Salon 76 // Phreaking

Hello, welcome to the 27th Salon of Techspressionism here on the internet. And everybody, I'm happy to see everybody. And before we start with today's Salon. Lee, it's actually the 76th. That's a lot. Oh my gosh. What did I say? 27th. I'm so sorry. It's all good. Welcome to the 76th episode of Techspressionism Salon. And before we start, we have two really important messages. And one is going to be that Renata and Tommy and Stephen are going to be talking about Siberiana at the tail end of our Salon. And at the head of it, right at the beginning, we're going to have Cynthia explain. Explain to everybody how we can be doing this in many languages at the same time. Take it away, Cynthia.

Lee Schnaiberg

Thank you, Lee. We had a little chance with virtual co-working on Tuesday to work with the translation ability of Zoom. And that's thanks to Colin, who took that upon himself to get it straightened out. If you look at the bar at the bottom or the top of your screen, and again, I don't know how this works on iPhone. Or iPads. But if you can bring up the bar where share screen is, if you look for me, it's to the right of record.

Lee Schnaiberg

Or before reactions, somewhere in that vicinity, you'll see CC show captions. And if you click on that, you can see there is caption language, view full transcript and caption settings. If you touch caption language. You can see. You can pick whatever language you would like to pick. To receive the commentary during the Zoom in that language. And so I think we had some luck with that the last time with Keanu. I don't know if he's still on. He was on earlier. So if you have the need of using a different language, please make use of this capability in Zoom. Any questions? Well, I have one. I just did. I followed, I thought, your instructions. I went and I selected a language for fun. I tagged a log. It was right there. But I'll try another one.

Lee Schnaiberg

Estonian. And then it says, okay, do you want to save it? And then I don't see anything. Where do I see the translated CC version? It's supposed to show up either in chat or it's supposed to show up in the chat. It's supposed to show up just because you've selected it at the bottom of the screen. At least I had that work for me. I think you hit show captions. Although I'm not sure if each user can show differing languages. It seems like now I'm seeing tagalog, whatever. I don't even know what that is. But it might just be that there's global language setting.

Lee Schnaiberg

I don't know that it could be done at the user level. But if you click the little CC button, it should toggle show captions and hide captions. Yes. You guys are able to see that. But I'm seeing it in this French now, it looks like. Oh, maybe not. All right. It's French now. Oh, now I see it. Okay. And then you click on show captions.

Lee Schnaiberg

Well, that's wonderful. Okay. So show captions has got to be chosen. And, of course, the language. And then you said, Lee, you have to show captions. You have to save. Right? Yeah. A window pops up and says, is this the language you want? And then you can click it. And then, yeah. But I think there's only one language per. It seems like when you're changing the language, I'm actually seeing it in that language, too. So it isn't like every user can select a different language.

Lee Schnaiberg

This is actually the first time I've seen this work in action. But it seems like. If we speak in a foreign language, does it change it to English? That's a good question. Maybe Lee can demonstrate that. Bien sûr. Si nous avons parlé en français, fait-il en anglais? Wow. It's trying to figure out what language it is.

Lee Schnaiberg

Wow. This is kind of interesting. Yeah. And it doesn't. You know, it's not perfect. Just like Google Translate isn't perfect. But it was working for me. It was working for us in coworking. And unfortunately, Cynthia Beth Rubin wasn't able to make it. I know Kianush used it. And Sahar had helped with setting it up. Sahar, is there anything you can add to what we did Tuesday?

Lee Schnaiberg

I turned it off. And I turned English on. Because it's like you have. I can read it sometimes. But I didn't turn Persian. But Kianush, I think he was using Persian language. Okay. So you used the language that you want to. He chose Persian and saved it. And he was. So. That's all I can say. Yeah. Well, it seems like that. Yes. There can only be one language selected for the entire group. But it's not in Italian. I think. So there's only really.

Lee Schnaiberg

We should probably set it to Persian, right? Because there are only English speakers. Persian. Uh-huh. Maybe. Persian in the coworking session. So we. Oh, yes. Why don't we try that? I'll set it to Persian. How about now? Is it coming up in Persian? Who thinks the heart needs to say something in Persian?

Lee Schnaiberg

No. I mean, it should translate the English to Persian. No. Oh, yeah. Look at that. It looks like it's in Persian. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Now it is. Yeah. So we'll just have to. Yes. You know. Yeah. See who's in there. Who's in, you know, that is an English speaking and we can do an alternate language. And maybe we can explore if there's a setting within zoom to allow each participant to choose a language. So that's maybe something we can check out. Yeah. I mean, I'm only seeing that when I select a language, it says something about a language.

Lee Schnaiberg

So I'm not sure that is it. So I'm not sure I can see that. It's not the same as I'm trying to make it more interesting. So I'm not sure I can see that. It's not the same as I'm trying to make it more interesting. So I'm not sure I can see that. It's not the same as I'm trying to make it more interesting. So I'm not sure I can see that. It's not the same as I'm trying to make it more interesting. So I'm not sure I can see that. It's not the same as I'm trying to make it more interesting.

Lee Schnaiberg

So I'm not sure I can see that. It's not the same as I'm trying to make it more interesting. Same show captions. It's not accurate, but I don't know. Okay. We will just turn it on. Interesting. That's for sure. It's not translating accurate, very accurate. So Sahar, it's working for you with Persian on?

Lee Schnaiberg

The Persian is on, but it's actually not very accurate translation. Right. Sometimes gets funny. That's what I noticed before. When Lee was speaking, it was the words were like, maybe it's this word, guessing. We have to choose things. We can read it. Yeah, because the Persian. English caption is more than better. It's really getting funny.

Lee Schnaiberg

It doesn't make sense. Should I set it? I mean, we could try setting it to English and see if that. I think all of them, I think maybe it's an AI and eventually it'll learn. I think English is okay. Okay. Why don't we do that so that people can read. Okay. So we're back to English now, I think. Yes. Yes. Showing up in English.

Lee Schnaiberg

Okay. So now before, well, maybe a little bit of a preamble about fracking, about freaking. I mean, we were talking about it a little bit before the show, before the salon started. And what I really liked was during the after salon last week or last month when we're thinking of a name, I don't really know why I said it at first. It was just like it came up and I was like, and now that I think about it, it makes sense. But I also really like what Patrick said at the time was like, what about freaking as a metaphor? Although also right now. We were saying before the salon that everybody should be encouraged to show whatever they find freaking cool.

Lee Schnaiberg

But as a metaphor, when freaking started, they were people who are interested in playing with telecommunications, late fifties, sixties, seventies. Eventually they had little ways that they can make free long distance calls and stuff, but it was a very, it wasn't just about getting something for free. It was about exploring. It was about exploring this new, this new field of the telecommunications field where sounds would do things, unlock things and open like it led into, or maybe worked hand in hand with hacking.

Lee Schnaiberg

So this has become a whole culture and this also led into the demo scene. And I think Colin has some demo scenes lined up to show everybody. And the demos were another way that people were using code to make visual imagery, but really focusing on, on having like clean code, very lightweight but visually captivating electronic imagery. And so in a way it kind of makes sense that it was like a lot of it seems to have come down from this and I didn't encompasses encompasses glitch art. I don't know. There was also had been more interaction around digital hosting with tech professionals who used digital hosting at Google several times at least every single year of 2020 in terms of visual imagery that could help model digital presuply.

Lee Schnaiberg

And like I said I think colin has got some demos I have a really nice data mosh that if there's interest in looking at a data mosh I have that saved up and I did actually have I showed colin I showed you them and sahar saw them earlier this week but I did have a couple of shots that I kind of took a few days ago thinking about the whole thing about freaking and how the payphone was a big part of it and there's a payphone right around the corner from me which is the only payphone I know of anymore right there used to be payphones on every block and this I don't even know why this one exists still and it's spray painted and graffiti people come by and it's it to me it's just it's a quite an image of like a medium that no longer like nobody uses who's even nowadays who even has a quarter everybody uses a debit card and so how are you gonna use a payphone and also if you don't have your cell phone what's the number so to me it's really interesting that I have this relic outside of my house so I like to shoot it sometimes and I and I often have different in the in the rogue pano world the pano art world they call them brush strokes series of movements and I have a couple of new ones so I was taking advantage of them so I wouldn't mind showing that too I'll ask the mod if it's okay but I think before I even do that colin would you want to show everybody some of these demos sure so let me share my screen here okay can you guys see my screen the okay so yeah so you know I had a little bit of personal experience with freaking which is spelled p-h-r-e-a-k-I-n-g and that really stems from the word phone that's the ph anyway and you know back when I was a kid in the 80s there was no web so people or basically you know there was sort of a subgroup of computer users that used to go in and dial into people's homes generally to trade you know pirated video games pretty much at least that was my experience of it and then there were also these freakers that I think the that originated I just actually looked up who invented the blue box which was an early piece of hardware that we were talking about before the salon that would generate phone tones to allow people to make free phone calls and it turns out that I had thought it was it was him but the inventor of the blue box was steve wozniak designed and built by steve wozniak and marketed by steve jobs circa 1972 so very interesting and you know this sort of this sort of folk history of apple I don't know if it's true or not is apple blew a pirate flag at their corporate headquarters.

Lee Schnaiberg

And they were pretty blatant about having, you know, stolen the GUI from Xerox early on that, you know, now we know is the Macintosh operating system that, you know, Bill Gates basically stole from Apple in Windows. So, you know, it's all kind of like that. Anyway, quick definition of freaking, according to Wikipedia, slang term coined to describe the activity of a culture of people who study, experiment with, or explore telecommunication systems, such as equipment and systems connected to public telephone networks. The term freak is a sensational spelling of the word freak with a PH from phone and can also refer to the use of various audio frequencies to manipulate a phone system.

Lee Schnaiberg

So if any of you guys want to expand further on that, there's a magazine called 2600, which the title is based on a certain phone tone. I believe it's a frequency of 2600 Hertz that, you know, early hackers and freakers would use to make free phone calls. Anyway, that leads me into these demos, which generally, I mean, my first computer was a Commodore 64. And there were these groups, basically cracking crews that were sort of synonymous or similar, parallel to like graffiti crews. That would crack software, generally video games, pirate them, trade them. And it seems like, at least in this generation of freakers, the necessity for freaking was that most of the big game companies like EA, Electronic Arts, and Epix, they would test market their games in England first, because it was a smaller audience to see which games people liked before releasing them in the US.

Lee Schnaiberg

So all the kids, in like New York, would hack MCI card codes to dial into Bolton boards in London, in the UK. And then they trade games, you know, months or even a year ahead of release in the United States. So at least that's how I know about it. But I never did it, I promise. And then before the game would start, there'd be these demos that would sort of show off the skills of the cracking people. And to me, that's sort of an early culture. That's sort of like the cultural precursor of NFT culture, which a lot of the people in the NFT scene are anonymous or pseudo anonymous.

Lee Schnaiberg

Pseudonymous? I don't know. But they use handles instead of putting their real names out there. And cryptocurrency inherently is anonymous to some degree anyway, in terms of using wallet addresses versus personal identifiers. So there's I think there's a lot of... Connections between the demo scene of the 80s and today's NFT culture and also you know a lot of stuff that's in style right now is pixelated graphics that are reminiscent of the 80s and 90s just culturally speaking so okay so this is definitely like a cracking crew that broke games and then you know it's almost like graffiti is tagging up subway cars I recognize that music that's from this game the last Ninja this must have been an intro screen to that anyway I'm waxing nostalgic here but those are some demos if you want to look at demos you could just go to YouTube and say type in Commodore 64 demo scene or Apple 2's demo scene that was sort of a competing platform at that time they were definitely crews on Apple as well so that's my little intro hey Colin C64 was actually 82.

Lee Schnaiberg

82 okay yeah I was working on C64 games while while at Coleco so yeah nice nice what games were you working on at that time oh golly Tarzan oh gosh a whole bunch of different ones I mean Echo Vision games we also did C64 games at the same time and Atari 2600 sometimes got licensed out depending on the titles so yeah it's been a while awesome awesome well it's cool to have you know an actual developer commercial game developer in the group it's a lot of history behind that yeah now thanks thanks Colin for showing that the next thing that we were talking about before before the salon started was we were mentioning the data moshing so everybody could see this other way that people are taking it's a it's sort of like this movement of playing with the telecommunications exploring the machinery and then the hacking and then trying to use the code to make like imagery and then trying to find ways that you can you know manipulate the imagery so it seems to me that they're all somewhat related in a way I hope that came out okay Lee could you paste the link to that YouTube video in the chat if you don't mind oh certainly and you know what I'm going to paste that the link in the video and I'm also going to paste a link to some of the software but also maybe there is there's a really good Reddit subreddit so that might be the way to direct people people are interested in playing with these softwares or in exploring data moshing it could it's definitely it's definitely a fun experiment and I find recently I've been noticing that there's quite a few people in the glitch world I've been looking at their glitches lately and I've been stopping I'm like are you data mostly too and they're like a little bit so they're like these things are all sort of overlapping it's kind of interesting so I'm going to add those add the link there for sure but while we're doing that it actually looks a lot I didn't realize it but one of the artists that was in the this on the video is this an image of the Expressionism Digital and Beyond show, Sue Beyer, who's from Australia.

Lee Schnaiberg

When I was looking at a lot of her work, now I'm realizing that must have been data moshing. I'll put a link to her page in the chat, too. But now that I'm seeing what this band did, she was probably playing with that technology, too. And on the Reddit, especially, there's a lot of people sharing their little tips. I haven't played with this for a while now. But I remember picking up little tips and going, oh, why don't we do that?

Lee Schnaiberg

It's something about using complementary colors. Or if you have something. That's moving really fast in one frame. Then you mix it with something that's a little more stagnant. Just little tricks. So I'll find that subreddit and I'll post it up there, too. But the video is definitely up there now in the chat.

Lee Schnaiberg

I have a question, Lee. Is your rogue piano images, would you consider those data moshing? No, they're definitely not data moshing. And I usually get really upset when people say. Oh, you do the glitch stuff. And I'm like, no. Because I feel like it's analog. What I do is analog. Whereas a lot of glitch world is software.

Lee Schnaiberg

No, like data mosh. What's it? Photo mosh? Photo mosh is probably a popular software in our group. Or motion leap? Maybe not. Hmm. Because these are some. Not so much glitchy, but a little glitchy. But they're definitely nice ways if you're. Well, because a lot of you have moving images more than me. A lot of my stuff is still. So with the still images, sometimes you might want to throw it in motion leap or something. And have pieces of it flying around. Like my angels sometimes end up flying through motion leap.

Lee Schnaiberg

It's a fun software. And also. Photo mosh. But. Yeah, I don't. I don't do that. I'm more. I'm always like. I'm like we were saying before. Cynthia, you weren't here. But we were talking about. The Vic 20 and the Commodore 64. And my comment was. How much I love to pull the headphone jack out and listen to the electronic sounds. Like.

Lee Schnaiberg

I'm not good at coding. But I like electronics. I like the technology. I just. I just like making. Noise. But. I don't know. But nobody's got their hands up. Anybody want to show some stuff that they consider. Freaky. No hands. I think Renata has her hand up. Oh,

Hey, Renata. Take the stage, please. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Principal. So Apple did me a big favor when they put out iOS 17. I've been in the habit of making shapes that I then superimpose onto other backgrounds. But now and I had an app. I have an app that I pay for. That allowed me to make. Message stickers. So if you have an iPhone. In the messages, you can send readymade stickers to your friends. Well, I had my own.

Renata Janiszewska

And one day they stopped working. It's because iOS 17 is integrated that sticker making capability into its software. So. Either on the iPad or on the iPhone. I can have my shapes cut out. Perfectly. As you can see, this one's pretty clean. I was recently asked to be part of a zine in Leipzig, Germany. And the.

Renata Janiszewska

Artist who asked me to participate is a new member of expressionism. And he wanted to work in black and white. So. I didn't have the ability, but Michael price helped me to tweak. The image to make it ready for print. And so this is a black and white version of one of my. Recent works. This is similar in structure, but a color. Work and. I guess what I want to draw your attention to is. The egg shaped.

Renata Janiszewska

Image is a, is a cutout, but inside the egg shaped image. Is a portion of the sticker that was on the title. Page of this presentation. S. I like very much being able to layer. Various iterations of various. Shapes or, or tools that I use. So for example, in this work, you have some. Of the old familiar Tanta images. On the left, the black. Shapes are a gorilla. If you, if you zoom in close, I guess. Can I zoom in.

Renata Janiszewska

So. You can see the. I guess you can see. The gorilla there jumping. And he's saying, whoa. And then on this side you have. The ship's horn. So that's the blast. The noise. I like these comic. Shorthand, if you will. And I think that most of us. Grew up reading. Various comics. So. It's just one of those things. That I, I like to play with. Here again, the same sticker is on the upper left-hand side. But layered behind. Some brushwork made with custom brushes. This is a mushroom themed work.

Renata Janiszewska

That I'm, I'm, I'm finding. You know, I'm moving. I'm trying to move in another direction with. Recession into space. Having the picture plane. Have various. Parts to it. And I'm going to finish this by showing you just 10 seconds of an animation based on the painting that you just saw. And. I'm. I'm.

Renata Janiszewska

Going to show you the painting. So you can see it. Thank you. Those are beautiful. Thank you so much. It's my pleasure. Somebody else got their hand up. I saw it. I think Tommy. Tell me it was your hand up. Oh, you were clapping. Oh, I thought you wanted to. Show some pieces. I do have something really quick. Oh, you want to go? No, no. Colin,

Please. Okay. I just, I wasn't really, I didn't really think of this until just now, but I have something that's sort of like a, not really. I don't know. I, I don't, I don't know that I've seen it before, but. It's directly related to this Siberian. Project. Which, you know, A couple of the artists. Here.

Colin Goldberg

Primarily Tommy came up with the idea of this, but. To use Mozilla hubs. To create, to curate a show, to put a show together. And I had never done anything with Mozilla hubs. And. Which is sort of like a, an open source. Like a multi-user 3d space. Kind of. Application. And. I had. Been play. I played a little bit around with this. Phone app called poly cam. Which allows you to do 3d capture. And I thought, wouldn't it be cool if I could do a 3d capture of my apartment. And then bring it into hubs. And I hadn't really seen that. I know that you can import 3d models into hubs. And I did some research on that. And I saw that there's sort of an application called sketch fab. Which lets you. Take certain types of 3d formats and translate it into other 3d formats. And I thought, wouldn't it be cool if I could do a 3d capture of my apartment.

Colin Goldberg

So I'll show you guys what I came up with. I don't know if this is going to be my actual Siberian. Project, but it was kind of fun to mess around with. So. Here we go. Spring my browser over. So. I basically, this is. You know, sort of a. A rough model. And I did that by. Basically. Walking around my apartment. There's the upstairs. Bedroom.

Colin Goldberg

And then the living room. And then the living room. My studio is kind of this. What's essentially the dining room. And cat and capture it. And you kind of move your. Your hand around and like. You know, capture the walls and everything else like that. And this is what the. The import into hubs looks like.

Colin Goldberg

And you can basically move around in the space. Like there's. The computer and this looks very. Glitchy in a way. That's what made me think of it. So this is like the computer I'm sitting at. This is when my printer was on that wall. That's the painting wall. That's behind me now. Living room. It's my bike.

Colin Goldberg

Going into the kitchen. And, and, you know, it's, it's a very. Rough. Capture. But in a way that, that it's what makes it so. Interesting to me. And you could also bring stuff into your actual video. If you're taking a live video, walking around a space. And you can bring the 3d model. Into the video as an augmented reality component.

Colin Goldberg

And that's something that I did. Like, I don't know if I can pull it up here, but. I created something. In Instagram where. I did. I took videos. Of my apartment. And I put in a video of that. Let me see if I could find it. Yeah. So this was just sort of like glitched. Stuff in the beginning, or it was really just using an Instagram filter.

Colin Goldberg

But then towards the end, I dropped in the model. Of my apartment into the apartment. You could kind of see. You know, it's kind of tricky and weird. And that's where the, this title techno Delica came from. So zooming into the laptop and there's the actual laptop. So anyway, that's my little. Glitched out experiment.

Colin Goldberg

That was that's fun. Is it, is it poly dot cam? If you look on the, well, it's a, it's a mobile app. So if you look at look up poly cam on the app store. You can download it there. And I think there's like a free flavor and a paid flavor, depending on, you know, different types of functions that it can do. But I think you can capture. Like 3d models of objects. As well as, you know, interior spaces. I haven't really played too much with that, but. I think it requires. You know, the, the, one of the relatively newer models of iPhone that has the depth.

Colin Goldberg

You know, the ability to get. The capture depth with the camera. Yeah. Are you. Oh, well, I was, but I. So how do you want to go first or. I just want to ask if there is a. Tutorial link that how can we import 3d models to Mozilla hops? I think if you. Just Google. 3d models. You can import 3d models into Mozilla hubs. That's a good starting point. I forget the actual.

Colin Goldberg

File type name, but. It was sketch fab. GLB. Is that it? Yeah. I think sketch global. Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah. Can you just add it as an asset? And I'm going to make an instructional video for Siberiana when, going to get this going really soon, I promise. I'm going to record a short video that will exactly demonstrate how to do that. Great question. The question I have sort of goes in with Sahar's is, the 3D model is just so fascinating. That you did. With the different levels and stuff. How big are those files by the time they, the actual structure gets put together, because if you're putting in, into Mozilla hubs, I think there's like. For the free version of 500 megabyte.

Colin Goldberg

Limit. So are you like maxed out? So you can't put artwork into, or. Well, they're vector files. I believe, you know, it's not actual bitmap. But it did say there were some. You know, pretty high number of polygons and textures. In the capture. I'm not exactly sure of how big the file size. Is it wasn't crazy though. No good.

Colin Goldberg

It's really cool. This has also come up as a question and I'm sorry to pull us towards that. When you're putting images up into your Mozilla hubs. Space. You're just making a pointer or reference to an image that's hosted elsewhere and saying, Hey, here's my picture on my website. Please display it within this frame on my 3d space. So it doesn't actually take. Server space. To store the pictures. It really just is the texture maps and.

Colin Goldberg

That kind of stuff. Yeah. The GLB file. I just looked at it. It's just under 22 bags. So it's not crazy. I have a question about. Polycam. When you mentioned that on the phone, it has to be fairly recent because of the depth. I remember some time ago, Patrick Lichty was doing an awful lot of these. And he said he was doing them on a. iPad. And he was doing them a couple of years ago when he had an older iPad. So I'm just, I'm going to try it out on both my iPad and my phone. If that doesn't work, I'm sure there's going to be some work around.

Colin Goldberg

I don't think they do a work around. You have to have the depth perception. I have a 12 and it, and, and Polycam works on that. That helps. I have an excess 10, but I'm running iOS 17 on it. I don't know if that's, it's probably the hardware, not the software. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Cynthia. Cynthia's gone. No, you're here. I see your hand is up. Yeah. Well, after Colin showed his Polycam piece, then I thought of, there are some couple I have and a couple of other things I've done with glitching. So I thought maybe I'll share that. Okay. Screen. Okay. Okay, this first one is Polycam. I have a hanging light in my dining room that I used in Polycam and walked around and came up with this. And then I came up with this second So they're very, very short, but nonetheless.

Cynthia DiDonato

You know, it's, it's Polycam at work. And then I did some. What I would think. Freaky. Things with primary colors. I never worked with primary color. So I decided to see what I could come up with. And, you know, I came up with this image as well. From it. And here and can see the glitching obviously. In that. And then I took.

Cynthia DiDonato

An image that I downloaded with permission of. Deep sea. Jellyfish. And again. It glitched it, but again, what's done with software. And then I took a television glitch. And some people have already seen this from coworking. And manipulated the telephone. I'm sorry, the television glitch. And came up with this series.

Cynthia DiDonato

And that up there. And I'm going to show you. And the thing I liked about the glitch is that it wasn't perfect. It had a lot of black around the edges. So that I could get some interesting. Shapes within the image. These are part of a series I've been doing for a long while. I call them 2d sculptures. And I'm going to show you. Even though. The software I use doesn't allow that. And then I, again, manipulating more and more and more.

Cynthia DiDonato

This original glitch. And. That also is. Pushing the glitch. And that is not one of the. Pieces I wanted to show. But thank you for looking. And I'll stop the share. Added into the chat. A. Organization that's based in Brazil. That do an online glitch. Exhibit. Every year. Those were really wonderful.

Cynthia DiDonato

I like the one that you turned into. Into, into, into the folded up into shapes. I actually, I really liked it. I like. Just from the beginning. Cause I think there's something about those. Electronic. Colors. I remember I had a piece a little while ago and somebody said to me. That reminds me of when our, my son smashed. His hockey stick into the widescreen.

Cynthia DiDonato

And, and, and I'm like, oh yeah. Or when I broke a monitor and it is recently I had, I just got a new computer. And. I wanted something that I thought would be strong enough. For my needs. So. I got a gaming, a really good gaming computer. And so far it works wonderfully for, for my video needs. But the funny thing is it's got these. Like they're not neon lights, but they're. They're like these. These, these beveled.

Cynthia DiDonato

Beveled pieces with a light that keeps on changing color all the time. So it's a little bit annoying, but every once in a while I've done some. Some. Pano pieces. With them. And that's another, that's one of the ones that I get a response from that. It reminds them of a, of a broken monitor. And, and that piece to me really had that broken monitor color. Scheme, which I thought was really fun.

Cynthia DiDonato

So, yeah, I really enjoyed those. And thanks. Thank you. And I waited a long time for that glitch on the screen. And that of course is from the influence. Of I think it's Sherry. Sherry Karver has done. Things with glitch screens. And so thank you for your inspiration. One of the reasons I love this group. Well, wonderful. Wow. And Tommy.

Cynthia DiDonato

And Lee, I, I see all you guys in here. I think all three of you. Have worked. That's really relevant to this topic as far as. Using the hardware and software, different sort of ways that they might not have been intended to. Just putting that out there. Yeah. Well, I hope Sherry wants to show soon. I'd love to show a couple of pieces that I did shoot.

Cynthia DiDonato

This

Past week, just thinking about the, the, the freaking. And as I was saying in the, in the pre-salon. There's a payphone near my house. It's the only payphone I know in my, in the city now. But. I've been fixated on it for awhile, but I went and did another shot. Just. Two days ago, thinking about. About the, this how long. So I'd love to show a little bit of it, if that's okay.

Lee Schnaiberg

And the first one here is. This is the, this is the payphone. And, and I'm amazed that you can actually still. Put coins in it. But. And I don't know if he can see, and there's a mushroom. So I hope. Is seeing my, my mushroom. Phone and. And, and this is one of the pieces, but. And this was my favorite piece that I got to do with the phone.

Lee Schnaiberg

But. You know, this is. This one's not as glitchy. Yeah, it is. It just takes a while to load up. That's the thing is the size is so huge on these. But I guess they are. I mean, I have a weird relationship with glitch because a lot of glitch to me. Well, I liked the way. I liked the way it looks to me. It's very much. Plug and play. And, and for me, there's no plugging usually. Well, I mean, it's plugging in the sense that Cupertino.

Lee Schnaiberg

Made an algorithm that allows me to do this. This was a pretty good one because you actually could put, put your. Put a quarter. And if you have a quarter. I don't think I've, I don't think I've seen a quarter. In three years now. I mean, since COVID started, I haven't. Somebody paid me for a piece two weeks ago. They came into town and they bought a piece of mine. And they paid me cash.

Lee Schnaiberg

I still have it here. I'm like, what am I going to do with this? Yeah. But. So, so the idea of a pay phone blows my mind. And then this is. I guess it's a little glitchy. But I shot this thinking. I'm thinking. I'm thinking specifically about, about freaking. And so, yeah, I thought it might be. Contextually appropriate for today. For today's salon.

Lee Schnaiberg

Those are my pieces. Thank you very much. And. And now. I hope I didn't share. I don't want to put you on the spot, but, but I'm so curious to see your stuff now. I think Lee has his hand up. Oh, really? Oh, please

Leave. Please take the stage. Well, I figured that sort of following up on that. I could show a bit of work. I'm, I'm certainly interested in how. The phone. The little intelligence in the phone gets. Screwed up by putting it in a, in a situation. It's not really. Designed for. Is that showing that looks like it's showing fine. It's not showing that it's showing fine. It's showing that it's showing fine. And so this is, this is my work from Japan early this summer. That I'm starting. Sort of finishing up on the editing and.

Lee Day

Work on. And so they take a little while to. Sharpen up, but. They're doing it. It certainly is. Pixelated or not pixelating, but fractionalizing and. I guess that's the visual version of. The whole freaking phenomenon. So these are all shot again, using the panorama function is as. The other Lee Day.

Lee Day

And. I'm shooting from a train from train window. And it's all created by the, by the phone. So. Trying to understand how algorithms see the world. It's really the way I look at it. And so the. The. The way I look at it is. You know, it's, it's at a bit of a boundary. Condition. Not really being able to put things together the way it's designed to. Because it's not getting exactly the right information since it's flying through space sideways, instead of being staying in one place and moving.

Lee Day

But it's, it's compiling and it's trying to put together. An image of the world that is passing through and, and trying to. In a way, understand that, or at least. That's how I think of it. And if things are going to be the eyes of the new artificial intelligences that we put out there. Well, you know, they're going to see it's sort of a way of thinking about how. They see the world or will be seeing the world and how different it is from how we see the world.

Lee Day

And so I think that's what I think about it. Sometimes very subtly different. And other times. Really. Shivering. That's what I have. Unless you want me to go through like all the B roll there, but. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much. I love this test related clouds. That's fantastic. I will one day. I'd love to.

Lee Day

Have a one-on-one with you and go through our different brushstrokes and show you mine and see some of yours. Cause I can see him like, okay. I think he's doing like a little figure eight here because you got those strong. Strong verticals and I'm like, okay, this is really neat. And. But yeah, very, very beautiful. Isn't it interesting how.

Lee Day

Like in art in the, in the lease case. With an S no apostrophe, but in our case, both of us are doing something similar. Mixing. The panel playing with the algorithm. And yet. I find like when I look at it, I'm like, oh, this is. This is a great piece. And when I look at yours, I'm like, oh yeah. Leaves in Japan. Okay. I like those. I like yours. I've seen some of them before and I like these. I like the way they're lined up and I, and I know that it's. It's.

Lee Day

I think it's really wonderful. When we look at. Tech. Art. Expressionism and we can see the artist. In the pieces. And I think that this is. You know, like I can think of a whole bunch of people in this room right now. And I'm like, yeah, years. I know. Yeah. Yours. I know. And I'm not saying I know all your work.

Lee Day

But your own style, your own essence comes out. And that's what we want. Like, that's what. You look at all the others. Spend ish. From the past, you know, post. Impressionism and, and expressionism and post-expert. And. You look at these pieces and you know, you know, when it's a key for, you know, when it's a, you know, when it's a Van Gogh. You know, you know this, you see the brushstroke, you see the handling. And if you, if you're in this world, you know them. And I think it's fantastic when, when we can look at things. I'm sure everybody in this room, if we're seeing. A Janice Scott. We know it's a Janice Scott. If I'm looking at somebody like. If I look, where am I going to see a tint in, you know, like. Because it's. It's inside of you and it's coming out. And I think this is fantastic.

Lee Day

And I think it's. Pretty amazing that we can do this. And it's one of the things I find beautiful about expressionism. Is that we're not just like. I don't want to put down kids doing NFTs. I don't want to put down anybody, but. When you look at a lot of work, you're like. A lot of stuff. A lot of stuff from. A lot of stuff from.

Lee Day

Random people. And it's like, oh, this is what we're doing. And then you look at the prompts or regular prompts. Looks like the AI made the art. And then I looked at Patrick's. Cats for example. This past week and like. That's him. It's not just a technology. It's not like just anybody can go in there and do that. And I think that's something that's really fantastic about this group. That we come out and we have our. Our, our, our. Essence coming out through the technology. We're able to make it an extension of us rather than.

Lee Day

It's like, well, they go, okay. Tech make me some art, please do it in blue. You know, When I was, when I was in university, still. I finished art school and I switched into, and I was in film school. And. I had a. The easiest job I had that I could pay my rent. Was I'd get swatches. And I was like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. And this was my first time like painting a painting. So I'd see like a bunch of people's furniture. Like if they did a new couch and they had the material from a swatch from the couch and they'd say. I want something naturey or.

Lee Day

I want something wintery like some random thing. And I'd be like, okay. And I just, you know, just whip up a painting, but it didn't have any of my soul in it. It was just. Just like. And I, and I think it's really fantastic. I haven't seen one piece from Tommy that I'm like, who did that? I'm like, oh, it's Tommy. And this is wonderful. This is really fun to be in a group that has this ability to override the technology and let our souls come out, so to speak. Tommy's hand is up. So would you please take the stage, Mr. Mintz?

Lee Day

Professor Mintz. Is the microphone working? I'm so sorry. I have a million screens open here. So I would like to see if we could rise to that challenge of making something with our techniques that doesn't look like what you expect. I guess I'll share a recent work that's what people expect. And then I'll show you something that's maybe what we're not expecting. I'd like to just share that too because it's a fun surprise. Let me share screen.

Lee Day

Hold my breath while I click. So recently, I've been not sharing a lot of my recent work simply because I've been working on a larger timescale project where I'm returning to this spot. This is maybe a famous location in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City facing Manhattan. At dawn on the solstices and equinoxes. This is my current long-term project. Just come back here, have a meditative thing. And yeah, it is glitchy. And I do think there's a lot of what Lee's talking about occurring within this space of this kind of use of digital processes to create something that is uniquely digital. And I hesitate to use the word with a PH freak to describe it because in my mind, that really describes. You know, like 2600 and the people that are doing phone freaking and whistling in, you know, a whistle to get free phone calls international.

Lee Day

But I do think part of that sense of like taking a technology and using it in a different way is the ethos that we work in. So this is maybe something that is recognizable, right? And then I was sitting in my studio. I have a basement studio with the shades closed. And these were projected onto the wall behind my monitor.

Lee Day

This is slit between shades projecting slices of light on a dark wall. And so then I said, of course, let's go ahead and run collages from this. So here's the results, Lee, that I want to challenge you to say, oh, that's obviously Thomas. Because it's not. But it is in a fun way. And, you know, it's one of these things where I feel like. Where? Where are these moments of sort of the.

Lee Day

Form, you know, becoming unique. Right. And part of the. Let me see if I can zoom out again. The process, you know, being evident. Oops. Oops. I just pressed the wrong button. Sorry. Oh, there we go. I like this one. You know, kind of creating something that is more than. You know, the component. Parts put together.

Lee Day

So anyway, that's what I wanted to share. Thank you. Where do I turn off share? I lost this. Oh my goodness. I'm so sorry. One second. One second. Oh, that worked. Cool. Thanks, Tommy. I, I still think that one did look like yours, but I'm good. Good. Just not the first time that you said I, the second of that series, once you, once you added, once it looked to me like it was put through. What I call Tommy software.

Lee Day

But I know it's the an automated that did you use the digital class? Yeah. I don't know. I made digital photo class, same software. I just ran. So it had that little, it had a little bit of that, like the way it pastes the images. It had that flavor, but yeah, it was definitely recognized that if you zoom are from your.

Lee Day

Yeah, definitely. But it was still you for sure. And Michael. Wow. Us show us something that we don't know. It was yours or what you want to show us. After Michael, we should probably just move on to the Siberian. Discussion just so we have, you know, in the interest of time. Oh, and Tommy, I just wanted to make this a little sub note that Tommy actually wrote the software in Python. Right. So it's not commercial software, but it's actual software that he wrote. And it's free and open source up on GitHub. Please download it. Like we did. And use it. And Tommy, if you want, I do have that idiots version that if you wanted to share to people, I, it makes my life so much easier when I do your software to have my dummy version.

Lee Day

My girlfriend's a good. Yes. Let's share that if she's comfortable sharing it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She said definitely. Yeah. That would be really good. And it's makes it just makes it a little bit easier. Where's that? Where did, where did Michael go? I'm right here. So, one of the, one of the, I think this is tangentially related, especially with the sense of audio, that we, that we've talked about historically, how some, how some of the, the, this idea of freaking and using tones to, create workarounds and such one, one of the areas.

Lee Day

That I've always been very fascinated is in feedback loops. Not only audio wise, but visually. So I've been playing around with some AI ideas based on feedback loops and what I can create that way. So let me, let me bring my screen up here. Okay. So I'm going to get that go a little bit more. So I'm going to have a little bit of a side effect. And we're going to have a little bit of a side effect. And what I did was I just started with some very simple, mathematical shapes and, worked on feedback loops, not knowing where it would go to. So the next eight images, I'm just going to share kind of where some of my experimentation has taken me.

Lee Day

And this was non-directed other than using the idea of a feedback loop to help generate these things with not anything specific other than a few initial very simple geometric shapes. And these are experimental works right now that I'm playing around with, but I'm very interested with some of the imagery here.

Lee Day

Those are beautiful, Michael. Thank you so much for sharing. Those are really, and they're like really subtle. That's really beautiful. Oh, Karen. Check out the chat. Keanu's just put a glitch of us on the. Oh, look at that. There we are. Thanks, Keanu. That's really cool. I like when people do that to us as a group, sort of surreptitiously.

Lee Day

We like. Colin said for this sake of time. That's pretty beautiful. Thanks, Andrew. For the sake of time, we do have Stephen and Tommy and Renata. We're going to talk to us about Siberiana. So please take it away. Stephen, would you like to start maybe? I'd like to start. And. Probably finish quickly.

Lee Day

I consider myself the junior member of the squadron. Here. To use a bicycle racing term. And so I'm excited about what's being created. I consider our, you know, real creator here to be Tommy. And I think he's the one who's got. The. The presentation along with Renata to do. I think you'll be delighted by this. And it's.

Lee Day

Kind of a model, I think, for a lot of things going forward. I'll pass it to Tommy. I think. Thanks, Stephen. I'm going to try to share screen once again here. So give me just another moment. If you want to. I'll stop here. I'll shoot for. And more seconds. I appreciate it. Hold on. Okay.

So Siberia is a 3D. Model space that is accessible through web browsers. You don't have to download any software. It is. Using. Mozilla company hubs, which is open. Source. Open source. 3D. Space software. That depending on how you host it, you know, it has some fees associated. And how many people you want to be able to have in your space. So this is what we're thinking of. It's like a town square space. And this is a mock-up still where artists will have doors.

Tommy Mintz

Into their studios. That, you know, we can hang out here and chat and then say, Hey, come see what I've been working on. Come see my work and let's go ahead and, you know, walk into my studio. Right over here. People. And the nice thing about. This interface, Mozilla hubs. And we were playing with this recently. The four of us hanging out and talking. So it actually is a very.

Tommy Mintz

Present feel that you have with one another, as you have these avatars floating around and you even put in a zoom. Like rectangle of your face, talking to your webcam. So people can see. And the audio works quite well. The navigation is either. Arrow buttons or the W a S and D. On your keyboard. So it's, it's a pretty.

Tommy Mintz

Rudimentary. If you will, like Minecraft style, 3d space. But I think that's all that's needed to create that sense of. You know, being, being somewhere. With other people. So those. Sorry. One second. Those doors are going to lead to people's own rooms that I'm hoping people will modify. So we're going to send this link and everybody will. I'm going to send the video on how to edit in spoke. Right. I'm just going to pull up in this scene.

Tommy Mintz

So you can see what a mock studio or some people are going to these galleries. We can. Discuss. Describe. It how you like. Space will look that you replace. The work on the wall with your work quite easily using the tools that hubs has. And I'll have. A. Video, as I said, describing that, but this is, I mean, really the idea is to have a 3d space that feels like visually it's in the same place.

Tommy Mintz

Right. So we keep the roof line. Well, it is slightly different. So I'll fix this. And sky. Floor tiles. I should fix their new dark ones. We just did a bunch of updates yesterday. And the idea is you can have people hang out here. Say we're going to meet up in town square. See who's there. Hey, come hang out in my studio for 10 minutes. Look at this piece and then let's go back to this town square and see what's going on back there. And so the idea is this sort of like.

Tommy Mintz

Social space, social sculpture that we've all been talking about. Us. Social space. Together being, you know, how do we continue to make that feel even more? So I think this might be an interesting way. So let's see where it goes. This is a giant experiment and I appreciate everybody's enthusiasm for being wonderful. Can you fix in this? I, you know, I don't know how successful it's going to be. We've had a lot of people respond with that. 80 respondents say they're interested in having. You know, a doorway and then.

Tommy Mintz

Put up a, you know. Send a shared link that we'll put into a door way to link to your space. And that's really what Siberiana is. Does that make sense? I feel like I've looked at it so much and like I'm. Talking in loops often when I, when I describe the space. Can I answer questions while we have this open? I'm happy to navigate around and talk to people. This is really exciting. I'm curious about one thing. Right off the bat.

Tommy Mintz

Are they only still images or moving images as well? And if so, what formats? So you can have any file type whatsoever put into your space, right? Your, your studio space. You can have a video, you can have a still image. You can have 3d models. Sculptures. Absolutely. What other files? Audio files, files, text files, anything. Yeah. That's all. I thought maybe you could mention about the mirror while we're in the town square plaza.

Tommy Mintz

Tommy? There's a mirror so you can see yourself. That's my avatar right now. It's a picture of me on a little avatar. And The other side on the other side of the mirror is so the idea is we have 80 people who thought they would like a door we only maybe have room for 40 doors, and the metaphor has to market this is to have an elevator going to of our times square ever down square that was a slip I see those hands up I'm gonna ask whoever had their hand up first to chime in I see colin's on top and then lee and then char colin did you want to end my sure I just was wondering is each artist's space based on sort of like a template like where it has this the same sort of roof line and sky or are people able to sort of just use the idea of a space as an actual artwork that they could make however they want like I was thinking about maybe doing something with polycam yes to both you can use our template and then you can use the template to make a space that's a little bit more like a template you can modify the template to remove all the walls and just keep the sky and the ceiling you can remove everything you can do whatever you want in mozilla hubs and even in fact we were thinking if people want to participate and don't want to build out a space right now you can just link to your website you know just have a link on the door to your site that's actually what I was doing with some of these just to test is there any way like on the door it says you know this is lee's space or we're not as basic as you know is there some identifier in that way excellent question this is a conversation we just had yesterday we're going to change the doors to be bigger pictures and we're going to request that people submit a picture with their name on it just you know that's a simple way to do exactly that colin yeah is that the avatar as well going to be the same thing as the avatar your avatar you can customize at any point when you enter the space I'm forgetting exactly where it is here but there's you can you can customize your avatar you have all these pre-made and then you could create your own like I did just by taking a picture and there is sort of like a better way to have your picture you know sort of arranged in space in order to have your face on top and not just your chin by your bottom but I was just messing around once again I'm sorry it's going really slow I think kazoo's on cynthia I think and I think I'll just reiterate a little bit what tommy said I think the idea is to make it as simple to get initially started and that over time as people get more comfortable with the way they're doing things I think it's really important that we get more comfortable with the space and the tools if you want to you know go crazy and do your own you know do everything on your own you'll be able to the one I think one of the issues is gonna be because it's not going to be completely automated at least not to begin with we may need to have periodic time frames for updates but I don't want to get too too deep on that and you know tommy you want to address that's, you know, whatever you think.

Tommy Mintz

Yeah, I mean, logistically, the back end on this is one of us using a tool to just copy and paste links and files to each of these 3D doors, if you will. And that will have to be somebody doing it. There's no program. There's no automated anything on that back end. So, yeah, it would be maybe we'd refresh it. But we're talking about once a month or once a season, depending on how much demand there is. You know, we'll just see how it goes. Yeah, but it is something we can update people's. Anytime you change your studio space or want to update your studio space, it sort of generates a whole. 3d space and we have a new url that we'll link to and I'll have explicit instructions on exactly that in the video you should definitely put like once it launches are you still going with december 1st for an opening or is that fairly fluid at this point I think we have that as fairly fluid it's a good description because I mean once it's up and running I would definitely like to put it right on the Techspressionism homepage so any visitors to the to the site are going to see hey I can actually go in here you know and explore people's studios and people could go into the site and see what they're doing and see what they're doing and see what they're doing the various studios without the actual artist being present right correct absolutely and we're also thinking of having a green light on the door to indicate that the artist is present you know if you see three lights and maybe come out into the town square and have a conversation also our opening has been pushed we're going to be opening on the 31st rather than the 1st of december and people could go in with an oculus headset right if they want to or some sort of a vr goggle piece of hardware tommy is that the case yes and in fact I find iPad navigation to be really great with mozilla hubs it's even better than keyboard and mouse because it has this sort of two thumb spaces that you just sort of you know swipe around and it's like having two thumb joysticks on a on a on a xbox controller or something so yeah the goggles are great on this absolutely I tried it once with oculus and it looks great sorry I'm gonna stop sharing I feel like my oh we have more questions lee did you have did you want to ask something before yeah so I was sort of wondering a functional question a couple functional questions about how this is organized so you have a you have a town square which is a town square and it's a town square and it's a town square and it's a town square and which is your 3d space and doors are the doors and what's on the other side of the door part of your space or you know you mentioned that there could be a link to some to a website so could this be to another hub space and so is the hub space part part of your space, this town square space, or is it part of something that you're creating yourself, or it sounds like it could be a mishmash of any of these things?

Tommy Mintz

Yeah, that's the answer. It could be a mishmash of any of those things. The hub space that you generate will be yours, right? Your little studio, whatever, small or big, really, is yours to manage and make. With as you please and you could link to it from outside of siberiana like you know you could say hey come see my studio I have it on my Instagram bio or whatever sure and the siberiana the way I'm hoping we'll have it set up is that there's a door in each studio that's a link back to siberiana so you could presumably also have like in your studio assuming you're managing it links to other places as well 100 yes you could link to your nfts for example from inside your studio I'm sorry I'm gonna like cynthia has a question I'm gonna pull up in the studio if that's okay while you're asking a question cynthia just give me a second I just have a quick question which I put in the chat can you hear me by the way I can hear you but I don't see chat because I have so many things open on my screen no just I just wanted to suggest that we share spaces if you had 80 people and there are 40 spaces I actually in real life was part of this open studios alternative space thing and we were assigned roommates and I became really good friends with the person that I was roommates with so somehow in the spirit of expressionists and sharing I just think you know two for one would be the way to go so I think that's a fantastic idea cynthia it might be logistically strange having two people in one room and I think that's a fantastic idea cynthia it might be logistically develop one space well not if they talk to each other yes I mean I mean that's the point is that the two people would talk talk to each other and they would share and in some way and share ideas and I think it'd be really great and I've just been noticing that many of us have influenced each other's work so directly I mean I was thinking that in the spring sometime time we might do a tech specialist salon where people point out who influenced them in the group but you know this is a way to explore that and not be exclusive but be inclusive making sure there's enough space for everyone.

Tommy Mintz

So I personally would be happy to share and work with a partner. And while you may think that it's technically more challenging, for me, it's a little less challenging to have someone to brainstorm with. Awesome. I think that's a fantastic idea. So I wonder how we could solicit interest in that. That's an open question. I don't, we don't need to answer it, but let's try to figure that out. Like to determine. Maybe if the people that would want to pair up to reach out to the partner that they want to work with in terms of a collab, they could do that. I don't know. Right. Or if you want to have a partner assigned to you, we could just sort of have a pool. If somebody says, Hey, I want to be part of the, assign me a partner group.

Tommy Mintz

We can do that too. So in the tutorial, are you going to include information about how to create the door back out to Siberiana? Cause I think that's definitely something that I was like, how would you do that? That's part of, so there's default stuff in this, right? So actually there's a link back to Siberiana right here. You know, that'll open it up and bring you right back to the right now it's a splash page and I'm using Siberiana.studio just to point to a directory on my web server that I maintain for an old website. And I just park everything there, but here's, you know, so there, there is the door there that'll bring you back to oops. Oops. I just clicked on too many X's here and I lost where we were, but it'll bring you back to Siberiana. So that's part of the, template if you will, you know, that people can modify and yeah, maybe that's what we'll ask is that you just include a link back to Siberiana.studio somewhere, you know, whether it's in 3d space or in a webpage.

Tommy Mintz

I see Roz has a hand up. Hey Roz. Hi everybody. I was dealing with a cesspool situation today. So really fun. I picked it up, but it is in a way it's, it's good to be here. I've been here off and on great presentations. So I'm going to see what it is. Lili, would this be something where if you had a conversation, it's recorded back in time, is it something where you can go back and see what's happened in the plaza or the open space, or is it all live? And can a lot of people meet at once? I know I'm asking a lot of questions, but I'm curious about. I don't know about recording. It is all live. On the license that I have right now, I think we have 10 people that can meet, I'm sorry, 20 people that can meet in the space at once. I see. Yeah. And we can have a chance to get in and will do that.

Tommy Mintz

So you're going to have to get in and do that. And then once that limit is hit, it starts a second instance of the space, I think, where, you know, it's a space, but it's another virtual room where different avatars will show up. I'm hoping that, you know, as you start seeing 10, 20 people show up in here, people will be like, hey, come see my studio. It's getting crowded. Let's five people pop off into one room and maybe it'll never hit that threshold of too many people. I'd love to have recording. I don't know how to do it, Roz. I think it's a great question and we should, as curators, look into that. I'm not sure. And do we need a user-written password? I mean, security-wise, is it just, you just go to a, it's like a website on the, a URL on our browser? Is that? Yep. Yep. And Mozilla Hub's building tool is called Spoke and you will put in an email address and then they email that email address with a link and it's called a non-password or something.

Tommy Mintz

You don't have a password. It's like they. They just send you a link every time you want to log in. So verify that it's you. Does that make sense? I was just thinking too, if there's a regular meeting day and time, kind of like the way the coworking sessions are held, it would be a really easy decentralized way for people to get together. There wouldn't need to be anyone running it. It could just be like every Tuesday at noon, let's get, you know, open studios or whatever, you know, that can be kind of cool. And then people in the public also could come. And they would know, oh, there's going to be a bunch of artists in there at that time, you know, kind of like expanding on the whole social sculpture idea. It might be interesting. And that could be right on the homepage under the description and the link in, you know.

Tommy Mintz

That's great. Is it is there a fee, which is fine, but is there one? Is that something to anticipate? No, there's no fee. I mean, what happens is Mozilla Hubs has a couple different tiers of. They're hosting quantity, you know, so it's a limit on how many. People can have avatars in the space at the same time is determined by our pricing tier. So I don't know, I got something that's really cheap. It's like ten dollars a year, twenty dollars a year. I just put it in because it's an art project to me, whatever. Twenty bucks. The next one up is significantly more expensive. It's like eighty dollars a month. And that allows for like it's enterprise. Yeah. You have one hundred avatars and all sorts of they intend that for businesses to make like Nike town and sell their sneakers kind of thing.

Tommy Mintz

But yeah, there are other more commercial tiers. It's also the possibility of us setting up a server ourselves using I don't know, here's my raspberry pie that's unused, right, that we could just sort of have Siberian to live on. Not sure why this way. One of the things I want to say is, yes, space like the idea of. Having a time to hang out here is great and you can place all these different.

Tommy Mintz

Sorry, things within the space to share, including drawings, you can draw in a space and upload a picture and just have it floating there or put it on a table and then pin it there and it will stay even once you leave. I'm not sure why that's that. Oops, I'm sorry. I just put the wrong time. It's again, as I'm demonstrating. So.

Tommy Mintz

So that was glitchy looking. I'm not sure what's going on exactly, but it should have been a picture of mine that's showing up and sitting on the table. Guys, we're getting close to the hour and a half mark. Yes. Karen has her hand up. Maybe we could make that the last question and we could cap it and the recording. But we'll keep the Zoom open for the after party slash advisory board. Okay. So we'll get together.

Tommy Mintz

I can go over into the after party if you want. My question was very simple in terms of modifying the space. If everybody goes in 80 people at a time and suddenly modify, I don't want to give you a lot of work in the background or whether that affects you or it's part of our hubs. I just want to darken down some things. That's all because I'm going to try to do more of a theater cinema look when you walk in. That's all.

Tommy Mintz

Yeah. No, I think all that's, I mean, the That will cause a lot of input on your end in the beginning, will it? So I think in the beginning we're going to have a little bit of a lift to put everybody's links in the right place. And yeah, that's the hardest part is to make sure we're keeping track of it. I have a spreadsheet that we're using to keep track of things. Okay. And we're hoping to have an email address that we're going to communicate through. Steven, Bernada, Michael and I, I think all have the password to Siberiana-Techspressionism at gmail.com. But I did send out a bulk email from already once, but it might have ended up in people's junk folders because it's, you know, 250 people from a newly formed email. I am going to use that email to send, or we, are going to send. Okay. Individual emails to each person saying, please respond to this with your link and a picture for your door.

Tommy Mintz

Great. And that's all we're going to do. Just trying to make it easy on you guys. Absolutely. Thank you, Karen. We've been thinking about exactly that. Okay. You know, Tommy, I could also, I could also set up a really simple Gravity Form on the site that you could direct people to that could go to you guys. So it would have an upload field and, you know, an email field and some other stuff. If that would make it easier. I mean, I think it would be easier than fielding tons of email responses. I don't know, but you know, you and I can connect about that.

Tommy Mintz

I think. Yeah. I'd love to talk to you about it because it is about, you know, it's like a database then. Right. How do you manage this? You could export all that stuff out as a CSV also at the end of the submission window. You know, so that might be. Something that would make your life easier. Possibly. I don't know.

Tommy Mintz

Do we know when the submission window is? So we are. Hoping it will open as soon as we get these instructions online. I'm hoping to do it this week. And then have that up. You know, two weeks of submission window. And then we could have two weeks of.! Right. What if we change it doesn't need to be quote unquote done by the opening. Right? Like it could be a work in progress for everybody.

Tommy Mintz

Yes. And I think we'd like to encourage people to change their spaces regularly to update and not think of it so much as like a gallery, but more like your studio space where you're always sort of putting up your new stuff, taking stuff down. Have flat files over here with a bunch of old stuff maybe you put stuff into I'm not sure if that's the good metaphor you know but that's what I was imagining it functioning like and that we could have updates at a regular time period so it's not like one of the things that we discussed is how do we make sure this isn't constant full-time job maintaining things and it's by having a either monthly or every couple months day where we gather new links and put them up and have a new town square set of links launch date does that make sense are you streaming live video into this space right now yeah isn't that cool it's super cool yeah so somehow I'm on a second camera too I have two cameras attached to my I'm trying to back up to it you!

Tommy Mintz

Just passed my video there we go hello Tommy it's a bit glitchy right now because of zoom I would suspect we have our meetings this way where we just have live avatars talking in the space wow and it's in real time and it's very crisp and very fluid and the audio is great too and it's actually proximate audio so if I move my avatar further away from your avatar I get quieter so it's a really interesting experience it's a really cool experience that I think this group will appreciate because we're kind of already playing in the space and let's just organize a little bit see where it goes and tell me it's really cool the idea of like every two two months or every six weeks or every three whenever it is every x amount of time then there's updates it's really cool because then it gives it a bit of a cachet and after the third month the third time that it's changed over there's going to be people now you can be like oh you liked it last time but wait for it to see what we got set up for this time you know you know it'll it can help generate fans yes and also what we're thinking about doing as curators is having a few pieces of art in the central town square and have that be a rotating exhibition so you know be like banners if you will or you know whatever our skeuomorphic metaphor is for having you know public presentations of images in town square hey guys I think I gotta stop the recording you just so we keep the lengths of these salons relatively standard but anyone that has you know further questions about siberiana you know definitely hang out I'll keep the zoom open until around 2 30 and then I can throw a host to someone else I gotta go pick my kid up but you know the zoom can stay open as long as everyone wants as long as someone's willing to hang out and you know be hosts so but thanks so much tommy and team for this siberianan project it's absolutely amazing and I think you know having a real you know like a place in cyberspace for the group is an awesome idea I mean this is like what expressionism needs you know so I feel like yeah kudos really cool and you know thanks lee for hosting moderating you know today and you know one thing that we always try to do for!

Tommy Mintz

The after party is come up with a topic so anyone that has any ideas you know please stick around and the only caveat is the person who suggests the topic is the moderator I hope that doesn't deter anybody but with that I will close this salon and thanks to all of the artists who attended so we will stop recording in three two one and cut and cut