Black Movement Library: Movement Portraits is a motion capture database project and series of experiences across different media by multi-media artist LaJuné McMillian. She wanted to see more black dancers represented in motion capture data, but produce it in a way that maintained a connection to the dancer and their stories. The project mixes documentary film and interviews produced for a live performance juxtaposed with fully spatialized renders of motion captured dancers. I had a chance to catch up with McMillian at the Tribeca Immersive space where we break down her experience, process, and challenges of trying to maintain right relationships with the embodied data that she’s capturing.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that's covering the immersive industry and the structures and forms of immersive storytelling. And if you'd like to support the podcast, then please consider contributing at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. So I'm going to be continuing on on looking at the different structures and forms of immersive storytelling from Tribeca Immersive. And the piece I'm covering today is called Black Movement Library, Movement Portraits by LaJuné McMillan. Langeyne is a multimedia artist working across different mediums and what's interesting about this piece is that Langeyne wanted to take the motion capture expertise that she has and to work with a community of black dancers and to capture the movements but do it in a way that's in relationship to them and in an ethically responsible way. In other words, she doesn't just want to capture these recordings and putting it up into the internet for anybody to use and extract the value out of these dances. And so she's trying to get the story of who these people are and feature them, but also use the different media. So she's doing video interviews and installation pieces. You can watch a documentary. But then when you're immersed within the VR piece, you actually see these same billboards of these LCD screens, but they're in virtual reality. And as you're learning more about each of these different performers, then you go into more of a spatialized representation of these different dances. as you see them dancing around and also different particle effects and colors and vibe that are trying to be tuned to each of the dancers that she's featuring in her project of the Black Movement Library that was featured at the Tribeca Immersive. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with LaJunée happened on Friday, June 10th, 2022 at the Tribeca Immersive in New York City, New York. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:55.736] LaJune McMillian: My name is Lajanae McMillan, and I'm a new media artist. And I actually work across various different mediums. But in virtual reality, I mainly focus on motion capture. So I've worked on motion capture for various other projects. And this is my first time creating my own virtual reality project with the motion capture that I have recorded. Great.
[00:02:18.227] Kent Bye: Yeah, maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:02:22.303] LaJune McMillian: Sure. So I actually started as a student at NYU Tandon in their digital media program. And I learned a lot about various different technologies and tools and mediums and how to make stuff with that. But I was always really attracted to and I fell in love with motion capture. And so I got into doing live motion capture performance art using primarily Unreal Engine and different motion capture suits. And so from there, I began to continue the process of creating performances, live performances. And it's really driven my experiences in VR too. Because actually, should I explain a little bit about this experience? So this experience, Movement Portraits, actually premiered last year as a live motion capture experience. And it was projected on the Brooklyn Public Library for two nights. And so you got to see the dancers themselves in the motion capture suit. And they sent their data to me in real time. And I projected and created all these visuals on the Brooklyn Public Library. So that was really exciting. So for this year, I got the opportunity to translate those portraits that I made into a VR experience. which was really amazing for me because I got to sit down and learn how to make a VR experience from start to finish. But I was really lucky because a lot of the visuals were already created and made from the performance, so being able to translate that into a 360 environment was challenging but exciting.
[00:03:56.355] Kent Bye: Okay, yeah, I'd love to dive into your experience here in a bit, but before we do that, I want to ask you, because you had mentioned that you had worked on other people's projects for motion capture, maybe you could go from when you were a student and when you started to do more motion capture technologies and what other projects you were working on there.
[00:04:12.693] LaJune McMillian: Yeah, sure. So I think one of the first projects that I worked on that we got to pretty much tour that was a motion capture performance was Ether. And so we got to basically create this piece about sacred geometry and the four elements. And that was my first live motion capture piece while I was still in school. And then from there, I got to work on other virtual reality experiences like Neurospeculative Afrofeminism, which premiered at Sundance in 2017. And I did the motion capture for that. And so I was just so excited to be part of that experience. And that honestly inspired me to, like, try to get into film festivals myself because it was just so fun. And we got to just, like, make everything and be together. And we were just troubleshooting. which was so cool. And then from there, I got to work on another motion capture piece called Dreams of a Jaguar's Daughter, which was a 360 video that premiered in Tribeca, I want to say maybe like two or three years ago. And so yeah, it's been Really exciting to be able to work on smaller teams. So essentially when I do work on motion capture with other collaborators It's mainly like small artists or small artists environments And we're all just like working together helping each other to sort of make our dreams a reality So it's a very different vibe than I guess like working on larger teams or like in big productions. But yeah, so From there, I got really interested in creating my own work. As I said before, I am also just a new media artist in general. So I make a lot of various different video art pieces using Unreal. But I also make a little bit of sculpture, a little bit of performance, a little bit of now VR. And yeah, I actually have my first solo show coming up at Bitform's Art Gallery June 23rd through July 30th. And yeah, basically that's there. And then I also have, sorry, now I'm just like show and tell. But I also have another experience that's tied to this at Times Square. So every night at 11.57 to 12 a.m. I have a midnight moment there and I'm taking over all of the billboards in Times Square and just showing the documentaries through various different mediums is something that I'm really interested in. And also just like sharing stories through various different mediums and seeing how a medium either changes or grows a story or expands a story, that's something that's very interesting to me.
[00:06:48.916] Kent Bye: Okay. The thing that jumps out right now is how did you get it set up to be on Times Square? Like, how did that come about?
[00:06:54.919] LaJune McMillian: Sure, so I think alongside all of these various different experiences is just the fact that I get a lot of artist residencies and fellowships to be able to continue this practice and this work. So with that, I've been able to work with various different organizations and institutions to be able to just help me and give me the resources that I need. And so basically I was able to fill out an application for Times Square Arts and that's basically the public arts organization that is responsible for all of the public art that's like seen in Times Square. So their midnight moment is actually in their 10th year anniversary and yeah for 10 years they've been taking over the billboards like at 12 a.m. so yeah.
[00:07:42.939] Kent Bye: Okay, is that happening all through the festival or is that just one day or? So that happens June 1st through June 30th so every night in June at 1157 the portraits light up Times Square Okay, I'll have to try to make it down and check it out So so let's go back to the last year where you start to because imagine that there's going to be some aspects of what we're seeing here both in the 2d because you have also a 2d documentary that is being projected on to large screen TVs that are vertically placed in a column next to each other where you can sit down and watch like a 40 minute documentary about the interviews that you did with these dancers. So maybe you could go back to like how much of what I'm seeing here in this documentary was already produced from last year and what is sort of new from the VR experience.
[00:08:29.149] LaJune McMillian: Yeah, so actually this is all from the performance. So basically part of the process for Movement Portraits, or I guess the idea behind it, is that I began this project called the Black Movement Library three years ago. And it started as an online database of motion capture data from primarily black performers due to the lack of access and representation of black people in existing motion capture databases. So it started from there, but then I began to expand on that idea from just a project and database to an actual library experience because I wanted to find a space to not only just hold data, but also to really celebrate our bodies and our movements and our journeys as well. And also to make sure that I'm not just collecting movements from people, but that I'm also recognizing that these movements come from people who have stories. So one of the ways that I do this is through this idea of humanizing data and humanizing data collection, inviting communities into that process because I also feel that motion capture and motion capture processes can be really blocked off from the community. It's always happening in this very expensive motion capture studio with very expensive cameras. And it's really hard for people to get access to go there. So to create this sort of public art performance to allow people into that archival process as this sort of ritual was something that I was really interested in. And so it starts off as this public performance that people are coming in, they're learning about the people. The dancers are actually performing to their interviews, so we create these soundscapes, and then we embed parts of the interviews that I do with them into the soundscape, and then they perform to that. So with this experience, too, we were able to do an actual documentary experience, which I was so excited and so happy and proud to add on, because I feel like it adds so much richness to the experience, too. But for a technical standpoint, it was a way to switch people in and out of the mocap suits and hook them up so we needed like that time to we needed like that five minute time space to like switch and turn on mocap suits for different performers to like basically inject their digital selves into the experience and so I came up with this idea to have actual documentaries to fill that space for people. And it just turned out to be just so beautiful. So in the live motion capture experience, you see the documentaries, and then it transforms into this abstract documentary. And then for this, I decided to just translate that into a VR experience, too, just so that people can just immerse themselves in the colors and in the sort of visuals that I have. in the like sort of visual experience.
[00:11:35.482] Kent Bye: Really living into that multimedia artist title there, because what sounds like that you were doing the live performance, but in order to fill in the gaps of changing in the tech, you needed to create the documentaries. And then from that, then you repurpose that into a live installation here within Tribeca, but also took those same clips and recreated those panels within the VR experience. And so when you're immersed into the world, as you're getting onboarded into the next person, then you see a series of clips as you're painting through a virtual representation of an art installation but in the virtual context but seeing those videos and then from there cutting over into the fully spatialized version of the motion capture so I thought that structurally it made a lot of sense and then to go and watch the 40-minute version of the documentary, there's a lot more of the information that is probably a little bit too long to include within the context of the VR experience. And so I feel like for each of the different media, you're trying to fill the strengths out for what you can do, have a little bit more space to get into the stories in the 2D documentary, and then try to create a more tight experience within the VR experience. So yeah, I'd love to hear any reflections of what you get from each of the media as you are combining all these different perspectives and different outputs of the media.
[00:12:48.940] LaJune McMillian: Yeah, absolutely. So for me as an artist, I'm really interested in how I can make my project the most accessible. Not everyone has access even now to VR or even wants to try it. So I wanted to be able to create experiences and entry points for them to still be able to be able to access the work. I think some people are more interested in 2D video experiences. Some people are more interested in going to live performances just in general. And then some people are really interested and are passionate about VR. And so for me as an artist, I just want to be able to open myself up to all of the various different possibilities to how I can tell this story so that as many people that are coming from different walks of life can come and see and experience the work. And I think that process-wise, I'm just so grateful to be able to learn and know all of these various different tools. So sometimes I'm editing in Premiere, sometimes I'm... I guess you could call me a really true tech generalist, where I can open up most programs now and sort of work my way around to get the gist of how something works and then dive deeper with what it is that I need to be able to make the thing that I need to make in that software. So, yeah, it's basically, like, half me just, like, diving into different tools, taking in the tool and the software and being able to make something with it. And I think that as I grow as an artist and as a maker, it just gets better with time. Things get a lot quicker to make. things get a lot richer I guess in the content itself as I also am just able to sort of see how people are viewing the experience or how they react to the experience. It's really interesting and also it's really interesting to sort of show the work in different contexts so like to show it in a festival versus an art gallery versus as a public arts project, you see all different types of people interacting with the work coming from different fields. And so to try and make work that can translate and really merge and form and like see different worlds, different like industries, like I think that that's like something that I'm really interested in as an artist.
[00:15:15.012] Kent Bye: Have you thought about doing augmented reality as a output as well?
[00:15:18.550] LaJune McMillian: Yeah, definitely. I mean, you know, I work primarily in Unreal Engine. So I feel like with the engine, you're able to make, like, what's so beautiful about Unreal Engine is that you can make so many different types of projects with it. So, like, I use it for, like, all of my visuals. And when I do get the chance, I am definitely going to work in augmented reality. I just haven't had the opportunity to sort of just, like, make it. Like, right now, how I've been working is essentially I'll get a residency or a fellowship to sort of work on one part of the library or one part of just like an experience and basically like each residency that I get they work or operate in ways that like will form or try to I guess help one part of the project. So I guess one residency that could help you curate workshops is probably not the best place to work on your VR project because they don't have the resources, or they may not know what the resources are to be able to help you with that. But then you might have a residency that can help you primarily work in VR, which is something that I did. So I was able to have an art residency with Meta, and that's how I got access to an Oculus headset. the Quest 2 and so I was able to sort of like play around with how to use it and work with it and that was like primarily how I was able to even make this project. So yeah, I guess it's like you know when I get a residency that will help me sort of learn their tools or like learn how to sort of make within AR then I'll dabble into it.
[00:16:53.058] Kent Bye: Yeah, one of the things that you had mentioned earlier was that there wasn't a lot of representation for black dancers in the context of motion capture data. But when I was watching the documentary, one of the dancers was talking about challenges around appropriation and taking information and not being in right relationship and having more of a colonial impulse to be able to go in and seize. access to culture and then kind of recontextualize it. So I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on the challenges of preserving the culture of these dance movements while also being in right relationship to the dancers and the stories behind it.
[00:17:27.822] LaJune McMillian: Absolutely. So honestly, when I first started this project, it was directed towards this one field of making tools. But then as soon as I realized that, oh my gosh, I don't want to just perpetuate or contribute to the appropriation, the exploitation, and the extraction of our movements. I actually want to do the opposite of that. I realized that I needed to refocus what this project and what this space was about and really what that means is starting with building and curating and really focusing on what it means to build a community and what does sort of this collective stewardship mean and look like. And so for the past few years, I refocused from that database mindset, because even people who were interested in it, I realized, oh, this isn't necessarily my audience either, that I really want to use this database. I want to be able to sort of open it up to people who normally would not have access or the space to be able to make things. to give them that opportunity to make stuff. And so that's when I refocus more so on workshops. So I teach a traveling workshop as part of the library called Understanding, Transforming, and Preserving Movement in Digital Spaces. And we talk about all of these different issues around appropriation and the history of appropriation and how oftentimes these tools, I guess these tools that sometimes they may have been created with this idea that we're helping, but sometimes we're not. We have those conversations around that. And we sort of place it into context. Because I also feel like a lot of different digital technologies oftentimes can perpetuate those systems of harm. So, what does it mean then to, like, hack those tools so that they're not doing that? And what does it mean to sort of repurpose them in ways that actually do benefit us and tell our stories in ways that really celebrate us and honor us. So, yeah, like basically, I toured the workshop. That's actually the first thing that I worked on primarily. And then from there, I was able to work on these portraits. And I think what's beautiful about the portraits is that oftentimes in existing motion capture databases, it's normally just like the movement. It's like, oh, walk cycle, subject one doing a walk cycle, subject two doing a dance move, subject three like sitting down. And I felt like that was just such a dehumanizing practice because it erases the person who's doing that movement. And I honestly don't feel like that's good for anyone, like, regardless of what your background is. It's just dehumanizing. And so what does it mean to reestablish that connection to the person who's actually doing that movement and make sure that they are being honored in the way that they come, you know? In the way that they are. Like, these movements aren't just coming from the sky. Like, they're coming from someone who has a story, and that story deserves to be heard. And so I began this process of creating these movement portraits as a way to try to, I guess, solve that problem, to re-humanize the data. And so having people experience these worlds that are made, built around these movements, I think, or at least I hope, can really allow people to know that they're not just using data, but they're actually collaborating. Whether or not that performer is there with you or sitting there with you, you are now in collaboration with that person. If you do choose to use this movement, and now you need to respect them, and you shouldn't just use this in any way that you please. You should actually really take care in what it is that you're making.
[00:21:18.856] Kent Bye: Yeah, I noticed as I was watching the experience, I was hearing them talk about their dance, and then I saw the dance, and then I went back and watched the 40-minute documentary just to help connect the gaps between who each of these dancers were, what their unique personality traits, their characteristics, what drives them, what motivates them, what influences they had from different dance genres. to take all that intellectual information and then to see their dance and to see what the emotion of their dance was and then to go back and then kind of watch again, hear a little bit more in depth about who they were and then to see the dance. So I feel like the challenge of something like this as a field in general, the dance, is that So much of the actual movements are what I would characterize as going beyond language to kind of really describe all the nuances of the movements. It's like, you can talk about genres of influences at a high level, but in terms of just watching someone dance, you maybe get a feeling, or one of the dancers was talking about her dance or their dance being all about liberation. There's larger character themes that may be difficult to identify or, you know, that there's an intention there. As someone watches it, they may not know what the intention is. It's like interpreting a dream. But hearing it and then seeing it, there's almost like an opportunity to start to go a little bit deeper to understand not just like the mechanics of what the motions are, but to add all these other layers of the influences and to preserve the fusion of all these different either dance styles or genres or what their own purpose for why they're dancing and for me I guess the challenge is to try to connect what they're saying with what I'm seeing and seeing if it's like matching up or if there's deeper ways of going beyond what words can just do.
[00:23:02.070] LaJune McMillian: Period. I mean, I think for me, this is a learning experience for me as well. Basically how I craft the world is through re-listening to their interviews and also just talking to them in general and pretty much getting a vibe from each person. So I get the vibe from each person. I sort of learn what their favorite colors are. What can I do through color, through visuals that can sort of match you as a person and as a performer? And so, yeah, I think I've started there, but I'm still exploring how I can sort of dive deeper into that process. What does that really look like? Yeah, I don't really have any answers. I just vibe as I go. It's like really just like for me like the whole process is like pretty much a vibe. So it's like learning who they are, trying to get that to sort of match up with the world and the colors and the experience and the movement throughout the piece and then just trying to get better at that with time.
[00:24:08.220] Kent Bye: Yeah, as you were talking about the trying to re-humanize the data, just trying to figure out how to not just treat it as just the motions of the body, but try to tie in all those different elements. I feel like right now it's in the context of these long-form interviews, but then, you know, the question I have is, you know, are there ways to break it down and to see if it's from an individual part to see if you can notice any things, or I was recently, within the last couple of weeks, playing with this AI generation tool of generative adversarial networks where you basically give it a line of text and then it basically produces a picture. And so are there ways in which the machine learning can start to understand the movements based upon the language that people are adding and then be able to have these higher dimensional latent spaces that the features are detecting within machine learning algorithms, is that a way to connect that with the language and the tagging and the meaning that is able to preserve a connection to who the people were and what it meant in a way that doesn't just erase that or appropriate it in a way that doesn't... I mean, there's a risk of that type of technology that just sort of extracts the information without attribution or it's like a colonized way of getting access to that. So there's obviously the risks of that, but I guess in terms of trying to humanize the data, I can see the benefits would be that you'd be able to maybe tie the personality of the people back.
[00:25:28.483] LaJune McMillian: Yeah, I mean, I haven't had too much time recently to sort of dive into machine learning. That's definitely on my list of things to dive into. Yeah, I think, but also like you were saying, like with machine learning, like that has its own sort of like, I feel like that's its own field of stuff. What I am trying to start with right now is pretty much just, okay, For me, as I work on these projects, I'm thinking about, or at least I'm approaching it from this idea, and this, I would say, lived reality that our bodies and our movements are their own technologies that are passed down to us from our ancestors. And so, if I start from there, and I focus primarily on that, we have so many fields that are just, based on the body, based on movement, based on these things, and there's some very in-depth worlds there. So I started there, and I was like, oh my gosh, this is its own field. How can I remain a perpetual learner of this field and not get lost in the digital technology, in the digital world? And so, basically, for me, it's been a large process of balancing the learning of the digital tools and the movement and the body tools that are required to do work like this. Like, right now, I also, like, perform in my... I didn't perform in this. But I perform in my own works, too. And so having that embodied experience and then also learning the digital tools on top of that, it's been very, like, just filled up. So much time. But I do hope that in the future, my hope is to start to build my own technologies, like my own digital technologies. And I would love for it to be, like, hacked and changed, like sort of remixed digital tools that exist now, or like even new tools that like we just dream up in the future. But I'm hoping that also through the workshops that I can bring in people who are also interested in doing that work with me so that I'm not doing everything by myself. So yeah, I think that like, yeah, these are all things I'm interested in. It's just like takes a lot of time to like dive into it.
[00:28:06.944] Kent Bye: So the Black Movement Library, is this something that's available to community? Or how do people get access to it?
[00:28:13.129] LaJune McMillian: Yeah, so right now, it's really just through the library is not necessarily online. There's a website, blackmovementlibrary.org. But it just takes you through all of the different pop-up experiences that I've been doing. And so right now, it's just like a sort of dispersed, like, if I'm able to do a workshop, I'll just do a workshop here. Or if I'm able to do a talk here, I'm able to do a talk here. If I'm able to present a work here, I will do that. But actually, this fall, I'll be able to present it as a pop-up library experience. So it'll be the first time I'll have all of these experiences. Like the workshops, the VR, the portraits, as well as, you know, sort of hosting movement and embodied and tech workshops. all in one space. And so hopefully I'll have that pop-up library experience as its own sort of touring experience until it finds its home permanently. And then online I guess like I told myself and how I'm working now I'm not putting anything necessarily online until I'm able to make sure that everybody is protected legally and that their movements are protected legally So once I figure out because there are a lot of like various different legal issues like with just like throwing things online So making sure that everyone's sort of like protected that when and if people use those movements from the database that they are Making sure that they credit the people that they are Working with that they're compensating them fairly like all those things like that takes time, too Yeah
[00:29:53.671] Kent Bye: Yeah, I just think about a lot of these GANs like the mid-journey that just scans the internet with all these photos and then creates these machine learning digestions of all that but it's kind of extracting that work without even knowing where it's coming from and then so yeah, I think I could definitely see that That is going to be a continuing issue of how to maintain that right relationship between those. You don't want to have it just so that someone comes in and seizes all the insights from it and then synthesizes it in a way that, yeah, just kind of extracts it. So, yeah, I don't know what the solution is other than your approach of trying to maintain a close, right relationship with these individual people to be able to have their stories and the data. But, yeah, how to gate it in a way that's made accessible for people that need it without releasing it to people who are going to abuse it.
[00:30:40.010] LaJune McMillian: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, sometimes just having things be like, you know, person to person, like, I mean, that's a vibe, you know, to to really think about what it means to really cultivate a community of people who are interested in working in particular ways. I think that that's important and I think that using I guess like those sort of old realities of in-person, doing things together in person, like I just I just think that it's really important especially for work like this because I don't want to just be like it's just me like I want people to know that everything that's like yes like you know I'm curating these spaces and I am sort of like trying to like be a steward of these spaces and I'm trying to also be like a caretaker to this space and I guess like as a caretaker you know I have to make sure that people are using it in the right way and that I'm really like really holding the stories like in a way that cares very deeply so yeah that's been pretty much the vibe.
[00:31:51.647] Kent Bye: Awesome. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality and this type of motion-captured data might be, and what it might be able to enable?
[00:32:02.473] LaJune McMillian: Um, yeah, so, you know, I'm really excited for things to become more, just more immersive. And I guess, like, for me, like, how I use VR or how I envision VR in the future is pretty much like a manifesting tool. So I'm really, like, interested in using these sort of, like, immersive tools to manifest, like, liberated realities. So everything's very, like, vivid with color, and I'm hoping that those realities can then become a real lived reality for everyone.
[00:32:32.057] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader Immersive community?
[00:32:36.179] LaJune McMillian: Yeah, no, I'm just excited to be here and I'm excited to keep making and also just tell people to keep making themselves. And that, yeah, it's okay to dive in and take your time and to just learn things.
[00:32:52.328] Kent Bye: Well, Lasane, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast and unpacking the Black Movement Library and talking a bit about your process and the project that you're working on here. So thank you.
[00:33:00.957] LaJune McMillian: Thank you so much. I had a great time. Thank you.
[00:33:04.754] Kent Bye: So that's LaJanae McMillan. She's a new media artist working across different mediums, focusing on motion capture for VR and is the creator of the Black Movement Library Movement Portraits. So I've learned different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, well, for me, it's just really striking about trying to do this type of database collection of motion capture data that there isn't a lot of representation of black artists and black dancers within existing data sets. And so she wanted to expand it, but not in a way that was just going to freely put it out for anybody to take and use, but trying to do it in a little bit more ethically responsible way of trying to give the additional context and the stories of these individuals who are being captured in these dances. So she's featuring who they are, what their inspirations were, a little bit about their story, and from there, going into more of an Unreal Engine-produced space that you're able to actually see the spatialized version of these motion captures. So for me, this is a really interesting project in terms of capturing different aspects of multimedia. So she had originally, you know, as an iterative process started with the motion capture and she wanted to have a live performance and as a live performance showing the spatialized version that's transmitted into a virtual space. But as they were changing the gear, then she needed to have the introduction to each of these different answers, which is where she. started to do the whole documentary for each of these dancers and then within the VR piece all of that is integrated into the VR piece so that as you are moving from each segment to segment you're Flying through a space where there's these virtual billboarded video panes that are replicating each of the different video interviews you get an introduction to each of these artists and then from there you go into the spatialized version and One of the things I would have liked to have seen was a little bit more variety in terms of the different types of particle effects and other ways that were really tuned to each of these different dancers when I was going through each of the different scenes. But overall I just really appreciated this project, not only in terms of the care and trying to Maintain the proper relational dynamics, but also really interesting content and stories And yeah as you move forward trying to look at these kind of sub symbolic embodied movements that people have what are the ways that they describe it and are there ways to maintain that connection between who that person is, what their inspirations are, and what they have for their meaning, but also if there's ways for other people as they're looking at it, how they start to think about it and make sense of it. And if there's a way to do it in a way that makes it available, in a way that is also in right relationship, not trying to replicate all of these things that are this colonialist extractive mindset that we often default back into as a settler-colonial culture. So that's all I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from listeners like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
