The Ford Foundation’s JustFilms program with supplemental support from the Sundance Institute commissioned Kamal Sinclair to do an intensive research project called “Making a New Reality.” She looked at a number of questions including: “What is emerging media? What are the concerns related to equality and equity in emerging media? What interventions can mitigate inequality and inequity in emerging media?” She published a series of articles on Immersed between November 2017 and May 2018 that can be seen here in this summary.
She covered topics such as “The High Stakes of Limited Inclusion,” “Silos, Groupthink and Knowledge Ghettos,” and “Design for Justice, Well-Being, and Prosperity.” She also goes into “Categories of Emerging Media” as well as the challenges, interventions, and a framework for action.
At Sundance 2019, I had a chance to talk to Kamal Sinclair, who at the time was the Director of Sundance’s New Frontier Lab Programs. We talk about the role of independent film festivals to support underrepresented minorities, the evolution of Traveling While Black, some of her work towards diversity, inclusion, equity, and equality in emerging media, and the challenges around privacy and ethics.
She shared a story of Sundance founder Robert Redford telling her and Shari Frilot that he’s got many scars and bruises from 40 years in independent film in trying to push back market forces long enough for artists to find their voices and their creativity. He said that the challenge for emerging media is that you don’t have to just face these pressures from the film industry, but also the technology industry and commerce itself. He predicted a long and hard journey for independent artists to be able to create sustainable living, but that if there is action taken earlier in the development of the industry, then it’ll be easier for underrepresented voices to find representation.
We also have an intense discussion about Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s artwork of using found DNA to recreate people’s faces. Sinclair says that Dewey-Hagborg’s that we’re entering a new phase of post-privacy, and I was really resistant to this as an underlying premise. But Sinclair said that “artists interrogate the world around us so that we can define what we want to be in that future.” So there is a provocation embedded into these types of art projects that cause us to reflect on our technological trajectory, and how to organize the required ethical frameworks to respond to it. This conversation was certainly a catalyst for me to continue to do some foundational work in different XR ethical frameworks to help make sense of the landscape of moral dilemmas that come up in emerging technology. See the following thread for a culmination of some of those interviews, panel discussions, keynotes, and ultimately an XR Ethics Manifesto.
1/ THREAD featuring 13 new Voices of VR podcast episodes focusing on XR Ethics & Privacy.
It features panel discussions, talks, & interviews with leaders in the immersive industry.
This 30min XR Ethics Manifesto talk synthesizes my ethical framework for XRhttps://t.co/WEFRgHppXB— Kent Bye (Voices of VR) (@kentbye) November 5, 2019
Sinclair also comes from a performance background, and so she had some really fascinating closing thoughts around how emerging technologies will start to integrate more and more aspects of live performance, theater, the visceral power of real-time, ephemeral moments, the power of ritual and the sacred, and the uncovering the ghost of place.
There’s a lot more of Sinclair’s Making a New Reality research that we did not get a chance to dive into here. We merely had a chance to skim the surface, but I’d encourage you to take a look at the summary article, which links off to the different essays and reflections. Sinclair is now the executive director of Guild of Future Architects, which is a continuation of this intersectional work to become “a home, refuge and resource for people collaboratively shaping a kind, just, inclusive, and prosperous world.”
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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. So at the end of my journey of Sundance 2019, a couple years ago, I had a chance to catch up with Kamal Sinclair, who at that time was the director of the New Frontier Lab Programs So she was involved with helping to fund and support and do these different residency programs. Lots of different ways of supporting a wide variety of different artists with a strong focus of trying to diversify the different types of independent voices that were using emerging technologies to be able to tell stories. So Kamal actually was contracted out by the Ford Foundation to do this whole research project of making a new reality. And she did over 100 interviews and was really looking at how to make emerging technologies more equitable, just, and accessible to a wide variety of different people. So she actually wrote up a whole report that's on makinganewreality.org, and I talked to her a little bit about that, as well as some of her future projects with the Future of Culture initiative that she's working at Sundance. And since the recording of this interview, she's actually left Sundance and now is the executive director of the Guild of Future Architects, but still looking at broadly how to create more opportunities for more diverse voices to participate within emerging technologies. So, that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Wastes of VR podcast. So, this interview with Kamal happened on Wednesday, January 30th, 2019, at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. So, with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:46.232] Kamal Sinclair: My name is Kamal Sinclair, and I'm the director of the New Frontier Programs at the Sundance Institute. And I've been in this field since 2009, so it's 10 years. My main focus has been helping to support artists from concept to launch with a consortium of support, whether it be coming to our labs and having kind of in-depth support on story and story design and producing strategies, or if it's a residency where we're putting them. into resource-rich environments to kind of see what's happening in terms of technology, in terms of science, in terms of just access to resources that they might not have as an independent artist, to start seeding how they're thinking about how to make story with those kinds of tools or technologies to plain old-fashioned grants and, you know, ongoing strategic support. So that's my role.
[00:02:37.267] Kent Bye: Yeah, I was talking to Ruthie, and she was giving me a bit of a history of the labs. But also, Traveling While Black is an interesting use case, because it traces the beginning of a new part of the program. And then it's debuting here at the 2019 version of New Frontiers. So maybe you could trace the evolution of a project like Traveling While Black through the course of the history, just to give us a sense of how it fits into the overall history of these programs that you've been running.
[00:03:01.685] Kamal Sinclair: That's a great point. Traveling While Black is a special, dear to all of our hearts because we've been working with it. A lot of our peer organizations, we've kind of as a consortium been supporting that project since it came to our lab in 2012, but I believe Tribeca even supported it in 2011 with a grant. And I think it's one of my favorite cases in terms of a traditional filmmaker taking the leap into bringing the intuition or the craft of story that comes from traditional medium into an emerging medium. But it was also, I think, a case of, well, one, Roger Ross Williams was just so incredibly busy with an incredibly rich career that it was kind of a marker of how the technology was changing so fast that every time he came back to having a moment to actually focus on it, he was like, Oh! I mean it didn't, it wasn't, VR wasn't even a part of the component when it came to the lab. It was looking at installation and interactivity and games back then. So it's interesting to watch this thing that was near and dear to his heart, the story of the Green Book, evolve in concept. as the emerging media field itself started to gain different kinds of capacity in terms of story. And then to settle with Felix and Paul, who really have been committed to 360 cinema since the beginning of this wave of innovation. He found an affinity with them that I think really works, but didn't get stuck in just 360 capture, but also was playing with dementiality that could be found within a 360 film.
[00:04:34.542] Kent Bye: What is the mission of the program that you're running? Just to give me a sense of what your goals and intentions are.
[00:04:40.547] Kamal Sinclair: Sure. Well, we like to say that we try to be the R&D program for storytelling. And this is something that comes back from Redford early days. The first program of Sundance was The Labs. And he wanted to create a space just for artists to come together to create a community of generosity with their expertise and kind of coming together to help independent voices tell their stories. And the festival came as he found that they're in the old studio system around Hollywood. It was just, there was no place for those stories to go at first. So the festivals like Sundance became that home that really was where the birth of independent cinema kind of had a moment, a rebirth I would say, because in the early days obviously we had independence as well. And I think that ethos is It was kind of a powerful moment that Shari and I had with him around the 10-year anniversary a couple of years ago. Shari was presenting on her vision for the 10-year anniversary, and I was there supporting her and talking about the work we've been doing. And he had this moment at a board meeting where he looked across this very long table full of all of our incredible board members, and he said, you know, I have a lot of scars and bruises from 40 years in independent film, trying to push back market forces long enough for the artists to find their voice and to find their creativity. And he said, and that was just the film industry. He said, you guys have to hold the heart of this institution against not only the film industry, but technology and commerce itself. And he said, you just have to be prepared to hold the heart of this institution in the wake of that. And so I think that that's been a mission for New Frontier. Shari certainly is one of the fiercest protectors of independent voices in her 20-year career with Sundance. So we try to create that safe space for craziness to happen and to not have to ask the question, is there a market? Is there a business model? Even though that's important. And I deeply, deeply respect and thank my friends in the field that are working vehemently to create sustainability for this stuff, to create audience. We want this to get to audience. But we see ourselves as just earlier in the process where you can play and see there's a there there before it starts to have to go to market.
[00:06:50.046] Kent Bye: That quote really hit me when he said that. I really feel that. Just because there are so many forces that are happening in the technology. For me, I try to find those stories and to amplify them. But it reminds me of an interview I did about a woman who was a media historian talking about the cinema of attractions and how the very early days of film, there was a lot of experimentation. It was like this real avant-garde. And people were really trying to find out what this medium could do, what the language was. Still just a wild experiment. And then she told me that eventually Edison set down the rules and standardization and that was the commercialization of the film industry that happened. I kind of have this split between the commercialization of the film industry and then the avant-garde, what I guess we would call now the independent. So we have this split between doing the work in order to make money and to serve an audience versus doing work in order to actually tell your story and to really communicate and to really facilitate the cultivation of community. And it feels like those can be two completely opposite intentions. And while we're swimming in a sea of commercialization that is a little vapid or lacking of that deeper heart or that connectivity to what is actually happening in the world. And I think that disconnect in some ways is In part, why I think VR hasn't necessarily taken off like everybody wanted it to. I think there's other reasons as well. But I think a part of it is, how is the content actually resonating with people on a deep, deep level? And I think that watching Traveling on Black, for me, it feels like this is one of the first pieces that I can point to and see and say, This is an experience that I think is going to get out there and it's going to resonate with people and it's going to facilitate this mass movement of people coming together and wanting to share their own stories after watching it. And so it feels like it's this distributed truth and reconciliation commission and community building type of experience that is just creating a context of shared experience that allows participants to share their deepest truths and tell their story and to have each other bear witness and it's like a modeling of community. And it's like that, as a vision, is what we need, is this hyper-local, going back to grassroots, people getting together, sharing these VR experiences. Preferably, you have a dozen headsets. Everybody watches at the same time. You come out, and then you have a discussion. That is what I have in my mind, is where this could go, and that that type of approach is going to help this medium grow way more than dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into marketing.
[00:09:23.948] Kamal Sinclair: You know, one, I'm just so happy that that piece resonated with you like that. That's huge. And I will definitely be echoing your sentiments back to Roger Ross Williams and Felix and Paul if you haven't already done so.
[00:09:35.466] Kent Bye: Yeah, I did talk to Roger.
[00:09:36.848] Kamal Sinclair: Oh, good, good, good, good. I think that there was a bit of a challenge with this second wave of VR innovation that, you know, you had... I actually did an interview with a venture capitalist, Chris Hollenbeck, who was one of the first or the first investor in Telltale Games back in the day, which was an investment in Story that paid dividends in terms of, I mean, that's one of those companies that has approached gaming through story in a really incredible way and has created these landmark approaches to story in gaming. And he said that his peers in the field, in terms of venture capital, were very fearful of touching content. He said they wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole because they got burned in the free content. cycles that happened over the last 20 years with content and that he thought that was a mistake because and they got really excited. He said they got really excited when the hardware innovations were coming because there was a solid and clear revenue threshold there. And I think that we've just had this challenge between the investment in the hardware, even the content companies that were getting big investments were really getting investments for their hardware innovations that were coming to try to realize their content visions. And I think that part of the challenge was that The content, I remember speaking with somebody who is a major thought leader in Silicon Valley, and he said, oh, the storytellers failed to figure out how to tell story in immersive media, particularly VR. And I said, oh, well, I can definitely, the majority of stuff that I see out there seems pretty surface and demo-y and didn't feel fully baked. I said, but have you seen, and I named 10 projects that I felt had hit some level of compelling story narrative if not experience that just was rich and he hadn't heard of a single one of them. And so I think there was a bit of a disconnect between what was happening in these independent kind of film festival spaces and what was happening in terms of market. I know there were some bridges between those like Yelena, Raczynski over Oculus and things like that, but it was I think that that was part of the challenge and I also think the other major challenge is the democratization of the tools because I always think about I think we're at a moment where we need our what I'm calling the two turntables and a microphone moment around these mediums where kids are playing in their garage with it and we had that I mean the early DIY days of VR I don't want to take and there was some incredible stuff that was coming out of that moment, but I think I think about independent film now and people have their DSLR, their Final Cut Pro, and they're doing it on their Macs and they're able to start making a lot of content. And it's not just making the content, it's seeing the content. A lot of the people that I know would be part of counterculture and subcultures that would start taking this and tricking it and flipping it and telling things that makes really a lot of sense to their niche. communities, which is audience, they don't even know what the possibilities are. They haven't even seen it. So that's a major issue, I think, in terms of developing a cultural movement around these mediums and having organic cultural production. You know, I think about hip-hop becoming a $300 billion industry in the 90s or early 2000s, but in, you know, 69, 71, where was it, you know? And so I'm looking forward to initiatives like, you know, I know that there's a cohort of institutions in Baltimore that are looking not only to create almost like a YouTube space style production facilities for citizens of Baltimore, but they're also creating gallery and cinema spaces year round so that people can start being inspired and seeing, getting access and building on what has been percolating in this early innovator community. And they're just going to take it to places that we're not, I can't even imagine right now.
[00:13:24.199] Kent Bye: Well, you got some support and funding to be able to do this whole exploration into making a new reality. So maybe you could give me a little bit of a back story and context of what that project was and what that was about.
[00:13:34.958] Kamal Sinclair: Sure. The Ford Foundation, particularly the Just Films program, which Kara Mertes runs, she used to be at Sundance. When I started Sundance, she was still running the head of the documentary film program. So we were already in conversation. She actually was one of the first people to be on the very first New Frontier Lab that ever existed in 2011. She was a part of the leadership that invited my project to come to it as one of the inaugural fellows. So we have a deep relationship in terms of being in conversation around equality and justice as it relates to these new mediums. And about, gosh, it's like three years ago now, she pulled me aside at the festival and she said, you know, I've been listening to you talk about some of the insights you're seeing in these small conversations and you're very passionate about it. You're seeing some things that maybe, can I commission you just to take a year to really dive in and compile all that thinking and talk to your peers in the field and others in the field and see how can we intervened to ensure that this next phase of media innovation is considering the values of equality fundamentally. And this is what was really crazy. Talk about another moment like what we had with Redford in that boardroom. She said, when television was an emerging medium, It was in the halls of Ford that they noticed that it was all commercial. There was no public space for public media and media for the democracy and all of that. And so it was in the halls of Ford that they decided to intervene and create the seed funding for ITVS and PBS. And so public television in the United States was founded in a few conversations happening in the halls of Ford. mid last century she said but what public television in this country has become and and has given to our society we were 25 years too late and all we got was PBS and not that that's a I mean we adore PBS but she started to give me the history of public media in other countries and the ways that they invested in very different ways and Like in Canada, they taxed every single television set to create funding for public, you know, spaces in television. And the same, similar kinds of strategies in the UK. And she said, we don't want to be 25 years too late in emerging media. And you know, with the rapid nature of emerging media, you could be a year or two late and have missed the boat on some opportunities. So that was also kind of a big thing that she laid in my lap. She said, I would love you to ask and talk and percolate ideas about how we can intervene and create public space in these mediums early on. And that was a hard question for people to answer as I went around the field. I mean, I talked to people like Locke Dow at the National Film Board of Canada, and this is pre-Cambridge Analytica, but still in the rumblings of all of the kind of fake news and all that was coming out. And he said in Canada, we're like, do we make our own Facebook, a public Facebook? Do we try to do that? Would that be bonkers? Perhaps that would be bonkers as a way to integrate with the commercial platforms where audiences and where public is gathering in these commercial platforms. and work with them on policies for creating access and public media kind of value systems. It was just like so wild. But one paradigm that came in was that, you know, in the 90s when the internet was, you know, starting to come, they had like a mission. The public good activists were just wanting to get access to the internet, you know, and we're still on that struggle globally. And the UN has made it a human right, and it's still not something that we all have access to. So that was like, you know, Web 1.0. right now I would say that in some, I mean this is very arguable, these really broad web 1, 2, 3, 4.0, but let's just bear with me for, I'm using one particular thought leader's framing, and 2.0 would say is now is this kind of where we're kind of in the wake of What does it mean to have safe platforms on the web? And what does it mean your data to be safe? And what is public about the platforms? Especially when you really look behind the numbers of all the platforms that are all really consolidated under a few, a very few companies. What does that mean? So we're still wrestling with those two, trying to find equality or justice or equity or public space in those two paradigms. Now we have Web 3.0 that is now coming to market, and that is, in some people's definition, the immersive web, some people's definition, the distributed web, the decentralized web, the Internet of Things, where you have Google Home, you have Alexa, you have these kind of bots and AIs, you have smart objects, you have wearables. even embeddables that are starting to change the environments around us. And now you're wrestling with what does that mean for equality, justice, and equity. Josh Breitbart at the New York City Mayor's Office, he's trying to figure out things like can he create data sovereignty by zip code in New York City just so that people have some sense of control over their own data. So that's Web 3.0. We don't know what the heck, we really don't know what to do with that. We don't even know what to do with 1 and 2. So now we are also at the very beginning and I just got a conversation with, I mean I had an experience with Micah from Magic Leap today of what some are defining as Web 4.0, which is the ultra-intelligent agent. And when you think about the billions of terabytes of data that are going to be generated from the Internet of Things alone, where you don't even have to be on a device and your body is being tracked, like there's all these facial recognition, all these distributed ways of data being captured and aggregated constantly. I can't even keep up with my inbox right now. So when all that data comes into the ecosystem or is coming into the ecosystem, I can't access it by any means through a personal AI. So now what does that indicate for, especially when you think about biased algorithms and missing data sets? So you can see, that's just one slice of this work that we've been doing with Making a New Reality. I basically asked people three questions. What is emerging media? So we could get a kind of scope about how to define it now, which is always a dynamic question. And what are the concerns you have in terms of equality? And then for every concern you have, I asked them to give me an imagination of at least one mitigating intervention. And so I tried to do my best to synthesize all that into 180 pages.
[00:19:49.931] Kent Bye: Yeah. Wow, yeah. Well, as you were speaking, a couple of thoughts come to mind. Just to go backwards and talk about one of the concerns I have in terms of justice is this idea of privacy and self-sovereign identity and ownership of data. But also, I was just recently at the American Philosophical Association, and the founder of the philosophy of privacy, Dr. Anita Allen, said, we do not have a comprehensive framework for privacy philosophically. So in the absence of that, it's been left up to the companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and all of these in terms of services, and we've mortgaged our privacy in order to have this access to free services. So there's a bit of, I'd say, an unlinkable connection between the economic models of surveillance capitalism, which most of the major companies have adopted, and the interest of privacy and self-sovereign identity. And because there's an opposition there, we really need to come up with a completely new model for capitalism in terms of how these companies are going to sustain themselves. And so I've really been thinking about this. For me, personally, I do a Patreon model where I have my listeners support me. There's some companies like Spotify and Netflix and to some extent Amazon and Hulu. There are these subscription services where people find that it's valuable enough for them to pay a certain amount of money and they don't have to own the experience. They just have access to it. So as long as they have access to the experiences, then they don't need to own it. They just need to have the direct experience of it and then they're fine to just sort of let it go. They don't need to sort of put it on their bookshelf. So we're moving from the information age to the experiential age. And so with that, though, there's a bit of the changing of the business models. But there's a challenge in which, like, how do you fund? And I went to the Decentralized Web Conference, and I was having this debate with Vint Cerf, one of the co-founders of the internet. And I was like, hey, Vint, maybe you at Google should stop doing this surveillance capitalist thing. And he's like, well, if you were to give access to all the world's information and knowledge for free to everybody, how would you fund that? And I think that there's no answer to that that anybody has come up with that is able to actually come up with a different solution. Whether it's subscription models or government funding, I don't know what it's going to end up being, but the lack of having that answer is putting the entire culture into this ethical and moral crisis time and time again for this unknown ethical threshold for what should be public, what should be private. I think we've gone way past the boundaries as to what those thresholds should be. We've gone too far. So now that we've transgressed those boundaries, maybe it'll be easier to define that. But from a philosophical perspective, we don't have a comprehensive model of the human experience. So because of that, we can't say what should be public and what should be private. So, in the absence of some sort of good enough framework, we're kind of left with using our own moral intuitions and with this widely varying range of morality that we have in our society today, it becomes a deeper issue. So, these are some of the issues that I've been thinking a lot about.
[00:22:39.629] Kamal Sinclair: Okay, well, I've got, I mean, just buzz, buzz, buzz in my head, right? Two things I want to throw at you. been wrestling with and I'm so happy to be in conversation with you about this. So we're looking at an initiative called the Future of Culture Initiative at Sundance and it's very early I shouldn't be talking about it but you know we're looking at partnering with Stanford University just to aggregate or curate an ongoing dynamic group of people that are coming from business, science, technology, commerce. and the arts and humanities and philosophies to consider not just what the technology capabilities are, the new capacities are, but also what is the lived experience of a person in the future of culture from these ecosystems and innovations. And I think about mass media as a major demarcation in the change of human communication and how Things like being able to read the Bible for your own self was revolutionary with print. How seeing Vietnam from your living room in the United States was a revolutionary sense of relationship to war and warfare. Seeing Earth from space for the first time as a global community changed and completely, I mean, you really think about what we understood reality to be 500 years ago. I'm reading a lot of historical fiction right now. I'm just like, oh my God, like these are revolutionary These technologies allowed us to have a revolutionary break in our sense of reality. And the artists showed up to try to make meaning out of that, and to try to make sense of all that. And you had things like post-modernism, where everything's random, there's no such thing as truth anymore, when so many different kinds of breaks to those old, kind of more rigid containers around reality got disrupted. So the artists are now trying to show up again to figure out what the heck to do about these disruptions to what is reality. And when it comes to privacy alone, just that piece alone, if you look at Heather Dewey Hagborg's work, who is a biohacker and one of the artists that came through our lab, she is basically pushing them through her work. There's a huge question if we're beyond privacy, if we're post-privacy as a humanity. Because she went around New York City, collected cigarette butts, gum, hair, and fingernails, not only was able to analyze those strangers' ancestry and their health, but she was able to use the FBI DNA profiling system to 3D print their faces. And then you think about with facial recognition technology or heat mapping and all of these things. And then she bought a vial of saliva online with her last project, T3511, and was able to not only break through and find the individual who was promised privacy by the company that he sold his saliva to, she found his Facebook page, she went to his house, and she's growing his tissue and cloning him right now. So the idea of are we post-privacy, and if we are post-privacy because every drink we take at a restaurant leaves traces of our DNA, every time something just happens to fall out of our hair and falls on the floor of a subway, we are now shedding the most intimate aspects of our privacy, not just our social behavior on a digital platform, our very health, you know, so that is something that we have to contend with as artists, as people in the humanities and the philosophies to say if we really are post-privacy because of the technology we have, we, you know, they just announced an advancement where now they can create babies out of DNA that have three biological parents. I mean this is disrupting our sense of reality and the artists are trying to show up to understand what does that mean and how do we as a humanity want to create social contracts around that. to preserve, even if we don't have actual privacy, what does that mean about how we're going to behave socially in social contracts and political contracts and legal contracts to at least maintain the benefits of privacy, even if it's not real?
[00:26:29.528] Kent Bye: Well, so I have a lot of thoughts. First of all, I don't think we're post-privacy. What I think was happening is that these technological innovations, whether it be VR, AR, AI, and any of the technology, they are creating these ethical and moral dilemmas that means that we have to have a paradigm shift in terms of how we relate to our privacy. I think that privacy is fundamentally important, that we have to have it in order to speak freely and in order to function as a society. So I don't even like to say post-privacy.
[00:26:58.921] Kamal Sinclair: That's what I'm saying like I I I mean
[00:27:02.057] Kent Bye: I don't like that term.
[00:27:02.857] Kamal Sinclair: I work for an independent cultural organization. Independence and freedom and voice and liberty and privacy are fundamental to my whole framework and world view. But I have to contend with the fact that if I take a sip at a restaurant, even though I want to maintain privacy, some random person, she's not even a scientist. She goes to a local biohacker lab in Brooklyn. She can do this. She can find out more about me than I know about myself. When I say post-privacy, I'm not advocating for post-privacy in any way, shape, or form, but I'm saying we do have to contend with those advancements to try to find ways to maintain what is freedom, what is privacy, what is rights in that paradigm.
[00:27:44.976] Kent Bye: I just don't like the term because it's future dreaming the wrong thing because we don't want to think that we're beyond it.
[00:27:49.439] Kamal Sinclair: It's not dreaming. It's now.
[00:27:51.820] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, okay.
[00:27:53.181] Kamal Sinclair: I mean, honey, I'm with you. Philosophically, that is the most scary term in the world, but it's what's happening right now. She found the man's house.
[00:28:03.627] Kent Bye: Just semantically, it tells me that I should give up and I shouldn't care about it because we're beyond it.
[00:28:08.216] Kamal Sinclair: Absolutely not. But my point is that the reality is that your privacy is very fragile. It depends on who can pick up your hair and go to a lab in Brooklyn for free and analyze your DNA. Now, that's the reality. What does that mean in terms of how we're going to respond to that culturally? How are we going to respond to that morally? How are we going to respond to that philosophically? How are we going to respond to that legally? This is what artists do. They interrogate. what is around us so that we can define who we want to be in that future and that is that's that's critical because we can't leave it up to just rugged individualistic pure free market capitalism even though I'm not saying I don't have great respect for what comes in terms of entrepreneurship and all those things but we do need to have a critical discourse around this because I don't give up I don't believe that we're going to a dystopia I really believe that we're actually set up, if we can find the right value systems, I think that we're actually closer to, if we can, and it's a very big if, I believe that if we do find the right value systems as a society, global society, I believe that we could be on the precipice of a level of enlightenment in the arts and the sciences and the culture. and in the philosophies that has never been seen by humanity. And not a utopia. I'm not a utopian peddler in any way, shape, or form. But I think about Scott Bonatti Fregnito, who's a machinima artist and a computer scientist. And when we were talking about the future of work and all of the narratives around that, you know, kind of 79% of the current work being displaced by automation. And she said, look, I come from a culture where my tech, you heard me say this before, but where my technological culture was rapid iteration, fast fill, bottom line, ROI. My Mohawk culture, Iroquois Mohawk culture is time in nature, time with family, time in community, and creativity as equal and if not even more valuable than the productivity of work for survival and for the functioning of society. She's like, if AI disrupts our notion of work, then maybe we can find balance with those value systems. So that to me is encouraging. So I definitely just want to be clear that I'm not a dystopia peddler in any way or a utopia peddler. I'm a let's create the conditions for a really incredible discourse.
[00:30:28.576] Kent Bye: Well, I guess I like the term because it gets me activated and it's from a Hegelian dialectic. There's a thesis antithesis and it's sort of like an opposite where I know that that's not where we need to be. We need to sort of synthesize and create a world where we actually have a new paradigm that allows for a new form of privacy. And I think that once Lessig's work in terms of the way he talks about how there's four dials to kind of shift the culture, he says there's the technology and the code of essentially the communication systems that we have to be able to communicate with each other and all the architectures in which they create these social dynamics. There's the market and the economics of the individual choices that people are making. There's the laws that are set by the culture that is, at this point, hijacked by corporations who are setting the laws to benefit themselves, and so that's a bit of a problem. And there's also the culture, which is being able to educate people to change their behaviors of how they operate. Now, the challenging thing with all of these is that they're collective, they're sociological. It's very difficult to shift and drive them because they're essentially a bunch of individual decisions by everybody. So, how to have cultural impact, I think, is one of the biggest challenges for how to navigate this complex, non-linear system of markets and culture and walls that are on the books, as well as the technological code. In some ways, the market is a way that people can make choices. If everybody decided culturally to say, we're no longer going to support the practices of these companies that we think are unethical and immoral. We're going to just opt out. I think that then has a market effect that then changes the dynamics of the whole situation. So I think that's what I'm seeing right now is that right now we're having to reevaluate our ethical and moral frameworks around privacy and ethics and technology. There's been all these transgressions and there's like a big reset that we have to do. And whether it's through the laws, whether it's through culture, whether it's through the market, or whether it's through the technological systems that we're creating, at all levels, they have to have a new paradigm. And for me, that's part of the reason why I went to a philosophy conference to talk to philosophers is because I see at the heart, it's like this reductive materialistic obsession with quantification of numbers and if it doesn't get turned into a number then it doesn't exist type of mentality that we have in our culture and then we have to move into something more of like Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy and looking at things in terms of ecosystems and relationships and processes that are unfolding and that I try to cover the VR industry as an ecosystem. So I have individual conversations and then that is related to a larger dynamic but you get a sense of the larger whole by having a little microcosm of each individual part and then through each conversation like this you have some sort of fractal representation of the larger knowledge and issues and open questions and things that need to change and that as people listen then they're able to listen with their own body and see how they want to participate in this larger community that we're building. So, to me, I'm trying to embody my own philosophy that is more process philosophy and ecosystem driven, but I feel like that every single dimension from philosophy to science to the way that the culture is operating, that these emerging technologies are actually kind of forcing upon us these ethical and moral crises because it's like an archetypal reflection of these ways that we have to evolve as a culture. and to evolve our values and to evolve as humanity, to evolve our consciousness and how we operate with each other. So to me, all of these technologies are just a catalyst for us to reflect upon ourselves and to make these decisions that we could operate together. So that's why I don't like post-privacy, because it implies that we can't do that, which I think we can.
[00:34:01.167] Kamal Sinclair: I think we can too, for sure. So I love Lauren McCarthy's point of view about, you know, especially around artificial intelligence, but she thinks technology is a reflection of ourselves. And in some ways she sees this as an opportunity for diagnostics. And it's interesting because I have seen with some of the clear challenges that have come from seeing how some aspects of our myopic designs over the last 20 years have kind of perpetuated. Now we're saying, oh shoot, this has been a blind spot, whether it be something that was malicious or something that was just a pure blind spot. It's created a certain dynamic that we had unintended consequences. I think we had good fortune of having Tim Berners-Lee here a couple of years ago, and it was amazing to hear him reflect on a little bit kind of the Oppenheimer reflection, where he was like, oh, you know, when you were making in a certain optimism, and when you think about, you know, the early days of the internet and the demarketization of media, the demarketization of information, and the many, you know, kind of instances that, like I was in the Gambia in 1999, with a former IBM exec that decided to retire in The Gambia, which was, I mean, a country that's, due to the lines of, like, British colonial lines versus the French in Senegal, like, had very little resources and very, it was one of the poorest countries I'd ever visited in my life, and he decided to go and retire there, African American executive, and just set up shop, I mean, there was no electricity 16 hours, you know, there's only electricity 16 hours a day, and he sets up shop with a giant computer lab, in the middle of the Gambia. And this is in 99, shortly after the Sierra Leone War. And at the time, I was there, one of my hosts, I was there with a cohort of African-American theater makers from New York. One of my hosts was a 25-year-old man named Lamin. who didn't know that human beings could live past 55 years old. He didn't even know that was a possibility because the life expectancy was that. And so, it was just so, you know, didn't know what a microwave was, didn't have, it was just really interesting to see these dynamics. And now, I'm still friends with the core group of people that I was with from the Gambia at that time. They got Hotmail accounts that year. And the access to information, the access to things like, oh, human beings live in, like in some places into their hundreds, just changed agency. It changed senses of, oh, what we should have the right to live beyond 55, all these things. And now they're all over the world, both in the Gambia and in Europe and in the States, living these totally different lives, like literally 180 degree lives. in terms of social mobility, wealth creation, education. So I think about, you know, that moment of the network, the power of that democratization of information that came with that. And also now the kind of usurping of that to manipulate the vulnerabilities of our psychology around fake news and, you know, the ways in which our elections have been tampered and all these things. But it has also turned a light on to an aspect of this vulnerability. So how do you not throw the baby out with the bathwater essentially is what I'm trying to get at in terms of finding what optimizations of these technologies can support I mean, I hate to use the term progressive because progressive is a tricky term, but can support finding the potentialities for good in this versus mitigating the potentialities for bad. And it's tricky. I'm not going to say, I mean, just to see some of the people I interviewed, they were like, they really felt like they had opened a Pandora's box with their advocacy around the internet for 30 years and felt responsible for that. I don't know the answer, but I think But I am on the optimistic side that we can find it out through this kind of rigorous discourse.
[00:37:45.769] Kent Bye: So for you, what are some of the either biggest open problems you're trying to solve or open questions you're trying to answer?
[00:37:51.953] Kamal Sinclair: Hmm, great question. One of the things that I think I keep finding myself coming back to is some level of lowering barriers to access. And I guess that's part of what Sundance and New Frontiers tried to do in many different ways, but I'd love to see that done in even more exponential ways. One of the things I'm excited about in terms of partnering with communities in Baltimore is the vision is to have a significant number of the community who are enthusiasts to gain skills in XR, particularly XR and AI. Even if it's something as simple as I know how to shade, I know how to, you know, 3D model, maybe they're not making full pieces, but building up the skill set so there's a community of skill sets that allows a different kind of agency in terms of wealth creation and entrepreneurship in it, in terms of creativity, in terms of innovation, in terms of not just entertainment and art, but also in terms of, you know, all the other areas of healthcare and education and all those other ways in which this becomes relevant. I'm so excited to see what happens when you have a community. I mean, this is an amazing community, New Friendship, but we're We come here once a year, we come to Tribeca once a year, and then we disperse. And I would love to see what does it look like when a community can invest in something and unpack or unlock some potentials that we haven't been able to yet. That's something I'm excited about.
[00:39:15.398] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of immersive storytelling is and what it might be able to enable?
[00:39:25.373] Kamal Sinclair: Well I am excited about the fact that I come from live performance and I was a dancer for 27 years and I was with the show Stomp for six years and I have had these moments of I committed to theater instead of going into media like film like some of my friends out of the high school the arts that I was in because I believe in this power of place and the power of you know in real-time synergy and the power of ephemeral moments right it's kind of the sacred the ritual And I love it. You know, I remember one time when I was in Stomp. I mean, I did a thousand shows, but very rarely did all eight of us hit a beat at the same time. And it was just like Kundalini up the spine. It was like, wah! Like, you know, your top of your head just wants to explode. I can't even explain. I think the reason a lot of performers end up taking drugs and alcohol to an extreme is because the euphoria of that experience is beyond explanation. And you kind of just want to keep that high going. It's like, we don't know how to manage that kind of high. But yet, we would work for like three to six months trying to get a project up. It's up six weeks and it's down, you know? And that's kind of the sacrifice of the ephemeral and the placemaking and the live. And I was always jealous of my film friends at NYU that could put the same amount of energy into a creation, birthing a creation, but that thing lives into antiquity, you know what I mean? It's like, and it goes beyond the boundaries of time and space and people can experience it forever. And one of the things that I loved about coming to the space when I first started coming in was the blending of those two dynamics. And I love the idea of information going off of a 2D space into dementiality, matching our bodies in some ways return to ritual. you know, being able to go, like, you know, have information geocast, uncovering the ghost of place, and being able to access it in different times and different spaces. I mean, all that stuff is, and still having visceral moments in real time, and even with digital time, and with, you know, sentient, maybe, machines. I mean, all that stuff, I'm like, what? Like the idea of ancestral AI where I could have, if my mother's, my grandmother's memoir, my grandmother died when I was nine years old, I couldn't have conversations with her about sex and marriage and bearing children. I can only have that through my mother. And I don't know what, you know, so what if I had an opportunity to be in a conversational relationship with her now while I'm in my forties trying to navigate, what does it mean to be a mother? And so these kinds of things, I could just keep going, going, going about what I'm excited about. And all of them have vulnerabilities and potentials for bad. So it's date.
[00:42:00.602] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the immersive community?
[00:42:04.585] Kamal Sinclair: Well, thank you. I mean, I know that sounds like a cop-out last statement, but I do really appreciate you. being in, like you, you are no, let me tell you, I saw this man's plan. He came here with a rigor and a ferocity and we don't have enough people that are, that are doing the critique and are capturing the moments of that and challenging and provoking. I mean, I've said things on this that I would, I've never even thought of before because you provoked me to think deeper. And so I hope that we have more of you come into the field.
[00:42:35.923] Kent Bye: Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much. So that was Kamala Sinclair. At the time of this interview, she was the director of the New Frontier Labs program, and she was also commissioned by the Ford Foundation to write up this report called Making a New Reality. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, Well, one of the things that really had stuck with me from Kamal is her talking about this exchange that she had with Robert Redford, who was really a big pioneer in independent film, where the commercialization of film had taken over so much that he needed to, you know, like he said, spend many years getting many bruises of trying to push back the market forces of the film industry in order for artists to find their voice and their creativity. And as Shari Freelo was giving her vision for the 10-year anniversary of the New Frontier, Robert Reverd told both of them that you're not only going to have to be facing all of this existing pressure from the entertainment industry in Hollywood, but also getting into like Silicon Valley and all the other technological biases that you have as well. So overcoming even more barriers to entry when it comes to getting lots of different diverse voices to be able to tell the different types of stories that they want to tell. So that was just something that really stuck with me, just because, you know, when you really look at the history of independent film and how it started with the labs programs, as what Kamal said, and that creators wanted to create and cultivate this system to be able to share their knowledge and to really help and support each other. But at some point, once they actually make the pieces, they have to find some way to distribute it. And so Sundance is really a huge pioneer of creating this market of this independent film festival to be able to at least show these different films and these experiments, because, you know, it's not for sure as to what exactly is going to resonate or what's going to work in the market or not. And so this is at least an opportunity for the story to be heard and then for different distributors to come there and to be able to potentially access these films and be able to get them out there. So the whole independent film circuit is something that is pretty amazing that has evolved out of the vision of Robert Redford. And there's a similar spirit when Sundance comes to New Frontier and the New Frontier labs that Kamal was leading for six years. And Sundance continues to be on the leading edge of trying to both support and cultivate diverse voices telling a variety of different stories. Traveling All Black debuted at Sundance 2019, and I'm glad that we had a chance to talk about it there, because it's definitely worth watching again if you haven't seen it. Actually, if you go into the Oculus Quest, it's featured right there as a main experience to go check out, so if you haven't had a chance to see it, now's a great time to see it. But I had a chance to talk to Roger Ross Williams back in 2019, and then earlier this year, I had a chance to catch up with him, and he did actually have a chance to take it around and show it to different people. And this conversation, we're talking a lot about new business models. And one of the things that I've gotten into more recently, this interview was over a year ago now, is this concept of platform cooperatism. So essentially like a public media model, but also cooperatively owned platforms where people who are involved in producing things can find new ways of sustaining each other's work through that. This is still very early in terms of what exactly that's going to look like and if there's going to be other new economic models like microtransactions or things like COIL and the Mozilla Foundation and Creative Commons spending over a hundred million dollars in different grants to figure out new economic means of exchange. So to really create this public media is something that we still don't know exactly what that is going to look like either. And so she shares the story of Ford and the Ford Foundation really having this vision to create this public broadcasting system. And that, you know, it really stopped with PBS and there's other countries that had continued to invest in creating spaces for larger types of public discourse outside of the normal market forces, really trying to speak to issues that are of community concern. And I think there's a lack of this common public sphere to be able to have these different types of conversations. things are so fragmented off into everybody's own little echo chamber that it's difficult sometimes to really moderate what feels like the public space and the future of public spaces. And I know that's something that Opoyome Omikami is talking about in my previous episode, working with American Documentary. Also something that Space Popular has been thinking quite a bit about, a couple of architects based out of the United Kingdom, really thinking about the architecture of these public spaces and what's it mean to have these public spaces. Kamal had mentioned many different varieties of what could be called web 3.0 or 4.0 depending on how you're counting, but all these things from the immersive web, the distributed web, the decentralized web, the internet of things, bots, artificial intelligence, and embeddable computing, all these things coming in together and For me, one of my big reactions is privacy is still something that I was really quite fired up after going to this philosophy conference back in 2019. And actually, this was kind of the beginnings of this nine-month journey that I took last year, doing a number of these different panel discussions and really digging into it, culminating with this XR Ethics Manifesto that I presented back in October at the Greenlight Insight Conference, trying to distill down a lot of the different moral dilemmas down into some sort of ethical framework. But I still think there's still quite a lot that needs to be done in terms of just general awareness of privacy and the future of our data and our sovereignty around our data. And, you know, I think in listening back to this, I was really quite triggered by this concept of post-privacy just because I believe so firmly in the vision of privacy. But it was a good prompt because I think it shows how these forces of technology are actually to the point where it becomes more of an issue of the culture and how we respond to it in our ethical frameworks as individuals. If it's just driven by market forces, then there's going to be all sorts of violations of our privacy and spin off all sorts of different dystopian futures of being able to capture your DNA and figure out all sorts of information about you and your health and your identity with your biometric markers. So this artist, Heather Dewey Hagborg, advocating for these post-privacy aspects, but doing art that Kamal said is that artists are interrogating the world around us so that we can define what we want to be in that future. And so it's a bit of this future dreaming of imagining either dystopic or utopic futures and how some of these different things play out and some of the different ethical and moral implications of that and how we're going to navigate that as a society. And that part of what the art does is puts you in that space of like, oh, wow, what does this mean that this is possible now? And it allows you to kind of sit with the implications of this potential post-privacy context that is going to maybe catalyze a deeper legal frameworks, other ways of thinking about how to still preserve different aspects of our privacy as we're moving forward. So just to finally just kind of wrap up, you know, there's this vision of trying to unlock the potential of these communities. And I love how Kamal was really going into her performance and theater background. You know, she said she was a performing cast member of Stomp. So she really understands this live performance and theater and the power of place and the power of those real-time moments, the ephemeral moments, and the power of virtual and the sacred. And she loves the fact that the immersive technologies are really blending these two between what is produced as this archival stories like in film, have that same element but you know with digital technologies still have to figure out how to archive it over longer periods of time but once that's figured out in terms of the formats and how to actually do digital archiving you have this archival aspect and also this potential to have those real dynamic ephemeral live moments and it's these blending of these two and the return of ritual and the as she said the uncovering the ghost of place and having these visceral moments in real time and I think that's what I find so invigorating about the potential of these immersive media is because It does offer this possibility for us to not just be passive consumers of the information, but to actually be engaged in dialogue. And I think in a lot of ways, the amount of culture that can be shifted in these different types of immersive and interactive experiences, I think is going to be an acceleration of that over the next five to 10 years. you know, we're in a state where it feels like the fabric of society is being ripped apart right now, especially here in the United States, where every day you check the news and there's just one more thing that just feels like we're kind of slipping into this dystopic authoritarian dictatorship. But aside from that... I hold out that there's an antidote here in the immersive technologies. At the same time that we have these challenges that are arising, we have these opportunities to start to use these media to be able to explore and tell stories in a new way. And of course, you know, there's the limited access of actually getting this out there. But I think now's the time for people to really think about the power of this immersive media and what it can do to really create this world that we really want to live into. And I highly recommend some of the work that Kamal's been doing with the making a new reality to go and read through a lot of these medium posts that she posted through this commission work from the Ford Foundation, as well as her latest work that she's doing as the executive director of the Guild of Future Architects, which is also doing a lot of this Ford looking futuristic writing and Zoom calls and lots of different synthesis of having an intersectional vision of the future of technology. 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 enjoyed 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 can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
