just a word that I came up with to talk about to describe my own work. But he was kind of the original Techspressionist to me. When I came into his studio as an undergrad and I was pulling screens, you know, and cleaning screens as that was my studio assistant job. But I also got to see the inside of a working studio. And, you know, it was the first time I really saw technology and painting combined in that way.

Steve Miller

And I was hooked. So, you know, kudos to Steve. And yeah, really glad he could come in and join us. Just wanted to put that little tidbit out there. Yeah. See, he's going to be in the annals of art history and Techspressionism. All right. Let's hope. Yeah. We'll make it happen. That's the goal. We finish goals here, right? Kind of.

Steve Miller

All right. And with that, I think we can move right along to our next presenter, Lee.

So you ready to present? Yep. That was very impressive. I love the multiple layers of all the work that's in there. Quite something. So my work is fundamentally I'm a photographer. Can you see the screen that I know I have to I haven't started sharing it quite yet. Yeah. Is that better? Yep. Good. So I'm a photographer. I started in photography when I was about 12 years old, so that's a good long time ago. I used to shoot stock and journalism, and then I went into technology, doing programming for CD-ROMs, websites, various other things in life.

Lee Day

More recently, I've come back to photography, and I've brought the experience of programming, technology, and love for all that kind of that world into my work. And so I want to share with you a couple of projects. And the photo you see here is from a project called Clipping Suburbia, Japan. And so I'm trying to do a couple of things in this work, or I'm responding to a couple of things. On the first level, on the experiential level, I'm really responding to the feeling of the world moving incredibly fast and crammed together, where all of your technology, all of your inputs and sources are...

Lee Day

You're free. Your phone, your computer, your... Everything. It just keeps on inundating you with more and more information. And frankly, this is a bit like how I feel about that. I feel like everything is jammed up. I can't catch up. There are pieces flying past me all the time. And so I started off shooting with the... This is all shot with the iPhone. And I attached the phone to train Windows.

Lee Day

This particular series is shot in Japan in 2019, just before the pandemic. And I'm hoping to go back there and continue working on it shortly. So on another level... On another level... What I'm really interested in is manifesting algorithmic perception and seeing how the devices that we use, in this case, the phone, the algorithms in it, which is a small, intelligent device, how it sees the world. And one of the things I've done here is I've put it in a situation that it's not really very comfortable with. So I'm shooting with the... The panorama function. Panorama function basically works like a scanner. It takes 100-pixel-wide strips. And then the computations, the algorithms in there try to put together those strips into a picture that works. But it's designed to be standing in one place and you're turning.

Lee Day

Whereas I'm attaching it to a window and it's going through space. So it's moving translationally. And it's not getting the right... The right information. And everything is moving too fast. And so it's been put in a sort of an untenable position trying to pull all this information together. So this project actually grew out of an earlier project. I've been shooting with this technique for about five years. Actually a bit longer. I started with the iPhone 4, which was 2015.

Lee Day

And I'm now using the 12. So we'll have to get out into the field to actually use the 12. And it started off with panoramic work. So this work is, again, it's using the same technique. These images take between five seconds and several minutes to compile. To be captured. And it's going to be one more little understand. And it's going to be like a big line. And it's going to be like a big line. And it's going to be like a big line. And it's going to be like a big line. And it's going to be like a big line. And it's going to be like a big line. And it's going to be like a big line. And it's going to be like a big line. And it's going to be like a big line.

Lee Day

One of the things that I'm really interested in is trying to understand how algorithms, these algorithms see the world and a bit the difference between how they see it and how we see it. We're both staring out the train window here. When I look out the train window, it looks like a seamless experience.

Lee Day

I see things flying by me, but my mind synthesizes the world going by out there. The phone, the brain in there. Can't do that. It starts picking out different types of information. It sees the information that's in the front very well, whereas the things that are in the back, it starts repeating and can't really get a hold of. Whereas for me, it's the things in the back that I find in the distance that all tie together seamlessly. For example, in this picture, you start getting repetition in the background. It's seeing the same little piece of image again and again and again. Whereas for me, I just see a sky when we're doing this. One of the things that I reflect on in thinking about this work is how the surveillance world that we worry about. We think about these algorithms as being some kind of omniscient system.

Lee Day

We're afraid. We worry about that always being watched and seen by eyes that are watching us in the store or tracking our movements and our every emotion. One of the things that comforts me a little bit is that I look at these images and see that the systems are in place. They're a little bit fragile. They don't see the world in the same way that we see the world. When you ask an algorithm to go through and look at a video of people doing something or a face, it sees little points and it has an experience of the world that is very, very different than what we see when we see a movie and are trying to extract information from it. For me, these images are very, very different. They're very, very different. They sort of give me a sense for what I think the algorithm is seeing and how its experience of the world is very different from our experience of the world.

Lee Day

I've done this. These panoply images. These panoramic images in three different locations in Japan, Los Angeles, and the Northeast. These images are from Japan, also 2019. A couple of them are overlapped from the industrial distraction series. A lot of what I do in these projects is actually curation. So the.

Lee Day

The. The iPhone, the algorithms in there are the ones that are compiling is what is compiling the image. I go through thousands and thousands of images to find ones that work. Okay. So I'm going to go through them one by one. Just at the for a last little piece for a little bit of context. This is a matrix of 6000 images that I shot over about a week in Japan.

Lee Day

This is what I'm calling those seven or eight images from in the panorama images. And so this is in essence a database of them. Hundreds and hundreds of miles of Japan, of the city of Tokyo mostly, as seen from the rail systems. And as you get closer and closer, you can see that you really can see the whole city.

Lee Day

And yet, when you get close enough, you realize that the images, you don't see any people or very few people in them. And it's again sort of a manifestation of this idea that the algorithm, it has a particular way of seeing the world. It doesn't see the people. It sees this world jammed up and put together and assembled in a different way. The way that then humans do.

Lee Day

And this one is about 15 trips up, back and forth between New York City and Reinfeldt. So, that's what I'm working on these days. So, frankly, in, during the time of COVID, and in the course of that, I haven't been able to do this for the last couple of years. But so I sit in the stream next to the house shooting another type of photography, which I could share some other day. But if there are any questions or any comments, I'd love to discuss the work. Oh, the chat has actually been fairly, fairly active since you've been presenting, because we've all been kind of admiring your work and talking about just different comparisons that we're seeing. And you actually have a kindred artist here, too, who also his name is Lee. Oh, yes. Yeah. And his work, though, similar to yours, your subject matter is very different.

Lee Day

Oh, he says hi, by the way. How's it going? All right. There was something about Panavision. Is that is that one of the stitching softwares? Apparently, it's a group on Flickr, that platform. I don't know them, no. Actually, Lee, why don't you come off mute? I know you have a voice unless unless you're voice shy these days.

Lee Day

Hi. Hi. Is it OK to say hi? Yeah. Hi, Lee. Your stuff's amazing. First of all, very encouraging. There's a filmmaker named John Jost. He's like a Jonas Minkus kind of experimental filmmaker. He, too, is one of the iPhone four people. There's a group on Facebook called Rogue Pano. I think it's got about 60. Active Rogue Pano or Pano sabotage. There's a bunch of names for this stuff.

Lee Day

But there's about 60 active photographers like really active on the Facebook group on Flickr. It's called Panavision and it's a member only. You got a request to join the main guy there. I forgot his name as Zevchenko. It's something like that. But there's another. Another like 60 or 100 dedicated people who are doing this. There's two books on in the Apple store.

Lee Day

Panorama art. iPhone panorama art. Incidentally, you can't do this, as you probably know, with Androids. You can only do this with the iPhones. And also, Lee, in Panavision, there's been a group for about two or three months now. Try. We've been having letter campaigns to the to the chief scientist people at Apple and the chief algorithm people because they recently decided to fix the bug, which actually makes a whole bunch of our moves in panorama sabotage, which is what a lot of people call that hard to do or almost impossible to do.

Lee Day

But one thing is when I'm looking at your stuff, I'm seeing a couple of moves. When you talk about the repetition in the background. Some of the folks that I've met, they call that brushing the teeth because you the movement that you have with your iPhone. You kind of it's kind of like a toothbrush active action.

Lee Day

There's also a whole bunch of other moves. I'm a big fan of this one that they told me is called the Infinity Brushstroke, where you kind of make these figure eights. And it ends up being a little bit more complicated. It ends up being like a choppy. I'm sure you've tried all these moves because we only saw a sampling.

Lee Day

But yeah, I'd love I'd love to chat with you more about this. I'd love to see you active in these groups because I think you're some of the things that I've seen that you just posted, like the way you've presented them. I can only imagine if you printed full size your matrix, like because I know that with the panorama, it's four feet. Well, 50 inches tall. And as long as you can. As long as you can get it before the camera dings and cuts you out. So I can only imagine that's like taller than an apartment building. And it would just look amazing. I mean, the cost of printing it. I mean, even if we got Colin to print it on his fancy printer or, you know, it would be forever. But I just think your stuff is amazing. And I hope to see you in the Pano Vision group. They'd all love you. And they'd probably include include you in their next book.

Lee Day

For sure. I'll definitely check that out. Oh, please do. And please share your photos. Just a couple at first. And people will feedback you and be like, oh, these are amazing. And even I mean, I'm not a huge fan of Facebook, but I've gotten a little bit warmer with it because I've managed to. It's been the best way for me to sell my photos these days lately.

Lee Day

But, yeah, I'm going to I'm going to go to your website. And. Love to keep in touch. Oh, and you're at Instagram. OK, so. Thanks, Colin. I mean, I do print. These are I have a show going off in a photo gallery in March 30th. And these are my printer. 17 inches. So that's about as large as I can do. But I print them up to 30. I think 36 inches.

Lee Day

36 inches long. Yeah. Three feet. For the square one. Right. OK. And tall is. 36 inches. The square. 36. Oh, it's like a square. Nice. Yeah. OK. The best one. The biggest ones that I've managed to sell right now have been have been about six feet in length. Yeah. Because I know that like some of those photos that I saw, some of your panoramas are like if you looked at them full, full, full resolution, they'd be like, you know, some of the longer ones would be like in the 12 feet or, you know, they're just. I should get off the mic here and let you get back up before I have questions. It's really excited. And I was, you know, I managed to show up today. And I'm so sorry, Colin, that usually I so screwed up and I don't manage to get to the.

Lee Day

But the 530 is a great time. So and I was so excited to see you work, Lee. And thank you so much for showing. Thank you very much. I think we can tell you were excited, Lee. Cool. Cool. I'll check out the group. Cool. And oh, gosh, Lee S. Please do drop the links to the Facebook group in the chat. So because I think at least one other person is also asking about being able to access that group. Sure. I'll put both of the links into the chat right now.

Lee Day

All right. Thank you so much, Lee. And thanks, everybody. And I just put my website into the chat. FYI. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right, Clive. I know you've been holding up your hand for a long time. That's OK. You ready? Yeah. No, I just wanted to. It's a great presentation, but also. I'm wondering if your idea of seeing more of how an algorithm sees the world has bounced back and made you sharpen your idea of how a human sees the world. That would be of interest to me to hear about that. Your change in how human consciousness experiences those pictures out the window, et cetera, et cetera, since you've been studying the algorithm view.

Lee Day

That's an interesting question. I actually hadn't thought about it that way. I mean, I would say one of the things is that being a photographer, a lot of what I do is about framing. And every, you know, I'm always looking for the best. And I think that's true. A frame. And it's a reductive process.

Lee Day

Photography. It starts with a million things in the world. The world is completely full. And what you're trying to do is reduce and find the nugget of the idea in there. Whereas a lot of other kinds of arts are additive. You start with a blank slate and you add things in. So I think that in terms of how I see the. This work is really sort of zeroing in on the.

Lee Day

Well, the idea that the experience that I see, especially in this in the smaller, the square ones. These ones are much more moments for me. They're like this quick experience, whereas the panoramic images are a bit more narrative in a funny way. That's how I think of it, because they go across a much longer space. They actually. Takes a lot longer for them to be put together. And in those, I do sort of think much more, I guess, about.

Lee Day

How the differences in how I see it and the and my iPhone sees it. How this little little brain in there sees it in the in the square ones. It's much more experiential. I mean, I think that really fits sort of this Techspressionism thing. It's much more experiential. Because I find them very much. There's this feeling of where we are in the world. I don't know. I don't know if everyone feels quite as overwhelmed as I do, but especially during COVID and everything. It's like it's just been a little overwhelming and that is definitely a mutual feeling throughout a lot of folks like the past two years now. We're on the anniversary of your muted.

Lee Day

That's. That's where we're at. Exactly. You're muted. That's great. Thank you, Lee. Kind of want to piggyback off the idea, though, because the whole thing about trying to understand how the algorithm or how that little processor is handling this visual these visual this visual data, like I think you can't help but alter your perspective or alter how you can. You see things when you're trying to understand how something else sees something like it's there's a playback there.

Lee Day

Like when you try to imagine something from someone else's perspective, like you're automatically having to adjust how you see things like, oh, so this is how this can be seen. But right. Yeah. And the only difference is, though, is that the algorithm might not be able to adjust to you. But you can definitely adjust. As a result of the algorithm.

Lee Day

Yeah, I mean, it definitely makes you think a little bit about how, you know, seeing where it breaks. Then I start thinking about where I break. Right. I was saying earlier, you know, he's talking about the brushing kind of thing in here. And I started thinking about, you know, parallax things, whatever. But, you know, the way that it's seeing and then I realized that's not how I see. I mean, the. The. The. The. The horizon line is perfect and pristine for me. It looks like a beautiful place. And yet there are all these little things there. If they're close to me, they're going whipping by and I don't see anything. And yet let me do this. You know, yet in the in the images, they it's the close things that are really, really sharp always. And then it's things that are farther away that become more.

Lee Day

Distorted and harder to find. These are a little bit tighter, I would say. Mm hmm. This one reminds me a little bit of my journalism. Oh, you're also into journalism? Yes. Oh, I see. I see. I started out in journalism, photography. And so for me, I always love these shots, but I don't get much positive feedback for me. This is suburbia in L.A. Where there are no people and Target is big and looming large and all the people are just sort of jammed up and you're looking into their backyards and nothing's there.

Lee Day

For the Waldorf. There's a lot to be said about the development of suburbia in this country anyway. A lot of people actually think it was a mistake in the grand scheme of things because of just I don't know it since since the development of suburban areas, it has literally changed the dynamic of just how communities work in this country. Yeah. Yeah. And it's for better or for worse. And it's for better or for worse. I feel that in a lot of ways, it's end up having people become more distant, even though the initial structure was like having everything uniform and together, but it seems like it's also pushed pushed away the idea of people actually being together.

Lee Day

Yeah. Yeah. So I think increasingly you're, you're finding that there are places in the suburbs that, that become little places. I mean, LA is like that. You know, you go to LA and Santa Monica, Santa Monica, and you don't need to go to other parts of LA or, or whatever. I don't know, Huntington beach, You can go there and you can sort of live there, even though it's still part of greater La and not big lead. It's funny.

Lee Day

I don't know. Oh, we have let's see questions for you. How often do you get dinged or cut off? So basically it goes to 1600 pixel, 16,000 pixels. A lot of what I do when I'm working, I sometimes work with two phones taped to the windows. And a lot of what I'm doing is trying to get them to continue compiling. I'm not actually looking at the images building most of the time because it's not really very controllable. What I'm mostly working at trying to do is keep them from not dinging, as he calls, to keep them from not dropping out. So it's to keep them tracking straight. There's a little bit of adjustment I can do since they're taped at the top. You can adjust them a little bit, which keeps the tracking working. And so most of them, you know, it depends on the location, but they go pretty long.

Lee Day

Yeah. Actually has a stream of questions for you. Hold on. We'll get back to some of them. Michael hasn't said anything yet. Have something to share. Yeah. Kylie, thanks for my presentation. So, it's kind of interesting. I think each of us in our own ways, as we work with various elements of technology, we run into that human technological barrier or challenge, I guess. And so for me, it's kind of interesting because as I was looking at your work, I thought back a little bit, I thought back a little bit, about David Hockney's artwork that he did, taking and stitching photographs together from various points of view to create this, you know, a number of different really evocative works.

Lee Day

And so I guess for me, I was curious as to how you see yourself and the iPhone that you're working with in terms of, you know, the balance of where you're at, where the iPhone is at, and how that balance works for you. I struggle with it a bit. I actually, in a lot of ways, I see the phone as taking the photos. And I'm the curator of this. Obviously, there's a fair bit of control and curation. And I do not like the concept of curation. But I find that this is a 100% curation project. And I find that in other work that I do, it's also, I shoot a lot. And I don't have control. And I really do not have that much control over what the camera or the iPhone or the algorithm, whatever you want to call it, is producing. I can try and keep it in line and continuing to compile.

Lee Day

But it's not until later that I go through and start adding my artistic, artistic eye to it. It's too random. I will say that if you go in the same place, so one group of photos is between Ryan Cliff and New York City, you start to understand places that work. And I've started to find places that work and then I go back to again and again. But I can't start the phone capturing in one place because the shadows are different, which means that it compiled. Even if I try to start it in the same place, it just, it doesn't work. They compile differently because it's a, the shadows are at a different place. The train's moving at a different speed.

Lee Day

So I've given up with that though. It's more of a probabilistic thing. You know, I know there's, there's good material there. So I keep on going back to that location and hoping, and I keep on, I keep on wishing that Apple would give me some, some frigging control over this, but, but Panorama, they have zero control, all the other things you can control, but, and what little control they, they used to have, you, they're, as the phones get faster, you have even less and less control.

Lee Day

Do you, so my follow up question is, is there something about Japan that for you may doing this process and, and this type of photography interesting to you? Is it the old and the new kind of coming together? Is it something else? Is it, you know, I was just kind of curious because you could definitely tell the distinctive differences.

Lee Day

Right. So I guess that's, that's a really good question. And in terms of the Panorama work, one of the things I found is that there's, there's sort of place consciousness. There's a lot of space in terms of the types of work that you get in any one location. And I did find that Japan worked really, really well for me. I think what it has to do with is there's a lot of things that are both close and far there's, there's a variety of distances. If you look in LA, even within trains and subways and things, everything has space. They have 50 yards away from the trains before they get to a wall. Sure. And you can actually see the mountains in the distance. I mean, there's space everywhere. So everything, you know, it has that feel to it. And in the Northeast, it's, it tends to be jammed up and there's a lot more history.

Lee Day

You find a lot older things sort of weaving, weaving their way into the images. So that's a really good question. I, I was looking for, in order to do this, the small square images, I was looking for material that would work for that for a long time. I wanted to do smaller ones and I'd never found it in LA and New York and in Japan, they worked. So. Excellent. Thank you.

Lee Day

Sorry. I was responding to the chat. So there, there is, there's a lot of, there's a lot of people who are asking questions about the, what else they're responding to. There's a common thread of thought that I've heard among quite a few people here. And I don't think it's just specifically applicable to like people are using the iPhone, but it's technology in general when the technology itself changes without our consent or without us wanting it to change because we've gotten used to how it's working and the things it does. It's a problem because then it doesn't do the things we want to do anymore. And so I just had this thought, like if there's any like app developers who might be per se as listening in the future, if someone goes out there and finds a way to like create a snapshot of the software or a snapshot of that app in the state that a lot of people are currently using it in and release that as like an open source thing that can be modified to the user.

Lee Day

But then. They own it. I think that'd be great for a lot of people because with the way things change and the way things develop, it's a lot is lost in the name of progress. And progress is great and all but it's not all great like there are things that are lost in some of those things are actually very valuable to people. Right. And I feel that if there was a way for us to just take a look at the data. And maybe snapshot of how we're using things as, or at least like make maybe make a feature for that future software, like hey, release the security updates whatever, but keep the software as it is maybe make another version that keeps updating but release that version, specifically.

Lee Day

So if you, I mean I think that this actually is something I've spent some time on and it's a problem, because if you get different phones they actually work differently. It's the processor speed has come up. It actually has gotten more difficult to do this so I, you know, all of this is shot with either a seven or 10, basically.

Lee Day

And, you know, they have different characters, I mean as a photographer, I would say they look like different film stocks, you know, but to respond directly to your point. You can actually go and take any one of your phones and get a an install. Of the original operating system and or any of the updates that were done so if you want for the for the OS. You can go and install the original and then upgraded to whatever particular level of whatever that you want the apps. I don't know. Yeah, that's another issue and I don't know whether even the Apple apps are going to be will be affected by that. But I think it's going to be a little bit more difficult to modify the OS upgrades I mean whether having been upgraded, it will still have the old app.

Lee Day

And I'm fairly new to Apple technology like I just got my first iPad this past week. And I have noticed that because I was looking at. I use procreate or start to use for create. And as I was looking for guides as of there was a. I was talking about how, and I like the iOS update the last one had apparently affected a lot of people's procreate, for some reason like it was lagging, like the brushstrokes weren't the same as they were on the previous update and it's like, if the OS itself has that much of an impact on the app or the app usage that's not good. Not good at all. This is like, I think Apple is, you know they went to their own chips. About a year ago. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's affected everything. That's my, my personal opinion and they're still trying to get all the pieces working again.

Lee Day

Yeah. Even maybe things that aren't using their own chips. The operating system, you know they have a new version of their operating system, you know they're still working through all that. The mountain of stuff that's in any operating system. Right. Also sorry Cynthia. And raise. That's going to get to you.

Lee Day

That's okay. I understand. I'm enjoying hearing everything everyone's saying and asking about. Lee, I very much enjoyed your presentation. Got me thinking about a lot of things regarding the way we see things and the number of things that we are encumbered with as we go through our lives. I have two questions. One is, do you tape your phone to the window of your car and then drive to create the panoramic view? Because you mentioned taping to the window. Trains.

Lee Day

Trains. I've done buses. Cars do not work. Yeah. No, they just don't work. But trains work pretty well. They're reasonably consistent in terms of level. What happens when the phone starts tilting, the image starts tracking up and down. And so if the train is level, it really helps it compile or keep on taking a picture. So a train is reasonably consistent that way. I will say that some places are more consistent than others. And the U.S. Is about the least consistent. Things tend to bump and boom, boom, boom. All over the place. Whereas my wife is Austrian. We do some of this in Austria. They're nice and smooth in Austria. Japan's pretty good too.

Lee Day

Fascinating. My second question is those square pieces that you have, were those cropped panoramics or did you use the square format in the iPhone to create those and then move? No, those are, most of them are cropped panoramics. But as Lee S. Said, what happens a lot of the times as you're taking the image is the phone is going along, it's compiling, it's adding strip by strip by strip. And then something happens and it says, yeah, no, wrong. I'm quitting. Right. And so when it does that, it just stops the image.

Lee Day

It actually, the way the panorama works is it gives you about 900 pixels. And then it's like, oh, there's 900 pixels on one side, 900 pixels on the other side. And then it adds little strips in the middle. So one of the, the reason why I started wanting to find those square images is because some of the ones that I saw where it had frozen mid picture were small and square and they looked really dense and really cool. So I was seeing something in these small images that I wanted to find and replicate. And in fact, some of the ones that are there, in fact, one of my favorite ones I could probably show you again, is actually was stopped by the phone.

Lee Day

This one, for example. If you look here, this, you can see in the clouds, this is what you might call an end piece. And this over here is also an end piece. And then everything else is gone. And then everything else in the middle is repeating. So basically the phone itself took this image. I didn't do much cropping on this. It found this image. So it was that I was seeing images like this that I really enjoyed.

Lee Day

And I liked the idea that it was, there was this compressed moment. And then I would go in into other images and try and find places where that was working. So this is cropped out of the middle of a much larger image. And this is cropped out of the middle of a much larger image. So your curation is at work here with these smaller pieces. Right. There's a bit more intervention in the smaller pieces than the panorama, I would say. In these I'm actually going through and doing some parallel processing. But this is fairly substantial cropping. Whereas in the panoramas, it tends to be much more what the foam took.

Lee Day

I mean, for example, on this, it would be hard to find a little piece, a square piece. I decided that I wanted square. It would be hard to find that in there. One that works that well. Maybe. Maybe. Thank you. Sure. Thank you, Cynthia. Oh, we do have a question from Colin. He said, how did you come up with the idea to start capturing panoramas from a vehicle in this way?

Lee Day

I think it's a natural thought. I know other people have thought the same thing. So. And I think it's a natural thought. I know other people have thought the same thing. I've met them. Basically, as a photographer, I mean, I have this device which does panoramas. And I know how it works. I mean, why wouldn't I stick it on the window? You know, I'm in the train. Why wouldn't I stick it on the window and hit the button and see what happens? You know, so that's pretty much I it's the experimental method. You see something that's interesting. You give it a shot and say it either works or it doesn't. Or, you know, maybe I should keep trying that. Yeah. I think that's the story of how a lot of artists work. It's you know what? Why not do that? And then you just go for it.

Lee Day

And but then the other thing is practice. And right. You know, you keep on doing it like I've been doing it for seven years now. That's my screen is different. What is it? Oh, so we have we have two questions in a row. I guess, Clive, you can go first. Yeah, I'm sure to ask a second question, but I'm actually going to surprise Tommy a bit. I want to know your take on this, Tommy. Algorithms and photography, etc. If you don't mind talking about it.

Lee Day

I'm happy to. Was there a specific question yet, Clive? I mean, because I'm fascinated by Lee's work and it's fantastic. Lee, really great work. I am fascinated by algorithms and how images are interpreted. I just see a lot of connection between your work and Lee's. And I thought you might know that's as specific as I get. Yeah, no, I mean, I use a different algorithm in my work. I haven't been using it, although I do love the panoramic algorithm, you know, algorithm that Apple has.

Lee Day

And I love glitches. You know, I think there's a lot of sort of overlap and sort of. This sort of use of, you know, algorithmic repeating forms that happens within your work that I think is, you know, a really interesting presentation of movement and time that I'm also thinking about in my work. So movement, you know, here is this wonderful flat sort of. Sense that's very peaceful, actually. Like, I really do feel like there's a meditative sense to the way that the algorithm is glitching. And I think that's really surprising. You know what I mean? So, yeah, I love the idea of, you know, the ideas that you're playing with in your work. I don't mean to.

Lee Day

Yeah. And yeah, I mean, it's something that I did sort of manually years ago where I took. I feel like this is a regular thing. So let me show and tell. Some pictures and along very much like Ed Ruscha, who's one of my favorites. This is the block. My favorite block in Astoria Queens. And then I photoshopped out the windows. I'm sorry. I'm getting reflection here. Photoshopped out the windows to. This is not going to work because I have a glossy print and Photoshop people that I found photos of online into the window. So I cut out the windows and put in all the imagined documents. But that's not what I'm thinking about in relation to your work. I'm thinking about this sort of beautiful panoramic flatness that's more like I'd say a freeze. You know, like I think of the sort of the way that they have the sculptures across the.

Lee Day

Temples that the Elgin marbles were there, right? That sort of like pattern that's also very much a stripe or strips. Great work. I mean, really keep it up. Keep experimenting. You're getting great stuff. You know, I'd love to see the favelas. I'm not sure if there's smooth trains through that, though.

Lee Day

Yeah, I don't think I don't think so. No, probably not. All right. Thank you for that, Tommy. And I think we actually do have time for one more question before we get pretty close to time. I don't want to mispronounce your name, but Mija. Hi, I'm Mija from New York. I have a question that you do not like to put people in your picture. But then the second question is, you know, smart, smart objects instead of the background landscape. When you do panoramic, the backgrounds are still looks the whole. It's not glitchy, but the small objects are a lot of glitches. So how do you interpret that? Maybe that's related to why not including because humans are usually a smaller object size.

Lee Day

In comparison to other backgrounds. Right. So, yes, I that's pretty much it. It's also how far away the people are. People are far enough away than they are. They will. They will not show up in the images in the in the comb the stitched image. Also, if the train is moving slow enough through a station, for example, you'll start to get start to get people a little bit like those cars on the L.A. Highway. But basically what happens is that if the things that are very, very close to you. I think the phone is looking for patterns that it can put together. And so if it sees the side of a person in one of these strips, and then it sees another piece of that person, it has a hard time figuring out how they're going together.

Lee Day

Whereas the backgrounds that are a bit farther away are more consistent. And so it sort of conceptually focuses. I'm not actually talking about the lens focusing, but the algorithm focuses its attention on the places in the image that it can rationally put together. And then in the area that are overlaps, you start to see a lot of these little pieces flying around.

Lee Day

Does that make sense? A little bit. I'm not seeing a ton of sense being made. I understand. I know exactly what happens. But how do you, in your work conceptually, how do you explain that? Conceptually, not like technically. Conceptually. That's exactly, yeah. Well, from my point of view, I mean, I put the algorithm, I put this intelligence in a situation where it's sort of a losing situation for it. It's supposed to be taking a perfect panoramic image from this one of whatever comes in. And I'm getting it dirty. Dirty. Garbage information. And so it's trying really hard to put together something that makes sense. And it's struggling.

Lee Day

So that's sort of how I make sense of it. As I was talking about before, I think it manifests or it shows how the, you know, we design our little intelligences to do certain things. But all it takes is a little twist and it can't understand the world around it. It's still trying, but it just doesn't understand anymore.

Lee Day

So that's how I conceptually see it. That's how I conceptually see that it doesn't see people. Because it really does not see people unless they're far away in the, generally far away in the scenery. I mean, I can find you a few people if you want, but. But then maybe you can't use two phones at the same time and people and you composite it. That's nonsense, right? I'm not compositing them.

Lee Day

I'm having a discussion with the phone's intelligence. Sorry, there's Star Trek jokes going on in the chat. Sorry. I can't read and talk at the same time. I didn't get the chewing gum gene. I mean, it's actually the case that most people that claim that they're great at multitasking, they're liars. They're just really good at pretending like they're doing a lot of things at once. Yes. You have to be very good at switching. And having two things in your stack and I'm not. Right.

Lee Day

So you focus on one thing and then you focus on another thing. That's, it's an illusion of multitasking. Yeah. So I wonder about kids, whether this is a skill that they may learn. It's like being ambidextrous a little bit or using both hands to do things at the same time. You can learn to do that. True.

Lee Day

Oh, well, that being said, this has been a great discussion and a great Q&A so far. So just wanted to say thank you, Lee, for your time. Well, thank you. And yeah, it's been a great conversation. I like talking more than presenting. Hey, whatever works for you. I can do both, I think. Maybe. I don't know.

Lee Day

As long as it works for you. There's no chewing gum involved. Yeah. Yeah. But that being said, I think we can go ahead and wrap things up here since we are at the top of the hour for our scheduled recording time. Before we do, really quick, since we're on the record, anyone want to present in two weeks?

Lee Day

You're on the hook if you do. Any takers? Don't be shy. Anyone? All right. Well, I guess I'm going to have to send out another one of those annoying email blasts. I mean, we might just have to start volun-telling people. All right. Victor, you're presenting next week. Sorry. That's just how it is. I second that.

Lee Day

I'd like to see what Victor's been doing. Victor, you haven't presented in a while. How would I know? Are you sure? Oh, never mind. I'll give it some thought. If you want to go and there's no other takers, go for it. But anyway. I see. Yeah. I'll think about it. All right. You know, I don't. I mean, I could always talk about something, but I mean, I feel like I'm I think I'm sort of waiting to where I have a lot to say. But, you know, I'll give it some thought. I mean, there's always something I could sort of focus on and share. It may, you know. But thank you for thinking of it. Yeah. See, volun-telling works. I just wanted to say, Sue, welcome to North America. Hope you have a good time. Yes. Yes.

Lee Day

Enjoy New York City. I can't wait till I'm really struggling to keep my eyes open right now. I just can't wait till I sort of like climatize. Yeah. Then I'm just going to be walking everywhere. And just looking at everything. That's the way to do it. All right, folks. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Lee Day

And I think that's a wrap. Please stop by next time. And if you were new here, I hope your experience was positive. One keeps you coming back. As always, thank you, Davo, for being a great mod. Thank you. I try. Or at least excellent in the chat. Who? Great ideas go in there. Right. The relate.

Lee Day

My philosophy degree actually does something. All right. On that note, thank you so much, everyone. Signing out. All right. Five, four, three, two, one. And that's a wrap.