エレメンタル設計の視点で読み解く「La Laguna Parla」とヴェネツィア・イマーシブ2026の総括

The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Pye, 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 voices of VR. So this is the last episode of my Venice Immersive coverage from 2026, And it features a piece called La Laguna Parla, which is a piece by smartphone orchestra's Stea Helma. And so this is a piece that was kind of celebrating the 10th anniversary of Venice Immersive. It was supported by Agog. And so La Laguna Parla means the lagoon speaks. And so this was about connecting to the local ecosystem by hearing both like sounds that are coming and recording from the Venice Lagoon, but also having us interact with each other in new and novel ways. So the smartphone orchestra, if you're not familiar, it's very much about creating these emergent social dynamics. So this is, again, a air fire piece, air being a lot of social dynamics and relationality.

And there's a lot of like looking at your phone to be able to get messages and meaning like here's a dolphin, go find other people who have a dolphin. And then you find the other people with a dolphin on your phone. And then you have this ad hoc emergent social group to be able to have different questions, but also to engage and interact with each other. And so there's a lot of like fire element as well where you're engaging and interacting and talking and exploring around, but also like doing the wave. So in this piece, it's about water, the water element, which is much more around kind of like the reception and music and rhythm. And there were some elements of that in terms of like maybe the spatial audio, which I'd say more is like the earth element in terms of like the spatialization of the different sounds kind of being playing on people's phones in a way that recreates as if you were kind of more in a spatial context. And there was a lot around the way that the story was being transmitted was through kind of reading text on your phone rather than playing music or having it narrated. So for me, I found it a little bit more abstracted, mental in the mind, but also a lot of focus on the dynamics of interacting with other people, the different emergent social dynamics.

But also I think there's a core playfulness and energy and laughter and lightheartedness that I think is through all of Staya Halma's pieces of the smartphone orchestra, which is kind of like trying to use the technology to not be addicted and blasting your consciousness into other realms, but to use your smartphone in a way that actually connects you to the people around you and to be able to engage and participate in meaningful ways. It's interesting also that Sia has been looking at my elemental theory and trying to sort of apply it in different ways. And so we had a lot of discussions around different aspects of this piece, but also this mood orchestrator that I think is going to be much more around ways that music can start to move your mood and your feeling. And I think that's going to be a piece that's much more focused on the water element, which is around emotions, feeling, music, rhythm, and this kind of collective mood and vibe that can happen with how you want to change the overall mood. of everybody. So I'm actually going to be doing both a bit of a workshop on experiential design with United XR, which is going to be the morning of November 10th, 8 a.m., which is about nine hours

from now when I'm recording this, but also 3 p.m. Central European time on November 19th. I'm going to be also doing another experiential design workshop with the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, collaborating with the Shared Realities Initiative that's funded by the CIIIC, the Creative Industries Immersive Impact Coalition. So there's this whole interest in creating emergent social dynamics, shared realities. How can we use XR technologies to potentially revitalize civic society? So I'll be doing a whole workshop exploring some of these concepts and ideas, but I think the last two episodes of both Shifting Connections in 1832 as well as 1833, this episode with La Laguna Parla, we'll be diving much more into how Sai has been thinking about bringing people together and having these kind of collective rituals all being mediated through technology. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Staya happened on Monday, September 7th, 2026 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in. I'm Staya Halema. I call myself a

creative director because it's kind of like a broad term that covers it. But I have basically two things that I do that are one. One is I really like making virtual reality, augmented reality, whatever reality and a part of that is the smartphone orchestra which is kind of like a very accessible multiplayer in whichever each and every audience members up to like 3 000 people can join my experiences those are actually one thing because what i'm really focusing on is what happens when you involve the player i think i'm really researching that that's my threat and i try to understand that more and more and that's why i love talking with you kent because you are I don't know, like a real investigator and it's really nice to like rub my thinking against your thinking so I'm looking forward to this conversation No, yeah, it's been a lot of fun to have conversations over the years and I'm excited to dive in today but before we do that, I want to get a little bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space Well, it's a bit of a long story, I guess

I always start with like my mother is an art teacher and my father is a magician so like being an artist was i guess normal for me and i know primary school i kind of like i started develop a little bit of an identity because i was the kid in class that could draw and then you go to art school and you try a lot of things i've been a musician for a long time i am professionally trained as a musician as well and at the same time me and my friends in the village i grew up you know we became this sort of like creative crew trying stuff things and 90s beginning 2000s when computers became a thing you could really do something with. Explored putting the computer on stage in live situations. And slowly I developed, maybe because I was a musician, and as a musician you're really actually institutionalized in being this artist and talking about yourself, and you have to promote yourself. And I think I got so fed up with that that I kind of flipped it,

and I didn't want to make work anymore that was about me, but I wanted to grab the opportunity to make work that is about the player instead of me. And then weirdly, sometimes you still keep telling your own stories because you're always still locked up in yourself and you're a lookout in the world. I don't know if that makes sense or too. No, that's a good... Well, and so I think in that way you've done a lot of stuff with doing collaborative multiplayer type of things that we'll get into here with your latest piece. So maybe you could describe this latest piece. How did it come about? And, you know, La Laguna Parla, maybe just kind of, what is it? Sure. So since I make Smartphone Orpsta pieces, basically multi-scale things, a friend of mine who is the artistic director of the Embassy of the North Sea, he's a really cool guy, and they try to get legal rights for the North Sea. and he's part of a bigger network called the Confluence of the Euron Water Bodies and he already created an artwork where he asked all the people, all the activist groups

to record their own water bodies. A water body is a lagoon, for example, or a river or a sea and he created an artwork with all the sounds of all these water bodies and when he did that, he realized, wait a second, one of my friends has a smartphone website. That's a much more effective way because everyone brings their own speaker. so he asked me and when he told me what he was doing I was like this is very cool, let's go I really think it's a fresh way of thinking about environmentalism and activism, you know like giving nature phenomena legal rights I think is going to make the deal much more fair and I think it makes the whole conversation just better so I support this a lot and then we made that piece and we did it for this pretty niche conference the confluence of all the European water bodies in Amsterdam. And it was really cool, you know, like we made, like it was this really cool work. And at the same time, roughly the same time I was here at Venice, and Michelle and Liz checked in with me,

like next year is going to be the 10th year anniversary of Venice Immersive. And they asked me if, like with the smartphone officer, we could do something. And I realized, oh, wait a second, I have the perfect idea, because Venice is a water body. and it was also one of the water bodies in the big confluence of the water bodies so I felt like it was I don't know, the perfect domino stone to put on the table and make the game perfect because it would be a thing to share but it would also be about the context it would have urgency because the Venice Lagoon is under pressure a lot you know, it is this beautiful ecosystem that has been basically facilitating this magical place called Venice because of all its conditions. And it would also be, I think, telling from the perspective of a non-human entity. I think that is something that's really close to XR. So it felt like it would make sense to celebrate ten years of Venice Immersion with something that's actually about the location,

talking from another perspective, being a multiplayer. So that's how La Laguna Parla came about. And for me, it was really cool to work on it. you know, this is my, I think, my eight year I'm here or something. And I love Venice. Like, I really love this place. There is, like, it's the water, it's the shimmering water, you know, like, it's being on the boat, it's the building that are insanely beautiful. It's, like, all these ideas that are about. So it felt really cool to make something about this place. And collaborating with a Phoenician artist, Leticia, was also really cool to also understanding the place better. Because I think that is the cool thing about traveling, is that you start to understand the place. And especially if you're here so often, it becomes a bit of a home and understanding that bit of a home better, it just feels great. And at what point did Agog come on board and what was their involvement in the project? I don't really know what their motivation is, obviously. But I needed to make a one-off for this. So I think Michelle felt like

you should get some money for it because she can also not be in the competition and everything we're asking you. and I'm filling this in for them, like disclaimer I think because Agog is doing a lot of things here at Venice at this moment and also they have this it seems like with the last call about climate change, it seems like this could be also like a nice symbol of being about climate change and doing something that's for all, like just again it's coming back to that perfect dominoes thing that I could put in the middle of the table that fitted for a lot of stakes in an elegant way nice well i know that we've had previous conversations and you were talking to me before your performance last night or a couple of nights ago and saying how you were looking at the elements and is very explicitly element based a lot of different parts of the piece and so i've been sort of classifying the different projects around like the primary and secondary centers of gravity of the elemental like my own personal phenomenological experience and so i'm just curious where you began in terms of what you were aiming for for what type of

experience you wanted to create well the first aim was like how can I give a voice to the water and the water bodies orchestra where this Laguna Parla derived from it's really about a lot of water bodies so it was about water in general and then it would like diversify about all the water bodies but like thinking about the voice of water I really like to dive into that like how can I make the water talk? And then when I made the water talk, I felt like it would be good to show her friends, namely earth, air, and fire, and that gave it kind of like an alchemistic kind of like thing, and I'm, you know, I really like to be this mystical, alchemistic hippie, but I really like not to tell anyone, paradoxically, I'm doing it now, into like this fun thing, so like, what I really liked when I started going like, okay, this cool this is going to be cool when I had that. I ask everyone to put their expensive phone on the ground. And then there's everyone going, oh shit, I need to do this.

But I'm also stating it, like you're very expensive. So I name the pain that it will cause. But the cool thing is, it is also activating because everyone is getting out of their screen, making it embodied, like putting your phone in. A lot of people are sitting down, looking at it, and then water talks about her friend, Earth. And then the next step is you have to put your phone in the air and you have to move it like your strand of blade of grass in the wind. And then I push a button and there's wind samples from all the phones. And it's really cool because like this spatial wind is around everyone. And you're basically like a blade of grass. And then you have to, like this is really like the coolest part for me. I make everyone blow into their phones. And then it's basically real theater. and then just a click place of a fire sound and you see the kind of flames coming out of your phone So it seems like we all blown this spirit into your phone and now it fire So I just felt like if I talk about water, I should talk about all the elements. And it was this really, I'm not sure if it's from Mark Serenius, this quote like, when water dies, it becomes air,

when air dies, it becomes fire, when fire dies, it becomes earth. And when earth, like, there's this circle, which I really liked. So it just felt great to put that in. nice yeah i think there's a lot of other aspects of what i see is like the center of gravity of both air and fire and the peace overall because there's a lot of text and you're you're speaking and it's a lot of listening to the ideas of the water having a voice and speaking but also there's quite a lot of interactions with other people i mean i think the core mechanic and you were talking about earlier of like empowering the audience to become a player and i think that becoming a player you have all sorts of ways at the beginning where you're having people have these little games where you have a little match game where you have on your phone maybe a dolphin i had a dolphin and i'm supposed to find the other dolphin people and so then we get paired up and then we have these questions that are asking about our memory but there's all sorts of ways that you're trying to not just have people stand there and listen you know you could have a projector where you're just

projecting everything on the screen and that could be it but to have people have their own phone or if they don't have internet or their phone battery died, then you have multiple people looking at the same phone. But you have this way that you're able to then use the speakers of the phone, which creates this whole spatialized audio experience, which was really unique and cool. And then at some point we have a little more of a high energy, we're doing the wave and whatnot. So there's a number of different beats that are in this piece that I think are novel in terms of doing different types of emergent social dynamics. that would be difficult to just kind of orchestrate, but you have the ability to, with everybody's smartphone, and you have some system to be able to communicate with the smartphone orchestra, to distribute instructions to kind of create architectures of people and choreograph people in a way as they're moving their body through space and interacting with each other. But there's also the core of it, I'd say, is this air element narrative in terms of the story that we're hearing that is both a story but also information.

I guess it's sort of the story part is water and the air part is the information, but I'm reading it. So I feel like it's more of the kind of mind that I'm receiving it because it's a language thing and I'm like receiving it through the language. So, yeah, I don't know. That's some of the first impressions I had from the piece. But just curious to hear as you're designing the piece, like where are you to begin and what kind of like arc did you want to take people on? wow that's a big question and i have like like your question was long and my answer could be enormous uh where do you start um well i like there is the paradox in what i do with the smartphone orchestra it's like i think it works that i make people aware of that we're sharing this moment together and it's really you feel bigger than yourself and i think i pull it off sometimes i however do that by making people stare at their phones quite a bit and there's a paradox and it's really, it's not a paradox, it's a contradiction. I really try to find a way to balance that.

So mostly because you start to tell the story, you start to lay out everything that matters, the start is mostly often too much spending. And then you try to find ways, how can I not tell by telling but by interactions. For me the holy grail of XR is finding a meaningful interaction. If you have a meaningful interaction, you have a good piece. and not interaction just to, I don't know, do interaction stuff. So I try to find interactions that work. And one of those interactions are, I think, social interactions because social interactions are often meaningful, especially if I give you a context, you know, they can become meaningful. And there's also the, I think my arc is always a little bit, I start silly and there's silliness, there's a bit of awkwardness, But the silliness and awkwardness makes everyone open up. You know, like if, oh, this is funny, you know, like then you're more likely to participate. Then when I put you in a situation that's mildly awkward,

then you suddenly realize, oh, the person I'm doing is also awkward. I wait a second, everyone is awkward. All of a sudden being awkward is okay. You feel that in the crowd. And then when you pass that point, you know, people are open and with you. And then you slowly make it profound. What I really like in this piece is one of those finds that I really, I'm so happy that my brain has the capacity to do that. You know, when everyone has to say bloop, it's super silly. It's the silliest thing you can imagine. It's like a countdown, three, two, one, and everybody says bloop. And it's just like, it's a spatial audio experience at that point. Yeah, and the context, at a certain point, the water is going to teach the audience words in their language. Well, a typical water word is bloop. So everyone says that, but then the meaning is, although I'm small, we are with many. And then I can bring it back to activism and I think sort of hopefulness. I think that in one tiny circle is, I think, what I'm really trying to do to, I don't know, make it.

I think silliness is going to escape the world in the end. And what else? Well, that's exaggerated. but I think we could do with a little bit more silliness and then understanding that we're all just silly and let's make it more fun and warmer and together sorry, I'm on the talking chair apparently like if I would like as an artist to achieve one thing it's the feeling in the audience that we belong together and we can figure it out together and this day and age I think this is really really what artists need to be doing like who cares about you expressing yourself You know, like I'm exaggerating again, but like everything's falling apart. We need to fix it. Yeah, I know. It's what comes to mind is the when we were talking last night, I had suspected that the piece was going to be a lot of social dynamics and kind of high energy, interactivity, participation, kind of more fire, like more air and then fire. The silliness is also kind of like high energy in the sense that it kind of like makes people laugh and discharging that energy.

The other kind of air-fire piece that's here is the shifting connections, which is like the social dynamics and have different ways that you're going to connect with each other. But there's a piece here that's called White Saboteur that is a little bit more abstract and more kind of spatial. The White Saboteur. Okay, okay. Have you heard of it or seen it? So I'll just sort of describe what they're doing in the paradox of this idea of climate change is happening because lots of people are taking actions and that their individual actions, it's hard for them to see the traces of that on a collective scale, and so they continue those. It's a piece that you're looking at the iceberg, and then the iceberg slowly melts, and then the next person who goes gets a slightly degraded piece. So it's a durational piece that lasts from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., where at the end it just ends up everything's white. So if you see it near the end of the day, it'll be more completely wiped out. But it's a way that each person's agency of their gaze looking at the peace actively destroys the icebergs in a way that their individual agency over the course of the day is collectively agency in terms of the destruction of this world.

Sorry, I wonder, like, I think that you could make the same piece with tourism. All these people looking for authenticity in a place and then by doing that slowly destroying their authenticity. It's an interesting dynamic. I love it. Yeah, so it's a very philosophical, abstract, contemplative piece. And it was fun talking to the creators about that because there's a thing that I've noticed in terms of experiences where you can often see your individual agency, but collective agency is difficult to represent in an experience often because, let's just say you're voting. You're voting and maybe you won, but maybe you lost. But sometimes it feels a little bit like a 50-50 split as to what degree did your vote really matter in this kind of voting. And so your individual agency meets a collective agency. And then at that point, it kind of gets lost in the way that you kind of lose track. So this idea of having a group act together in some way, I think you're kind of exploring that a little bit in your piece of people making something that no one individual could create on their own.

And so there's a way of using that group energy to create. It's more experiential in a lot of ways, but it's still getting into this exploration of collective agency in a way that is a difficult problem, but I think it's something that you're really looking at. Absolutely. I'm talking really from my intuition here. I think making people feel connected with each other in the group is the start, and then you can also feel connected to more than that group because it's already you've said the connection, everything is together kind of way. Yeah. like regarding your expectation like obviously I collaborated on this piece with activists so if I would have made this piece completely on my own it would probably have met your expectations better but I really liked for example the Phoenician artist she made this sound field that I made 200 people listen to and be silent and I have been afraid during the whole making process that that would be way too long and I just felt like well I'm collaborating you know like she's from here like she wants people to listen to the lagoon who am i to tell

her that that should be not that long so so so in that sense it's really a collaboration also harpo the main sound designer and basically initiative taker of the idea you know like we really collaborated nice and so yeah i'm wondering if you could talk a bit about the story that you wanted to tell in terms of like because there's a voice of the lagoon and there's like a persistent narrative that's happening where we're learning about the lagoon so yeah i'm just curious to hear about the arc of the story of the the text that we're reading yes well it starts with a waiting game that's a kind of a new form we developed because sometimes it takes quite a while for people to log in and especially in a place like this where the internet can be all over the place We felt like, okay, let's have a game. And in that game, first you have to point your phone to the carafe of water that was on the pedestal. And then when you do that, you push a button and you make contact with the water. And then you get a caller and you have to find someone else with the same caller.

And yeah, I give you questions to ask each other, which is fun. It could be a piece on its own. But it's also a great way to keep people busy. Might all of a sudden the server explode because there's too many connections and stuff or Wi-Fi breaks down. There's time for all the connections to go. So that's where it starts. And then I bang a gong. And then the piece starts with, hello, human. No, I'm not your phone. Your phone is just a tool to communicate with you. To realize what I am, we're going to do like exercise. So then you have to collect saliva in your mouth. First you have to think about the last drink you drank. And then you have to collect some saliva. Then you have to swallow it to your bladder. So I try to make it embodied, basically your imagination. But you are imagining your own body doing that. So which hopefully grounding you in a way and like I'm here and like and then that exercise shows like wait a second like you followed me through your own body. So like I'm water and you are a body of water. Then I go to the moment, you know, like because I felt like I want to if this celebration, we should really be aware that this is a special moment.

And then I try to do that obviously fire water. So I had the sentence like, look around, make a brief wave to at least three people around you. Which then, very mild but nice interaction. It's silly, it's easy, and people do it, and you create connections. And then I really, really like writing this piece. And I'm like, look around, everyone around you is basically big bags of water on legs. and then I go to like and there's even a smaller bag on top of the bigger bag with a very neat cool trick the ability to store memories thoughts and ideas and you know like so usually I bring about wait a second this moment will be stored I bring it to virtual reality like because actually we can all go back virtually because we had this collective experience meaning there's now a virtual reality experience in everyone's brain who experienced it that we can collectively go back to. So I'm basically trying, for the one smart enough,

like saying, your brain, your memory is a virtual reality machine. This is actually really cool. And then from there, we talk about memories, and then like let make more memories together Let do something Then we do the earth air fire ritual And then by the way the earth when you have people put your phone on the ground and i was like uh like is my phone going to be safe is someone going to step on it is you know is it going to get scratched and so but you have a like sort of like squat down and put it on the ground but also like put our hands on the ground and it was a very grounding moment in the sense that it was a bit of a pause but also like I don't know, breaking the normal patterns that I've never like sat my phone down on the ground like that. And a big group of people that are all also hesitant to do it, but still do it anyway. But yeah, there's a real powerful connection to the earth element there. Right. And it's so easy if you embed it right. You know, like it's all about, I think, like a lot of people think like, well, the technology of the smartphone or extra is really smart.

Obviously it is, but it's also just really robust and as much out of the way as possible. it's really about the prompting like making people do stuff that they're actually doing it and by doing it like feeling the story is kind of like the whole I think the language that I've been trying to develop for the last 10 years it's really the prompting of the player that is I think what Smartphone Orchestra is so if I continue with like the vibe so then you are water like water speaks then there's earth then there's air then there's fire then I bring it to the heart I do that because I let everyone think about when they cried for the last time and everyone has to hold their phone against their forehead which is entirely silly and a hand on their heart but then I don't know if that came across because I felt like I'm not sure if I got the wording right but you know there's also so there's a collective moment that we all think about something that made us cry which I think is super cool like that you just share that moment of being sad or happy, happy, sad or like tears of joy

it's all possible but you have that moment together which is another piece I would like to make called Mood Conductor which will probably be with an orchestra that will really sit in the if you go to a concert basically you synchronize mood so I will like until later sorry, I'm branching but then I pick that hard up since I'm older than the universe I've been part of every tier that ever existed again, stating that common denominator that water is all of us that water is in all of us and we're mostly water then when that is done I think oh yeah then I'm going to bring it to the lagoon like so I'm water but actually you are a water body as a human you know but you're just like a lake or a river or a glacier or a sea or ocean or a lagoon actually you're now in a water body so I bring it to Venice finally then we really start diving about how beautiful Venice is

and people can triggers sounds of the Venice Lagoon, which then makes it basically an interactive sound piece. Because there's also choices. So the music is always different, which I really like. And there's also, because they push the buttons at different moments, you get kind of like particles of sound flowing through the space. And then we go deeper. And then the lagoon says, although our relationship between humans and the lagoon leads to great results, now I'm actually not feeling that great. Because you need to listen to me better. Then we go into that two and a half minute sound field where Leticia, the sound artist, made this beautiful recording of sounds that are typically Phoenician and Lagoon. And I make the audience really listen to it. And when they did that, we go into a conversation. You have a social moment. You have to find other people. You had the dolphin. You found other people with the dolphin. Someone with the fountain had to find people with the fountain. And then I ask them, what do you think the Lagoon tried to tell you?

Which is a very open question, and people actually don't know, so they have to search together, which works in a way, because people start to figure out this riddle. But then, after a couple of seconds, a button appears that gives them some thought starters, because it's really hard to tailor everyone. So you also really need to help people sometimes. And then people have a conversation about what they heard, so I make them aware of listening to Venice, which I think is again a great way. And my hope for this piece is that people will now walk through Venice or sit on the boat and listen better. Because listening makes you present. You know, it really grounds you in where you are. And then when that is done, I think we move to the ending. Oh, yeah. And then, so you have listened. And now we need to learn to communicate. So we get to language. And then I try to, or the water teaches the audience. I should speak from the perspective of water. I'm giving it all away. Shit. The water teaches the audience two words. and the first word is the water makes everyone breathe at the same time which is a really cool idea by Harpo

from the Embassy of the North Sea because if a lot of people breathe at the same time it sounds like a surf again a connection and everyone breathes at the same time which is totally meditation and all of a sudden people realize and then when people did that at a beautiful moment of synchronizing their breathing total yoga, hippie and everything wonderful the water tries to explain although everyone knows it it's a difficult word because it's meaning somewhere in between relax this too shall pass and everything needs to breathe lead space to breathe and then I have a quote the marshes are actually the lungs of the lagoon but also the oceans create 70% of the oxygen we breathe we're so interdependent basically the oceans breathing out is us breathing in so like this is the circle so it's the ecology and then I go to my favorite part the bloop you know the second word is

the water's favorite word it's bloop because it means although I'm small we are with many and then we kind of like end it and actually I wanted to end it there but then we felt like we should end bigger and then it was quite an easy thing to do but also fun to make the audience do the wave and what I liked about it was that it's it's just like you have to do the wave and it's up to the ones that's closest to the toilet to start meaning the audience has to figure it out themselves, they've been guided all the time but now they have to do it themselves which is kind of like okay let's do this and there's a fragility and then people do it and then we did that for the first time because we couldn't test that we came with that idea as feedback on the last test so it was a bit of a mess but every time they did the wave I had these really loud samples on the phones of water which I think was a cool effect so that was kind of like the arc and also hopefully also the reasons why we chose for all those moments in the piece yeah thanks for recapping that and what i was noticing is that i feel like that hearing you say that something's

laying more than me reading it in a way that i'm wondering if you had ever considered having some aspects of that narrative that you just shared be actually like spoken rather than me reading on the screen? Well, that's also budget. Like we have pieces where the phones talk. Like especially in the beginning, the idea for the smartphone orchestra started really as a musical idea, synchronizing the phones. And then we also did a lot with voiceovers. Speaking, the thing is we really need to adapt it and we have very little time. And then if you do the voices, then your capacity of changing it becomes harder. So in that sense, it was really with text and interactions. But yeah, I would love to do voices in this. And by the way, that segues into, I think, the real goal, what I would like to achieve with this project, is not only this. You know, this is really cool, and I love this festival. I love listening to Michelle. It was cool, a little bit scary, to do this with all the geniuses that are here.

Like, Venice is a lagoon, but, you know, the Miami Everglades are actually a very slow river. So, if we could now make an adaption about the Miami Everglades or about, I don't know, the Gota Pipeline or, I don't know, about the Donau or a glacier in the Alps. Because the smartphone orchestra can be so local. You're with people in the moment in a space. I would really love it to be a piece that could have different chapters everywhere in the world. Nice. Yeah, and you had mentioned to me that you were wondering what the elemental balance would be kind of like engaging people's minds in social connection, but also like the interaction and play. And you were wondering if it was going to be coded as water. And you mentioned something around sitting down and with an orchestra and listening to music. Like water is usually emotions evoked either through music or kind of sitting down and like listening to the musical because it's a piece about water, but it wasn't like sort of coded for water for me

just because it was so interactive and social and participatory and energy going outward. And water is actually sort of like very receptive in a way that's more like everybody's sitting down in a circle looking at each other and like kind of listening to music or kind of receiving and less about the body and playful, silly social interactions. Yeah, like if I abide to your system, which I like to because I love your system. And it's also like every system falls apart by trying to capture complexity. But like I really appreciate you trying and especially you see so much, you know. and I really like how you look for validation in all kinds of knowledge, and not only scientific, but all, like you're so broad. I think it's very cool, and I appreciate it tremendously. But it was obviously a nice illustration of how your system works, that a piece about water is not categorized in water. It's nice. Interestingly, Mood Conductor, which is going to be a water piece as well, is very much water because it's about emotions. Mood Conductor will be a successor of a piece I made with the Metropole Orchestra in the Netherlands.

I worked on this format where everyone is in the audience playing games, and in that way they influence what the orchestra is playing, so it becomes like a collaborative effort. And the successor of it is like I felt like a concert is basically a lot of people with different moods going to one place, being synchronized with moods. And although everyone has this personal version of that mood, you know, like music is so much mood or most of the music at least is so i felt like what if like everyone comes to a mood conductor and we measure everyone's mood we have all these questions and that kind of like how do you feel like coming to this place how do you do that how do you that and then we kind of like play from the classical canon we address all this different mood so everyone feels hurt which is very therapeutic and important thing and then we're going to work towards some shared mood, you know, based on where we want to go together. So that piece will be very much water. Yeah. Now that sounds like a little bit of fire water because you're also playing a game in the middle of it. What's the game and how's it? Well, it's not so much a game, but in the end, yes, there is a game.

And that's also because there's also emotions, frustration or reward. Basically, you control a school of fish going through like an underwater world because the image on the screen, what you see, what you control is, it starts above water, but then when we go darker, then we go underwater, like we're into under streams of where emotions live. And at a certain point, you control the school of fish collectively. So it's really like the phone becomes a steering wheel, and if everyone goes like this, then the school of fish goes to the left. Turning the steering wheel to the left and the fish moves to the left. Exactly. But if everyone does that, the fish turns too much to the left. so they need to create this hive mind intelligence that they sort of do that and when they fail like at a certain point becomes hard they fail collectively so you share a moment of feeling frustrated together you know like so that's way how you can basically provoke emotions but also the reward and then i make everyone sing which especially like you people can actually really

sing if you help them a little bit if you take away the social conventions if you make everyone feel safe, then people can sing quite well. So with the success of the score, I've made like 1,500 people sing at the same time. And then the orchestra harmonizes beautifully. So there's this gospel trick that you play basically the same notes or two notes and then you change the bass notes. And that's actually almost spiritual because you feel the perspective shift and then something inside of you happens. And if you do that when people sing notes and you shift the underlining tones, then you bring them somewhere while they're actually just singing two notes, but you change everything. So, yeah. Looking forward to making that. It's called Mood Conductor? Is that the... Yeah. Sounds like a really fascinating project. I'm definitely looking forward to that because I feel like there isn't as much interactive or participatory music experiences in that way. But also just the idea of... I mean, already Maybe concerts are mood conductors like you say, but or explicitly do a little bit more

intake and tune it a little bit more. Yeah, it sounds super fascinating. And you know in the quadrivium that numbers abstractly as math numbers and space and time Are you in the book the quadrivium It his black book and it starts with one and two All right yeah yeah Yeah the quadrivium and numbers abstractly is math numbers and space is geometry, numbers and time is music, and numbers and space and time is astronomy. But that numbers and time is, I think, the water element in the sense of frequency and how music is the language of emotion. And also water being connected to memory. So when you're asking people to remember memories in your piece, you're also kind of evoking these moments from our past about what's the last time we swim, you know, just kind of evoke different memories. But that's certainly a water element, but also kind of mediated through, like, the air element because you're doing it in a social situation. But, yeah, the text on the analysis, like I saw this morning, you sent me the text, and I thought I can go to that.

I can also dive into your system a little bit. So I took an hour to listen to the podcast, read your stuff. And I think it's really interesting. It's a bit daunting as well because it's a lot of lists, like this, this, this, this. So at a certain point, I zone out in abstraction. So I'm trying to validate them in myself in one other way. And one thing I really noticed in my career, I've been a musician quite a while. And as a musician, you know, you're basically fiddling with chords or beats or sounds or words in the melodies. And you're basically, all the time you're feeling it. Because your feeling is your guide. And you're trying. So I was always like tinkering with sounds to create something that I could really feel and then make clear. And I kind of like felt like a fish in the mud at a certain point. and then I kind of because I was always doing my own music videos and stuff and trying to find digital ruses to promote my music at a certain point a couple of those ruses my VR music video and the smartphone orchestra

kind of took off and I kind of went above water and all of a sudden I was really working on concepts and story and I felt like now I'm really in an air period in my life which I, although I feel like water is really my element I surf, we have been talking about astrology but I still find hard to really go along with but i'm a pisces for real paradoxically uh so water is really my thing but i really like floating like a seagull above the ocean and seeing where where i need to go like it's nice air is great yeah no i i've been reading into charles saunders purse he's a pragmatist and so there's a way that i'm like taking all these sort of esoteric systems and trying to find like a pragmatic use of them. I mean, here's the problem I have is like I come to Venice, we watch, for me, I start like four days ahead of time and I watch about a third or half of the content and then I'm here for three days. So I watch anywhere from 20 to 30 hours in the course of seven days and then do like 30 hours of interviews. The challenge is how do I

digest and process all that information? And so it's, it's sort of like this system is a bit of my like memory palace of just trying to schematize and code and remember because there's so much that happens and how do you remember it and then how do you conduct an interview that's interesting so like your work is mostly social dynamics and interactive and participation so finding ways of uniquely connecting groups of people together and there's only one other experience that's like that here at venice this year is a shifting connections uh really really really like yeah Like, I think Jen and I are doing the same thing, but different. I really like his work. I thought Free Your Head was also really cool. I would really love to collaborate with Jen, especially with his last work that I saw. I was like, yeah, ah. It's like, and I kind of like, I'm really the Western version. Like, I am taking a more extrovert route. And he's more the Asian, the more introvert, like, safer, but still the collective route.

Yeah, because you're in mixed reality, but mostly in VR, but you're in abstraction. so you have the freedom to kind of move around, but you don't see anybody, so it sort of creates this safe space to play around with interactions, but in a way that has poetic abstractions on top of yourself, but kind of enabling you to act in a way that you might not other, because you have this occlusion of not being seen. Yeah, exactly. Well, going back to your system, I really like you doing this, and I so much understand that you have to find this ordering system. You digest so much work. yeah where was the imaginary friend for you on the well that imaginary friend oddly my recollection was that it was actually every element in a way because you were doing everything we talked about this you said you said like it's it's i thought i took it as a compliment you said like it's maybe like the most complete use of all the affordances of vr i think you said that almost those words does it also mean like your system fire air because it had a lot of water it had air in that sense that it was social.

It had interactions, which are fire. Earth, what is Earth? Earth is like the body and the environment, so like this kind of spatial experience of it. I mean, you kind of have an avatar, and you're kind of flying and doing different mechanics. Yeah, and I think most, it's kind of an anomaly in some sense because it's flipping between genres, between different beats of the piece, whereas most pieces will pick a lane and stick to it. And so I had originally thought, okay, well, there's 15 combinations of the different aspects of the elements, but then I realized, well, all the elements are always happening, but there's going to be an emphasis of what are the top two. And if you only look at the top two, then there's going to be the 12 different genres. I can say your piece and the shifting connections are similar, and then all of a sudden, you know, oh, hey, this happens to be your favorite piece. You can do an XI diagram, right, with the four quadrants, and then you can just, like, make it more air, close the fire, right? Well, having a four-fold Venn diagram, you can't actually do with circles.

So the way, yeah. So anyway, it's a bit of the mandala that I have set up. It kind of has the combinations and clusters with the 12 different genres. But it's sort of the point is that if people really like agency, as a good example, the only sort of water-fire experience here is called Desert Palms. And it's a piece that is an Apple immersive video, and it's a single shot, one take, but there's like 20 people and there's basically four major storylines going on at the same time. Based upon where you look, you'll pick up different aspects of the story. There'll be like a golden path, but you have the choice to be able to basically look and listen to any one of those emerging stories. And so it's actually providing agency to you in a context that a film usually is not really change over viewing, but this is a case where they have multi-threaded stories. And so there's user agency that changes your experience based upon what you pay attention to. So there's things like that that's a very unique piece. But if people really like interactivity in agency, then they might not have known that it's such an innovative piece in that way.

Yeah. I have two thoughts. Like, my first, I already expressed that in an earlier conversation. Like, I think you should do a master class. Like, it would be so cool, like, to be here in Venice. And then we have, like, a day with you, you know? like and you have a little bit more time like i listened to your podcast this morning and you know i remember like the guy who who's the moderator saying like i promise you it would be dancing or something like that so it's so much at the same time and it would be great to have more time to go dive into it but my other thought was like you're creating this system but i think a lot of creators creating systems for themselves like i have this five challenges system that i use to i need to like think about the five challenges to then i kind of know that i'm round and then have thought about everything good enough it would be interesting like not trying to give you more work but you could also map that maybe like like and then put it against your own system and see like if there's even a more universal kind of system yeah i'll definitely have to follow up

and i'll take a look and i've been digging into all sorts of different philosophy and i'm in discussion with different universities potentially go and do some more extended like workshops and And so that's sort of in the works. But, yeah, I guess as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what you think the ultimate potential of this type of immersive and interactive participatory storytelling might be and what it might be able to enable. You mean smartphone works are kind of pieces? Yeah, either that or just in general where this might go. What you hope to see in the future, what might be possible? Well, I think I already said it. Like, I really, as an artist, I really like to create stuff that makes people feel that we belong together and we figure it out together. that's my spiritual motivation for fun, you know, my next challenge would obviously be a stadium and like a real, like doing it for real, but the thing is, like this market is often spoiled by tech bro startups that then sell the idea to a football club and then because they don't really think about the dramaturgy of it to make it really work then it becomes just a

tech demo that no one likes so I'm waiting for the opportunity to do this really big scale with an investor or a party to do it with that has the patience and the the courage to do it for real because you imagine you could really really engage 30,000 people in the stadium in something meaningful you know like that they are part of something for real that would like for fun that would be like something I would really like to make and the other thing I'd like to list to go and that's in line with what I'm like I've been making 12 years of Smart One Orgstar pieces I think I might have made somewhere between 20 or 30 pieces. I know how to make smartphone orchestra pieces. And although I'm still learning, my dream is to not be the main artist, but to be the chief editor of a company that publishes smartphone orchestra pieces. Because inherently in the smartphone orchestra is that it's from the audience. So it should not be me only telling the stories. If other people could use the same effect, the same medium, I would really love that.

And it would also basically make me spiritually transcend, you know, not trying to be like the artist with the ego and like, but just like facilitating this. I would like that to happen. Mic drop. Nice. And again, like everyone who listens, like I so much appreciate, Ken, your system. And what you are doing is really, really, really, really good. Thank you. Awesome. Well, thanks, Tanya. And yeah, I really enjoy all your work as well. I feel like you're kind of really honing your craft of really focusing on this kind of collective participatory engagement and agency. And, yeah, IFA DocLab this year, there's a CIIIC talking about this shared realities initiative where they want to try to find out ways of revitalizing civic society. And I think there's a part of what you're doing with Smartphone Orchestra that's sort of in that line of how do we be together face-to-face and find new ways of interacting and ironically and paradoxically doing it through the smartphone, but doing it in a way that it's not isolating us but actually connecting us. So anyway, thanks again for joining me on the podcast to help break it all down.

Yeah, cool. One last thing, it doesn't have to be in a podcast, but do you know a book called The Method by Dick Reimakers? I have not come across it, no. Okay, so Dick Reimakers was the sound engineer for Philips in the 50s. There's two people who were basically the real pioneers of synthesizers. It was Raymond Scott with Manhattan Lab in New York, and it was Dick Reimakers in Eindhoven for Philips. at first he was a scientist figuring out all this electronics and then he became an artist and he created really good art but he wrote a book called The Method and it's actually a poem of like a couple of hundred pages but it's also how creativity works how electricity works how system works and it starts with first there was this this wanted to go to that they found each other in the context and just it builds and builds like that you will love it to be honest I've never got further than page 20, but until page 20, it's rock solid. And it's beautiful. I'll have to check it out. Are you going to ITFA? Yeah, I'll be there. I'll just write down now to buy it for you, and I'll give it to you there.

Okay, perfect. Awesome. Thanks so much, Skylar. So it's a promise shit. I have to really write it. All right, thanks. Thanks, Ken. Thanks so much for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And I just want to say that I'm really trying to live into the transformation economy, meaning I want to give away all this information for free. make it public accessible for not only you, but the entire community. And if you find value in that, then please do consider supporting me on Patreon. You know, I'm on this journey of trying to reach my 1000 true fans. And if I have just $5 a month from that 1000, I'll be in a much more solid and stable financial position. So really need your help to be able to get to that point. So if you enjoy what I'm doing here at the Voices of VR podcast, then please do consider supporting me at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening. Thank you.