Ikhet (Sound Pyramid) is a 14-channel spatial audio installation that included ButtKicker Haptics, LED tubes with diffractive glasses giving a ghostly, analog Holographic effect, experimental field recordings, and a harsh electronic music track that reflected the artist Ali Santana’s strained emotions throughout the pandemic. I had a chance to chat with Santana to unpack his journey and process in creating this piece. Here’s his description of his immersive installation, which details more of the technology and emotional intention for the piece:
This installation inspired by the ‘Glorious Light’ integrates a multi-channel sound collage with audio-reactive LEDs to create an experience that engages viewers via light, spatial sound, and haptic feedback (vibration). The dynamic lighting which changes color and pattern in sync with the experimental sound piece, immerses the audience in a multi-sensory experience that they will see, hear and feel.
Field recordings made between 2019 and 2022 along with experimentations in analog audio synthesis and hardware samplers were combined to create textures, noise, beats, and tones that reflect the artist’s personal feelings of resilience, anxiety, grief, and frustration, during a period of unprecedented change.
Ali Santana’s description of Ikhet (Sound Pyramid)
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Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] 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 looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So, continuing on my coverage from Infodoc Lab, today's episode is about a sound installation that was called Iqet Sound Pyramid by Ali Santana, an XR immersive installation that has got a lot of elements of immersive spatial design, a whole haptic couch, as well as using these LED tubes and refractive glasses to create these kind of holographic effects. is in this room that had 12 different speakers and a butt-kicker and a subwoofer. Actually, if you listen to some of the other interviews that I've done, you can sometimes hear a low-level bass. That is this experience that was kind of rippling out in this general field. But the actual immersive experience was one of the more viscerally embodied experiences that I had at FADOC Lab. The story element was very loose. It was much more of a vibe and emotion of Ali trying to describe certain periods of his life, especially during the pandemic. But the narrative, well, I'd say it was a little bit more sub-symbolic in a way that it's difficult to walk away and know exactly what the story was about, but it was able to also convey a general feeling and a vibe. And also, the whole embodied and visceral experience of it all was quite impressive, and people were taking lots of social media Videos and photos of it just because it was a very shareable type of experience as well. So That's what covering on today's episode of a system VR podcast So this interview with Ali happened on Tuesday, November 15th 2022 at if a doc lab in Amsterdam, Netherlands So with that let's go ahead and dive right in. Oh
[00:01:57.407] Ali Santana: My name is Ali Santana, and I'm a multidisciplinary artist from Brooklyn, New York. And I think I'm basically a collage artist, to put it simply. And I just like to mix different technologies, different mediums together to think through ideas and curiosities and tell stories.
[00:02:16.823] Kent Bye: Yeah, maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into making this type of art. Sure.
[00:02:21.967] Ali Santana: I come from a family of artists. My mom is a photographer, my father's a filmmaker, and so I was always brought up within the art space. And I think from an early age, it was pretty much normal to express myself or my feelings through art. And so that just became part of my art practice to kind of process emotions. through creativity in order to figure things out. And so over the years, I did that initially with pen and paper and crayon, whatever. And as I got exposed to different technologies, I just found it interesting and empowering to be able to experiment with different mediums to tell stories in different ways.
[00:02:59.320] Kent Bye: Yeah, maybe you could tell me a bit about the project that you have here at DocLab.
[00:03:03.081] Ali Santana: Sure. The project at DocLab is called Eket, Sound Pyramid. This is an XR piece, an extended reality piece, and when making it I wanted viewers or participants to feel something. I also wanted to kind of stray away from screen-based work. I was primarily working with video art and performance in some way, but I wanted to do something different where people could gather together to experience the artwork in the same room, especially coming out of from lockdown and the pandemic and being on Zoom and in front of a screen, I just felt like it was important for people to be in the same room and experience something. And so this artwork is an immersive sound collage done in spatial audio. So it's in a room with an array of speakers kind of surrounding. the viewer and in the center or at the end of the room there is an array of led tubes and those tubes are arranged in the shape of a pyramid and those tubes then react to the sound collage so there's some audio reactivity and the lights and patterns change along with the different sounds and on top of that then there's an haptic experience there's a couch in the center of the room where viewers can sit and the the couch vibrates, basically, to the bass frequencies of the sound cloud. So it's a really immersive experience. On top of that, then there are diffraction glasses, almost like people call them 3D glasses, that bend the light in certain ways to allow different patterns to appear in the lights when you move your head or turn your head around. So it's a lot kind of going on, but it was really fun to make.
[00:04:40.177] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's a seven minute loop and I think I've seen it three or four times now It's it's a really immersive piece and I found myself like I saw it once and then there's gonna do this interview with you and I went back and watched it like three times in a row and I feel like it's a piece that When you're in the couch, it's super immersive in the sense that you have this haptic feedback in your body And then you have the visuals of this pyramid which has like a square at the bottom and then a pyramid so there's eight total and LED tubes to be able to get a little bit more control of the different types and colors of lights in different ways that they're flashing in different patterns But because it's a spatial pyramid in front of you and you have these diffraction like polarizing glasses on It is bending the light in a way that kind of created this Spatialized ghostly holographic effect in a way. So yeah, I could see why you call it XR I think most people who listen this podcast think of XR is like virtual or augmented reality but this is more of a a spatial immersive experience that is extending different aspects of reality. I think especially with the spatialized audio, with a number of different audio channels, maybe that's a good place. Or maybe I'll ask you, where did you start with this piece? Did you start with the audio? Did you start with the visuals? Like, where do you begin on a piece like this?
[00:05:49.046] Ali Santana: So I started this piece, I was a member of New Ink, which is an incubator, an art and technology incubator, that's part of the new museum. I was part of the XR track, the extended reality track. We worked together with Onyx Studios and we had a space where we can go to Onyx to kind of create. And so there was an exhibition over the summer where all the other members of the XR track could present their work that they were working on.
[00:06:13.155] Kent Bye: Is that during Tribeca, or is it?
[00:06:14.536] Ali Santana: Yeah, that was actually during Tribeca that the exhibition went down. And so a lot of other members were doing XR motion capture. I mean, motion capture VR experiences. And I'd never really had experience with that. But I was really interested in the spatial sound element. There was a surround sound, spatial sound room at Onyx. And that's kind of where I spent my time. And so the initial idea for the exhibition was that I was going to create this immersive sound collage. As I started to create it based on field recordings and loops that I was making and experimenting with at home, I realized what was the experience going to be like for people who came in the room to listen to this collage. Were they going to be in the dark? So I started to ask around if there were lights that I could use as part of the installation. And then Onyx mentioned that they had these lights and I looked into them and I saw that they were DMX controllable, meaning that they were programmable. I remember that the VJ software that I use in my live performance stuff has the ability to output to DMX. So it became this whole journey of trying to figure out how to connect the lights and tell the story with the sound. And then from there, like, I was just working in the room and building that project in that sound room and just kind of just adding more and more tech and trying to figure out how I could form this into a project that has some kind of meaning. And so like I had 24 hour access to the space and when everybody kind of went home at the end of the day around six I would kind of stay late and I would crank the volume up the surround system would get really loud and they had the subwoofer in there that was really really powerful. And so the cleaning staff was always like really confused as to what was going on when they come by, but that was like part of the learning process. Like I was really into the vibrations that this subwoofer was making and I was feeling it kind of like directing the story based on these vibrations as well. And, uh, I'd shown it to some other Onyx members and they, you know, had recommended like there's some haptic feedback that you can use to like even make those vibrations stronger. And so it was just kind of this process of experimenting with new technology and kind of adding things piece by piece. The glasses came into play because I originally wanted to use a smoke machine. I wanted to have some kind of fog or some layer in between the eyes and the light in some way. And I thought that smoke could be an interesting way to do that. But because of fire codes or whatever, I wasn't allowed to use a smoke machine in that space. And so I remember seeing on Instagram like an ad for these rave glasses that would diffract light. And so I just ordered a pair just to kind of play around with it and really like the effect that I saw and then started to design the light show around the look of the diffraction glasses. And that's kind of how the piece got built, step by step. But it was really like a learning process and it was really important to be in the space creating. And then the idea for the pyramid just kind of came along, because originally I only had four lights to work with. And I was trying to arrange them in different configurations to see how I felt about the sculptural aspects of it. And eventually I was like, yeah, I think a pyramid is going to be... I like pyramids anyway. I'm really into like ancient technology. And I was really thinking about this trip that I'd made to Egypt in 2014, where I'd visited the Great Pyramid. And I just remember this tour that was talking about all the technology and what the pyramids were used for or what they thought they were used for. And I remember the story about something about pyramids and light. And then I kind of went back to my notes and my pictures and revisited that trip. And then just stumbled upon, just Googled the story about the Iket pyramid and how it's shown brightly. And that just became the theme for the installation and kind of worked around that. So it just kind of came full circle in a way. And it was really... I know it was really a great experience to work on, and I'm really kind of proud of it and happy how it came out.
[00:09:43.808] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think it works really well. And like I said, it's a piece that I can go to and just chill out and vibe out. And the visceral haptic experience of that haptic couch, I think, is really impactful, especially as you're having different rhythms and frequencies of stimulation in the couch. And it's also responding to the music, which also has a different consonance and dissonance cycles. And then the lights are also having different patterns. You have different colors or different strobes or different configurations of the eight different tubes, like which ones are on and which ones are off at different times, creating different sculptural elements that have a spatial quality. And so you have the lights, you have the music that's a spatialized multi-channel mix, and you have the haptics. And so what was your process of having those interact with each other as you were developing it? And if you would start with any one or the other, or if you would change one and see how it fit into the complex of all these other media.
[00:10:35.133] Ali Santana: Yeah, I mean it really started with the sound. The sound was kind of the basis. It was a process of going through these field recordings and I had like maybe 24 hours of recordings initially and was just kind of whittling it down into a shorter experience. We're trying to figure out how to tell a story, an abstract story, through these sounds. And so just a background on the sounds, I've been recording the sounds that I use in the piece since 2019. So like prior to the pandemic and I was just kind of recording day-to-day life and I was at protests and then funerals and then the pandemic happened and I was just experimenting with different techniques and making like noise and expressing myself and feelings through noise and beats and then once I had the main composition down I started to experiment with the lights and once I had the glasses I was really kind of able to see how the lights would interact and I broke down the sound composition into scenes and then made different light patterns for each different set of sounds and made sure that they were audio reactive and just tried to tell some kind of story that took you kind of through space and time in a way to tell the story of the last three years of my life. to me it kind of sounds like this planet's bending and breaking or like astrological things changing and then I don't know there's a lot of transformation I guess and change and then moments of quiet and peace and meditation and I just wanted to have like that kind of up and down feeling because that's the way that I was feeling personally.
[00:11:55.712] Kent Bye: And what was the process of doing the haptics in the couch? What kind of tech are you using to even give those sensations? And how do you start to even give language to the different types of quality of haptic feedback that you're able to provide with that type of system?
[00:12:09.575] Ali Santana: Sure. I initially just started really low tech with a subwoofer that was provided in the room. And I'd crank the bass all the way up. Because that's not something that I can normally do at home. But in this office space where nobody was really at, I was able to do that and experiment with how that bass felt. And then, you know, as I kind of showed the piece to collaborators and other folks on the track, there were people who were like more knowledgeable of just like other technology. And somebody recommended this haptic device called a butt kicker, which is like used in 4D movie theaters that vibrates the seats and it kind of attaches to the bottom of your couch or your chair. And so that was adventurous, but I couldn't get one in time. So we actually started out with something called a sub-pack. It's like a backpack that you wear that simulates like bass responses through vibration. And we kind of tucked that away in the couch in the initial version. And so as the different iterations of the project went on, we just started to kind of like get more powerful haptic feedback and try to see how that felt. And I think that where it's at right now feels really good. I think it's a good balance.
[00:13:09.107] Kent Bye: Because there still is a bass in the room, but you have, in this installation, is it just the butt kicker, or do you also have the sub packs in there as well?
[00:13:15.291] Ali Santana: There's no sub pack, but there's a subwoofer. There's a big subwoofer and the butt kicker in there. And the subwoofer is necessary, because I feel like even though the vibrations give you a certain feel, there's a certain way that the sound vibrates in the space, in the room, in the area, that really changes the quality of the work. I tried it without the subwoofer, just trying to be mindful of neighbors and other people who might be around. And it wasn't the same. It didn't give me the same feeling so it's a combination of having that extra haptic feedback plus the subwoofer that really kind of like Helps immerse the viewer and like I said It's something you can feel that rumble is part of the storytelling in a way and I was just experimenting with like new tools in order to tell Stories, you know and in new ways
[00:14:00.055] Kent Bye: Yeah, how many different speakers are you using in this installation then?
[00:14:02.856] Ali Santana: It's currently 14 different speakers, or well, there's 12 speakers around the room. There are some overhead and some at ear level or eye level in the room. And so the sound kind of goes between. the different areas of the room and moves around and then there's the bass channel which is coming through the subwoofer and then the butt kicker. So there's 14 different channels of sound and the sound collage kind of moves between them and certain elements will appear on like the left side and then appear on the right side and then kind of pan and move around and so I've really had fun working with that spatial element.
[00:14:38.291] Kent Bye: What was the DAW that you used to put together the audio piece?
[00:14:41.273] Ali Santana: Ableton is my DAW of choice, just because I feel like it allows experimentation. I don't often do things the right way, I guess. I tend to kind of just work out of curiosity and piece things together and plug things in, and Ableton is really good for that. And so I was able to just experiment and see how things sounded and felt. And because I was kind of producing the track in the space where it was being exhibited, it sounded exactly how it should sound. I had to make it sound good for somebody else's headphones or car stereo. It was made specifically for that room and that space.
[00:15:15.555] Kent Bye: Yeah, as you talk about this piece being about the last three years of the pandemic, I definitely see there's some turns in the piece that get really harsh sonically and just a real visceral experience when you're in it, but it doesn't have as much of the melodic, nice to hear sound. It does feel very confronting in a lot of ways. And so I'd love for you to maybe break down If you're willing because you say there's a story there, but because there's some audio that can make out some protest sounds But in terms of like piecing together a narrative It's a bit of a puzzle in that sense of there's a lot of symbolic logic that you're using But as I walk out of it, I don't understand the coherent story I have a feeling that I have So I'm wondering if you're willing to share that or if you feel like this is a piece that you just want the audience to Walk away with their own embodied experience from it
[00:15:58.918] Ali Santana: Yeah, the abstraction was intentional. A lot of it was based on my own feeling. And I don't always know the story that I'm trying to tell when I'm making the piece, but it's feeling. And, you know, during 2019 and 2020, I was experimenting with different ways of sound making and kind of expanding my sound practice. And so I was working with a lot of analog synths and my way of working is play. I don't necessarily read the manuals first, I just start to make sounds and see how I can express feeling through turning knobs and pressing buttons and making beats. And so a lot of these sounds were just experimentations and I liked The way a lot of them sound, as chaotic as they were, I felt like it was more like a diary of how I was feeling inside. If I really liked the sound, I'd let that chaos kind of loop for a long time. That was a representation of what I was maybe feeling inside. And some of those really harsh moments and chaotic moments are representative of the change that was going on in the world. All of a sudden, we have this pandemic and lockdown, and we don't know what's coming next. And that was just my representation of the old systems breaking and confusion and not knowing what's coming. but then also kind of moving into moments of peace and there's moments of quiet and like meditative points where I kind of had to realize that things were going to be okay and that I was going to be able to make it through whatever hardships that I was going through. There are moments where you can hear voices and like protests. And those are recordings from my neighborhood in Brooklyn. There's a big protest about the police, like increased police presence in the subways. And that was in 2019 before the pandemic. And I was a part of that protest and found it really powerful to record some of these chants and speaking and talking. And even the police engagement, you know, they were threatening to arrest people at a certain point. I just felt like that really kind of gives it a timestamp, in my opinion. It gives a sense of environment and atmosphere in a way. There's another point where there's some singing and it was at a funeral of a family member. And I just felt like that singing was really powerful. And I recorded it and was experimenting with looping it and everything. But in the end, I wound up layering it with the protest sounds. I just felt like there was a real interesting balance between the two and expressing the way that I felt and so I was like That was a moment of like feeling grief And so there's a lot of different emotion kind of embedded in the piece But I don't really want to spell it out for the viewer I want people to kind of try to understand it for themselves to get their own meaning out of it But there are some little hints in there to give To get some clues as to where the piece might have been made or you can tell from certain things that are said You know what might be going on? But yeah
[00:18:24.424] Kent Bye: During the protest sounds I did notice that all the lights were blue and I did have that association of the police and different ways of using color to either create mood or create other symbolism and so I'd love to hear if you as you create a piece like this if you recognized if you're changing color to say red it's kind of gives this more urgency or alertness and blue being you know in that context being more around the police and then at the end there's kind of a complex of all the different colors kind of in this Slightly modulating way.
[00:18:54.369] Ali Santana: It was kind of a unique structure that was in any other pieces But it was calming as it faded out in the end But I'd love to hear any reflections on your use of color and creating different mood and different emotions Yeah, like I mean it was the same process as maybe creating the sound in a way it was just a matter of sitting through the piece and kind of like playing it back over and over and over and just deciding what colors felt right or like what colors sounded like in a way. So I would be listening to the piece and be like, oh, this feels like red, you know, this feels like blue. It wasn't like advanced color theory in a sense that I was trying to get other folks to understand the meaning of it through color, but more so like how I felt or what I thought was interesting and how I could kind of like change the space and the color, you know, over time to kind of give it a balance feel, I think. And that ending, I just, I didn't want to end it in chaos. I wanted to kind of end it with calm, just as kind of a reminder that things are going to be okay in the end. So that's like a point of resilience. Like, you know, you've gone through all of this so far. We don't know what's next, but it's about kind of taking those experiences and learning from them and knowing that things are going to be okay in a way. And so I just wanted to end it on that before it loops, you know, kind of goes into it again. So it's a cycle and who knows what cycles we're in in life or what we're, what's coming next and what, You know what the next big thing is gonna be, you know And so I just tried to represent that through the different feelings in the room Yeah, I noticed from myself when I saw that I wanted to like Such a visual experience.
[00:20:17.693] Kent Bye: I was like, oh wow I wonder if I could like capture this through my camera and I like put my phone camera up and record a little clip and I saw a lot of other people recording moments from your piece and putting them on instagram and DocLab promoting them on their stories and stuff. And so, yeah, there just seemed to be a moment where you're able to transport people into this feeling, but there is a sort of visual aesthetic to it that can translate pretty well to sort of a quick shot as well for people to kind of share with their other friends. And so I think that's an interesting quality of this piece that has that social shareability quality to it as well.
[00:20:49.148] Ali Santana: Yeah, I loved that. It was a kind of a surprise because that wasn't something that I was making the piece for. That's not something that I expected. But from the point when I initially showed it in New York, I noticed how people were sharing it and kind of like interacting with each other. I noticed that some people would come in the room without the glasses and people who were already experiencing the piece would like make sure that they told the person coming like, you've got to wear the glasses, you've got to sit in this space, you've got to turn your head a certain way. And so there was this interaction. that was involved and a lot of the time when we think about interactivity we think of like high technology and coding and networks but I feel like that person-to-person like kind of social interactivity was really important and I noticed that that was happening in the room and even the way that people were sharing the images everybody Shares it differently and it's like the angles that they choose some people are looking through Putting the glasses in front of their phone to kind of capture the optical illusion some people are moving their phone To the rhythm and so I've been really entertained by the way that people are experiencing and sharing the piece Because it's all unique and it's actually helping me to see the piece in a new way And so I've kind of just been collecting those videos and asking folks to send them to me Or tag me in them just so I can see how everybody else is experiencing it. But yeah, I
[00:21:58.882] Kent Bye: Awesome. Yeah. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of these different types of extended reality might be and what they might be able to enable?
[00:22:08.274] Ali Santana: I mean, I mentioned this before. I wanted to make something that people felt and just different, felt together. Virtual reality, for me, it seems to be more of a singular experience and kind of takes you out of the real world, but I wanted to create something different. Maybe I just haven't figured out how to express myself through virtual reality yet, but I'm just very curious about new technology and what's coming and how new tech can allow us to feel differently or to do things differently or to tell stories differently or to be together differently. I just love to experiment and to play, you know, and any opportunity I can do to do that is something I'm looking forward to. And so I really like the idea of making immersive pieces and sculptural pieces that deal with space. And I think because there's been so much like emphasis on the metaverse and going into these virtual worlds, I've kind of felt myself going the opposite way and wanting to make more in-person experiences that build community because I think that that's really important. I just feel the power and seeing people face-to-face and kind of communicating face-to-face. And, you know, even in terms of communication, sometimes it's just the energy of being in the room with other people that's important. You know, even if there's no words spoken, it's just that shared experience. So I want to make more pieces like that.
[00:23:19.373] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, this is one of my favorite pieces at the fest just in terms of the immersive quality and also the multi-layered aspect of it because the visuals are very dominant as the first thing that's on top of mind that I'm processing and then the visceral nature of the embodied haptic experiences on the couch and then there's all these layers of the sound design that you have that as I go through again and again I keep hearing more things that I didn't catch the first time because you know maybe these other senses were a little bit more dominant for my primary experience, but it's a Multilayered piece that I feel like as a recommendation for folks. I've been saying okay. Definitely go check this out. It's easy to see it's a quick immersive satisfying experience and yeah, I just really enjoyed it and it's a piece that I can come back to and just Change my mood in a way that almost like a reset So it's a nice embodied experience. That is kind of a cleansing of the palate as it were So but yeah, I just really enjoyed the piece and thanks for joining me on the podcast to help break it all down So, thank you
[00:24:10.693] Ali Santana: Yeah, thank you so much for talking to me about this and hearing your perspective and how you experienced it because that's really important to me. And yeah, thank you for sharing it and letting other people know about it. It's really something that I'm proud of and that I look forward to kind of sharing more. But yeah, thanks.
[00:24:26.556] Kent Bye: So that was Ali Santana. He's a multidisciplinary artist from Brooklyn, New York, and he had a piece there at Ifadoc Lab called Iket, The Sound Pyramid. So I have a number of takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, Well, I really enjoyed this piece. Just the whole visceral embodied experience of sitting on a couch with a butt kicker and a subwoofer and the whole immersive sound installation and the sound pyramid. And just to see all the different variations of different colors, different patterns, and you're wearing these diffractive glasses and it's giving you this kind of like spatialized holographic effect because you have this 3D pyramid that's in front of you with these different LED tubes and it's doing all these different light patterns. And each of the different light patterns are creating these different refracted experiences that as you're seeing it through these glasses that are diffusing it, it kind of looks like this ghostly holographic effect, which you can take your camera and start to record it and start to capture different elements, which ended up being a whole social media component that people were wanting to share different aspects of this experience. So in talking to Ali in terms of what this was about, it sounds like he's reflecting on the last three years of the pandemic and there's some more harsh elements and there's moments where the lights get all blue and he's talking about different aspects of police violence and the different protests that were going on. And a lot of it is more, I'd say, of an ambient sound design, where you kind of get these echoes of the sense of it's a protest, but he's overlaying other aspects of, say, music from a funeral, which, you know, you don't have much context that that's a personal symbol, but for him, he kind of remembers that moment that he's capturing. He's taking all these components of the sound design and overlaying it on top of this more synthesized music that is playing in this loop. And yeah, just sitting on the couch with the butt kicker and having all those haptic experiences. It's difficult to really describe, but it is quite relaxing and immersive as he has all these multi-sensory things that are happening all at the same time. So yeah, I think this is a piece that I actually was recommending a lot of people just to go see because it was an installation piece and it was something that was surprisingly immersive for how kind of analog most of the stuff on the surface is. So there's obviously a lot of integrations of being able to control the light patterns with the music. But yeah, on the whole, it doesn't have a lot of virtually muted environments. It's all working with this physical installation and doing this immersive sound installation. So, yeah, really great piece by Ali and really happy to be able to have a chance to kind of unpack it a little bit and just to talk about his own process. And again, there's this connection to the Onyx Studios that's in New York City and Onassis of helping to provide a lot of this type of technologies for Ali to have access to and to be able to stay after hours and start to play around with some of these different music installations that ended up here at IFA Duck Lab. 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 people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you could become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.