Episode 57 – Influence, Build, Become
Gabrielle Martin: Hello and welcome to Push Play, a Push Festival podcast featuring conversations with artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form. I’m Gabrielle Martin, Push’s Artistic Director, and today’s episode highlights AI as spirit, future grief technology, and building things together. I’m speaking with the co-creators of 2021, Cole Lewis, Sam Ferguson, and Patrick Blenkarn.
2021 is being presented at the Push Festival January 23rd to 24th, 2026. A father rendered as data, a daughter rewriting the code, 2021 blurs the line between remembrance and replication, an experiment in how we grieve in the age of AI. 2021 co-creator, AI prompter, and performer Cole Lewis is a Dora-nominated director, playwright, and designer whose work fuses technology, design, and live performance to explore class, bias, and alternative futures.
2021 co-creator, programmer, and performer Patrick Blenkarn is an artist working across performance, game design, and visual art, exploring language, labor, and democracy. He co-created Asses Masses, which was a 2024 Push Festival audience favorite, and co-founded Video Can. Co-creator, programmer, music and sound designer Sam Ferguson is a Toronto-based award-winning sound designer and composer with an MFA from Yale, creating evocative soundscapes for theater and live performance.
Here’s my conversation with Sam, Patrick, and Cole.
And before we begin, I just wanna acknowledge the indigenous territories that I’m speaking from today, which are the unceded and ancestral territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, and also to acknowledge the ongoing nature of colonization, um, through policy, through extraction, through fast-track development, um, that, at, which is at the expense of indigenous sovereignty and, uh, environmental protection.
And I was recently reading the Yellowhead Institute’s Fast-Track to Disaster paper, which is on BC’s Bill 14 and 15, and, um, in this paper, we’re really reminded that time is our most precious resource, and the future isn’t inevitable, but shaped by our relations to land, to care, and to each other. And I would love to invite you to share where you are.
What lands are you on right now?
Patrick Blenkarn: Oh, right now we’re in Germany. Uh, yeah, we are coming to you live from a bedroom at a hotel in Munster, Germany, where we are about to spend a week or so in residence at a theater called Theater im Pumpenhaus. And, uh, they have a residency program, so if anybody’s listening and are interested, um, look them up.
They’re great people. Um, it’s a place where you can stay and work 24/7. So…
Gabrielle Martin: Starting tomorrow.
Patrick Blenkarn: Starting tomorrow, yeah, sorry. We-
Gabrielle Martin: Exciting.
Patrick Blenkarn: Context for this conversation, because, uh, some of us, not myself, have recently arrived in Germany after an overnight redeye flight and then a delayed Deutsche Bahn train, namely you two.
Sam Ferguson: Yes. Yes.
Gabrielle Martin: And then I just sprung on you that we were gonna have some of this taken, uh, used for our social media, some of the video used. So thank you- Yes … for being so generously open to that after a long flight, and you all look fabulous, so I’m glad people will get to see also how cute you are all snuggled onto a bed for this podcast conversation.
We should
Patrick Blenkarn: also… Some of us forgot that it was this evening.
Sam Ferguson: Mm-hmm.
Patrick Blenkarn: Yes. Not I.
Sam Ferguson: Well, forget I, I was confused about the time change, apparently. I, I- Yeah …
Cole Lewis: kept thinking it was Thursday, but not Friday. It’s all good. It’s all good. We’re, we made it.
Gabrielle Martin: We’re there.
Sam Ferguson: We made it.
Cole Lewis: Yes.
Gabrielle Martin: Great, and usually, where are you based?
‘Cause you’re not usually in Germany.
Sam Ferguson: That’s true. Uh, yeah, I’m from, uh, Toronto.
Cole Lewis: Um, my name is Cole, and I’m from St. Catharines, Ontario, and, uh, that is part of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee, uh, peoples, um, have been there for very, very, very many generations, time immemorial before us.
Patrick Blenkarn: Sam, were you… Do you wanna…?
Your name is Sam.
Sam Ferguson: Yes, my name is Sam. I’m from Toronto.
Patrick Blenkarn: And, uh, my name is Patrick Blenkiron, and, uh, I am currently of no fixed abode. But I grew up in Ottawa, um, which is Algonquin territory.
Gabrielle Martin: Thank you. Uh, thank you for starting us out this way. I’m gonna jump right into some juicy questions, uh, about 2021, starting with you, Cole.
So you’ve described 2021 as a live narrated video game about your father, a man you both loved and fundamentally disagreed with. And I’m curious about how the form of the game with its rules, choices, and glitches helps you confront the contradictions of his life and your relationship to him
Cole Lewis: That’s a really good question.
I think before I go into the, how it helps me confront the contradictions in him, I’ll give a little bit of context and maybe talk about the game itself. Um, my dad is a funny, cantankerous, or was a funny, cantankerous, uh, soul. Um, he, uh, both meant really well, but could be a complete jerk. Uh, uh, um, and, um, could be cruel.
Um, and, uh, and his politics, uh, he loved Trump, so I found that very, very difficult when he was alive, um, and was constantly trying to navigate that with him. When my dad fell ill and was, uh, terminal, uh, part of what was so challenging, I think, in some ways, what we talked a lot about, right, Patrick and, and Sam, are, um, well, just what the…
how caregiving was so challenging. He felt lost in a bureaucratic system. I felt like I was constantly on the phone learning how to be patient and willing to wait for four hours for someone to finally respond, um, because the documents or the person on the other end held information my dad needed so very much to keep his care going.
Um, he would feel lost. He would get delirium. Um, and because the borders were shut, I was caregiving from Canada, and he was in America. Uh, and that made it really, really challenging. He’d be confused. He wouldn’t know where he was. Um, and that could make him really upset, and they’d have to call me, and I’d have to calm him down.
So our relationship in that time was really mediated because I worried, “What if my dad is such a jerk no one in the hospital wants to take care of him?” And, uh, and regardless of it all, he’s my dad, and I wanted to see him cared for in the last days of his life. Um, and partly what led us, I guess, to the form of the video game was it didn’t…
it felt like the best way to show what it’s like to be lost and how to find and navigate this immense system as a caregiver and as a patient. Um, and, uh, I think we couldn’t find a better way to convey that sensation.
Patrick Blenkarn: I think we had tried a couple other formal devices. Um, you know, when we started the show, we were also coming out of the last show that the three of us had made together, which was a live cinema performance.
So that also had a very tactile, um, process-based construction whereby images are constructed in front of audiences in real time and voice acting is applied on top of it. Um, so we… you know, there was a certain amount of labor that is interesting to watch on stage that all- I think all of us are interested in.
But as we were testing forms, the particular, um, frustrating nature of a medical system, a foreign medical system being, like, an important part of it too, uh, felt like Yeah, the game’s s- context and also history was helpful for focusing that experience or that affect in some way, yeah
Cole Lewis: And then I could expand, like, onto the second part of your question in terms of how does a game show the contradictions in him.
When we have one player come up and play the game, and they, uh, get to play aspects of my dad, make choices of their own that then add to this kind of new narrative or character of m- of a fictional version of my dad, they g- they extend who he is, and if the player chooses to sit down and another player comes up, then we get another version of my dad.
So in some ways, we found through the form a way to make those contradictions actually quite present and part of the world and part of the game, um, via the contradictory choices different players, and even an individual player, might make as they go through the levels.
Patrick Blenkarn: Yeah. I don’t know if it’s, like, entirely relevant, but I was just watching something where Jason Alexander was talking about when he first got the role as George on Seinfeld, and he was like, “How the fuck am I supposed to do…
Like, this doesn’t make any sense, Larry. No one would do this this week,” and then the next week they would do this totally different thing. And Larry David’s response was like, “What do you mean? This is me. This is how I responded in this situation. This is just, this is just what happened to me.” And, you know, Jason Alexander’s, like, applying this great actorly mind to being like, “Oh, like, somehow I’m gonna have to sort of create a bridge between these characters.”
And I think, you know, we all come from, um, theatrical traditions, like, you know, actually fairly conservatory and, like, you know- Mm-hmm … as well as experimental. But y- um, you teach acting, Cole. Sam, you also teach, like, sound and dramaturgy at TMU right now. And, like, I think when we think about how we are able to build bridges between these contradictory elements, in so many ways what we’re trying to do using the g- video game form is also what an actor does all the time, whether you’re Jason Alexander in Seinfeld, or you’re someone else in a, you know, more contemporary play, right?
Cole Lewis: Yeah, we’re just asking and inviting an opportunity to have empathy with a character that is maybe unlikable to some people. Mm-hmm. Um, and invite them to find things that are kinda likable and step into the shoes of what it’s like to be his daughter.
Patrick Blenkarn: Yeah.
Gabrielle Martin: So I wanna get into talking a little bit more about the code, the AI, this aspect of the work.
Sam and Patrick, you’re both theater artists and self-taught coders. Uh, Patrick, your practice often explores language and systems as well as games, how we play, vote, and work inside constructs. Sam, you’re a sound designer and composer by trade who has also taken up programming the show’s AI. So what did you two discover when you applied your new programming skills to the subject of grief, to the act of trying to code a person, specifically your friend’s father, into a playable simulation or AI?
Sam Ferguson: A lot of the work of the actual AI stuff has to do with the data that was collected by Cole in order to form this character. Like, the kind of… What we base it off of is this model that has all these weights, and then we go through a process where we developed our own data set where those weights were shifted in a way to make them more, um, like Brian-ish.
Yes? Um.
Cole Lewis: Yeah. Well, and th- the, there, the data set itself, for, uh, people who aren’t, are not aware, is both of, like, how AI is built is we grabbed public facts about him that I’m okay sharing, that my dad was okay sharing, that were in the public, and then we used my memories. Um, and then I built 1,500 conversation threads.
So imagine just small, little 10-line conversations, and 1,500 conversation threads sounds like a lot, but it’s not. It’s a very, very tiny data set. And then, um, with the help of David Rokeby at the BMO Labs, uh, he fine-tuned that using these weights and the temperatures. Yeah. And now Sam is-
Sam Ferguson: Now, now we’ve, now we’re implementing it in a way where we’re, we also have these other databases full of, like, memories and opinions and, like, other things that we kind of live take the prompt from the speaker, whether that’s Cole or someone in the audience or however we do it, and then we kinda, like, throw them into the context window and try to create, like, a coherent result that makes sense from all these different data sets.
So it’s a big, uh… And to answer your question, like, how do I find it, it, it’s a big juggle of a lot of information that I’m just trying to hold onto.
Patrick Blenkarn: Wait, wait. Can I, can I ask? When, when you… So you tag them, and then as you’re doing tests, like, locally at home-
Sam Ferguson: Mm-hmm …
Patrick Blenkarn: do you get responses though that feel, like, too, um, like that you need to check in with our friend about?
Sam Ferguson: Yes, exactly. Yeah. It’s, it’s an iterative process of, like, throwing it all together, trying it out a few times, then going to Cole and being like, “Does this seem right?” And then al- sometimes it’s obvious, ’cause sometimes it’s, like, out there, but then we kinda spend some time homing in, and there’s, like, finer points about, like, how this person would behave in certain situations and, like, and trying to, like, figure out where to kinda draw the dial.
Yeah.
Cole Lewis: And w- and one thing that we also did is, um, in those conversation threads, and that Sam’s also doing through a process called RAG, uh, Retrieval Augmented- G, I forget what the G is for
Patrick Blenkarn: Yeah. Come on team, we’re live. We know what we’re doing. Just
Gabrielle Martin: make it up. We don’t know.
Cole Lewis: Good stuff … is, is that, um, that’s another way we get the contradictions of my dad in because we can look at how are we going to respond to, um, how might he respond to one question.
Well, on one day he might respond to it very differently than he would on another day. So we looked at his beliefs, his value systems. We generated a bunch of different categories, and then we also generated different responses depending on what the m- the moods are, and that’s all part of the data set.
And as Sam find, like, continues to play with it in both using the t- the tags and the RAG, we’re expanding that, um, in relation to the show so that we can have a real improvised conversation with it, but we know that it will also, um, be as close as possible to him. Yeah But that, how that is to do that for…
Like, you had to hold a lot of, you had to hold a lot of stories that I share.
Sam Ferguson: Yes.
Cole Lewis: Yeah.
Sam Ferguson: Yeah.
Cole Lewis: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I’m very lucky, these kind people.
Patrick Blenkarn: Tag is not an acronym. It’s just-
Sam Ferguson: No, it’s just… Yeah.
Patrick Blenkarn: Yeah. RAG is an acronym- Im- … for which we don’t understand what it means, but that’s- Exactly. The, the important, the
Sam Ferguson: important thing- It’s just three letters
the, the, the important thing
Cole Lewis: about
Sam Ferguson: it is the semantic search. So you can like- Mm … you don’t have to tag, you would have to say the exact tag to match it. A semantic search, which is what RAG is doing, is that you can say a similar word, and then we’re using fancy math to, like, bring in things that are similar, other words that are similar, but, um, exist- Mm
in the same meaning space.
Cole Lewis: One thing that can help- Yeah, mm-hmm … people too is to think of a family tree. So if you, uh, if I want to pull a memory of a great-grandmother name, that’s very difficult. Like, if you actually think about the math of trying to show that that is a maternal/paternal great-grandmother, it can be really hard to do the math of that.
So partly the RAG is helping us specify if this name is mentioned, it relates to these memories- Mm … to these conversation threads, not these ones. Mm. So we’re, we’re kind of funneling where, where it should go. So if I say the word, um, pepper, it knows that I’m not talking about pepper that goes on the food unless the context relates to food.
It knows I’m talking about my family dog when I was little.
Patrick Blenkarn: Who makes an appearance in other parts of the game. Yeah. As well. Um, which I guess, I mean, the game part… So I’m, you know, admittedly, um, there’s, there would be such a thing as too many cooks in the room for both the AI and the, the larger game system that’s been made.
So, um, Sam and I have sort of split ourselves across these two components of the project with Cole being in the middle, and we both kind of have to check in regularly about is this what it looked like? Is this what it felt like? Is this, um- You know, how might we move, uh, through space and the, when the player takes on the role of Brian inside of the game, it’s a first-person perspective for the most part.
So we actually don’t have to, we’re not engaging with the question of representation so much as with the question of how, as Cole was saying earlier, you know, we’re, we’re asking people to sort of bring themselves also to the role and, and mold the role of the father to their own actions, and the implications of their actions then become the story of his final weeks and months of, of life.
Um, so as you know, as the programmer, but also one of the animators, like, all of our choices are about trying to, uh, create something that is as accurate to a memory, what is now a memory of the time in 2021 and the, and the months leading up to 2021, um, the year. And, uh, and also I think we have… One, something that’s important and, you know, I’ve learned from previous projects is we are changing aesthetics and game forms often.
Um, this is partially to capture different elements of the experience that Brian went through. Um, Cole mentioned that there was significant experiences of delirium, uh, at different times, and that has been something we were interested in exploring because it gives us some extra freedom, but also they were particularly harrowing, I think, experiences for you as you look back on those moments.
And, uh, so we do use 2D, we do use 3D moments. There’s like a racing game at one point because, um, no lie, this, like the thing that prompted this, and it’s no spoiler because we begin the show by talking about it, is that your dad was, um, uh, he drove away from the hospital. Uh, he was released from the ho- hospital early.
It’s, we shouldn’t go into the whole thing ’cause it’s like way too much. It’s too complicated. But just to say, there’s a moment where- Come to the show … the man, silver alert was put out for this man, and during that silver alert, Cole actually texted me saying, “You won’t believe what’s happened.” story. My dad has like, you know, escaped from the hospital ostensibly, and there’s a silver alert from him.
This makes me feel like we should probably make a sequel to our previous show, 1991, and, and then a number of years later-
Cole Lewis: And call it 2021 …
Patrick Blenkarn: and we should call it, and we said, it’s like, “We should call it 2021.” And then, you know, a number of years later we were like, “Hey, I think that was actually a really good idea.”
Um, you had brought it up again, and we were saying, “Yeah, like let’s, let’s explore that as-
Cole Lewis: And, and not to make light of like-
Patrick Blenkarn: The
Cole Lewis: silver alert … that I was I was, I was- It was a very distressful time … I was horrified and, and very scared in that moment and stuff. But there is this kind of ability to share with Patrick and Sam, um, like both fear and also like the humor that arises from those moments.
Mm-hmm. And so I think that is kind of what has made us the right team for this content and this material, is to be able to deal with some really difficult material that unfortunately many people will experience at some part of their life if they have to care for a loved one, how to do it with, hopefully with dignity.
Um, and then how to ask the hard questions I felt like I was asking, uh, in that moment or afterwards. Um, and then how to have some humor, because my dad would kill me if there was not a show with humor in it about him.
Patrick Blenkarn: Yeah, so we try to make it, there’s funny bits. Yeah. There’s funny bits. There are- Um, there’s also zombies and some other things that made appearances in hallucinatory experiences.
Uh, and you know, um, yeah, sad bits, funny bits. I don’t know. It’s like that’s not, that’s not our marketing pitch.
Gabrielle Martin: It has everything.
Can you, um, just briefly, um, let us know what 1991 is?
Patrick Blenkarn: Yeah. Do you wanna do that?
Cole Lewis: Uh, 1991, Patrick referred to earlier. 1991 is a, a show that all three of us made in 2019 as part of the Riser X project with, um, w- through Why Not Theater, and it’s a live cinema piece. So we took, um, shadow puppets that, um, Patrick and I made by actually scanning people’s bodies and, like, making our own silhouettes of them, and we had over 300 puppets and backdrops that we built with the cinematographer, and Patrick photoshopped, like, intricately.
Sam, uh, did all the sound design for it. And then you would watch, um, myself play a, a version of myself when I was little, and my dad was also in that story. So it’s about a road trip my dad and I took across borders, um, when I was 12 years old. And, um, and then there are four women on stage, myself, and I play the role of me in it, and then there’s two people who are puppeteering on overhead projectors to make a live film, uh, that the audience watches appear before them, and then one actor, um, Jessica Carmichael, who played all, um, the other characters in the play through live voice modification.
So she was a bit of a tour de force watching her, um, press a button and change a character and have scenes with herself, and it would change the voice through this, what Sam built.
Patrick Blenkarn: And maybe we should say your dad, as a character, you know, there was a kind of… Your dad represented this, um, kinda get out of jail free card.
It was like he picks you up in southern Ontario and takes you for this adventure- Oh, I see what you mean … across
Cole Lewis: the
Patrick Blenkarn: border. And yeah, maybe that’s not… Like, it was sort of like there’s this, like- Well, like, you get a, there’s a-
Cole Lewis: He, he was a carefree spirit, do whatever you want, um, and, uh, kind of… Yeah, it would, like-
Patrick Blenkarn: And I think part of what we thought is, like, that carefree spirit has positive and negative consequences.
Cole Lewis: Yes.
Patrick Blenkarn: And it, that story also was very personal and had, um, you know, pretty intense subject matter, uh, for a lot of people. Um, do you wanna say anything specifically about it or, like?
Cole Lewis: Well, it’s, I mean-
Patrick Blenkarn: Yeah, okay. Um, so but all to say is, like, what’s interest- I mean, it’s interesting for us as a group because, you know, we had- we, we learn stories about this man.
He was alive at the time when we were making that show. And, um, a lot of the ways that that show also came to be understood was, in some ways, the way that he let you down when you were 12 years old. Yes. And so as we look back at, and we don’t explore that sense of having been let down, but I think that we try to, again, you capture the complexity of, um, being the child of complex people.
And, and knowing that, like, despite maybe all the things that have happened to you, to you, but also maybe to other people on our team or in the future or in our audiences, you know, despite all the things, the way that you might have been let down by a parent, you might be the only one there for them in the end.
And how do you, um- do you shelve those things, those feelings and opinions or stories or experiences so that you can be there for them? And what does it mean to be there for them when, in our case, for you, you could not physically actually be there for the majority of that, that time. So yeah, there’s a lot- the- for us, it seems like there’s something very interesting.
Um, it’s not- this is not a sequel to 1991. It’s just s- you know, 30 years later.
Gabrielle Martin: Yeah.
Cole Lewis: With technology.
Patrick Blenkarn: Yeah, with updated technology. No more, like, acetone or acetate, uh, overheads. Yeah. Yeah.
Gabrielle Martin: Thanks for that context on a little bit more about how you’ve been exploring this character, person and character through your work and, and, you know, through different forms.
And I’m curious about how the audience member becomes patient 203, so embodying Brian, but I’m also understanding that there’s also a nuance between becoming Brian or just influencing and bringing a new narrative layer to who this is or could be. Um, but interested about, you know, the audience playing a role as a kind of collective caregiver.
What does it mean to invite spectators to play this character or to drive this character or what that relationship with, with someone who has passed? Um, where does witnessing end and participation begin? These kind of questions.
Patrick Blenkarn: I would say one of the things, we’ve talked about this before, is, um, we discovered the audience- Mm
as caregiver at a particular moment. I think when we thought about the show at the beginning, um, at least I’ll say for me, we were interested… There was a construction of a kind of collaboration happening on stage. There was a player, there was a narrator, and there was a musician, and those, like those, there was this sort of like principle conversation between these elements.
In its first iteration, there were even more elements. There was like a live cinema, live cameras, some top-down photography, a bunch of other elements that, um, were kind of outside of the digital systems that we were building. And then in, in its second iteration, all of those other elements came inside of the video game and including the AI thing that we’re talking about, uh, to become, like the video game became the overarching structure that would house these other elements.
And, but still that meant that the conversation was largely between a player, a narrator, who was Cole, and a musician, who has become me on stage playing Sam’s music. And, uh, and then when we were doing it though, in that first run, there was a moment where a player yelled out, “Help me.” And everybody in the audience was very willing to help them.
And, um- You know, it’s funny that, like, that wasn’t something that we were interested in trying to cultivate from the very beginning, um, especially given the context of the very active audience in previous video game works that I have made, um, and been a part of. But now I think it’s, it’s something that we’re trying to understand specifically how they do have a clear role in the relationship with, with the player, and also…
Yeah.
Gabrielle Martin: And just disclaimer, they didn’t yell, “Help me,” because you put the audience in any type of- No, no, no, no, no … extreme distress. This is for the- Where do I go? … future audiences of this show. No,
Patrick Blenkarn: no, yeah, yeah. It’s gonna be fine. I-
Cole Lewis: No, I, I don’t even know that she… It, like, my memory of it too was that she actually yelled- Or where do I do?
“Where do I go?” Oh, where do I go? Sorry. Sorry. Where do I go? Where do I go? Where do I go?
Patrick Blenkarn: Much more like, sorry. Help is trouble. I mean, it’s the sentiment. It’s the same sentiment, but- But,
Cole Lewis: but there, there was i- in, in that moment, even still, P- you, Patrick, were, like, resistant about encouraging the audience, not in a bad way, but, like, hesitant because of what- Telling
Patrick Blenkarn: them
Cole Lewis: what to do
to do. Like, to- Yeah … to encouraging them to participate. Um, but I think we also discovered that, uh, the audience becomes the caregiver for the player in that way, and it was a really beautiful thing to allow to happen and to help give permission to, and that if we didn’t give permission to it, um, that there was, there was some resist-, like, different than, different other versions.
It, it-
Patrick Blenkarn: Yeah, and if, if anyone’s listening to this who’s, like, interested in the shop talk, what we realized was basically because Cole is a narrator on stage, we were finding that audiences were deferring to her to be the solution. Like, if there’s a problem, the trained and paid performer would be the person who would engage with the player.
Cole Lewis: But I don’t help.
Patrick Blenkarn: But Cole is the narrator. Her job is just to narrate what is happening in the story, in the pl- in the playing out of the game by the player. Zz, potentially plural. Um, so you know, we were learning and, and we didn’t… And you know- Right … we’ve sort of found our stride now, but-
Gabrielle Martin: Yeah …
Patrick Blenkarn: uh, at the beginning, it turns out this is actually a piece where we can say at the beginning that the audience, the public audience, the fuller audience is, you know, encouraged to be on the same team, you know, because of the context of the story that Cole will have already told on stage.
And anyways, come see it. You’ll understand. Uh- What else can we say about, like, audience care?
Cole Lewis: Well, I, I mean, not… Maybe not so, but you, you mentioned, uh, earlier about becoming Brian, and I think about it as building Brian a little bit. Mm. And this maybe is personal to me, but I think the show begins by an introduction to, uh, artifacts or, like, mati- things that belonged to my dad, like his wallet.
Um, and I won’t give away anything else. But, uh, and people get to know him through some of his, uh, what’s left behind, and then the game happens, and they get to make choices on his behalf. Yeah. They get to try to help see him succeed and win, which, uh, we always hope they will, and, and I think they do. Yeah.
They do. And then at the end, um-
Patrick Blenkarn: Does it… Well, uh, uh, the transition between the game form and an engagement with an AI representation of him actually takes place through an avatar selection process, which for anyone who’s familiar with video games, normally that’s the beginning, right? You’re gonna get a character.
You’re gonna pick who your character’s gonna be, but we do that at the very end.
Cole Lewis: And I find it fascinating because I think a lot of people really feel like the AI avatar is my dad, and I think that is partially because collectively we have all built him that night in a theater together.
Sam Ferguson: Yeah. We’ve all done the, the show together in general too, like even the music.
The music is, is, you know… I’ve got like kind of a framework of stuff to play, but Patrick actually plays it, but plays it off of something the player does. Yeah. Right? And so it’s all, it’s all kind of constructed in front of your eyes.
Patrick Blenkarn: And I think that’s- Mm … you know, and that is an inheritance from the previous show’s- Mm
principles as well that, um- You know, what we’re doing in the theater is s- we’re trying to do something together in the theater. And so the more things we can be doing together is- Mm-hmm … the more things we can do in the theater together, the better. And also, this is a story about someone who might have benefited from doing more things together with other people during the time that they were alive.
So, um, you know, that, uh, hopefully that is clear and we work towards… That’s what we’re working- I mean, that’s why we’re here in Germany. Mm-hmm. Uh, we’re also here testing whether or not we can, um, do live translation-
Sam Ferguson: Yeah …
Patrick Blenkarn: of the piece because, you know, if we’re gonna do it together, are we only gonna do it with people who understand English?
Hopefully not. Um, so, uh, we’ve had, you know, Vlad Voino, who, uh, is the projection and technologist on the show, Vancouver-based. Hey, Vlad, uh, if you’re listening to this. You know, he’s been working with us about building his own, uh, translation software using AI principles, also trying to figure out how maybe we can extend the access to the piece.
Because Cole narrates im- like, improvised text for, you know, the majority of the show. It’s not really feasible to do a traditional surtitling, uh, system. Mm-hmm. So yeah.
Gabrielle Martin: I wanna just circle back to some of the ethical issues that you’re, that are, like, clearly present throughout this piece. Um, so when AI resurrects someone’s voice or likeness or, you know, this idea, are we granting dignity or fabricating ghosts?
How do you navigate the line between technological wonder and moral discomfort? And I’d love to hear you talk a little bit more about that.
Patrick Blenkarn: Oh, okay.
Cole Lewis: I, I- Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Um, okay. I f- I mean, I don’t think it’s an either/or question. Like, are we fabricating or f- I, I missed the second half, but it- the, the… I think it’s a, it can be both/and.
It could also be many other things. Um, I personally am really, I think on one end, and I don’t wanna give away too much for the show, but on one end, um, I b- became really nervous around, like, the time my dad died, within a year or two, this idea of, like, I mean, already in 2021, there were people talking about resurrecting somebody’s spirit through AI, and the invitation to even think through the lens of AI in this show was examining, uh, AI as spirit at a conference, um, at Yale’s, uh, CCAM.
Um, so we were invited always to think about it through spirit and, uh, and at the same time, it was being offered as a potential future grief technology, which is now present in many parts of the world and being used as a way, as, uh, apparently to overcome grief, and it, it pr- possibly works for some people.
I have a lot of questions around that. Um, and so those questions are part of the show. Um, and the, how we, um, have consent is, is an issue, particularly for someone who’s passed on. Um, my dad loved to be in my shows. Um, would, you know, my dad, I, I wanna be AI? I d- I don’t know, and even if he did, I don’t know that I would actually make my dad with all the material I have on him AI.
Um, because I think some of that, I have, I have ethical, um, I’ve had really hard ethical stances from the beginning, even sometimes when we don’t agree on them and they’re like, “Well, you could consider this,” I’ll be like, “No, I’m not, not okay with it.” And, uh, ultimately, my dad was a living human being, and I need to respect, um, what I see Uh, as e- even though I didn’t agree with a lot of him, even though you have said he’s owed me I, I don’t, I have to have some boundaries.
Sam said that, not- … Mr.
Patrick Blenkarn: Radio Podcast. Radio Podcast. So, you
Cole Lewis: know. And Sam said it too. It was great. It, it, uh, but at the same time, I, um, I, I think there are a lot of ethical questions around AI, um, uh, even using the likeness of someone to move it, and those are questions we’ve integrated from the beginning.
Um, and we used to make a point of them in the show, and we don’t. So some I would say that we don’t make as much of a point about as the avatar that looks like him is actually my body and my face made to look like him. So it, like, aged and… So I, we’ve thought about things, um, if I, if, if we were to use a photograph of him, those are photographs I know I’ve always had permission to use, uh, as archival material for shows from him from when he was living.
So I’ll, I’ll, uh, I, I think that we have a pretty good ethical framework around- Yeah … what we’re okay with, but new ethical questions arise around AI every day uh, that are, um-
Patrick Blenkarn: And I think in some ways, um, the question of making a show about someone else, um-
Cole Lewis: Right. Yeah …
Patrick Blenkarn: this is, I mean, we’ve been over this bridge in some ways before with 1991.
Um, but to what extent? You know, that was a dramatization of a moment in a child’s life. Um, this is a drama- uh, you know, this is a docudrama in some ways. Is it a documentary? Like, at what point can we say… I mean, the, the real daughter is on stage, and all the real artifacts are on stage, and we’re talking about details.
And sure, maybe they might happen in different orders because of the way a play- player engages with them, or he might run into the wall repeatedly. And so that night he kinda looks a bit confused or, like, he’s like, his mobility’s sort of failing at some points. And we use that to, you know, enrich the storytelling.
Um, but I have questions about where we draw the line on the ethical issues of even just doing documentaries and, and editing each other. Editing, you know, w- w- for Sam and I, I think while you focus on Brian, we are in a position where we focus on you- Mm … Cole and Brian, and we’re looking at both of them as subjects of an audience’s witnessing at the same time as being, um- You know, being very clear about like, “Okay, we, we agree we don’t wanna have this particular individual make an appearance in the story.
That’s not… Like, that person doesn’t need to be here for the story to, to be clear.” Um, and that to me feels like that’s not an AI question, but that is exactly what any, I would imagine, documentarian- Yeah … would be asking themselves about what, what can I do to tell the story as honestly as possible without sacrificing, uh, yeah- Yeah
the dignity to, of living people and dead people. And it’d be
Cole Lewis: like writing a memoir or- Yeah … ethnographic kind of performance as well, the kind of questions… I mean, that’s a great example. We, we have left, purposely left out people. There are stories around my dad’s life where we don’t name them and we don’t share them because that didn’t feel, uh…
It didn’t feel- that felt, like, problematic to me to do that. Um, so s- some of the questions we’ve had have also been just about narration and storytelling and who to include, what to include, how do we include it- Yeah … when is it okay to, when is it not. And I would offer, um, that, like, building AI, uh, what Sam has been doing, like, what we’ve been doing with AI is very similar.
It’s what data do we select? What data do we use? Um, it, it, it’s very similar to building a narrative. Uh, it, it really has felt like that to me and even when we’ve talked about-
Gabrielle Martin: Mm …
Cole Lewis: the tagging now. Like- Mm-hmm … how we tag information is also thinking about it in relation to what makes sense and what’s okay and where do we wanna draw attention and focus.
Patrick Blenkarn: Yeah.
Cole Lewis: Yeah.
Patrick Blenkarn: Which maybe is not as like, you know… But that’s the shop talk version. Or like, that is, like, you know, when you get into the weeds of it, you know, we’re using all the skills that we have despite not being trained as computer scientists and programmers and AI developers or data curators. You know, we have…
We can at least say to anybody w- listening to this, like, who makes performance that you, like, you might actually already have the skills to be able to make, you know, informed and dramaturgical decisions- Mm … about data that is significant to
Cole Lewis: you. And that, that, those… I guess I did end up talking about some of the questions at the end of the show because those are some of the questions for me, are what do we do with the data?
Um, and how do we provide dignity to someone who’s died through their data as well? What’s okay and what’s not okay? Yeah. And it also extends to memory. How do we remember people? How do we hold people after they’re gone when we are rebuilding them through each other’s memories, through-
Patrick Blenkarn: I don’t think that-
the
Cole Lewis: sharing …
Patrick Blenkarn: I don’t think it, like-
Cole Lewis: Yeah …
Patrick Blenkarn: it doesn’t ruin the show, but ’cause, like- Yeah … in so many ways, we, we circle over and over on this subject of the… Like, we bemoan the situation of data and the lingering of data, but we’ve also got homes of photographs, and we’ve got these other materials, and we’ve very consciously structured the show around these three sort of f- forms, you could say of, of material remains, digital- Remains, and then also this pure data question.
Um, moving from the concrete to the, like, increasingly abstract, uh, to try to ask the question about why the previous act’s forms or materials didn’t seem enough or don’t seem enough anymore for some people. Mm. And that’s not gonna be everybody. There’s gonna be some people in the audience who are like, “No, a photo is all I need of the person who I love who is not with me anymore.”
Um, but there’s a lot of PR and marketing out there right now trying to tell you that that photo’s not enough. And, you know, then capitalism gets involved. And so I think, you know, we’re trying to ask a question about each form by working through them, and then also having the forms re- reappear in the other forms.
So there are, you know, three-dimensional scans of all of the material objects. You know, like, well, now we’ve got a scan of this old radio that he had. Do you still need the radio? We’ve LiDAR scanned it, so it’s great. It’s here. You could see it and you could turn it around in 3D space. Isn’t it beautiful?
Why do you keep the original one? Um, Walter Benjamin would have a field day with our- … like, with our piece. Yeah.
Cole Lewis: And there, there is actually, that reminds me, like, in terms of also boundaries of what’s okay and what’s not, there are things that I’ve included in the show that I don’t necessarily have my dad’s consent for.
We include- Sure … World War, uh, World War, sorry. It’s ’cause we’re in Germany right now.
Patrick Blenkarn: Oh, too soon. My
Cole Lewis: dad was, um, my dad was a Vietnam veteran, and, um, after he died, we found that he won the Bronze Star. Um, and he kept that a secret his entire life. Yeah. Um, and we discovered it only because it was put on his tombstone.
Um, and then I realized these medals that I assumed were my grandfather’s and didn’t look at closely were actually my dad’s. And so we do include those in the show, um, because partly, uh, for me, they act like a photograph of, like, strangers, where I don’t have a lot of information, I don’t know, and I can only, um, imagine around it.
Gabrielle Martin: I’m so thrilled for our audiences to get to experience this show, not just because of what… First of all, it’s such a touching and thought-provoking experience, um, and as you’re mentioning all the ways in which you build this experience together and really, um, pull the audience into this experience. The experience, the personal story, which is not private, is there’s a lot of universal themes, so many that you’ve been talking about.
Um, and then also all these big questions that you’re getting at that are so of the now that I think people will not only think about in the moment, but also that will really stay with them and hopefully spark some really interesting conversations. Combined with the really incredible innovative use of, uh, form.
So yeah, I’m really glad that we’ve had this chance to just talk a little bit more about your practice and all the thought process and development process behind this work. Thanks so much.
Patrick Blenkarn: Thank you. Thank you for that. We are, we are very excited to bring the show to Vancouver, and we are, like, honored for the opportunity.
Mm-hmm. For real, so.
Cole Lewis: Very, very much so.
Patrick Blenkarn: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you