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do i need to clap no no because it would be really complicated

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you are joining me [Music]

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welcome i have here today with me julie gendron who is a

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independent creative director she’s a strategist a designer an artist

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as an artist is really interested in performance and performance video

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sound all things media art atmospheric kind of work installations

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she’s also worked with a really wide variety of cultural organizations

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large and small she was the programmer for vevo she’s worked extensively on the vucavoo

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project streaming platform for independent media arts in canada um

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welcome to art engine julie how are you doing today good i’m good yeah it’s nice to have you

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here so julie been part of the digital economies

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lab project working mainly on the offer need machine

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but i wondered if we could start with the the basics back to the beginning and you have a

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really wide variety of experience so i’m wondering what was it about the digital economies

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lab that made you want to participate well honestly in that point in time i was thinking about

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going back to school and doing a masters in business because i

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have been thinking about how artists could more artists could become

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or join or create the creative economies without being

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dependent on the granting system necessarily and i had seen some examples along the way and i was

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really interested in how well the bigger theory for me is that um

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i want people to see people create more art or crafts or whatever it is that

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they do in order to allow them to become more thoughtful about their

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ability to think independently and so in my grad work in 2005 i was

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looking at participatory design and how to get more artists to do

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how to get more people to participate in sculpture and interactivity

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and i did quite a few installations that were interactive at that point in time that allowed people

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to show them that they could draw or they could um make sound and beat box and all of these

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different things with the naive theory that the more that

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they learned that they could be creative that they would maybe become more

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participatory in their own communities and within their own economies

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instead of purchasing culture all the time i wanted them to make culture everyone even if it wasn’t

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like high-end art and so going to

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seeing digital economies lab and thinking about working with a bunch of different people about this was basically the perfect

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way for me to start moving towards i don’t really want to go back to school

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i really don’t want to but i i want to learn more of the skills around economics in order to assist

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um art organizations more so i that’s what i do i do digital strategy i do a lot of um

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you know a lot of work around helping art organizations become more successful

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accessible successful by bringing on new tools or

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processes and so the part that was missing was the economic part of it um

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and to get more official ideas around it the project that you guys were uh

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ended up being really a part of for for the the long

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arc of the deo um is really focused i think on individuals

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obviously um there’s the idea of addressing the individual artist but then also the kind of digital existing

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digital infrastructure or existing infrastructure for the cultural world already of transforming organizations

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small and large and did you know or was it really important to you that there you were focused on those individual

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artists i didn’t really know what i would be focused on i tried not to make any kind of

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judgments about how i was going to become involved with or what i was going to take on with this group of people um

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i originally was just excited about meeting everyone when we first met in ottawa um

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and you know when we first started talking about all of these things we weren’t

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talking about uh any solid ideas of what that included

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outcomes it was more about how do we connect people and i

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connect people in order to create more prosperity and then connecting those people

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was thinking about how can we [Music]

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get artists who are also professionals in a lot of ways

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or consultants that also work for art organizations there’s a there’s a thing

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that happens as we all know probably that artists have a side job and then they have their

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professional job they happen to be very good sometimes they work full-time

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and then there’s art organizations that are looking for professionals like marketers and

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they often can’t find them if we can’t find each other um

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and so organizations go to these big agencies that have

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really very little idea about how nonprofits and arts artists work or art organizations work and they provide

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really expensive solutions that often the art organization is

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trying to explain to them as they go along that’s not how we work that’s not how we work and then it becomes very convoluted expensive and the and the

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goal in the end is not it’s it’s so hard to get the value alignment like

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and the story and context understanding um coming from an arts organ a small

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arts organization it that the thought sometimes of working with consultants on a wide variety of things but

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particularly around around marketing or even organizational change is so difficult because there’s

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like how much energy do we have to to get them to understand the context of

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of what uh an experimental independent arts organization does and is is like

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yeah exactly and those values the alignment is really really difficult because people get

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involved in art and community organizations for a very

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specific reason um and it usually doesn’t have a lot to do with getting rich

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and so you know like like a very concrete example right now is for me is when i can find i need assistance with

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doing certain things so sometimes i help create a website for an organization

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um but i need someone to do the or research around

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the like the themes or the different the way the design that’s going to work and so right now i’m working with

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someone who is a craftsperson but they are also very good at understanding

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design in the internet and so and they will make money off of doing

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that uh but i would never would have found them in the city

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unless we were on the board we’re on a board together we share but i never would have found them and so i guess

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this was what i’m i guess the basic goal or the basic

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understanding about connecting people and you know making it easier for people to

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work together and reach their goals was that kind of situation

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so i want to get you to uh describe the o m project

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uh in a second but i did want to touch on one thing um and we’ve mentioned throughout these interviews the notion

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of prosperity um and i wonder for you what does that mean artistic prosperity

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for me well i enjoy doing my strategy and my

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kind of that kind of work i really do because i get to meet lots of wonderful people and i really like to help people

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improve their organizations or do their project online

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but for me personally that prosperity means that i don’t have to worry about money

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while i spend solid pieces of my time creating work

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artworks and it’s really the last residency that i

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was able to go to and residencies are awesome because you get to like do exactly that well maybe you worry about

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money a little bit but you get to go to a place and you concentrate on something and you create

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something and you get into that mindset and you’re not worried about um you’re not worried about

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all the other stuff so people that do like the people in the world that i’ve seen do it best so the

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residency i was went to was in iceland um and it was in citizenfield which is on the

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eastern side of iceland and it was for sound art residency but i was doing the video part

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um with my partner emma hendricks and uh um

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what i saw is that icelanders do this perfect thing they are very creative they all

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go to school to make music like not all of them but a lot of them or do something else but then they’re also

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professionals and it’s just like an expectation like you’re meant to you’re not meant to

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just be someone working in a company you’re also meant to be someone creating some sort of artistic form and it often

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becomes music or oral coral

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so can you describe the uh the o m project the offer need machine as it is now and sort of where

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you’re headed currently we’re in the middle of research

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and understanding who the people are that are going to use it

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and so just the o m stands for offer need machine

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and it’s a theory so far that there would be some sort of digital

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tool that we would eventually create and when i say we i mean messi and kofi

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um that would allow people to connect online to offer

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one hour of service to another person in the arts um or you know

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they don’t actually have to be in the arts but an expert in the arts they don’t have to be an artist is what i mean

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and then a from there that person that offers an

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hour and a and the the amount of time is debatable still right now um

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that person can receive an hour of expertise from another person it’s not directly reciprocal

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we’re thinking that like as a an example would be potentially there is

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a consultant who’s an expert in not necessarily marketing but in trying

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to figure out audiences that an art organization might need so someone in

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that art organization and an executive director might need this expertise but maybe let’s say it’s a craft museum so

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that executive director is probably also an artist uh who

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knows how to knit or print or do something that so they can offer something that kind of skill to someone

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that wants that but the idea is that one person offers

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and in order to receive they have to offer first

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and if we are not intending on facilitating long-term

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connections this is not facebook this is not um we are just creating the spark

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okay so the spark of that so it’s almost like a little incubator of relationships

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that the idea of um you have to input uh

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uh something uh whether right now the unit is an hour of time and uh and

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knowledge and expertise that you might have um and you sort of put it into uh the system uh

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on offer for others um and then that allows others to kind of pick up and

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it’s not like you said it’s not a one-to-one exchange this is a sort of distributed idea of there being a kind

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of uh a network of possibilities for you to draw upon

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yeah and yeah do you see it as i hesitate to say transactional but in the sense of

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if you put one in and then you take one out is are you sort of expected to

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be um giving and receiving um in like in alternating form like is

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there supposed to be a kind of sum zero do you think for a for a participant not necessarily

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someone if they feel very altruistic can go and give as much as they want but

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they don’t have to take anything back but the idea is that you have to give first because there’s a whole set of values being created

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yeah through this project it’s not just about this transaction as you might say it is it’s not yeah like you say it’s

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not necessarily a transaction but there’s more to it and i think that’s what’s unique about this project

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is that we are expecting people to come to this to this we haven’t decided on the

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technology so do this thing this machine yeah it’s called a machine

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um a bit tongue-in-cheek when we say machine between macy and kofi we have created

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a code of conduct that we work together with an understanding of how we’re going to

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work and what we want to achieve um and what we want to learn from each other

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and we’re going to carry this out into this machine that we create

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so we are determining we’ve talked to lots of people that do

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are very generous with their time lots of people that um in the arts community or organizations

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who you know have a lot of valuable skills are super smart but and give a lot and

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so we’ve talked to them about how does trust break down for you when do you stop volunteering how do you ask for

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help like all of these different values um and and then there’s also a lot of other

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platforms out there which um like i wouldn’t say that they’re my inspiration so i wouldn’t spend much

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time talking about them necessarily but they’re really good to see how their their workings happen on the internet

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um and also where trust breaks down for them and their communities and so the idea is that when someone comes to this

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comes to o m they will actually have to commit to a

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certain value system and that value system will

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what we’re going to try to do is normalize respect and care so you you can’t be on there if you’re going to

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take advantage of anyone and we’re also trying to normalize

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something that doesn’t happen much anymore especially because the internet and social media makes everyone jealous of each other

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we’re trying to normalize taking joy in other people’s success and that’s the spirit that you have to come to in this

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that you are actually trying to make other people success and that success is not

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that success is not limited it’s actually infinite in the same way that people think about love right

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like we can live together and all be successful and so you know and with that we have to people

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have to know what their boundaries are people have to self-reflect people have to

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work on their trauma because there’s a lot of it in this world um

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and people um yeah i think i said this already but

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people need to know what their boundaries are and they need to know and they need to know when they start saying

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no or when they and they need to know what the limit is of what they’re going to give in that one hour going onto that

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platform means or whatever it becomes means that they’re almost agreeing to in

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terms of service that’s very different than what you would a corporate terms of service where it

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talks about how don’t sue us you know or you can’t sue us because

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you’re invincible you have no rights that’s it yeah so what we’re saying is we you have lots

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of rights and you need to exercise them yeah it sounds uh the term idea of terms of

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engagement although that sounds very worry for some reason but that sounds more like it’s not about service but

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about uh you know terms of partnership or terms of relationships or um i mean i think it’s

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really interesting the way that you’re trying to

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practice a kind of care and trust in the development of the project and how

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you’re seeing translating that over to um embedding it into the sort of

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participant or user experience what might be the the interface or how how do

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you go about bringing participants into that is it sort of reading is it

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how are you how are you trying out some of those ideas so you know there’s been a couple phases of this project so far

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and the first one was just meeting these people um before covet came and then kikovic came

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and the second phase was you know where art engine was able

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to help us facilitate users interviews

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and talk to those people that i was saying those generous people in the art sector

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and i’m speaking mostly about the canadian art sector um and um

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[Music] looking at the organizations that do similar work and so now we’re in the

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third phase where we’re again looking at how people use things and

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you know we haven’t decided we haven’t decided on how or what is

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going to happen but i think that that we’re going to basically use the very like the agile type way of

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creating prototypes in order to test them in order to run them by these people that once don’t

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want to participate um and you know like

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so we’re not at this place where we’re saying what what can you do because it’s very complicated like how do you take

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that how do you take trust and try to put it into an app you know like and i think we’re going to

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get there but we have about a year to do so i mean it’s a really interesting moment of course because trust is like

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trust is a hot word because of the crypto stuff but it’s like the opposite kind of trust

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it’s actually not trust right like the whole crypto structure is about

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no human trust but everything determined so like there is no room for trust

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because you don’t need trust anymore because everything is determined by the code and the structure of this

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and this is the opposite play and i i wonder you touched a bit you know

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we don’t want to dwell on like a critique of linkedin or anything like that but you know what if you can think

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about what is different about this project as a network like what is missing in existing networks

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um that uh you’re doing with this project i don’t know really like

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if we compare kind of linkedin uh well social media is doing kind of the opposite of what we’re doing

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um and creating suspicion

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like everyone becomes performative i guess when they’re on social media

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and and i guess in this in the offer need machine we’re

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expecting people to be just themselves uh

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genuinely themselves and that we all make mistakes and that we’re not perfect

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and so that’s a little bit different if i think that’s what you mean

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yeah i mean i think i mean you did touch on it in the sense of you know looking at care and trust and i’m not sure i

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think there there is this idea

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i think with any design project you’re going through this process of this is really unique we need this and

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then suddenly you one the next day you’re like oh this is just like all these other things

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um you know people are already sharing and caring for each other like you know the many of social media’s worst parts

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amplify you know performativity um sensationalism all of these things at

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the same time they’ve been instrumental to social movements

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and care in the last year and a half particularly but but i think both of us sense that maybe

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that’s happening despite the infrastructure of the network it’s not encouraged by the network but rather

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something that people overcome within the network to actually reach out and create those connections i think the important part

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is that we’re making it so that it’s fleeting in that one hour

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and that you can back out of that relationship i think a lot of other social media because they have a business

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they you need to have this amount this amount of users and they need to stay online this amount all these statistics and how

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it’s supposed to work and so um their main goal is retention whereas our main goal is not retention

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our main goal is uh like i say the spark of connection passing on some really valuable

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information quickly and then if it turns out to be really valuable then you go off line or

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you go on to your own little communication tools and create a longer term

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yeah um so that brings that you know brings up questions about how do we

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how do we make sure they’re still safe once they’re off and what is our what is our

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winners our responsibility stopped like

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ephemerality and and even anonymity are both values

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um anonymity in particular as a value privacy is something that we we’re losing so we’ve lost you know we lose

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yards of it every day um and i i uh but the ephemerality of

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the interaction that you’re about to kind of spark um i think that’s a really interesting um condition uh to think of

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going into a network uh and participating in something that actually requires um you know a fair amount of

24:34

commitment in some ways to be involved but can have these sort of fleeting elements in which one can

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come in and maybe once one is initiated over a certain period of time coming in and coming out but allowing yourself to

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be there and available but also be able to to pull away yeah because i’m you know

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like for an example i’ll just do it from my own point of view the mansplaining thing is a real thing

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right and so me going on there and needing some advice from someone i might end up

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with a mansplainer but i can put up with that for an hour

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you know and shake my head at the end of it but i i don’t have to have that relationship past that one hour i can just totally yeah and i might still get

25:19

some important information from that mansplainer but um

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but there’s also something triggering about being mansplained too so i you know what i mean and that happens with a lot of people with from different

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backgrounds yeah well i think that’s that’s an interesting scale of steak as well and that idea

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like you’re the the talking about the spark that this is like where um

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i’m not hiring you for a big contract in which fifty percent of it you’ve been explaining to me things i already know

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uh we’re we’re engaging in a smaller thing um and there’s there’s

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much less at stake and hopefully if someone doesn’t if someone gets a dead hour

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you know you know maybe they can go and teach how to knit one for one more hour to another

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person so that they can you know get one another hour that maybe feels better

26:15

to them this is brings up another design question from its relationship to previous and the

26:22

existing social network condition which is one of sort of rating and evaluating

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you know have you guys had discussions around that we actually haven’t talked about that in any of the o m sort of

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interactions we’ve had but that’s rather big one we have this expectation of being able to

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uh rate someone but that is this whole uh intense performative thing

26:45

and the language people use is also like i think rating is really important

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but it’s um

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i i’m i have a word in my that i want to say but it’s not the best one it’s uh

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distorted really quickly i think that that’s part of the conversation also that we’ll need to have in terms of like

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how do how do people find out what they need but i think that rating systems often

27:17

work on one star to five stars you know what i mean and it’s solving experience it

27:23

flattens totally flattens it out yeah and so you know if i’m thinking off the top of my head

27:29

it’s more like can we think about rating and terms of really constructive

27:35

yeah terminology yeah um you know there is always a way

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to if something doesn’t work for you if you don’t like something there’s

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always a way of describing it so that it doesn’t become personal but

27:53

because people just don’t mesh sometimes right like they just come from very different backgrounds and you know within canada

28:00

we there’s this idea that there’s this long uh

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long ago idea that we’re all just going to become the same but we have so many cultures and so many ways of talking to

28:11

each other within like innumerable ways within this huge country and

28:17

it doesn’t have to be aggressive to explain why they don’t mesh and it’s okay not to

28:23

mesh yeah i think that would be a really interesting uh design challenge too to think about

28:30

both the pace at which one would provide sort of metrics for

28:35

it like an idea of a star system but is it you know can you create

28:40

something that’s a little bit more abstract and obtuse that doesn’t look like it’s you know it’s a

28:45

five-dimensional object that gives you some sense of uh

28:50

of different factors that that that the person experiences like what do you you know you think about the different kinds

28:56

of language in which one would you know how does it fit for you what did you value and then also the sort of longer

29:03

form idea the way we might tell stories um about experiences share those stories

29:08

to get at the nuances of experience so that seems like that’ll be really exciting part of the project i

29:14

know for us here at art engine thinking about metrics is something um that i’m i’m really kind

29:23

of obsessed with over the years because you know how do we

29:29

find ways to connect these kinds of very uh

29:35

quantitative factors that determine so much and qualitative experience

29:40

and find new and innovative ways to talk about what we what we measure and see in the world especially because metrics are

29:47

born out of capitalism and capital innocent is meant to just get to the very

29:54

sell more product right it doesn’t matter who you’re actually destroying in the pathway of that yeah

30:01

you know the counterpoint though that would be that metrics in the empirical sense are also really part of uh

30:08

of research and and um in not just science but research in a broader sense of like what is you know

30:15

really um how do we put things into a framework where um not that they become a truth

30:22

but they can they can be more substantial and not that but i agree there’s certainly

30:28

uh you know uh the last 10 years have uh capitalism and metrics have been a

30:35

a incredibly powerful toxic combination but i think you know

30:41

this do that is a huge design challenge that we have i meant the thing

30:47

i think that we are continually thinking about today and the days and weeks that come

30:52

is how do we onboard people and how do we connect those people responsibly

30:57

um because there’s lots of people that don’t want

31:02

to work with other people and you know there’s lots of people that want to

31:10

work with people that they relate to in some way so like how do we

31:17

because there’s also identity and self-identification and in all of that

31:23

and there’s lots of people that don’t like to self-identify but still don’t but still want to be within their

31:28

community right so that is a big that is that is the big design question at the moment

31:35

yeah it’s gonna be an exciting year for the project for sure um

31:40

i i wonder if we could talk a bit about um where you have drawn inspiration from

31:47

and where you see care and trust working in networks whether that’s within

31:53

um the cultural sector or broadly in different kinds of communities the top of mind thing

32:00

is for me is art city which is an organization in winnipeg that

32:06

is in the west broadway area of winnipeg that has maybe

32:12

lower income very highly dense apartment buildings and lots of children

32:18

that uh need to maybe keep busy after school

32:25

and so art city basically invites children from the neighborhood to come to drop in

32:31

to do art and that’s within that um so you know children have

32:36

a lot less baggage than we do they’re much kinder i mean they can be very mean too um but

32:43

i think that’s because they’re testing boundaries right and so but within that organization and how it

32:49

works between after school until seven o’clock or

32:54

that time where you have to start thinking as a child to go home and get ready for bed or do your homework um

33:00

they they have guest artists come in they have so many art supplies they have

33:06

like so people come so these children come in and and

33:11

then there’s older children that help out the younger children and i all just have a really good time and play together and then you know around i

33:18

don’t remember what time it is but around six o’clock food is served you know no questions asked you eat if you

33:25

want or you don’t sometimes adults come in like you know that just need to be with other people

33:32

um from the community uh it’s just a very safe place

33:37

and um very real uh without all of that baggage so and

33:42

that’s an inspire inspiration in terms of how people approach each other um

33:48

and then you know inspiration can come from other i was

33:53

very in the 90s when the internet first came out um

33:58

it was very there was a belief system that these networks could create

34:04

a sort of decentralization um and there was

34:10

like there was a really new communities were coming together

34:16

finding each other with similar backgrounds and you know sharing information and gift

34:23

what became it was during that time coined the gift economy um [Music]

34:29

so since then corporations have taken over and you can see that gift economy still happening but um mostly

34:36

but it was really about that’s when people started talk questioning copyright well why does

34:42

copyright have to exist why can’t we have copy left where we have certain different ideas around how what can be

34:49

shared and what can’t be shared um and and so i guess

34:55

that’s some of the inspiration just like gifting and generosity creates more success in everyone

35:02

well this has been uh a great conversation um i wonder just to close

35:07

out i i know that the uh offer need machine found support from the canada council

35:14

for this next phase so uh can you tell us a little bit just uh before we uh we

35:19

leave each other uh what what the next while holds for the offer need machine

35:25

at the moment we’re very busy trying to um digest the

35:32

the research still from phase two um and then there we have to create a list of design

35:38

questions which of course we touched upon a couple of them and then find the solutions for that we

35:45

have to finally make some decisions you know there’s i mean this has been beautiful

35:51

kind of time of incubation but then there’s this decision making and

35:56

um especially when it feels like it costs so much to make those decisions there’s always that

36:02

just like hesitation or just anxiety around those final directions right yeah

36:09

so you know the group of us have to sort that out and then we’re gonna obviously

36:14

we we can’t do everything because we have other projects going on but we’re gonna bring in designers and also outdo

36:20

outreach to find other people that can basically help us through their

36:26

understanding of the world give their opinions about what we’re doing a large part of this

36:33

is basically user testing which is that terrible user word but it’s about

36:41

human computer interaction basically um and user and user groups and

36:47

and coming back to the people that we already spoke to participants they’re participants participants better more

36:52

than user yeah um and so we

36:58

get more participants on um making sure that we are talking to

37:06

many like when we first came up with the first group of participants we really think thought about are they older are

37:12

they younger are they a person of color are they new to canada are they so we tried to

37:18

we tried to balance that out and so continuing to balance that out with even more voices

37:25

um and depending on kovid we’re hoping to travel and come together

37:30

to ottawa at our dungeon to do some more work around that and create some sort of

37:36

prototype so we have hiring to do also it’s all exciting stuff yeah it’s great

37:43

i mean i i you know you know i think i really

37:49

really respect a lot of the work that uh that the whole team has done within with the offer need machine and seeing the

37:55

kind of care with the development and the patients um to allow different ideas to come forward

38:04

i think it’s a really great and exciting time to get into this moment where you do have to leave behind a whole

38:10

bunch of ideas but new ideas come from actually putting those materials together and seeing what

38:16

happens when you start to experiment with these things so i think it’s going to be a really interesting year and arden really looks

38:23

forward to continuing to support the project in any way we can so great we look forward to it

38:29

well we look forward to seeing people in person really yeah in the same room

38:37

yeah so it’s been pretty amazing just having the energy over the internet with mesa and kofi um i can’t imagine what we

38:44

could do if we could actually just meet with each other yeah yeah i know well i look forward to that we look

38:51

forward to having you here in ottawa uh sometime so thanks for joining us today and uh

38:58

we’ll talk to you again soon thanks for the opportunity

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[Music]

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