Opening night of Futureproof Festival is Wednesday, October 28, at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre. Here's how it runs, so you can plan your afternoon accordingly. Times can still move before October, and the program page always has the latest.
Noon: badges. Badge pickup opens at noon. The building is open all afternoon and the exhibitor tables are up, so come early, grab your badge and have a wander before anything starts.
5:00 pm: the party. Doors open at five with a DJ and a bar. Ninety minutes to arrive, get a drink and find your people before anyone says a word from the stage.
6:30 pm: welcome to the territory. A welcome to Squamish territory opens the festival. It is the first thing said from this stage, before any of the rest of it.
6:45 pm: Amber Case. Amber Case wrote the book on calm technology, and the first talk of the festival is hers: Calm Technology in the Age of Loud Machines. What AI should feel like when it is built for people instead of markets, and what it costs us when it is not. Then ten minutes of questions from the room.
7:25 pm: the AI Builders Fellows. Two builders from the AI Builders Fellowship, Internet Archive Canada's program with BC + AI, get eight minutes each to show what they built after six weeks inside the Government Publications collection. Props to Internet Archive Canada, our founding sponsor, for backing them.
7:55 pm: Brewster Kahle. Then the man who built the Internet Archive takes the stage. Brewster Kahle gives What a Library Owes the People Who Aren't Born Yet: public memory, the open web, libraries, and who all of it belongs to. Questions from the room after.
8:35 pm: the creative AI live set. Artists with AI as their instrument: generative visuals, live-coded sound, and a room that gets louder as it goes. Philippe Pasquier, who directs the Metacreation Lab at Simon Fraser University, is on stage, with more artists to announce. Twenty minutes, then the set hands the night to the party.
8:55 pm: the open social. DJ, bar, art on the walls, and all the conversations the talks just started. Stay until they turn the lights out, and go home with people you'll still be texting in March.
Thursday morning we start again with Making sense of it together. The whole program is here.
Opening night is in the Festival Pass, along with both program days and the closing party. Get yours here, and bring someone who should be in this room with you.
Come curious. Leave with your people.
Space Centre photo: Michelle Diamond.