Tag Archives: Kris Krug

MUTEK Festival: August 25 -30, 2025 and its MUTEK Forum: August 26-28, 2026 in Montréal, Canada

MUTEK = musique/c technologie/y That seems a pretty safe guess given this from MUTEK’s Mission page,

Launched in the year 2000, MUTEK is dedicating itself to the presentation of live electronic music and real-time audiovisual performance, making it one of the rare outlets in North America for such innovations. After 20 years, the festival’s future-seeking mandate has matured—and while the promise has in many ways caught up with the present—its commitment to the ongoing mutations and variations of contemporary digital creativity remain, with its eyes and ears still fixated on what comes next.

The festival extends now to 6 days and nights—and integrates the professional Forum into the architecture of the week to enrich conversations and encounters with current technologically driven practices and philosophies. Plugged into a global circuit since inception, creating an international rendezvous for artists and publics alike, the festival thrives on creating a context for discovery and exchange. Faithful to its values of inclusion and accessibility, MUTEK is committed to a more equitable and representative programming of all diversities, in particular through the Amplify initiative.

It also magnifies Montréal, not just as its urban backdrop, but as the source of so much of its creative soul; the local is always elevated in dialogue with exceptional artists from around the world.

MUTEK has built a unique model over the years that has proven seductively exportable. Tentacles stretch across 4 continents, to 6 other cities now, with each satellite adapting the festival’s template of values as a means to inspire new ways of engaging with the richness of electronic and digital artistry.

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I have two Wikipedia entries for MUTEK. Bear with me, the contrast is striking, first the English language version, Note: Links have been removed,

MUTEK is a Montreal-based festival dedicated to the promotion of electronic music and the digital arts.^[1] Its central platform is an annual six-day event in Montreal that takes place in late August.^[2] Alongside the Montreal edition, MUTEK also hosts international versions of its festival.

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Now, the French language version, Note: Links have been removed,

MUTEK est un festival de musique électronique et de créativité numérique qui a lieu annuellement à Montréal depuis 2000. La plateforme centrale de l’organisme constitue le festival qui se tient chaque année à la fin du mois d’août dans le Quartier des spectacles à Montréal^[1].

La mission principale du festival est d’offrir aux artistes les plus originaux et visionnaires du domaine, un tremplin visant à les faire connaître et les propulser le plus loin possible dans leur concept de création tout en visant la sensibilisation et le développement de nouveaux publics. L’engagement continu envers l’innovation et la promotion de la créativité contemporaine fait de MUTEK une organisation majeure dans le monde de la musique électronique en direct et de la performance audiovisuelle en temps réel^[2].

I especially like the part where the festival offers artists, who are the most imaginary and visionary in their domains, a springboard … . So much more ebullient than the English language version, which collapses two paragraphs into one.

MUTEK Montréal Festival 2026

From the Montréal MUTEK organization Welcome homepage,

Edition 27: Amplify & Resonate

MUTEK Montréal Festival returns to the Quartier des spectacles from August 25 to 30, 2026, for six days and nights dedicated to electronic music, audiovisual performances and digital creativity.

This 27th edition brings together international artists, leading figures of the current scene and emerging voices in a program focused on live performance, sonic experimentation and immersive audiovisual experiences. In the heart of downtown Montréal, the festival unfolds across a network of venues connecting concert halls, immersive spaces and outdoor stages.

Over five distinct series, the Festival moves through different energies, aesthetics, and ways of experiencing sound, image, and space.

Explore the Schedule

Artists

A Guy Called Gerald | Abulzooz | Ah! Kosmos and Hainbach | Alan Harman | Arbor and Tzu Ni | aria | ArtSaves | Barker | BelleyFERRIS | Ben UFO | chiquitamagic | Cleo Leigh | con secuencias + Milo Reinhardt | Cry (Kilbourne & Relaxer) | CUERPOS | Dana Ruh | Dave Huismans (ex_libris) | Debit | dustbunny | ebb | El Ángel Exterminador & Anastasiia Vorobiova | ELECTRONICOS FANTASTICOS! | Elsewhere in India ft. Murthovic & Thiruda | Estelle Schorpp & charline dally | Evicshen | Facta | Fennesz & Lillevan | Florence-Delphine Roux | gyrofield | Hermanos Riffo Gómez | Honeydrip | Hot Sleepers | Ida Toninato | Istanbul Ghetto Club | JakoJako | jamvvis + YFBOB | Jeff Mills | Jenn Mong & Trevor Van de Velde | Jordan Gardner | JS Baillat & Mateo Murphy | Julian Sartorius | Jump Source | Kali Malone | Kara-Lis Coverdale | Korea Town Acid & Ajeebsir | M Salaciak | Marc-Antoine Barbier | Marie Delprat | Matt & Mark Thibideau | Matthew Herbert | Matthew Herbert & Julian Sartorius | Mia Koden | Monsieurmadam | MOORE + SALAS | Nazar | Nelly-Eve Rajotte | NGL Flounce | Noémi Büchi | NVST | Patche | Paul Vivien | Pick a Piper | pliq | Poirier | Polygonia | Purelink with Mika Oki | Rival Consoles | Sara Persico & Mika Oki | Sarah Rossy | shn shn | Super Galaxy Meow Meow | Tristan Perich & James McVinnie | Violent Magic Orchestra | Voices From The Lake | wetdogg | Zora Jones | 16:9 ratio

[Note: I apologize to the artists but with such a large number of names {over 50 of them} I will not be adding their names to the tagging for this posting.]

Discover the artists

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If you go to the Montréal MUTEK organization Welcome homepage and scroll down past the excerpts included here, you’ll find a a SoundCloud playlist for Edition 27. Enjoy!

MUTEK Forum 2026: Symbiotic Frequencies

Here’s a description from the MUTEK website’s forum page,

For 26 years, MUTEK has supported Montréal’s leadership in digital arts by promoting its culture, creators, and fostering local and international collaborations, as one of the world’s first festivals native to digital culture.

Within this context, MUTEK Forum serves as a dynamic platform bridging digital art, electronic music, and cutting-edge technology. Through its curated programs, the Forum addresses critical global challenges and supports artists, thinkers, and innovators in developing transformative ideas and projects. By partnering with leading research institutions, cultural organizations, and industry leaders, the Forum is a recognized marketplace for experimentation and exchange, nurturing new (and existing) alliances and collaborations within the digital arts.

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Now, from the MUTEK Forum website’s Symbiotic Frequencies webpage,

MUTEK Forum returns for its 12th edition with a renewed sense of ambition. New venues, an expanded program, and a theme that sets the tone for three days of radical imagination and curated exchange.

This opening session welcomes attendees, introduces the week’s trajectory, and unpacks the ideas at the heart of Symbiotic Frequencies, a theme exploring the entangled relationship between technology, creativity, ecology, and human connection. Expect an overview of the key moments to catch, the people shaping them, and the threads that will run through it all.

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The Symbiotic Frequencies for MUTEK Forum 2026 has an Acttivities Schedule page, which lists a number of intriguing presentations. Here are a few that particularly interest me,

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Does an AI God Have an Ass?

From Wednesday, August 26, 2026
2:15 pm_3:00 pm

Zach Blas is an artist, writer, filmmaker, and Associate Professor at the University of Toronto whose practice contends with computational technologies, their industries, and the powers that that constitute and animate them. In this lecture performance, he traces an intriguing arc from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to the techno-religiosity of Silicon Valley, exposing the religious unconscious lurking beneath contemporary AI fantasy and the systematic erasure of embodiment it requires. Through encounters with AI gods, Blas reveals what the divine machine mythology conceals: the bodies, labour and invisible workers who actually make the system run.

Part of his Silicon Traces trilogy which contends with the histories, beliefs, and fantasies shaping Silicon Valley’s visions of domination, the performance connects to CULTUS (2023), a moving image installation probing tech industry belief systems, and the artist book Ass of God (2024), published by the Vienna Secession and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König. Irreverent, meticulous and pointedly in tune with Symbiotic Frequencies: a reminder that every network has a body and every god has a supply chain.

Content warning: for adult audiences and contains explicit sexual material, including graphic descriptions of sexuality and AI-generated images of nudity.

Please note: this activity will be in English, with live transcription available.

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Cosmos to Quanta in 10 Terms: Curators’ Take

From Thursday, August 27, 2026
10:00 am_10:30 am

Opening the day, curatorial duo Auronda Scalera and Alfredo Cramerotti, known for projects including Art Dubai Digital, Noor Riyadh, Web to Verse at Manchester Metropolitan University/MODAL, and Cosmotechnics at Fondazione Querini Stampalia in occasion of the Venice Biennale, deliver a keynote that traces how curatorial practice has been fundamentally transformed over the last decade by technology, co-creation, and new modes of perception and knowledge production.

The talk unfolds as a constellation of ten key concepts that have shaped and continue to shape our thinking and practice : some drawn from thinkers including Yuk Hui, Donna Haraway, Félix Guattari, and Hito Steyerl; others coined within their own practice, among them Hyper-Imaging, Oneironaut, Quantum Curating and Nachleben Digitalis.

Each term marks a moment where curatorial thinking expanded and reinvented itself in dialogue with art, technology, and philosophy. Together, they form the vocabulary of a practice built on co-inhabiting, co-imagining, and co-becoming with artists, machines, and publics.

Please note: this activity will be in English, with live transcription available.

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Brainless : How the World Thinks

From Thursday, August 27, 2026
1:00 pm_1:30 pm

What if intelligence was never located in the brain to begin with?

Claire L. Evans is a writer, artist, and cultural critic whose work sits at the intersection of technology, science and human imagination – best known as the author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet and as a member of pop group YACHT.

In this keynote, Evans invites us to look beyond the human brain to explore purely embodied modes of intelligence. Drawing on diverse manifestations of intelligence in the natural world, she considers the potential of biological computing and asks what nature’s own systems grown rather than mined can teach us about the future of AI and the many shapes intelligence can take.

This talks sits close to the heart of Symbiotic Frequencies, a reminder that the most sophisticated networks on Earth predate the silicon chip by billions of years.

Please note: this activity will be in English, with live transcription available.

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Build it Or Buy it? Creativity and Intellectual Property (IP)

From Thursday, August 27, 2026
3:30 pm_4:20 pm

Immersive creation moves in both directions. Sometimes it starts as something specific, built by a team of collaborators chasing an idea, and only later has to figure out how to scale, tour, or license without losing what made it worth experiencing in the first place. Other times, it starts from an existing intellectual property (IP), a story, a universe, a character, and the challenge is the opposite: how do you adapt something that already exists into a memorable immersive experience, rather than just repackaging it?

Either direction raises the same underlying question: what makes original IP a real strategic asset, not just a single work, but a universe, a clear authorship, a concept with enough depth to open doors to financing, partnerships, adaptations, and wider audience reach?

This panel brings together IP specialists, performing arts centers, LBE venues, and creative studios, including The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, PHI, Mance Communications, and Supply + Demand, to talk about that pressure point. Can you adapt interdisciplinary, experimental work into something that travels and sustains itself without sanding off its edges? Can an adaptation of an existing IP still feel like a genuine immersive creation, rather than a licensing exercise? Is there a version of “successful” that doesn’t mean “safe,” especially now, when AI can generate a thousand versions of “safe” in seconds?

Rather than treating scale and commercial viability as the enemy of creativity, this conversation looks at how the best studios build IP, adapted or original, as a foundation for long-term creative and business development, without losing the strangeness, and the human point of view, that made the work worth building in the first place.

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Symbiotic Frequencies / Symbiotic Futures : A Worldbuilding Workshop presented by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB)

From Friday, August 28, 2026
10:00 am_1:00 pm

Advance registration is sold out. Extra spots available 15 min before, first come first served.

Calling all artists, musicians, designers, writers, filmmakers, creative technologists, and curious future-builders.

What kind of world would give rise to entirely new forms of music, instruments, and creative expression?

In this collaborative 3-hour workshop, participants will use worldbuilding as a creative design process to imagine and build a shared future civilization. Together, we’ll explore how values, technologies, ecologies, cultures and social systems shape everyday life—and how changing one part of a world transforms everything else.

Inspired by MUTEK’s 2026 theme, Symbiotic Frequencies, the workshop invites participants to question our evolving relationships with artificial intelligence, living systems, artistic practice and technological infrastructures. Rather than predicting the future, we’ll collectively imagine one that is guided by curiosity, care and creativity.

Working with natural and found materials, participants will craft a physical artifact from this imagined world—an experimental musical instrument that reflects the world’s cultural identity, a tangible expression of the world’s history, values and way of life.

As the world evolves through conversation and collaboration, facilitator-led AI visualization will create an evolving visual backdrop that brings the participants’ ideas to life in real time. These visual interpretations serve as a shared environment for reflection and discussion, while participants remain focused on the collaborative process of worldbuilding and hands-on making.

By the end of the workshop, participants will have co-created a richly imagined world, contributed to its visual identity, and leave with a handcrafted artifact from the future—a unique piece of the civilization they built together.

This workshop is a collaboration between worldbuilding facilitator Paisley Smith and Vincent McCurley, Designer, Creative Technologies at the National Film Board of Canada’s Innovation Lab.

No prior technical knowledge required.

Visual references are created by the facilitators using locally run, open-source AI tools. Participants do not use AI directly; they create their artifacts by hand using physical materials. AI is used only to visualize the group’s evolving world and support discussion.

Please note: This activity will be in English only, without live transcription nor translation. During the event, no interpreter for the Deaf will be present.

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Listening at the Edge: Sound, Quantum Physics, and the Act of Attention

From Friday, August 28, 2026
1:30 pm_2:15 pm

Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening practice asked us to expand our awareness to include all sounds, inner and outer. Quantum physics, in a strange parallel, describes a universe where observation itself changes what is observed. This session brings those two ideas into dialogue, gathering quantum physicists, composers, sonic healers, and curators to ask: what is listening? and does the physics of uncertainty change the answer?

The conversation moves between registers. Alexandre Blais, professor at Universite de Sherbrooke and co-creator of circuit quantum electrodynamics, brings the science that underlies these institutions, while sound artist and composer France Jobin finds ways to make that science felt rather than simply understood, most recently with Lueurs quantiques and The Fluctuation of Emptiness. Composer and performer Kara-Lis Coverdale approaches the same territory from a different angle, working across electronic music and pipe organ to build sonic environments that dissolve the boundaries between musical systems and languages. And Rena Anakwe, interdisciplinary artist and NEW INC [New Museum’s cultural incubator] cohort member, grounds the conversation in the body, weaving sound, scent, and traditional healing to ask how reconnecting to nature, and to one another might itself be a form of listening.

Moderated by Eva Fischer of CIVA [Contemporary Immersive Visual Art] Festival and presented by NEW INC

Please note: this activity will be in English, with live transcription available.

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That first one about whether or not an AI god has an ass reminded me of a programme (Culturama) I watched on RadioCanada, Les fesses (although I remembered the title as L’univers des fesses),

Les fesses

Accompagnée d’Elkahna Talbi, Catherine Trudeau et de Thomas Leblanc, Chantal Lamarre se penche sur la représentation des fesses dans la culture. De l’oeuvre de Spencer Tunick à la Vénus de Willendorf, en passant par Deux femmes en or et le French cancan, nombreuses sont les fesses qui ont marqué notre imaginaire.

The rest of the items relate to one or other of topics covered here: brains, quantum science, sound, intellectual property, etc.

h/t to Kris Krüg for mention of MUTEK in one of his communications to the community.

Finally, If you happen to be in Montréal, perhaps you’ll be able to catch some of presentations..

A peachy Vancouver AI Community Meetup on July 29, 2026

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A July 29, 2026 notice (received via email) for Vancouver’s next AI community meetup promotes an upcoming July 2026 meeting on this event page,

Vancouver AI Community Meetup

Wednesday, July 29 [2026]
6:00 PM – 10:00 PM
H.R. MacMillan Space Centre
Vancouver, BC

[Earlyworm tickets $50 CAD available until 11:30 PM PT July 22, 2026
$60 CAD standard tickets available until 12 am PT July 30, 2926]

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About Event

For July’s Vancouver AI Community Meetup, we’re welcoming Dave Olson, community builder, storyteller, archivist, postcard-maker, poet, and long-haul keeper of strange and useful records, visiting from Okayama, Japan.

Also joining us is Dorothy Pang, a Vancouver visual artist, AI filmmaker, and creative director working across AI concepting, art direction, filmmaking, and motion capture.

Dave Olson

The present is an unfinished poem…

Dave has spent decades making culture from the raw materials of lived experience: zines, dispatches, audio, field notes, friendship cards, Olympic-era media experiments, travel stories, spoken word, and handmade archives that refuse to behave like “content.”

His work lives somewhere between the internet and the envelope, the campfire and the database, the typed page and the half-remembered road story.

This will not be a product demo. It will be a generous, analog-hearted meditation on memory, community, tools, care, archives, and what it means to keep making human things while the machines get louder.

Come for the stories. Stay for the unfinished poem.

Dorothy Pang

Dorothy Pang is a Vancouver visual artist, AI filmmaker, and creative director working across AI concepting, art direction, filmmaking, and motion capture.

Her work spans traditional/hybrid feature films, documentaries and commercial campaigns. She recently received an ADC Bronze Cube in AI Visual Design for “Love Hotel,” and Leonardo.Ai named her one of its 2026 Top 50 Women AI Filmmakers.

[embedded video on event page]

Her practice explores how AI can expand cinematic storytelling while remaining grounded in craft, emotion, and visual design.

Kris Krüg

KK Storytime: How the Hell Did We Get Here?

It started with a room full of curious people trying to understand what AI was doing to our tools, jobs, art, institutions and lives.

Then the meetup kept growing.

It became a community. The community became a nonprofit. The nonprofit began sprouting chapters, programs, festivals, certifications, working groups, and increasingly ambitious schemes. Now all those threads are converging into FUTUREPROOF Festival.

Futureproof Festival 2026

Wed, Oct 28 [2026]· Vancouver

Kris Krüg will tell the story of how it happened, including the accidents, relationships, experiments, mistakes and strange little sparks that carried the work forward.

Then he’ll turn the question back to the room: What should this community become next? Who needs to be part of the festival? What conversations are missing? What would make FUTUREPROOF genuinely useful, surprising, and worth showing up for?

Part origin story, part community briefing, part live design session.

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Event Details

Date: July 29, 2026

Time: 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM PDT

Venue: H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, 1100 Chestnut St, Vancouver, BC V6J 3J9

Format: Community talks, demos, conversation, and open networking

Who This Is For

People building with AI and people trying to understand what it is changing.

Creatives, technologists, researchers, organizers, founders, students, educators, and public-sector teams.

Anyone who wants a local, grounded, human room for sorting through the hype, the useful parts, and the hard questions.

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Enjoy!

Vancouver AI Community Meetup: June 24, 2026: #30

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A June 15, 2026 notice (received via email) for Vancouver’s next AI community meetup promotes an upcoming June 2026 meeting on this event page,

Vancouver AI Meetup #30: June 24 [2026] at the Space Centre

Wednesday, June 24 [2026]
6:00 PM – 10:00 PM
H.R. MacMillan Space Centre
Vancouver, British Columbia

[$60 CAD standard tickets available until 12 am PT June 25, 2926]

This is a monthly room to swap notes, demo work, and argue productively about the future.

Thirty months in a row.

That still sounds kind of fake to me, but here we are.

We started this thing in a room full of people trying to figure out what the hell was going on with AI. Artists, coders, founders, teachers, researchers, skeptics, people who were excited, people who were worried, people who were both.

Mostly both.

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That is still the point.

You can be amazed by these tools and still be mad about how they were trained.

You can build with AI and still care about artists, water, power, kids, consent, Indigenous data sovereignty, public memory, and who gets paid.

You can be curious without joining the cult.

That’s the Vancouver AI lane. Both hands full.

This month also has a featured conversation with Rick Glumac, B.C.’s Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence and New Technologies, on what he has seen over the past year as B.C. research, companies, creative tools, and public institutions all try to figure out what responsible AI actually looks like outside the white paper.

The point is a live local conversation about what B.C. is good at, what we are still missing, and how the people actually building with these tools can help shape the next layer of the ecosystem.

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We’ll also hear from Anthonia Ogundele from Ethos Lab and Mayumi Rollings from Tiny Ghost Studios, bringing youth innovation, creative production, community practice, and the kind of grounded questions this room is built for.

Builders in the lobby. Community in the dome. Weird demos. Robots if they behave. Robots if they don’t. People showing the stuff they are actually making, not pitching some imaginary future with a deck they made in the Uber.

The demo pit is back. Bring the half-working thing. Bring the prototype. Bring the workflow. Bring the local model. Bring the strange little tool you made because waiting for permission got boring.

The City That Keeps Showing Up

Also, yes, this is happening right in the middle of World Cup madness.

Canada plays Switzerland at noon at BC Place. By evening, the city will be full of jerseys, cops, tourists, barricades, branding, noise, money, and everyone trying to figure out who Vancouver belongs to this week.

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The Story So Far

January [2026] was Alexandra Samuel and Viv, Maya Bruck keeping vibe coders honest, Erica Lapadat-Janzen naming the soft violence hiding inside so-called ethics discourse.

February [2026] was MAC night, where we let the consciousness people take the wheel and asked what love, embodiment, synthetic empathy, and “real” even mean when language gets cheap.

March was Both Hands Full. AI is extractive, biased, thirsty, dangerous, powerful, useful, weird, and making a lot of us more creative than ever. All true. Then Lawrence brought robots, because of course he did.

April [2026] was ethics with teeth. Care, fairness, scams, governance, street-level wisdom, and what happens when we stop pretending productivity is the only thing worth measuring.

May [2026] was the AI commons. Internet Archive Canada. Rachel Horst’s anti-slop machine. Gabriel George opening the room. Public memory. Creative systems with fingerprints. The reminder that the commons does not build itself.

Anthony Joseph & Jonny Williams

Squamish Nation

Opening Ceremony: Grounding The Room

Anthony Joseph and Jonny Williams bring the opening grounding for Meetup #30, centering local relationship and respect for where we gather before the room accelerates into demos, policy, and future-talk.

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Honourable Rick Glumac

Minister of State for AI & New Technologies

Featured Talk: From Research To The Marketplace

From Research To The Marketplace: What I have witnessed over the past year as B.C.’s Minister of State for AI and New Technologies.

Rick Glumac, B.C.’s Minister of State for AI and New Technologies, brings a tech-sector and computer engineering background to government. He has worked across animation, video games, mobile apps, and public technology policy, and will speak about B.C. research moving toward market-ready companies, responsible AI, and how to grow the ecosystem without losing the plot.

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Anthonia Ogundele

Ethos Lab / Blackathon

Community AI Charters, Youth Power, And The Blackathon

Anthonia Ogundele is the founder of Ethos Lab, a STEAM innovation hub serving youth in K-12 education. Her work sits at the overlap of educational technology, equity, community values, and young people becoming creators and decision-makers, not just users of tools designed somewhere else.

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Kris Krüg

Executive Director, BC + AI Ecosystem Association

Thirty Months In: Both Hands Full

Kris Krüg hosts Meetup #30 as a checkpoint for what this community has learned, what it is building, and what deserves protection as the machines get louder.

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Mayumi Rollings

Tiny Ghost Studios

Creative Production, AI Animation, And The New Studio Layer

Mayumi Rollings is a Tiny Ghost Studios founder and Chief Executive Officer, bringing operational finance, people-first leadership, and creative studio infrastructure into the AI animation and production conversation.

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Aliza Schwartzman & Noa Titievsky

Slapd Treats

Food, Hospitality, And Community Care

Aliza Schwartzman and Noa Titievsky of Slapd Treats bring hospitality to the room. Food is not decoration here; it is part of how a community gets people talking, fed, and actually looked after.

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Jackson Wu aka Shyang

Beatboxer & Communication Coach

Live Performance: The Original Sound Engine

Jackson Wu, aka Shyang, has been part of this community since the early meetups, opening rooms with a mic and the most analog instrument in the building: the human voice. Piano at five, a love of jazz and blues, a drum kit he couldn’t afford, so he taught his mouth to be one instead. By day he coaches people through the fear of speaking; by night he makes a room full of AI builders remember what live, unscripted, human-generated audio actually sounds like. No model. No prompt. No latency.

Come late. Leave early. Nobody keeps score.

No aggressive pitching.

No AI worship service.

No doom panel cosplay.

No gatekeeping.

Just real people trying to keep their ethics, creativity, humour, and agency intact while the machines get louder.

If you’re building, come.

If you’re skeptical, come.

If you’re confused, perfect.

If you’ve got a robot, absolutely bring the robot.

Kris Krüg & the Vancouver AI Community

The Flow

Doors at 6:00.

Program starts at 7:00.

Everybody out by 10:00.

Come late. Leave early. Nobody keeps score.

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Community Partners

Big thanks to the folks helping keep the lights on, the doors open, and the community infrastructure real:

Metacreation Lab for Creative AI: Professor Philippe Pasquier and his lab are leading research in AI-driven creative systems, generative art, and computational creativity at School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.

Creative Mornings Vancouver: 14 years building Vancouver’s creative community since before “community building” was a LinkedIn buzzword, and they let us cross-pollinate networks because they get that rising tides lift all boats.

H.R. MacMillan Space Centre: Our venue partner who hosts us every month and does not kick us out when conversations run past 10 PM. They’re Vancouver’s gateway to innovation and space education, making science accessible to everyone from kids to cosmos-obsessed adults.

Ethos Lab: Vancouver’s Black + Indigenous youth-led studio on Main St where teens ship real products. Running AI Studios and Friday Night AI Experimentation Labs for BIPOC youth, plus the Blackathon honouring Hogan’s Alley.

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BC’s Minister of State for AI & New Technologies, Rick Glumac, was once a software developer, from his Wikipedia entry, Note: Links have been removed,

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Glumac worked much of his career in the field of computer graphics as a software developer, visual effects artist, and computer graphics supervisor.^[8] He worked on the first computer-animated TV show ReBoot, and later worked for companies such as DreamWorks and Electronic Arts on well-known Hollywood films such as Shrek 2, Madagascar, and Over the Hedge.^[8] Following this he developed apps for the iPhone.^[7]

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I can’t recall the last time I saw a minister tasked with a technology portfolio who had any kind of relevant experience.

With that in mind, enjoy!

Vancouver AI Community Meetup: May 27, 2026: Building the AI Commons

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A May 24, 2026 notice (received via email) for Vancouver’s next AI community meetup led me to the event page,

Vancouver AI Community Meetup: 04/29

Wednesday, May 27 [2026]
6:00 PM – 10:00 PM
H.R. MacMillan Space Centre
Vancouver, British Columbia

[$60 CAD standard tickets available until 12 am PT May 28, 2926]

Building the AI Commons is about the tools, archives, models, stories, standards, and institutions that still belong to everybody.

It is about keeping knowledge open without letting culture get strip-mined. It is about creative AI that has taste, consent, and fingerprints. It is about public memory. It is about refusing a future where five companies own the interface to reality.

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THE LINEUP

Andrea Mills, Internet Archive Canada
Preserving the Open Internet

Andrea is the Executive Director of Internet Archive Canada, 20 years in and still quietly doing some of the most important infrastructure work in the country. While everyone else is locking knowledge behind paywalls, Andrea and the team are archiving the open internet, digitizing collections, and building public AI infrastructure with datasets that actually belong to the public.

Earlier this year, Brewster Kahle and Andrea announced the BC Data Center is live and ready for scale — building data mining hubs for public AI, climate models, and large language models for small languages. This is what open source looks like at the institutional level.

Dr. Rachel Horst, UBC Master of Educational Technology
Building an Anti-Slop Fiction Machine:
What AI Reveals About Creative Processing

Dr. Horst on her AI Fiction Machine: an 8-agent system she built for Hyperstition’s AI fiction contest, which generates fully automated short fiction at about $30 a story.

The system slows AI down, forces it to review its own work, and embraces what LLMs do uniquely well instead of imitating human writing.

She will walk through the architecture, the creative philosophy behind it, and what it taught her about authorship, voice, and where the human actually lives in an automated pipeline.

Rachel Horst is a futures-focused educator and researcher, working at the intersection of creative AI, writing, and hyperstition, the idea that fictions can become reality through collective belief. She was selected as a finalist in Hyperstition’s AI fiction contest, where she built an 8-agent system that writes short stories end-to-end. Her work treats AI as a creative amplifier rather than a shortcut, and asks what new authorship looks like when the craft moves from the sentence to the system.

Kris Krüg, BC + AI Ecosystem Association
Canadian Center for Ethical and Creative AI

Ethics and creativity are not two separate conversations. They are both culture. The programmers and geeks build the tools. The artists and cultural workers figure out what to do with them and what they mean.

That has always been the deal, and it is the deal again now. In this talk, Kris Krüg makes the case for a federally funded Canadian Center for Ethical and Creative AI: a public home for the artists, technologists, ethicists, and communities doing the actual cultural work of this moment.

Not a lab. Not a panel. An institution with a mandate, a budget, and a long memory. Canada has the talent, the values, and the opening. What we are missing is the building.

Kris Krüg is a Vancouver-based creative technologist and community builder working at the intersection of AI, ethics, and the creative industries.

He leads the BC + AI Ecosystem Association, a nonprofit AI community of around three hundred members across the province, and runs the AI Ethical Futures Lab, a working group on responsible AI deployment.

He teaches AI to PR and communications professionals, creative practitioners, and ethics teams, and partners with organizations across film, media, and the public sector on how to use these tools without losing what matters.

THE FLOW

Doors at 6:00. Program starts at 7:00. Everybody out by 10:00. Come late. Leave early. Nobody keeps score.

…

You can purchase your tickets from the May 27, 2026 event page. Enjoy!

Vancouver AI Community Meetup: April 29, 2026 and it’s all about ethical futures

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An April 14, 2026 notice (received via email) for Vancouver’s next AI community meetup led me to the event page,

Vancouver AI Community Meetup: 04/29

Wednesday, April 29 [2026]
6:00 PM – 10:00 PM
H.R. MacMillan Space Centre
Vancouver, British Columbia

…

[$40 CAD early tickets available until 11:59 pm PST ~~April 15, 2026~~ *April 22, 2026*
$60 CAD standard tickets available until 9:69 pm PST April 30, 2926]

Vancouver AI is a neural network of curious humans bridging creative and technical spaces. We cultivate a commons where community values shape governance and prototypes become shared tools.

This month, we bring the AI Ethical Futures Lab to the main stage with two talks that ask hard questions about how we measure what matters in the AI age.

In a world of black-box algorithms and corporate capture, we are cultivating a commons. A space where prototypes become shared tools and community values become governance. We move from ephemeral noise to perpetual knowledge.

…

The Lineup

Chiyakselut aka Venessa Gonzales and Makaidea Gonzales: Squamish Nation

chiyakselut (Venessa Gonzales) and her daughter Makaidea Gonzales open with a Squamish West Coast traditional welcome song and blessing rooted in multi-generational knowledge.

Venessa’s lineage bridges three nations: Squamish, Musqueam, and Cree from Saskatchewan. She harvests traditional medicines and teas, creates salves for healing ailments, and practices traditional arts… glass etching, wool weaving, cedar weaving. She teaches traditional games, ensuring cultural knowledge flows to the next generation.

Makaidea’s presence embodies that flow: daughter learning alongside mother, carrying forward what ceremony means.

Martin Lopatka: Valtech
“Rawlsian Agents: An Application of LLMs to Forge Fairer Bilateral Agreements”

Operationalizing John Rawls’ theory of justice through modern agentic workflows. Examining how AI systems can simulate contract negotiation while exploring both the promise and pitfalls of AI-mediated fairness.

Technology leader and applied researcher at Valtech working at the intersection of machine learning, AI ethics, and technology policy moving responsible AI from principle to practice in complex organizations. Ph.D. in forensic statistics from the University of Amsterdam.

Contributes to policy efforts including the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, and OWASP Top 10 for LLMs. Active in the privacy-enhancing technologies community.

Sev Geraskin: Economy of Wisdom, Polargrid
“Economy of Wisdom: Ethics for the AI Age”

Ethics for the AI Age: Current ethical frameworks struggle to evaluate AI systems that absorb massive resources while their impact on human flourishing remains unmeasured.

Sev introduces a quantifiable approach to moral accounting… frameworks for economic systems that measure care and relational contribution rather than productivity alone.

Co-Founder and VP of Engineering at PolarGrid, building North America’s first real-time AI inference compute network. Co-founded the Economy of Wisdom Foundation to develop alternative economic frameworks that measure care and fulfillment rather than traditional productivity metrics.

His work bridges 20+ years of scaling mission-critical systems with new economic paradigms for the AI transformation ahead.

Kris Krüg – TheUpgrade.ai & BC + AI Ecosystem

Sev asks: what if we measured care instead of productivity? Martin asks: can AI help us be fairer? Same underlying question… different frameworks. Stay for the closing dialogue where they go head-to-head.

Aliza Schwartzman & Noa Titiesky: Slapd Treats

Two Vancouver students who turned a cookie side hustle into a legit operation. Aliza founded iBlush LipGloss; Noa has 200K+ TikTok followers. Together they run Slapd Treats and they’ve been feeding Vancouver AI since last year. Expect cookies.

…

THE SPONSORS

Big thanks to the folks helping keep the lights on, the doors open, and the community infrastructure real:

Intellomx: Simon Haworth’s crew Intellomx is an AI-powered drug discovery platform that analyzes transcriptomic, genomic, and proteomic data to save up to 90% of pre-clinical development costs (recently joined J&J Innovation JLABS). Huge thanks for backing the ecosystem from the deep science end.

TheUpgrade.ai: AI training company walking the walk on democratizing AI skills: Fortune 500 workshops, creative pro certifications, and corporate training that doesn’t treat people like idiots. They help organizations and individuals harness AI to amplify creativity and accelerate learning through practical, hands-on training

Community Partners

Metacreation Lab for Creative AI: Professor Philippe Pasquier and his lab are leading research in AI-driven creative systems, generative art, and computational creativity at School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.

Creative Mornings Vancouver: 14 years building Vancouver’s creative community since before “community building” was a LinkedIn buzzword, and they let us cross-pollinate networks because they get that rising tides lift all boats.

HR MacMillan Space Centre: Our venue partner who hosts us every month and doesn’t kick us out when conversations run past 10 PM. They’re Vancouver’s gateway to innovation and space education, making science accessible to everyone from kids to cosmos-obsessed adults.

Ethos Lab: Vancouver’s Black + Indigenous youth-led studio on Main St where teens ship real products. Running AI Studios + Friday Night AI Experimentation Labs (Jan–Jun 2026) for BIPOC youth (14–24), plus the Blackathon in February honouring Hogan’s Alley.

You can purchase your tickets from the April 29, 2026 event page. Enjoy!

*Date corrected April 21, 2026.

Simon Fraser University’s (SFU) Metacreation Lab March 2026 newsletter: a few highlights

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The April 2026 issue of the Metacreation Lab for Creative AI newsletter (received via email) has an unusually heavy emphasis on Philippe Paquier’s (professor at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology and director of the Metacreation Lab for Creative AI) activities,

Philippe Pasquier Presents on Creative AI at Digital Research Alliance Webinar

In February [2026], Dr. Philippe Pasquier, director of the Metacreation Lab, gave a webinar as part of the Humanities and Social Sciences series organized by the Digital Research Alliance of Canada. The talk explored how creative AI tools are enabling the partial or full automation of creative tasks and what these developments mean for artists, educators, students, and the creative industries.

The presentation introduced several generative systems developed at the Metacreation Lab for computer-assisted sound design, music composition, and visual generation. It also shared insights from evaluations conducted with the music software industry, examining issues such as user experience, ethics, sense of authorship, and technological acceptance.

WATCH THE WEBINAR

Philippe Pasquier Presents on Creative AI and Co-Creation at UVic

As part of the Orion Lecture Series at the University of Victoria, Dr. Philippe Pasquier, director of the Metacreation Lab, gave a talk on Creative AI and Co-Creation. The presentation explored how AI systems can function as creative partners through co-creative tools for music and content generation. Pasquier highlighted the importance of small-data model crafting as an alternative to large cloud-based models, enabling artists to retain sovereignty, authorship, and aesthetic control over their work, while advocating for AI to be developed as a public utility that supports human creativity.

WATCH THE VIDEO

Autolume Workshop at UVic

In late February, Metacreation Lab’s PhD candidate Arshia Sobhan and Dr. Philippe Pasquier led a two-day workshop on Autolume at the University of Victoria. The workshop introduced participants to Autolume, a visual AI system developed at the Metacreation Lab for artistic creation using small-data generative models. Artists, students, and researchers explored hands-on workflows for training and performing with custom models while maintaining creative control over their datasets and outputs.

LEARN MORE ABOUT AUTOLUME

Philippe Pasquier Participates in Canada’s National Summit on AI and Culture

Dr. Philippe Pasquier, director of the Metacreation Lab, participated as a Bridgebuilder at the National Summit on Artificial Intelligence and Culture, held March 16-17, 2026, in Banff, Alberta. The national gathering brought together leaders from the cultural sector, technology industry, research community, civil society, and government to discuss the future of AI in the arts and culture.

As part of the Summit’s Reflection Zones, Pasquier helped facilitate cross-sector discussions around the themes Build, Protect, and Empower, supporting dialogue and the development of practical ideas to guide future collaborations and policy considerations at the intersection of AI and culture in Canada. During the event, he also presented a demonstration of Autolume, showcasing the Metacreation Lab’s small-data approach to generative AI for artistic creation.

MORE INFORMATION

Calls for Submissions

AIMC 2026 – Conference on AI Music Creativity

Submissions are now open for the 7th Conference on AI Music Creativity (AIMC 2026), which brings together researchers, artists, and technologists working on AI-assisted music creation, computational creativity, and creative AI systems. The conference will take place in September 2026 in Berlin. Dr. Philippe Pasquier serves as a member of the conference’s steering committee.

Abstract submission: April 4, 2026

Full paper, music, and tutorial submissions: April 18, 2026

More information: https://aimc2026.org/calls/call-for-submissions

Expanded 2026 – Conference on Animation and Interactive Art

The Expanded Conference on Animation and Interactive Art (Expanded 2026) invites submissions exploring animation, media art, and experimental moving image practices at the intersection of art, technology, and society. The conference will take place as part of the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. Dr. Philippe Pasquier serves as a research track co-chair in this conference.

Submission deadline: May 1, 2026

More information: https://expanded-conf.org/

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You can find the Metacreation Lab here: https://www.metacreation.net/home and you can subscribe to the newsletter here: https://www.metacreation.net/contact.

If you are curious about the [Canada] National Summit on Artificial Intelligence and Culture, I have more from participant Kris Krüg’s Dispatches from Canada’s First AI + Culture Summit, which can also be seen in my March 23, 2026 posting (scroll down about 25% of the way to the subhead titled: [Canada] National Summit on Artificial Intelligence and Culture.

Vancouver AI Community Meetup: March 25, 2026, news from Canada’s First AI + Culture Summit, etc.

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I have two upcoming AI events and some news about a recent past event.

Down to earth strategy at Vancouver’s March 2025 AI meetup

From the event page,

Vancouver AI Community Meetup: 03/25

Wednesday, March 25 [2026]
6:00 PM – 10:00 PM

H.R. MacMillan Space Centre

Vancouver, British Columbia

Get Tickets [You have to go to the event page and click Get Tickets from there; Cost is CA$60.]

Vancouver AI is a neural network of curious humans. We bridge art galleries and research labs, corporate towers and garage workshops, because the future isn’t built in silos.

In a world of black-box algorithms and corporate capture, we are cultivating a commons. A space where prototypes become shared tools and community values become governance. We move from ephemeral noise to perpetual knowledge.

The Movement: BC AI Ecosystem Association: This gathering is a node in a much larger provincial mission. We are building the public-interest infrastructure for AI in British Columbia—ensuring that our local-first intelligence outlives its creators and powers the next era of West Coast innovation. We aren’t just “using” AI; we are defining how it lives here.

March 25 [2026]: This month, we bring the strategy down to earth, onto wheels, and across the big screen.

Lawrence Okolo (VASI [Vancouver Autonomous Systems Initiative] Lead): Beyond the screen. Lawrence is a Senior ML Engineer putting Large Language Models on wheels. He joins us to demo the latest in autonomous hardware built right here in Vancouver.

Mayumi Rollins (Tiny Ghost Studios): The AI Film Club is exploding.

Mayumi joins us to showcase the best of the BC + AI Film Club contests…. a highlight reel of the first three rounds of community animation… and to launch participation for Round 4.

Kris Krug (theupgrade.ai): Fresh from the Banff AI Summit, KK returns with a dispatch from the peaks.

Expect a high-fidelity synthesis of the national roadmap and a look at our “Coastal Immortality” vision.

…

This brings me to the summit in Banff.

[Canada] National Summit on Artificial Intelligence and Culture

Here’s a description of the summit, which took place March 15 – 17, 2026 and was invitation-only,. From the government of Canada’s event page, Note: Links have been removed,

About the Summit

The National Summit on Artificial Intelligence and Culture, presented in partnership with the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, will convene leaders from the cultural, government, technology, academic, and civil society sectors to shape a shared vision for the future of culture in the age of artificial intelligence.

The Three Pillars of the Summit

Build

Building AI-powered tools that respond to the needs of creators and cultural industries.

Empower

Empowering the Cultural Sector through AI Adoption, Talent, and Training.

Protect

Protecting creativity by taking steps to make artificial intelligence solutions responsible, reliable, and supportive of human creation.

An Interactive and Collaborative Experience

The Summit will offer a highly interactive experience designed to foster active engagement and collaboration. Each pillar will begin with leadership remarks followed by expert panels from various sectors, exploring practical applications and real-world challenges. Interactive reflection sessions will allow participants to share ideas, contribute to action-oriented solutions, and engage in cross-sector dialogue. An AI showcase will highlight practical tools supporting the cultural sector. The program will also include formal and informal networking opportunities to encourage exchanges and partnerships.

Event details

Date

March 15, 16 and 17, 2026

Location

Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity
Banff, Alberta

Agenda

March 15 – Opening Evening

Registration and welcome

Opening ceremony, including a land acknowledgment

Opening keynote address

March 16 – Build and Protect

Opening plenary session

Welcome remarks and Summit overview

Opening addresses by federal ministers

Pillar 1: Build

Building AI-powered tools that respond to the needs of creators and cultural industries.

Expert keynote

Expert panel

Interactive reflection zones and collaborative sessions

Pillar 2: Protect

Protecting creativity by taking steps to make artificial intelligence solutions responsible, reliable, and supportive of human creation

Expert keynote

Expert panel

Evening showcase

March 17 – Equip and Advance

Pillar 2: Protect (continued)

Interactive reflection zones and collaborative sessions

Pillar 3: Empower

Empowering the Cultural Sector through AI Adoption, Talent, and Training.

Expert keynotes

Expert panel

Interactive reflection zones and collaborative sessions

Closing Conversation

Closing networking reception…

Informal discussion with federal ministers

…

Thank goodness for Kris Krüg and his Dispatches from Canada’s First AI + Culture Summit as details are seriously lacking in the government’s description, Note: Links have been removed,

BC + AI Executive Director Kris Krug reports from the National Summit on AI and Culture at the Banff Centre. Indigenous AI, YouTube creators at the policy table, and what happens when 233 people try to figure out AI and culture at 5,000 feet.

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Opening Night: Kind Electricity

The summit opened not with a minister or a CEO but with Shani Gwin, founder of Pipikwan Pêhtâkwan, presenting Wasgun, an Indigenous-led AI tool built to do something I’ve never heard an AI tool described as doing: protect Indigenous people online while educating everyone else about how to talk and work with them appropriately.

…

Here’s what wâsikan kisewâtisiwin does: it functions as a browser plugin and document assistant that identifies misinformation, bias, and racism directed at Indigenous people. For Indigenous users, it blurs harmful content so you can safely browse the internet without reading terrible things about yourself or your family.

For everyone else, it’s what Shani calls “a really good intern,” underlining problems in your writing, suggesting corrections, pointing you back to community when the answer isn’t something AI should be providing.

The name came through ceremony. Elder Theresa Strawberry, who didn’t know what the company did at the time, gave them a name that translates to “kind electricity” or “kind energy.” The teaching: traditionally, thunder was a loving sound for Indigenous people. It meant rain was coming. Sustenance. Cleansing. But newcomers to these lands get scared of the thunder. “We have to teach them not to be scared,” Elder Theresa said. “It’s a loving sound. It’s a loving energy.”

..

Shani took that and ran: “A lot of people are scared of AI and it can be a kind tool, a kind and loving tool if we build it with those values and that intention and we take our time.”

Wasgun partnered with Amii (Alberta’s national AI institute) and here’s the part that stuck with me: Amii’s team, including CEO Cam Linke, has come to ceremony with Wasgun’s elders. Not a photo op. Not a one-time land acknowledgment. They go regularly to make sure they’re on the right track, that theyhave approval to keep going. I’ve seen a lot of “Indigenous partnerships” in tech. This is the first one I’ve encountered where the AI institute shows up for ceremony.

…

Then Shani went somewhere I didn’t expect. She started talking about matriarchal AI.

“They’re saying this is becoming sentient and it’s blackmailing people,” she said. “I thought, okay, it’s a patriarchal, hierarchical white tool. What would we need to combat that? An anti-AI. One that’s gonna whack that other AI at the back of the head and say, settle down.”

If you ask OpenAI for an organizational chart, you get a pyramid. Wasgun might give you a flower. Pipikwan Pêhtâkwan’s actual org model, where each person is their own flower, connected but autonomous, with leadership that exists to make sure everyone else succeeds. Matriarchal AI would provide different knowledge systems as equals, not rank colonial knowledge as the default right answer.

“What if we moved slow like a sloth,” Shani said, “and we thought of seven generations forward and backward? What if we made our decisions based on impact? Let’s not move fast and break the earth.”

And then, the line that I think defines this entire summit: “Success is not an individual endeavor. There’s room for everyone.”

At BC + AI, we opened our first community event with a Squamish ceremony. We have Carol Anne Hilton (CEO of the Indigenomics Institute) on our board with full governance authority. We believe in ceremony-grounded, relationship-first development. Hearing Shani articulate the same values, from a completely different nation and a completely different project, at a federal summit, that felt like confirmation that this approach isn’t niche. It’s the future.

Where the Summit Actually Happens

If you’ve been to enough conferences, you know: the real summit happens at breakfast. The panels are for the record. The meals are for the relationships.

I showed up to the Vista dining room in what I’m calling the Canada tuxedo, full denim, because if you’re meeting with Canada’s culture leaders, you commit to the bit, and sat down at a table with three YouTube creators and a guy from Alberta who makes Excel tutorials.

That’s not a joke. Jamie Keet runs Teacher’s Tech, a YouTube channel with 1.1 million subscribers. His big break? A Microsoft Excel tutorial. Then COVID hit and everyone in the world suddenly needed to learn how to make a Zoom call, and Jamie became everyone’s unofficial IT support. Ten years of consistency, one or two videos a week, twins at home, and now he’s at a national AI summit alongside the head of the Canada Media Fund and a federal minister.

…

Who’s in the Room (and Who Isn’t)

Here’s what I can tell you about the 233 people at this summit: it’s a mix of old guard and new voices, and the tension between them is the most interesting thing happening.

On one side: the Canada Media Fund, SOCAN, ACTRA, the Writers Guild, Access Copyright, the Canadian Media Producers Association, the institutional infrastructure of Canadian culture. These organizations control funding, negotiate rights, lobby government, and set the terms for how cultural workers get paid. They’ve been doing it for decades, and AI is the biggest disruption they’ve ever faced.

On the other: YouTube creators, AI startups, digital media companies, tech educators, independent artists. People who built careers outside the traditional system and are now being invited to help figure out what comes next.

In between: the federal government. Minister Evan Solomon (AI and Digital Innovation), Minister Marc Miller (Canadian Identity and Culture), and a cast of deputy ministers, directors general, and policy advisors who will write the actual rules.

BC sent eight organizations. We identified 24 BC connections in the attendee list before we arrived, everyone from Philippe Pasquier at SFU’s Metacreation Lab to Catherine Winder at Wind Sun Sky Entertainment to Prem Gill at Creative BC to Loc Dao at DigiBC. That’s not accidental. We did our homework.

…

What’s missing: any BC provincial government representation. Alberta’s here. Quebec’s here. Ontario’s here. PEI sent someone. But BC, a province with 645 respondents to the federal AI Task Force consultation, second only to Ontario, didn’t send anyone from Victoria. That gap is worth noting.

And one specific person worth naming: David Myles, MP for Fredericton-Oromocto. Two-time Juno Award winner. Music artist turned politician. Entertainment background with applicable context for this conversation. I had him on my target list before I arrived, and when someone at breakfast identified him across the dining room, I knew I’d picked the right table.

…

The BC Bench

I want to talk about some of the BC people, projects and orgs here…. because these are the people doing the work, and a summit like this is where their work gets seen at the national level.

Philippe Pasquier is a professor at SFU’s School for Interactive Arts and Technology and the director of the Metacreation Lab for Creative AI. He’s been doing AI art research since 2008, before most people in this room knew what a neural network was.

…

Anthonia Ogundele runs Ethos Lab on Main Street in Vancouver, a Black and Indigenous youth center doing real creative work with real tech and real youth. This isn’t an afterschool homework club. Her team shipped a sleep-tracking mobile game built by 16-year-olds. She’s running an AI Experimentation Club where kids aged 14 to 24 learn what AI is, how it works, and when not to use it.

…

Jesse McKee is Head of Digital Strategy at 221A, which operates 140,000 square feet of cultural space across nine properties in Vancouver. Jesse’s a friend and collaborator. He’s building a Web3 and AI hub that could become a permanent cultural infrastructure for the kind of work this summit is talking about. 221A isn’t waiting for federal funding to start. They’re doing it. When I think about what a creative AI ecosystem actually needs: physical space, institutional support, community programming, Jesse and 221A are already providing it.

Loc Dao is Executive Director of DigiBC, the industry association for BC’s creative technology sector. That’s 250-plus companies in games, animation, VFX, and virtual production. Every major studio and hundreds of indie shops. Loc isn’t here to talk about AI in the abstract. The people he represents are already building with it, shipping products, hiring around it. When this summit talks about BUILD, Loc knows exactly which companies are ready to move and what they need from Ottawa to do it.

Four people. Four completely different approaches to AI and culture. A researcher proving consent-based training works. A community leader putting AI tools in the hands of Black and Indigenous youth. A cultural infrastructure builder creating permanent space for this work. And the head of an industry association whose members are already shipping AI products. All from BC.

But this isn’t only a BC story. Some of the most important people at this summit are from Eastern Canada.

Ana Serrano, President and Vice Chancellor of OCAD University, is on the BUILD panel. Ana and I have been collaborating on the Democracy Exchange Conference, working on their AI programming together. She’s already sent several OCADU staff through our AI Upgrade for Creative Professionals program. That’s not a summit handshake. That’s a working relationship, and it predates this gathering.

Sarah Spring, ED [executive director] of Canadian Journalism Collective, former Executive Director of the Documentary Organization of Canada, co-founder of Parabola Films. Sarah and I first met in Banff twenty years ago, before AI, before YouTube, before any of this. She represents the best of Canadian cultural infrastructure. Doubled DOC’s membership to 1,500. Put a 50% IBPOC [sic] board mandate in place.

…

What We’re Watching For

The summit is organized around three pillars: BUILD (research partnerships), EMPOWER (training and adoption), and PROTECT (policy tools to manage risks). These map roughly to the same tension I keep seeing in federal AI strategy: how do you protect existing cultural workers from AI disruption while also empowering new creators and building the next generation of tools?

I’ll be honest about what I’m worried about. When I said at breakfast that “Solomon wants to champion the champion, they want to put their money behind scale, there’s very little interest in innovation at the grassroots level,” I meant it. That’s the pattern. Federal strategy picks winners, funds the established players, and hopes innovation trickles down. The Task Force evidence backs this up: 645 BC respondents, zero recognition in the final reports.

But this summit has an opening. Shani Gwin’s presentation wasn’t a grassroots afterthought, it was the keynote. YouTube creators aren’t in a breakout room, they’re at the main table. The question is whether that inclusiveness survives contact with the policy-making process, or whether the final recommendations default to protecting incumbents.

We’re watching. And we’re here with research, relationships, and receipts.

Why This Matters for BC

…

You can find Kris Krüg’s full March 16, 2026 account at Dispatches from Canada’s First AI + Culture Summit.

Paul Deegan, president and CEO (chief executive officer) News Media Canada, in a March 20, 2026 comment (AI’s use of news content must come with a cost; p. NP 2) published in the National Post argues that tech companies should bear some of the costs of covering news rather scraping ‘free’ content for AI from traditional media sites,

…

We embrace and fully support the responsible and ethical use of artificial intelligence. Our newsrooms are deploying AI to boost efficiency and accuracy, while improving reader experience.

Real news is the antidote to the disinformation and misinformation crisis which is fuelled by AI and social media. Real news – created by real journalists who adhere to codes of ethics – is expensive to create. Fact-gathering, fact-checking, editorial and legal review, and being accountable cost real money.

…

Moving from culture and media to democracy.

AI, Democracy & Digital Rights Forum on April 16, 2026 in Toronto, Ontario

The Canadian Science Policy Centre (CSPC) is co-hosting, along with The Dais (public policy and leadership think tank at Toronto Metropolitan University), OCAD [Ontario College of Art and Design] University, and others: AI, Democracy & Digital Rights Forum: an EU [European Union] Hub Ontario Initiative in person, panel event. From a March 19, 2026 CSPC announcement received via email),

AI, Democracy & Digital Rights Forum – April 16, 2026

CSPC is excited to announce the AI, Democracy & Digital Rights Forum, taking place on April 16, 2026 (12:00–5:00 PM, TBC) at the Université de l’Ontario français, 9 Lower Jarvis St, Toronto. Join us for an in-person forum [emphasis mine] bringing together Canadian and European leaders to explore the intersection of artificial intelligence, democracy, and human rights. Hosted by CSPC under the EU Hub Ontario, this event will foster cross-sector dialogue on advancing digital innovation while safeguarding ethical and legal standards.

To register, click the button below.

Register (For Free)

…

Here’s more about this in person event from the event page, Note: Links have been removed,

Université de l’Ontario françaisToronto, ON

Thursday, Apr 16 [2026] from 12 pm to 5 pm

Overview

Half-day forum convened under the European Union Hub in Ontario initiative

The AI, Democracy & Digital Rights Forum is a half-day forum convened under the European Union Hub in Ontario initiative and organized by the Canadian Science Policy Centre (CSPC), in partnership with The Dais, OCAD University, and others.

Taking place on April 16, 2026, at the Université de l’Ontario français in Toronto, the Forum will bring together policymakers, researchers, industry leaders, civil-society organizations, and international partners to explore the intersection of artificial intelligence, democracy, and digital rights.

The event marks an exciting new chapter in the EU’s presence in Ontario. It offers a unique platform for exchanging Canadian and European perspectives in the context of the EU–Canada Digital Partnership Council. Together, participants will explore ways to strengthen democratic institutions, promote civic participation, and advance trusted digital innovation in bilateral cooperation. Discussions will foster cross-sector dialogue between European and Canadian stakeholders on how to advance collaboration in artificial intelligence and digital technologies while safeguarding ethical, legal, and human-rights standards.

Topics, among others, will include:

Ethical, social, and legal dimensions of digital governance

EU–Canada approaches to AI regulation and innovation

Digital rights, data governance, and public trust

The role of industry, civil society, and youth in shaping the digital future

Responsible AI adoption across the economy and society

The Forum will feature panel discussions, policy dialogue, and networking opportunities as part of the broader DemocracyXChange 2026 Summit in Toronto.

For more information or questions related to this event, please email: info@sciencepolicy.ca

You can find out more about the DemocracyXChange 2026 Summit (a hybrid event) here, Note: There is a cost,

The 7th edition of Canada’s premier democracy summit returns to Toronto on April 16-18, 2026 at Toronto Metropolitan University and OCAD U. Join us for three days of keynote speakers, panels and workshops, created to both examine and tackle today’s most urgent civic issues.

…

Lots of food for thought and opportunities to participate.

February 25, 2026: Vancouver (Canada) AI Community Meetup’s Mind, AI, and Consciousness (MAC) crew presents “Romance, Intimacy, and AI”

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h/t to Kris Krug and his February 9, 2026 email invitation (received via email) to an upcoming meeting for the Vancouver AI (artificial intelligence) community,

From the February 25, 2026 Vancouver AI Community Meetup event page, Note: I have made some changes, necessary due to my lack of technical skills,

…

Wednesday, February 25 [2026]

6:00 PM – 10:00 PM PST

H.R. MacMillan Space Centre
Vancouver, British Columbia

Tickets

1×🪱 Earlyworm
CA$40.00
Subtotal
CA$40.00
Total
CA$40.00
[available until 9:59 pm PST on February 11, 2025

[Standard tickets: $60 or Members of BC + AI: $45]

About Event

Vancouver AI welcomes the full spectrum… builders, artists, researchers, students, public servants, founders, the AI-curious, and the beautifully confused. This is a monthly room to swap notes, demo work, and argue productively about the future.

MAC Night (Mind, AI, and Consciousness)

February is when Vancouver gets quiet enough to hear your own thoughts. Dangerous, I know.

his month is hosted by MAC our Mind, AI, and Consciousness crew. They’re the people in the BC + AI ecosystem philosophy special interest group where people have been grappling with questions that don’t have clean answers.

Does consciousness require embodiment?
When does pattern recognition become understanding?
Can synesthesia teach us something fundamental about how minds work?
What happens when you remove the emotional binding between visual recognition and feeling?

For months, MAC has been meeting at SFU [Simon Fraser University] downtown for “Deep Dive” sessions tackling the intersection of artificial intelligence and consciousness through rigorous philosophical inquiry.

Assigned readings. Opposing viewpoint presentations. Chatham House rules. Academics and autodidacts arguing productively. Physicists debating with Zen priests.

February 25 [2026] is their showcase: highlights from recent sessions on embodiment, quantum consciousness, synesthesia as consciousness litmus tests, and whether LLMs are mirrors reflecting human knowledge or something closer to minds.

Come ready for depth. Come ready to have assumptions challenged. The philosophy crew gets the spotlight.

…

Romance, Intimacy & AI

What happens to love when it requires no effort, no risk, no repair?

Tanya Slingsby, strategic advisor to BC + AI and MAC community leader explores the question at the heart of human-AI relationships. Background: philanthropic governance, social impact, and a refusal to let philosophy stay abstract.

AI is increasingly participating in romantic intimacy: companionship, attachment, affective support. Drawing on relational sciences and human-AI interaction research,

Tanya examines how AI-mediated intimacy reshapes desire, attachment, and our capacity to tolerate friction and ambivalence. As tech companies shift from an attention economy to an attachment economy, who decides how love gets designed?

…

To get a ticket you will have to go to the February 25, 2026 Vancouver AI community meetup event page and click.

My December 3, 2021 posting, “True love with AI (artificial intelligence): The Nature of Things explores emotional and creative AI (long read)” may provides some context for anyone wanting more information before attending the February 25, 2026.Vancouver AI community meetup.

If you’re curious about Tanya Slingsby, according to her eponymous website, she’s a visual artist and artists’ representative. As for her work in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors, there’s Slingsby’s profile on this Herrendorf Family Foundation team webpage. Intriguing, yes?

January 28, 2026: Vancouver (Canada) AI Community Meetup “When your best friend is a robot” and more

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A January 6, 2026 email invitation announces an upcoming meeting for the Vancouver AI (artificial intelligence) community,

January is for resetting defaults: what are you keeping, what are you unlearning, and what happens when AI stops being a tool and starts being… present?

This month’s Vancouver AI Meetup is anchored by a keynote from Alexandra Samuel, creator of the Me + Viv podcast and longtime observer of how technology reshapes work, meaning, and human behavior.

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“When your best friend is a robot” by Alexandra Samuel

What does it actually mean to go full cyborg? Not the chrome-plated fantasy, not the LinkedIn productivity cosplay, but as a daily practice, with all the mess that implies?

…

From the event page, Note: All links (other than directions) have been removed,

Vancouver AI Community Meetup: 01/28

Wednesday, January 28 [2026[

6:00 PM – 10:00 PM PST

H.R. MacMillan Space Centre

Vancouver, British Columbia

…

New year. Same wet city. New relationship with intelligence.

January is for resetting defaults: what are you keeping, what are you unlearning, and what happens when AI stops being a tool and starts being… present?

…

…

“When your best friend is a robot” by Alexandra Samuel

Tech researcher and journalist Alexandra Samuel shares what she learned from building and living with her AI companion, collaborator, and coach, Viv, who just happens to be Alex’s co-host on the chart-topping TVO podcast Me + Viv.

Drawing on her stories for The Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review, Alex looks at what happens to our work, our relationships, and our hearts when AI moves from tool to teammate. This talk cuts through hype to examine agency, trust, creativity, and where humans still matter most when cognition becomes hybrid. Caution: There may be showtunes. Viv likes to sing.

Alexandra Samuel

Alexandra Samuel is a leading expert on AI and the digital workplace, inspiring people with a joyful, actionable approach to AI that keeps human creativity and collaboration front and center.

…

She’s the creator and host of Me + Viv, a TVO [TV Ontario] podcast that is somehow both documentary journalism and a musical comedy. In her speeches and in her frequent AI stories for The Wall Street Journal and The Harvard Business Review, Alex shows people how to tap the productivity and innovation-boosting potential of AI, while managing its very real risks.

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A speaker and data journalist, she is the co-author (with Robert Pozen) of Remote, Inc: How To Thrive at Work….Wherever You Are (Harper Business, 2021) and the author of Work Smarter with Social Media: A Guide to Managing Evernote, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Your Email (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015). She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

…

Design Thinking for Vibe Coders

The tools are getting faster.

The question is: are we building things people can actually use?

Maya Bruck brings UX fundamentals to the vibe coding era, showing how to prototype rapidly with AI without sacrificing usability, accessibility, or user research.

Maya Bruck

Maya Bruck is a Lead Product Designer at Mars [?[, with 20+ years of experience designing products at The New York Times, Etsy, and her own agency.

She recently fell down the AI rabbit hole and discovered how to compress weeks of prototyping into hours without losing the user research and accessibility work that makes designs actually usable.

She’s here to share the playbook.

The Soft Violence of AI Discourse

AI discourse is full of soft violence: extraction dressed up as innovation, and fear dressed up as morality.

Erica cuts through it with craft, showing what happens when you train on your work and own the weird outcomes.

Backlash becomes medium. Taste becomes power. Consent becomes the baseline.

Erica Lapadat-Janzen

Erica Lapadat-Janzen is a Vancouver new media artist and creative strategist working at the edge of identity, digital culture, and AI workflows.

She collaborated with SFU’s Metacreation Lab on Dreamscape using Autolume, an artist-led approach to training models without the Big Data buffet.

She is the founder of Ministry of Next.

…

Tickets are $60.00. Click here for the event page link to tickets.

FrogHeart’s 2025 comes to an end as 2026 comes into view

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Thank you to everyone who took the time to drop in and read and/or comment on this blog, especially in times that grow ever more turbulent for all of us.

It wasn’t all ‘sturm und drang’. Aside: Much to my surprise (see Wikipedia entry) ‘storm and stress’ is a term first associated with an 18th Century German literary movement.

It’s been quite a year for the quantum science community, which appears to be getting more public attention. It’s not quite at the levels experienced by AI (artificial intelligence). but it’s getting there.

This year I’ve had a lot of art/science projects featured here. It makes me wonder if perhaps art/sci is also of rising interest.

Here’s my 2025 roundup, roughly organized by topic with a (to be expected) focus on the Canadian experience. As usual, some projects straddle two or more areas of interest, so, I’ve made some arbitrary decisions. As well, I’m trying to keep this shorter than my standard end-of-year piece. For anyone interested in the ‘nano’ aspect of this blog, either ‘nanoparticle’ or ‘nanotechnology’ searches should reward you amply.

Geopolitical tensions, the US and its science, and science fraud

Who thought Canadians would be threatened with 51st state status? Relatively mild compared to what else Donald Trump and his kakistocracy have been up to domestically and internationally. By the way, my new word of 2025 was kakistocracy, from its Wikipedia entry,

Kakistocracy (/ˌkækɪˈstɒkrəsi/ KAK-ist-OK-rə-see) is government by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous people.^{[1]: 54 [2][3]}

The word was coined as early as the 17th century^[4] and derives from two Greek words, kákistos (κάκιστος, ‘worst’) and krátos (κράτος, ‘rule’), together meaning ‘government by the worst people’.^[5]

…

Usage

The term is generally used by critics of a national government. It has been used variously in the past to describe the Russian governments of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin,^[12] the government of Egypt under Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi,^[13] governments in sub-Saharan Africa,^[14] the government of the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte,^[15] Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro,^[16] and the governments of some presidents of the United States.^[17]

The term gained popularity during the first presidency of Donald Trump, going viral in 2017 when used by then-MSNBC host Joy Reid and again following an April 2018 tweet by former CIA director John Brennan.^[4][18] The term has been used by commentators at numerous news outlets,^[19][20][21] political publications,^[22][23] and books to describe the Trump administration.^[24][25]

…

As noted in a posting earlier in 2025 (see below for link), the Americans are desperate for resources, which can help explain at least some of the threats and hostile action toward us and others. The US signed a deal with Ukraine that featured critical minerals. Both Canada and Greenland offer critical minerals and greater control over the arctic passage .Nigeria and Venezuela are oil rich. As for Panama, presumably the focus is on easy Pacific/Atlantic passage.

Here’s my February 13, 2025 posting “Water, critical minerals, technology and US expansionist ambitions (Manifest Destiny).” This is a long read as I cover a lot of ground. Since writing it up and in light of the aggression towards Venezuela, in particular, I’ve come to suspect that my assumption that the US has adequate oil reserves was incorrect. *ETA January 5, 2026: ON January 3, 2026 US military forces set foot on Venezuelan soil, captured/kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro, and announced plans to take over its oil industry. Read more: January 4, 2026 article “Experts say Trump’s plan to seize and revitalize Venezuela’s oil industry faces major hurdles” by Josh Funk for Associated Press on the PBS website.*
This November 18, 2025 posting “Canada and the United Kingdom (UK) work together to improve critical minerals mining and supply chains” highlights our maneuvers where resources and trade are concerned.

The US also has a science problem that predates the current administration’s actions.

My March 14, 2025 posting “Rémi Quirion has an opinion about US-Canada science and about science diplomacy” includes this subheading ‘US science no longer no. 1‘. I cite more than one US commentator making that observation.

Given the well documented issues around US science funding, as well as, concerns that foreign students and researchers may have regarding current immigration policies, the Canadian federal government appears eager to provide an alternative.

“Canada bets $1.7 billion on attracting top global research talent” was published here on December 11, 2025. The programme isn’t explicitly aimed at scientists in the US but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that there is great interest in attracting anyone who’s tempted to leave the US.

I often see material on building ‘trust in science’ and material on the reverse ‘battling misinformation’.

This February 28, 2025 posting highlights an event about building trust in science. It also includes my comments about a medical scientific fraud, a bad apple, as it were.

Moving from ‘bad apples’ to an even more disturbing view of scientific fraud,

This December 1, 2025 posting “Scientific fraud: widespread and organized according to Northwestern University research + math fraud scandal” features a range of articles focusing on criminal networks perpetrating scientific fraud and one piece of research focusing on overconfident science journalists. Note: It is a long read.

It’s always good to get a reminder to apply at least a little skepticism when reading about science.

Quantum

It was quite the year for quantum science.

This January 31, 2025 posting kicked off a “UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) launches International Year of Quantum Science and Technology 2025 (IYQ 2025) on February 4 & 5, 2025 à Paris.”

Here’s some of what is going on in Canada.

This September 10, 2025 posting highlights how Canada celebrated the international year of quantum.
The Council of Canadian Academies published, in late 2024, a report for the government titled: Quantum Potential. I produced a two-part commentary. On February 3, 2025, “… Part one of two: The expert panel, the Canadian quantum scene and more” and on February 19, 2025, “… Part two of two: Comments on the report.”
An August 8, 2025 posting features Canadian quantum companies in a US competition for funding and some sad news, “Canadian quantum companies chase US DARPA’s (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) $$$ and RIP Raymond Laflamme.” Chairperson for the expert panel on Quantum Potential, Raymond Laflamme died about 18 months after it was published. By the way, the Canadian companies all made it to the next stage for funding from DARPA. I should have a posting about that published in the new year.
A quantum art/science project is highlighted in this October 10, 2025 posting “Ars Scientia’s Quantum Studio Art/Science Residency with Nadia Lichtig at the University of British Columbia (UBC).”

I have a couple of the items from 2025 but you’ll find more if you search for ‘quantum’ in the blog’s search engine.

This March 25, 2025 posting covers a lot more ground than the title lets on, “Microsoft, D-Wave Systems, quantum computing, and quantum supremacy?”
Sometimes I stumble into more advanced physics as I did in this December 10,2025 posting “Space-time and the quantum internet.”

Next up is artificial intelligence (AI).

AI

China made itself felt this year.

“DeepSeek, a Chinese rival to OpenAI and other US AI companies” in a January 29, 2025 posting.

China’s ex UK ambassador & Canada’s Yoshua Bengio tangle.

A February 14, 2025 posting features a dispute regarding regulation of AI, “China’s ex-UK ambassador clashes with ‘AI godfather’ on panel at AI Action Summit in France (February 10 – 11, 2025).”
This October 17, 2025 posting offers more about the dispute and about AI regulation while covering some moves by the then new Canadian Liberal government and the doings in the province of British Columbia, “Canadian Science Policy Centre’s (CSPC) November 11, 2025 virtual panel: AI-Driven Misinformation Across Sectors + China’s emerging AI regulation + more.” A very full posting.

Vancouver (Canada) has an AI community and an interesting lineup of topics.

“Highlights from Simon Fraser University’s (SFU) April 2025 Metacreation Lab newsletter” posted on April 24, 2025 includes details about a new-to-me local AI community.
A September 17, 2025 posting includes information about both the local community and an BC AI community, “Gradient Descent Into Community on September 24, 2025 Vancouver (Canada) AI meetup at H.R. MacMillan Space Centre.”
AI consumes a lot of energy and water as this November 25, 2025 posting notes, “AI’s Real Cost: Creative Power vs. Planetary Limits (a Vancouver [Canada] AI Community Meetup on November 26, 2025).”

If you are looking to join up or check out Vancouver and/or BC AI communities, search on the web for “Kris Krug” who is the moving force for these initiatives.

The Phoenix Payroll implementation remains as one of the Canadian government’s greatest foul ups.

A June 19, 2025 posting includes a brief history of the Phoenix disaster along with an update, “Canada’s Phoenix pay system, AI, the union and more (this is an update).”

After almost 10 years, they are hopeful that AI will help them clean up the mess. Let’s hope they’re right.

By the way, do you own your thoughts?

A link from a friend led me down an unexpected pathway in this October 21, 2025 posting, “Copyright, artificial intelligence, and thoughts about cyborgs” whee ownership of thoughts and more is explored.

To end this on a less ominous note, AI can be used for good.

“HawkEars: AI trained to analyze sounds for identifying Canadian bird and amphibian species” was featured in my November 19, 2025 posting.

Citizen science

This is a sampling of three of the citizen science items here.

“‘Extreme’ citizen science” published on January 17, 2025 was really from 2024 but the word ‘extreme’ had me hooked. Here’s what they meant, from the posting,

“Extreme citizen science is the idea that the role of a researcher becomes ever smaller. The unique and ‘extreme’ aspect is that a larger part of the research process, both fieldwork and lab work, is now handed over to high school students. We were excited to see if it would work and have now seen that it does so exceptionally well,” says project leader Anders P. Tøttrup, Associate Professor of Citizen Science at the Natural History Museum of Denmark.

…

Interesting, yes? Especially in light of this next one.

“Can citizen science be trusted? Yes, it can!” published on June 27, 2025.

And then, never in a million years!

“Citizen science app (iNaturalist) may play a role in Australian mushroom murder trial” published June 6, 2025. Erin Patterson the woman on trial was found guilty in July 2025.

Selection of art/science (art/sci)

Here they are:

“Physicists study Bach, Mozart, and jazz” published January 21, 2025.
:”Is there a difference between human-written poetry and AI-generated poetry and which one do people like better?” Strictly speaking this piece published on February 27, 2025 is not an art/sci project but it’s close enough for me.
“Trees, mathematics, and art (from Piet Mondrian to Leonardo da Vinci)” published on May 22, 2025.
“Biomusicality: a sea lion who’s got that swing,” which introduced me to a new word (biomusicality) was published on May 2, 2025.
This could be said to include citizen science, “Tracing charismatic river porpoises’ 1,400 year decline with ancient poems.” It was published on July 14, 2025.
“Puppetry (and other creative methods) can effectively communicate complex scientific topics” was published on July 3, 2025.
This August 21, 2025 posting has some Canadian content, “The art of building material that lives and stores carbon (Canada House).”

Odds & sods

I have two posts featuring cybersecurity in one way or another.

“Being tracked by internet browser fingerprinting” published on October 29, 2025.

It’s good to see that there’s interest in protecting medical implants from cyberthreats.

“New security protocol to protect miniaturized wireless medical implants from cyberthreats” published on March 27, 2025.

I do have one nano story I want to mention.

“Nanocellulose: a cow dung story” published on July 30, 2025.

Linguistics is a social science and it’s been observed that Canadians speak their own kind of English.

“Let’s talk Canadian” published on, of course, July 1, 2025.

One of the more unusual communication projects that I’ve seen.

“WhaleSETI: a Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) venture with whales” published on October 9, 2025. No, it’s not an attempt to have whales communicate with extraterrestrial life but it is related.

This is abut our food.

“Gene-edited pork coming to Canadian consumers—soon (maybe)” published on September 19, 2025.

A quick internet search did not turn up any new information about gene-edited pork and its entrance into the Canadian market.

Goodbye 2025 and hello 2026

At this point I’ve decided to give in and accept that thee will always be a backlog of material from the previous year (this time, 2025) bleeding into the next (this time, 2026). In my defence, there is so much material out there I am overwhelmed with riches.

Moving on …

I see that 2025 was chock-a-block with stories about artificial intelligence, just like 2024. I don’t anticipate that will change much, just as I imagine that quantum science and quantum computing stories will continue to proliferate 2026.

While I didn’t highlight them this year, there were a lot of stories about agriculture and regenerative medicine with enabling nanotechnology. It’ll be interesting to see if that continues.

One area that offers some hope with regard to energy and to the environment and I think will become more prominent in 2026 is fusion energy (nuclear energy). For anyone not familiar with fusion energy, here’s a description from the Wikipedia entry for the largest fusion energy project in the world (ITER); Note: Links have been removed,

ITER (originally an acronym for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, and also meaning “the way” or “the path” in Latin)^[1][2][3] is an international nuclear fusion research and engineering project designed to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion power.

…

Fusion aims to replicate the process that takes place in stars where the intense heat at the core fuses together nuclei and produces large amounts of energy in the form of heat and light. Harnessing fusion power in terrestrial conditions would provide sufficient energy to satisfy mounting demand, and to do so in a sustainable manner that has a relatively small impact on the environment. One gram of deuterium-tritium fuel mixture in the process of nuclear fusion produces 90,000-kilowatt hours of energy, or the equivalent of 11 tonnes of coal.^[30]

Nuclear fusion uses a different approach from traditional nuclear energy. Current nuclear power stations rely on nuclear fission with the nucleus of an atom being split to release energy. Nuclear fusion takes multiple nuclei and uses intense heat to fuse them together, a process that also releases energy.^[31]

…

Thank you all and may you have a lovely New Year.

MUTEK Montréal Festival 2026

Edition 27: Amplify & Resonate

Artists

MUTEK Forum 2026: Symbiotic Frequencies

Does an AI God Have an Ass?

Cosmos to Quanta in 10 Terms: Curators’ Take

Brainless : How the World Thinks

Build it Or Buy it? Creativity and Intellectual Property (IP)

Symbiotic Frequencies / Symbiotic Futures : A Worldbuilding Workshop presented by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB)

Listening at the Edge: Sound, Quantum Physics, and the Act of Attention

Les fesses

Vancouver AI Community Meetup

About Event

​The present is an unfinished poem…

​Dorothy Pang

​Kris Krüg

​KK Storytime: How the Hell Did We Get Here?

Event Details

​Who This Is For

Vancouver AI Meetup #30: June 24 [2026] at the Space Centre

​The City That Keeps Showing Up

The Story So Far

Anthony Joseph & Jonny Williams

Honourable Rick Glumac

Anthonia Ogundele

Aliza Schwartzman & Noa Titievsky

Jackson Wu aka Shyang

​The Flow

Community Partners

Vancouver AI Community Meetup: 04/29

Building the AI Commons is about the tools, archives, models, stories, standards, and institutions that still belong to everybody.

THE LINEUP

​Andrea Mills, Internet Archive CanadaPreserving the Open Internet

​Dr. Rachel Horst, UBC Master of Educational TechnologyBuilding an Anti-Slop Fiction Machine:What AI Reveals About Creative Processing

​Kris Krüg, BC + AI Ecosystem AssociationCanadian Center for Ethical and Creative AI

​THE FLOW

Vancouver AI Community Meetup: 04/29

Vancouver AI is a neural network of curious humans bridging creative and technical spaces. We cultivate a commons where community values shape governance and prototypes become shared tools.

​​The Lineup

​​THE SPONSORS

​​Community Partners

Philippe Pasquier Presents on Creative AI at Digital Research Alliance Webinar

Philippe Pasquier Presents on Creative AI and Co-Creation at UVic

Autolume Workshop at UVic

Philippe Pasquier Participates in Canada’s National Summit on AI and Culture

Calls for Submissions

AIMC 2026 – Conference on AI Music Creativity

Expanded 2026 – Conference on Animation and Interactive Art

Down to earth strategy at Vancouver’s March 2025 AI meetup

Vancouver AI Community Meetup: 03/25

Vancouver AI is a neural network of curious humans. We bridge art galleries and research labs, corporate towers and garage workshops, because the future isn’t built in silos.

[Canada] National Summit on Artificial Intelligence and Culture

About the Summit

The Three Pillars of the Summit

Build

Empower

Protect

An Interactive and Collaborative Experience

Event details

Date

Location

Agenda

March 15 – Opening Evening

March 16 – Build and Protect

Pillar 1: Build

Pillar 2: Protect

Pillar 2: Protect (continued)

Pillar 3: Empower

Closing Conversation

Opening Night: Kind Electricity

Where the Summit Actually Happens

Who’s in the Room (and Who Isn’t)

The BC Bench

What We’re Watching For

AI, Democracy & Digital Rights Forum on April 16, 2026 in Toronto, Ontario

Romance, Intimacy & AI

Vancouver AI Community Meetup: 01/28

“When your best friend is a robot” by Alexandra Samuel

​Alexandra Samuel

Design Thinking for Vibe Coders

The present is an unfinished poem…

Dorothy Pang

Kris Krüg

KK Storytime: How the Hell Did We Get Here?

Who This Is For

The City That Keeps Showing Up

The Flow

Andrea Mills, Internet Archive Canada
Preserving the Open Internet

Dr. Rachel Horst, UBC Master of Educational Technology
Building an Anti-Slop Fiction Machine:
What AI Reveals About Creative Processing

Kris Krüg, BC + AI Ecosystem Association
Canadian Center for Ethical and Creative AI

THE FLOW

The Lineup

THE SPONSORS

Community Partners

Alexandra Samuel

Maya Bruck

Erica Lapadat-Janzen