Who are you giving the keys to your creativity to?

There’s no reuse of the heat at all, because the centers are so big that they couldn’t heat traditional buildings. It would have to be factories, huge industries, but ones that have to be on the periphery within a certain proximity, because you can’t transport heat over 50 km. So that makes it really hard to reuse the heat from the servers. Where Orio is different is that it’s decentralized, and these are small data centers.

So we’re able to take all of that heat and heat the building they’re housed in. And don’t hesitate to ask questions if you have any. Yeah. Well, exactly on the topic of Microsoft, there’s an organization that was created recently called LaQLL, the Quebec association for free software.

OK. Which raises exactly this question of Microsoft’s investments by the government, and in fact the fact that government data is in Microsoft clouds, or is locked, in quotes, inside Microsoft software. Yeah, because you were talking about parking earlier, the app, I saw it was hosted by Microsoft just to park in Montreal. But beyond that, we can talk about national security, we can talk about, you know, it just doesn’t make any sense. Never thought about it, and it seems like all of a sudden it comes and blows up in our faces, and everyone does, it’s the same thing with education, the whole ministry of education and the whole education system is constantly, is completely tied to a certain vision of technology and how it’s used. That’s what we impose on our kids ever since they’re 6 years old.

Hmm. So this association says, “OK, the question isn’t to throw Microsoft out of the administrations and so on, but let’s say there’s a volume of money that’s there, that all goes into that budget for Microsoft.” Yeah. But there are also organizations that do open source, that are capable. There are actually open source alternatives to this kind of office suite and so on.

There are countries, there are some in Europe in particular that do it, where the army, the French army for example, is moving away from Microsoft. Oh yeah, alternatives. So there are administrations that are getting out of that. Except that the money, instead of giving, so there could be a portion of this Microsoft money that would be recovered, but that would allow funding companies, either people who are in the government or companies that will help develop and maintain this software, and all of a sudden we’d cut a form of dependence on the company, which here in this case is Microsoft, where, OK, we’re not sure we want to leave Microsoft, but still, the fact remains that if something happens with Microsoft, what do, what do we do with all our data that’s on those clouds, in that software?

I have an anecdote about that. I spent 4 years in Munich at Scanline, which is a German company, and Netflix bought it, and so of course they wanted us to use the same software as them. And for me I was really focused on human resources. For human resources, we had a homemade software because the guy who developed Scanline is a genius. He made Flowline, which was a software for, in short he was a developer, so he had also made his own human resources management software, except that now we had to move to Workday, but Workday is hosted in the United States, and in Germany there’s the GDPR like in Europe, and the first time I really faced this problem is when the head of software told me, Julien, you’re being nice, but you don’t understand the problem.

It’s pretty serious what you’re asking us to do, to put all our personal data, because since it was Workday it went pretty far into personal data, it was even too much according to the salaried employees, it’s, and ID documents, and home address, and there’s really a lot of stuff there, and date of birth, it sounds silly, but social insurance number, yeah yeah yeah, so he was like, well no, I’m not putting my data there, and it got pretty problematic, because, and I had to admit he was right. It was like, OK, afterward we discussed for a long time and we found a middle ground, but it’s true that it was pretty, for me it was like, yeah we’ll just like change software, but he made me react, he told me, wait a minute, think about what we’re doing here, it’s pretty delicate, so it was pretty, I think that when the United States was under other administrations they thought about it less. We believed in their good faith. Hm hm.

Now it’s a different challenge. Now we say, “Wait, if he wants to, if he’s capable of doing that, he’s capable of doing that.” Nicolas, you spent 11 years at the SAT building tools that didn’t exist yet. Why weren’t the market solutions enough at that time? The market solutions that we, that we saw. Well, in fact it came from a, I was on the Scenic project, which is, whose objective is to allow artists to build shows across several venues.

Hm hm. Simultaneously. So you have, for example, two stages, one a theater somewhere in Quebec, and a stage in Montreal. Hm hm.

And you want the audiences and the actors to share the same experience, so a bit like telepresence, but for live performance, except that, the idea was born in the early 2000s. Zoom on steroids for performance venues. Yeah, that’s exactly it. So it was, that’s it, I think it was born in the early 2000s, the idea at the SAT, before, before I was there.

OK. And the goal was basically to put the arts in Quebec a bit on the map, on the map, but in a unified way, that is to gather, oh OK, gather the different performance venues and different artists. So it was, that’s it, it was the idea that the SAT is an urban hub. OK.

Yeah. Which is in fact a meeting point, and the arrival of the internet is, it’s because the SAT started out at the beginning making CD-ROMs, maybe you experienced that. Me, I made CD-ROMs. You made CD-ROMs? That’s it.

Me, I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t see that. But anyway, that’s fine. After that, there was, there was the internet. So what do we do with the internet for the arts? Which had this idea of gathering and making it so that there’d be more, so that Montreal wouldn’t be the center of Quebec on the cultural level, which it isn’t, but there’s still a lot of cultural activity, and to open up the cultural abundance of Montreal toward the regions, and so to create a network like that of, yeah, performance venues that do telepresence shows.

So it’s really experimental innovation and so on. So, I get to your question. Yeah. When, when they started doing that, and I actually arrived on, well, on the market, I think there was Skype, there were certainly, well other, other, other tools, but it was mostly remote meeting stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Things like that, and that’s it, there wasn’t really a market that said, “We’re going to do this,” so. Yeah, because I experienced it in a demo, it’s still way better. In any case, the idea is to be as transparent as possible.

You almost don’t realize it’s telepresence, the projection is at real human scale. Exactly. Yeah, there you go. So that, I don’t think you can do with Skype.

That’s it. There’s quite a lot going on. That is, it’s not just an image of someone framed in front of the screen. So already, there’s the logic of getting out of the screen a bit.

That is, here, we’re on stage, so we put screens on stage, yes, but the screens, like you say, if there’s someone remote that we’re talking with, well we put a projection at scale 1. So it’s like the person is right next to us. Yeah. Yeah.

There’s also potentially the transmission of information for lighting. There are, there, we move to the next scene. So there are ex, yeah. Even, there were, well by the way, we were together in the audience and we went to see networked music shows where musicians are actually remote and they make music together, which is a subject that touches me personally because I did a doctorate on the subject, on synchronizing networked musicians.

OK. Wow! Which actually brought me to the SAT directly, so, well, there you clearly see that you couldn’t, there was no software where you could pay a subscription at 10, 10 dollars a month and it runs. That’s it.

It’s really, well in fact, well it’s really the question of innovation, making something new out of a dream. And so, well, in fact you have to, you have to build, you have to build, well, the uses, the technology, it’s really, it’s very experimental, and in fact it’s done incrementally, that is we do a, we do a first show with artists who are ready to commit to it. And then we get feedback, we read too, because there was, there was a lot of research on telepresence at that time as well. OK.

Surely scale 1, the, the gaze too, you know, when someone’s remote, it’s you I’m looking at, but then it’s you. It’s, it’s not obvious. Do you need two cameras? Do I, just the description of what it is, that answers the question.

So that’s it. We had, we had to do it ourselves. We had to do it from scratch. We talked quite a bit between us about AI hosting, or you had a precise term that I don’t remember anymore, which was self-hosting.

Yeah. Yeah, that’s it. We’re talking about self-hosted AI. It’s, well, because the question was, does everyone use the AIs, the names we know?

Is there a downside to that? And does self-hosted AI solve that problem, or at least solve one of the problems you can have with the others? Well it solves, in fact, well, self-hosting, the idea is to say that rather than being subscribed to an online service and then typing into it, conversing, sending images, and in fact, all the interaction we have with the system is in a cloud where we don’t know what people are doing with our data, and even often we’re going to say intimate things too, we’re even going to ask for images. There’s the question of data and what, there you go.

So the idea tied to self-hosting is to say that the intelligence, the software that is the intelligence, the artificial intelligence, yeah, runs on a computer that belongs to us. OK. So it can be in a sovereign cloud in Quebec for example, but it can also be on your own machine if you have a computer with a good graphics card, and well, in fact we can download tools that are open source or not, but there are tons of self-hosting options that are available directly, because these are researchers’ works that are published somewhere. Other people have built a graphical interface on top so that it’s easy and so on.

In short, you install the software in your computer or in the computer you rented in a cloud or something, and in fact you’re in, you own your own storage space, and there you control what’s in it. For example, if you have to work with client data that’s sensitive, well, you could, there, you know you have control of the data, so, yeah. Yeah. It makes me think of lawyers who have their own messaging software that’s like just for that, which is a special encryption layer, so a self-hosted AI, it could be local, locally on site in the computer, but also in a cloud.

It’s true that for me it would reassure me more to host it at Orio than on your own machine. Than, well, than on my machine. Yeah, really. Or maybe, let’s say, a mix of the two.

Depending on the needs. There’s a phone number you can call to pull the plug when it goes off the rails too much. Got it. But exactly, for Daily, every day, you have a very, very philosophical approach to the impact you want your installations to have on the place.

So I’m wondering, and it’s very poetic and it’s, we’re like wow, that makes so much sense, but I’m wondering how it goes internally when you say, OK, that’s the theory, now how do we put it into practice, and have you already hit walls with that? I think the question is actually a bit different. There was, in any case, especially at the beginning when we were starting, there were no tools for that, but we knew it, we came from an approach and a philosophy where we’re able to use, modify, transform existing or non-existing tools to reach our ends. Yeah.

After that, we always have resource constraints, we have budget constraints and others on projects, which means we’re forced to constantly redefine our objectives, what we’re trying to do creatively, getting to the essence of an idea and also to the essence of a technological problem we’re trying to solve. But we come with an approach where, given that it’s not the technology that dictates the experience, and it’s not the starting point, it’s more a tool to answer a need for experience, where it becomes a, how to say, a question of back and forth, of dancing as a pair with the technology until you find, relative to your capacities and your skills, a result that matches what we’re trying to do. For example, on Coeur Spaghetti, I think it’s the latest one, did you, did you have to tell yourself, OK, so now wait, I need to focus, I need to learn this, or I need to develop. For this installation, did you tell yourself, I need to go find something that I don’t master yet, or, well, unfortunately I don’t know how to do anything anymore. That’s done.

So it’s not me, but inside the team, yes, that is we needed, I don’t remember how many linear feet of LED we have there, but we have, I don’t know, let’s say 200, describe a bit what it is, so it’s, it’s a work that’s installed right now actually at the National Gallery, at the National Gallery of Canada, in Ottawa, installed for 3 months in the great hall, and that’s inspired by a series of projects we’ve developed, which is the Hello series, which are kind of commentaries on communication, our ability to engage with the world around us in different ways. So in this case, you send a message, you have a microphone, you can leave a message and your message becomes music and light, and it travels inside a luminous spaghetti until it reaches the other side, another microphone. When it arrives on the other side, it’s really become music only and light. And it evolves that way.

So it’s a sound and visual work. And well, all the hardware, we couldn’t find LEDs long enough to make this luminous spaghetti in an elegant way. We have a lot of real-time processing, of the voice, of how we transform it to make music with it, how we do an analysis quickly enough with the processing means we have and others. Of the voice, to detect its musicality and create a piano melody based on that and so on.

It has to run for 3 months too, eh. It’s not just that it has to run for 3 months, it has to be autonomous, and that the audience can have an experience that’s fast, gratifying, that they understand what’s happening too and what they’re doing exactly. Yeah. So well, there are pieces that we’ve been developing for quite a while now, that we’ve been working on.

So now we’re starting to have building blocks we can build with, but each time, you have to refine the concept by iterating on the prototypes. What are we able to accomplish? What do we manage to get the technology to do? Are there things that appear, that emerge, that become features?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It’s really a back and forth like you say, it’s, it’s a dance with what’s possible to do, what’s, what’s the mandate? And you try to make the right recipe that works well for it.

Yes. What’s, what’s viable too for a studio to produce? That is, it’s not research funding where we can work. It’s sure there could be other solutions.

There are always, there are always more expensive solutions or longer ones over time. But you have to work with those parameters too to manage to deliver something. Yeah. And exactly about that, for the cities, well, the installations for a city that are created always with the same concepts, like for all the other cities.

Do you, do you see it sometimes, maybe? They’re things that are pretty recurring, always the same systems. Do you voluntarily try to distinguish yourselves from what’s generally done, to bring a bit of traffic into the cities, or I don’t know, maybe it’s not the right word, but some flow of people? Do you, is it, is it, how to say it?

Is it conscious for you to say, “OK, pretty much everyone does the same thing all the time. They project stuff onto a wall when you pass by, it makes little interactions. Us, we’re going to try to do something a bit more poetic, a bit more,” yeah, poetic, because it’s a word that comes up often in your, in your language. I know you also put out a book that I can’t wait to read, because exactly, what I really love about Daily tous les jours, and I’ve known it well since 2019 for MTL, is the poetic aspect.

Do you exactly look at a, do you try to distinguish yourselves about that? I don’t think the starting point is to distinguish ourselves. I wasn’t sure if you were going toward, because technologies in the city, yes, there are creative expressions, but there’s also a lot of technology in service of efficiency, of optimizing services, in service of all those criteria. And what we, what we try to take is the need to develop an infrastructure for the human spirit, an infrastructure for the human experience, for more intangible things at the level of the social impact we can have with it and so on.

So to reflect and also invite people to see technology as something that can really bring us closer, that can really contribute to reweaving social bonds through positive shared experiences, experiences of joy, of connection, and not only a technology that’s there, also, either for efficiency, or in many respects that’s dividing us enormously, that’s creating silos where we’re each in our bubbles, no longer in relationship with one another, where we no longer talk to people we disagree with, we receive feeds that are filtered to constantly reinforce our tunnels, our tunnels. Exactly. Our worldview. And it’ll only reinforce that even more.

So to try to make a proposal for a technology that comes to support something else and that facilitates human connections, really. Great transition for the next part, which is a bit about what path you chose to put this into practice in reality. Nicolas, so open source, it’s not free, it’s not amateur, it’s a creative playground without the walls that others decided for you. So, we talked about Scenic, which connects 20 cultural venues in telepresence.

I believe you gave the Scenic code away for free, it seems to me. Can you talk about that a little? It interests me. OK.

Well, in fact, it’s not me who gave the Scenic code, it’s, in fact, well, Scenic, there are several software components in Scenic that are different, but the laboratory I was in worked in open source. That is, the software that’s developed is publicly visible to everyone on a site, and people can download it and analyze it, use it, try to work with it. So it’s like working in public, and contributing, adding modules, that’s possible too, or it’s possible, yes, and in fact it happens pretty often in the case of, in the case of Scenic it stayed very, very niche, the work that’s done, but yes, in fact the work is put out in the public domain. So there are several reasons for that.

And by the way, it’s still the case even now, for example with the music listening tool, it’s that when you have a small team and you want to build, basically, a piece of software or an experience or something like that, well, what do we, we can’t rewrite everything from scratch. Yeah. Yeah. So in terms of code, we’re going to grab pieces of code that allow, for example, doing music analysis, libraries from people who know mathematics and physics very, very well, and they’ve done part of the work.

And so if we grab a library that is itself open source, well, somewhere we benefit from the work of others. The ones who put it, who put it, who published it. Isn’t that a bit what Apple does, and then they make you pay afterward? So, Apple, Apple, I don’t know exactly how it works, but no, in fact, apparently, from what I, the stories I’ve heard, it’s more that there’s prototyping done with open source.

Yeah, that’s it. And then afterward, they’re going to rewrite everything. So in fact, you pay armies of engineers to rewrite things that already exist so that the ownership is, is, is, you make me think of this because you’d told me about a Quebecer who had developed the Vision Pro, a homemade version. That’s it.

And they kind of bought it and then redid the whole thing with their, their in-house developers. That’s it. So in fact open source, well, we grab the work of others. We put it to use in our own tool that offers other uses.

Along the way, potentially we’re going to see that there’s, we’re going to find bugs, where we’re going to gain experience from using other people’s tools. And so, well, since it’s in the public domain, we’re going to be able to contact them, say, hey, I fixed a bug in this, here, look how I fixed it. And then he goes, “Oh great, thanks,” and boom he puts it back in. So it’s in fact a community of people developing different tools that allow building other tools that allow, there you go, it’s like a sharing of knowledge, in fact. And you can’t really control the people who are just freeloaders, who just come to take and never contribute.

That’s something you have to leave fluid, I imagine. It’s a question that I, well it’s, it’s there in the public domain, in fact. So, if you put your podcast on YouTube, there are maybe people you don’t like who are going to watch it. But, and normally there are licenses too, with terms of use and so on.

So in theory, you still have a legal framework within which you could, if it were of interest, put a stop to activities that aren’t within that framework. The same way that if someone takes your podcast and decides to rebroadcast it under their own name, you can decide to let it go, or you can act. Then, what’s the real capacity to act there? Exactly.

In fact, there’s still a whole range of licenses. And in fact, well, often we say “open source,” but open source means that the source code is visible. Yeah. And then there’s the free software world, which has a panel of licenses that are more or less different.

So there are licenses that say, in fact, well, the code is there, you do whatever you want with it. Yeah. OK. There are other licenses that say, “If you want to use this code and you put it in your software, well, your software too, it has to be, there’s a license contagion, it too has to be open source.

You don’t have the right to,” there are even licenses that say, “You don’t have the right to put it in a cloud.” Actually, you do have the right to put it in a cloud, but if you modify the software because you improve various things, you’re obligated to publish the modifications. OK. Yeah. So there’s a whole framework like that.

So there are even, there are licenses too on, this can be used, but for university research or for education, but not to do commercial work. OK. So there’s a whole set of variables that are there. There are even people who take existing licenses that are known on the legal level.

By the way, I have an anecdote about that, which will be interesting, but where we add things, for example, I don’t know, it’s open source for everyone, but those guys, I don’t like them, I’ve already seen that. It’s true, I won’t go on about who and who don’t like. But those guys, those guys, I don’t authorize them to use my thing. It’s maybe, maybe to protect the community aspect too, in the sense that you know those people, they’re maybe only going to take advantage, they’re not, they’re not going to contribute, or there are maybe things like that too, I imagine.

Yes, at the base, for sure the idea is to be able to feed an ecosystem that stays alive. So, you can’t take a thing normally and close it off. You take and you contribute, and the thing evolves, and we benefit from the collective effort for everyone. By the way, on that subject, there was the XN day, the XN summit, and it really struck me. At the level of Quebec, because we talk about this here conceptually, but there I also really saw it through the people who were present.

It was, everyone comes, it’s a bit like open source, everyone comes to help this organization take the right direction for the coming year. So each person participates, gives their opinion, there are votes, there are things like that. And it’s, each comes as a private company with their own personal business objectives, but they come with the goal of saying, “Well, if this organization does a good job, it’s going to benefit me, it’s going to benefit the others.” But we’re members, so we’ve already, how to say, mandated this organization to represent us, and we think we have more to gain from a centralized representation than not. So already the people who are around the table, a priori, have already made that pact, in quotes.

That’s true. Yeah, it’s, it’s true that it’s, then I was more used to the VIIS, which is more of a user organization. I think it’s a bit less business-oriented too. That’s maybe why.

Hm hm. But in any case, I really liked it. So speaking of structure, you two, you’re both attached to businesses that have a classic structure, let’s say. There, you, you made the choice of the cooperative.

Tell us about it a bit. The cooperative, well, in fact that’s it, it ties back a bit to your earlier question, it’s really, I think there’s the logic of work behind it, which is, what’s the meaning of work as a worker and in society. For example, the fact of, if you’re a developer and you’re in a company where we say, OK, we don’t do open source, OK, you can work on products you’ll be very proud of. I don’t know, products that are successful and so on, that have lasted for years, that’s great. And then you can also find yourself in situations where, where in fact a strategic test was done.

You worked for 2 years on a project and finally it’ll never see the light of day. It’ll never have been put in front of any client, any audience, and it’s trash. Yeah. So OK, the work, we still learned things doing the work, but there’s, there’s, there’s a taste of, why did I do this?

Is it a bitter, a bitter taste of, finally, did I, did I not work for nothing, in the end? There’s, there’s, there’s that side, that work side, which is the meaning of work, a bit, and, well, the cooperative is a business model in which, so there are members and employees, well, you can have employees who aren’t members, but overall, overall the idea is to have people, people who work in the company participate in the decision-making process of the company. Yeah. The strategy in fact, on the decisions, it’s built more or less at different, different levels. Yeah.

Which means that, and this is a hypothesis I’m verifying, let’s say, because I spend time with people who resemble me by spending time with people from cooperatives, seeing that they exactly find a meaning in it. But yeah, because it’s true that it filters your colleagues a bit too, in the sense that not everyone is going to say, you have to have thought about it before joining the cooperative, after all. Well, yes and no, because in fact you can be an employee and just do your job and not be, not be engaged, but in fact you have the possibility to, in fact, to get involved in the company, in the decision-making process, and in fact that pushes toward having collaborative work, doing it together. OK.

Yeah. So that’s it, that’s a bit the logic. Me, I see it as, for me, and well, it’s maybe not the best business move, but let’s say that for me the company is a human experience above all. So yes, you want, you want your clients, you want to serve your clients, you want to answer their needs.

But you also have the people you work with day to day around you, and then it’s with them, and it’s them too who answer the clients. It’s with them that there’s a dynamic that happens, and then if, there you go, so that’s really the, that’s the solution for the engagement of VFX artists. A big cooperative, to be interesting. Then it comes with difficulties too, exactly how to formulate a common vision.

Well in fact governance, that’s it, it’s, well it’s maybe harder to find the compromises, the, how do we vote, does everyone find their place and so on, but in fact it pushes toward dialogue. Me, as a founder, well, we’re all just founders for now, but as a founder it’s not as if I created my company. I say, “OK, you, you, I’m hiring you.” All the logic of strategy would rest on me. Whereas it’s like, in fact it distributes a bit, the whole, it can be an alternative to giving away shares in a company to ensure that the employees or the members are as engaged as you yourself.

The cooperative, that can also be an option for that. Yes, in a way. Except that, in fact, what I, what I see in the, in the cooperative side, in any case it depends on the scales, because there are very big cooperatives, notably Les Jardins, which is a cooperative, oh yes, well yes, or a bit different, because we, we’re a workers’ cooperative, that is it’s the workers who are the cooperative, but in the end, in fact, the evolution of the company we produce and so on, it’s something that resembles us as a collective, not something that resembles me, if I were the only founder and I have my vision, and in fact if I, well I have, there are always things, I always have plenty of opinions, always plenty of things to say. But I express them to the others, and the decision is made collectively, and so in the end I get challenged by default by my colleagues, and well the reverse is true too.

There are people, yeah. And that’s it, in fact, we, it pushes toward advancing in a direction such that it’s understood by everyone, that’s in the process of, do you have any tips to start off on the right foot? Because I imagine if you go directly with people you’re just in opposition with, you never manage to agree, that can also be a problem, no? Did you, did you start with people you knew, with whom you tell yourself there’s a minimum of affinity to start, or, or can it work just automatically?

I don’t know, it’s really hard to say, because there are, there are, there are, there are a huge number of cooperatives. Often you’re forced to start with three, and then often there’s, over the course of time, one or two who more or less disappear, it rebuilds itself. It’s, yeah. But I think the, the key point, and this isn’t specific to cooperatives, I’ve heard plenty of startups that worked like that.

It’s OK, what, what do we, what do we have in terms of skills and resources around the table? And how do we manage to create a product or a service that answers, well, that answers the needs but that’s also realistic for us to produce. It’s really a question of orchestrating the discussions and making realistic decisions, because sometimes we want to do things absolutely, and we push hard on team X or team Y, and well, we can push on it, but in the end, there you go, there will be what there will be. So it’s really, yeah, yeah, me it’s a subject that speaks to me, since I was, it’s really the discussion.

Yeah, I was very much into conflict resolution, so I could talk about it for hours, but I’ll stop there. Was there a moment when you said, wow, I couldn’t have done this project if I’d only had proprietary tools? Do you remember that moment? I think it’s pretty much all the time, because in fact all the projects I’ve done in terms of development, whether in university labs, whether at the SAT, or even now, in fact there’s this whole free software ecosystem that, well, in fact we take, we build on it, and ahead of time, if I had to do this with proprietary tools, well in fact I’d need a team of, I don’t know how many developers to develop each component, or else buy the licenses, get into discussions with such-and-such a person, with such-and-such a vendor for such-and-such a product.

Anyway, I think it wouldn’t be the same work. Yeah. OK. That is, in fact there’d be a whole, there’d be a whole phase of setting up product development to buy the right things, or, well, that, you, for you, open source, proprietary, you don’t really care, from what I understood?

Oh no, I don’t not care. It’s just that it’s not, it’s not a critical decision-making factor today. But you ask the question, could we have done what we do? We still built all the first experiences thanks to platforms like Arduino, like Processing, which were themselves born from a collective and community philosophy and approach of developing accessible tools for artists who use technologies that were previously exclusively destined for industry.

So when I started working with electronics, we worked with chips, I think they were Atmel chips, things like that, so we were repurposing a use that wasn’t made for what we wanted to do. And then after that, when Arduino arrived, we really saw the field of possibilities, and the difficulty level drop enormously and democratize, finally, that access to that technology. So that, like I was saying, that’s still part of the DNA of the studio. After that, today, we make decisions based on what’s going to be the most efficient.

We developed our tools in-house, some starting from them, or in collaboration with the open source universe, others not, because it wasn’t the best tools we needed. So it’s not dogmatic, it doesn’t, but it stays there, it stays close, and we ask ourselves the question regularly about which tool we use and why. If you have two solutions to choose from, you’ll choose open source. If we have two solutions to choose from, we’ll choose the one that’s going to let us get to where we need to get.

Yeah. And the decision-making criteria can be economic, they can also be tied to values. There’s a whole set of things there. But yeah.

Exactly, on the values side, you say the smart city should be witty. I had to look up the word because I didn’t know it well. It’s like “malicieux” in French, I think. Ah no, “malicieux” is negative.

Witty, it comes from German, Witz. Ah yes, yeah. I went and looked up Witz, which means, which is negative too. No no, it’s like funny.

But in German it lost the meaning. From what I understood, “witty” is like someone who’s clever with vocabulary in particular. Yeah. Who’s able to make people laugh, but in an elaborate way. Let’s say a city that laughs in an elaborate way.

Oh wow! Yes, why not? Poetic, plays a trick on you. What’s a city you want to spend time with?

I think a city you might want to spend time with is a city where you can develop a sense of belonging, a sense of pride. A community, it’s a city where you feel welcome. It’s a city that accompanies us through the different moments of our life in a positive way, that has positive impacts on our mental and physical health and not the opposite. It’s a city that’s built around the well-being of individuals, ideally.

How far do you go in your research exactly, beforehand? Much too far, from what I gathered, that you have demographic flow studies. Anyway, I, I listened to a few podcasts, it seems to really be a deep study. You’re not just there.

OK, we’ll put that because it’s going to bring more people. Period, it goes further than that. Listen, we have, it’s part of our creation process to seek, not necessarily to do research, but to seek, to ask questions, to try to have iterative processes where we can get feedback, to make what we do evolve. I think we often ask ourselves the question, am I putting my energy in the right place? Am I doing the most important thing that I could be doing in my life when I wake up in the morning? It’s not an easy question.

So this desire to also understand the impact is an answer to that. With your KPI, it could be the number of smiles. The KPI, it could be the number of smiles. It’s not worth enough on the market, unfortunately, to find others.

Ah, for a long time, we found that it was maybe not, not serious enough, that it wasn’t enough, but today, we know we need to rebuild bonds of trust between people, that trust is an essential parameter for the resilience of a community, and that we have important challenges that are going to confront us in the coming decades, and that we need to be resilient together, to have a social fabric that’s strong, to be able to react more quickly, more efficiently in the face of adversity, of challenges we don’t yet know. And in that sense, we also bet that shared moments of pleasure and joy contribute to reinforcing a sense of trust between people and ultimately to a resilience of the community. A perfect transition for Orio Cloud, because it lets studios render their images directly from Quebec, neither in Seattle nor in San Francisco, and its infrastructure does something that no one else does: reviving the regions. We cited the example of Saint-Adrien, but before going to talk about BIM in particular, Moment Factory is a client, they were there with you at Hub for the launch.

Why were they won over? It’s sure there was a strong interest due to the sovereignty of the data, due to the fact that we reused the server heat, but also I think mainly it’s that we offer a custom solution, so one that’s really designed for the clients. So we go there, we look at their infrastructures and we define their precise needs. So we don’t sell them something they don’t have a need for.

So it’s really that whole side of sitting down with them and defining their needs, that giants like Amazon aren’t able to offer, and for whom studios like Factory, it’s very important, and it’s important to have that flexibility, that control too. In the end, Orio offers what Rodeo would have liked to have before. Yes, absolutely.

I think there are a lot of visual effects studios. When you need to have something that’s custom and something that’s flexible, and you have changing deliveries and all that, I think it makes a lot of sense. And on top of that, it’s in Quebec, it’s in Canada, it doesn’t need to cross the border. So exactly, so we keep the money of Canada, of Quebec, here in the country.

It also lets us create jobs, but also with our decentralized data centers, it lets us create interesting jobs in the regions. Yeah. More technical jobs. Exactly, the church in Saint-Adrien, I loved that concept. Transforming it into a creative hub, so already putting the church itself back as a creative center.

And then the render farm, the data center that’s in the basement, or in any case a floor below, it heats the building at the price it would have taken to heat it precisely with a classic heating system. Is it like your cornerstone project, or does it set the example of what you want to do by multiplying it, or is it just an exception? Yeah, it comes a bit, that’s it. So there are two things.

So BIM is an OBNL that Pilou created, that came from the fact that he wanted to revitalize heritage buildings, including churches. And in acquiring the first church in Saint-Adrien, Pilou realizes that it costs a lot to heat a church, and Desfil, an engineer, starts to develop processes, technologies to use server heat at that point to heat the church in Saint-Adrien. And that allowed him to meet, at a certain point, the team from Exin, which is a sub-company of EDF, Électricité de France, which is like Hydro-Québec but for France, that wanted to open data centers in Quebec, that had already started to look at this technology, reusing server heat, being sovereign and all that. So the collaboration of the two meant that that’s where Orio was born, and the first data center, which is in the old convent in Sherbrooke. So they house the data center in the basement and they’re able to heat the building with that heat.

Me, in any case, I just heard the concept and I was like, that’s genius, that thing is sure to work. And in summer, what happens? It’s reused the same way in other, other forms, you know. There are, among others, industries that need to dry wood. So you can reuse that heat for that.

Me, I think of, growing pineapples or oranges. Yeah, me too, I was thinking we should do, like, server, commerce and loofah farm on top, like that. Yeah, that’s it. There could be something there, but, no, there are other ways to reuse it in summer too.

Is it scalable? Can it expand? Is it able to compete with more rendering capacity? Hm hm.

But maybe more with clusters that multiply across the country. That’s the idea behind it. Exactly. In fact, what happens is that there are a lot of permits to get to build data centers, permits among other things at the level of energy capacity.

So when we decentralize them and make smaller data centers, there are fewer qualifications to obtain. So that lets us build data centers much faster. And we use existing buildings. So we don’t need to build, we need to adapt buildings into data centers, but we don’t need to build new buildings. So we save time there, and again we don’t use agricultural land that we’d reuse.

It’s reviving the existing rather than destroying the living. Exactly. So we use what’s already in place. Yeah.

What made you join the adventure? That’s a good question. It was a confluence of circumstances. I met the Orio crew at a BCTQ networking event by chance.

We get talking, he tells me about their project, I tell them about my VFX background, and we start brainstorming. And me, because I’d been in the client position, I had my share of frustration that came with what we weren’t able to do and the service we weren’t able to get, and they arrived with a turnkey solution, with a technological partnership with Exin, something super interesting. Again, a project that’s eco-responsible, that’s innovative. So it clicked right away, and we started, one thing leading to another, to just brainstorm and bring our, our range of services that we’re going to offer with Orio up to standard. It’s like you brought together a lot of your values in one product, in one company.

Yeah, exactly. It brought together my values, but also I think I could bring ideas for solutions that are necessary in this field. And it brings them credibility too, given your past, which is still pretty high-end maybe. Yeah, I can say it.

But now we’re going to talk a bit about the downsides of each of your approaches, because necessarily there must be some, it’s not possible there aren’t. We’re going to compare it to the local ecosystem, or working locally, like a family. There’s support you find nowhere else, like you just said. But there are also obligations, moments where it’s complicated, and maybe moments where you want to leave, where you don’t want to hear about it anymore.

So, Nicolas, do you, so open source is your playground and has been for a long time. Are there moments where you say, “Ah, this is all too complicated, I just want to use something that’s already finished, already packaged, and I don’t want to deal with anything anymore. Leave me alone.” Have I already, well in fact, yes, me, I’m more on the side where exactly I’m going to take things that are experimental and rather complicated and make them simpler.

Yeah, it doesn’t mean they’re simple, but simpler. I think I experienced that with, obviously I work only on Linux, not on Windows, so on my computer. And for example, the documents to fill out from the government, often they require having Acrobat Reader to go fill out the forms, and I’ve already tried to fight to try to get the version of Acrobat Reader that works on, I never managed. Yet I’ve already spent a bit of time on it, but, and so there, yes, I found a computer.

If you just want a PC with the classic install, that’s, that’s a case. I think that’s probably the, the, the, that’s it. There are certain video games too. Oh yeah. Online video games that use platforms, you absolutely need their platform, and if they don’t support the free ecosystem, well in fact we, survive the system.

But in fact, well that’s it, that’s it, that’s it too in the, well, what we do is, we do a lot of software development, let’s say experimental, that is we’re going to take researchers’ work, we’re going to take libraries that are pretty low-level. Yeah. That give information on the people who are in a room, whether even the analysis of sound and so on. And in fact, we bring this complexity toward, because we talk about software, but it’s sure that people, they don’t necessarily want to install Linux, they don’t want, it’s not, it’s not their work environment. Yeah.

And so we put that into hardware that’s going to integrate correctly into installations, things like that. So in fact, we do this work of experimental development and bringing it to a product, and in fact in the end the users, well, in fact they have a tool that’s already built and that integrates well into their, into their system. Hm hm. And by the way, there’s, in fact it’s also an attribute of the software, of the free ecosystem, that there’s this notion of interoperability that emerges all the time.

Yeah. Yeah. And the fact that you can configure, modify, and so interoperability in the sense that you can make your software work with another software that’s potentially proprietary. Well, after that, there’s also, in an organization, there’s all the inertia of transforming all the data, moving to something else, training and so on. If it works, you don’t touch it.

But regarding what Mouna was saying earlier about dogmatism, notably with open source, in fact exactly, open source, the people, the open source people are often seen as people who are very dogmatic about, me, you absolutely have to have such-and-such a license and all, which isn’t false. There’s, there’s, there’s a lot of that, but in fact, open source production, and notably us too, there’s, there’s, there’s always this notion of being able to move from one software to another, either to make them work together, or there’s really an openness toward, there you go, where we do an installation, for example like what Mouna was describing, with LEDs, with audio recordings, and there’s, there’s a whole bunch of tools, there’s no single tool that’s made to do that, in fact. Yeah, yeah, they made the tool, and that tool is, me, well, maybe you’ll correct me, but it’s an assembly of lots of things. So maybe there’s an open source piece, there’s a proprietary piece, the thing is to make them talk together.

OK. Yeah. So basically that’s it, the problem with, well, with free software too is that there are tons of tools that are put out there and they all have different degrees of maturity. There can be someone who worked in the evening for 2 days, who put out a thing, and finally it’s handy for converting Access databases.

Yeah. Yeah. For example. But on the other hand, on the other hand you’re going to have to download it, you’re going to have to run the script, you’re going to have to, so there it can be, it’s going to be complicated.

But so that’s it, there’s a lot of work to, and it’s the one we do, in fact, to bring that to a level of maturity such that, and even into hardware, such that you, as a user, can just take an interest in what interests you and get the service while benefiting from the benefits of open source. That is you have the advantages without the disadvantages, in quotes. It’s a bit what opened my eyes when visiting your studio, your cooperative, it’s, me, I just hadn’t thought that you could have solutions so custom. But personally, me, I was afraid to put, already I’m not a dev, and I didn’t want to put my hands into open source.

I tell myself, “Ah, it’s too complicated, I know nothing, it’s all going to crash.” But there, you, you position yourself as an intermediary to say, “Don’t worry, I know how it works. Tell me what you want, I’m going to make you something that works, and on top of that it’s not going to be proprietary. So if you want to have it done by someone else afterward, or modify it yourself, there’s no problem at all.” That’s it. And in fact, well, there’s, there’s, there’s a lot of difficulties too with everything related to intellectual property.

Hm. Because, and then, well, in the, in intellectual property in the sense that, if someone wants to build a tool or an installation, if we develop open source software, does my installation have to become open source? Do, do I in fact remain the owner of what I’ve, yeah. So there’s, there’s always this, this thing, in fact, with open source and the, let’s say, commercial world, there’s always this question, and in fact, well, in fact it’s, there’s no, there’s no real problem.

It depends what you want to do. If, if I want to become Microsoft and I want to sell Word and, there you go, well, I couldn’t sell the technology in a proprietary way if I’d included open source in it, because, and it depends which, which open source, it depends on the licenses, because potentially it’s going to be contagious. So that, that, if you want to produce, contagious. Yeah, I like that.

A positive word. Well that’s it, in fact it’s, there’s, there’s love is contagious. Well in fact that, that, but there’s, there’s, I don’t know if there’s really a word for positive contagion. Yeah, several times we’ve assimilated it so much to a virus that, yeah, well in fact that’s it, it’s, there’s a propagation of things.

But on the other hand, when, when what interests us is to make people smile, or to make an installation where in fact most people are going to use the technology as a tool. Yeah. And to create something, and it’s that something they create that belongs to them. It’s the technology, in the end.

Do they need to, I’m maybe, you’re going to do that, but I don’t know if Daily tous les jours is going to want to become a software vendor one day. Yeah. Even if you develop some, I imagine. So that’s it, there’s like a confusion between the, not a confusion, but an ambiguity between the intellectual property of the technology and the intellectual property of its creations. And it’s not really the same thing.

And well, us, we’re aware of that, and we also know that we can use open source pieces jointly with proprietary technologies. Yeah. And so build the proprietary technology that works with open source, a bit like if you said, well, we built you a hammer that works well for your nails to build your shelf. Well, the shelf in the end, even if the hammer doesn’t belong to you, it’s still your shelf.

But on the other hand, if you made a special hammer, well maybe, yeah, yeah, I understand, well it’s, well it’s very good that you specify that, because the question I’m asking myself now for the people watching is, is there a critical size to use open source? A critical size. Well, that is, if I’m solo, I do a creative business, whatever it can be, is it better to wait until you have a team to develop custom tools, or are there cases where it applies to solopreneurs? Well in fact, in fact I think open source isn’t really the subject in there, because, why, it’s a bit what Mouna was saying, in fact, it’s what you want to do. Hm. It takes you somewhere, open source, it gives you, it brings you certain guarantees about the fact that, I don’t know if your software, well, once you’ve downloaded it, it’s there, you can keep the same version, you can, it gives guarantees, so we could say, but concretely, whether you’re all alone or 10,000 employees in your company, yeah, either way you’re going to use open source.

OK. Yeah. Without necessarily being in front of your screen, you, in front of the software, but for example, if you’ve created a website, and then your, I, the percentage of websites that are hosted on systems that are open source, so on Linux, that are made with tools like WordPress or something, it’s that it’s all open source. Hm hm. Either way, without, without open source, the digital world wouldn’t function.

Yeah. Today, I mean, it rests on open source. OK. So us, as a user, in fact our creation tool, well, if we want to use an open source tool, we can try them.

Maybe it won’t be suitable, maybe it’ll be suitable. But either way, in fact, there you go, the subject isn’t, in my opinion the subject isn’t to tell yourself, I want to do everything in open source, it’s, it’s what I do, but either way behind it there’s open source that runs and that makes, if there were no open source, there’d be no internet. Thanks, open source. Regarding that, it still requires pretty specific skills. You, you’re very tech, you’re Daily every day, at the level of recruitment or collaborators, since you use all types, you have a somewhat hybrid approach, does it complicate recruitment a bit when you need to expand the team, or how do you go about ensuring you have the right people in the right place who use the right tools?

No, there too it’s not, it’s not an issue that’s specific to free or not free. There, it’s an issue that’s more specific to which tools do what today, what we need, how we attach ourselves to something and we build things without reinventing the wheel each time, and at the same time how we adapt and are able to advance. But me personally, for 10 years, I tried to shift my machines onto Ubuntu and things like that. I gave up.

I, yeah, it’s not the right, it’s not, yeah, unfortunately. And yeah, it still stays, I think from a business point of view, we have options for, in the field we work in, creation, we have a lot of options because exactly it’s a field that emerged from an ability to collaborate among ourselves to manage to develop tools that weren’t accessible and that we couldn’t have had. After that, I think for the general public, it’s, it’s something else too. Yeah, there are ideal use cases, others maybe less, I imagine.

Yeah, yeah. But it’s true that I remember at Rodeo, all the machines were on Linux and it worked better than on PC, where Scanline was all on PC. I really saw the difference in how optimized it was at Rodeo, for example. Yeah, I can, I can add too, there are, there are a few local players too in Montreal and Quebec who are there to help companies, either to do hosting on open source systems, or to move to, so the ecosystem exists there.

In fact, you can get help to transform certain parts of your activity. I think notably, for example, of alternatives to Google Drive. Yeah. With a tool called Nextcloud, for example, which is pretty popular right now. OK.

Yeah. Yeah. Not the only one, but so it gives a suite. Yeah, because if I put myself in the place of, let’s say, business reasoning, me the first thing that would come to mind is, OK, I don’t want to pay my subscription every month, I want to host this myself.

For example Synology or others. But something else could also be, well, I want longevity. I want to ensure that, in fact it’s true that thinking about it a bit further, we see, because it’s not immediate. We tell ourselves, “Ah yeah, the trick, for sure, it’s going to be good for me.” But thinking about it a bit, you can, you can see where the long-term or medium-term benefits sit pretty quickly.

It’s you, as a client, let’s say, you, you invest money in, well, you move to, you’re on Google Drive, fine, it, everything and so on. At the moment you scale, it becomes, there it becomes paid, because you need more space and so on. The prices can be per user, it can be and so on. So in fact, finally the money, you invest it there.

Yeah. If you’re going to have a local player who develops you an alternative that’s, that’s, that’s open source, and that, in fact, what they charge for is hosting, for example. Yeah. Well in fact your money that you spend, it stays in Quebec.

You support people who develop knowledge, who are there, who maintain it. Yeah. And who potentially, well, are interested in open source development, who themselves are going to go contribute to Nextcloud, improve it. So you, the money, you know where, where you put it, in fact. There’s a virtuous circle that makes the link with Orio’s solution.

Exactly. Isabelle, the downsides of Orio, if there are any. Let’s say between AWS and Orio, is there a case where AWS is still better? Hm, yes, it’s, it’s a very good choice.

It’s always going to remain a good choice. If digital sovereignty isn’t important to you, you can stay with Amazon. If you don’t feel like taking risks and changing your pipeline, because it’s sure it’s comfortable once you’ve managed to do everything, because they’re still big pipeline setups to be able to manage the cloud render farms, so I understand that once all that is dialed in, you maybe don’t feel like trying something else. On the other hand, if digital sovereignty is important to you, if being eco-responsible is important to you, and if having a custom solution where you talk with real people, where you don’t talk with a chat, a chatbot, and someone who’s really going to want to evaluate your infrastructure and suggest the best solutions, well, that’s what we offer. After that, if the service that’s not custom suits you.

And then there’s also an approach regarding cost, you know, at Amazon, you have no warning of, “Oh wait, this is going to cost you a lot soon.” Us, we want to, we do that accompaniment where we’re able to say, this is what it’s going to cost, you’re able to evaluate it even at the start of the project. And then we really want to do the follow-up throughout the project, not just at the end when it’s time to launch all your renders 3 weeks before delivery, and there we go, “Well, we’re going to take advantage, we’re going to charge the full amount.” No, that’s not it.

It’s to say, look, us, we accompany you throughout the project, we’re going to let your producers see the costs coming on their project. You’re like, avoiding the traps, or how to say, making it so there’s no trap at the end, whereas Amazon would maybe be more their business model. No, exactly. And generally speaking, I’m not sure about the question, but in your opinion, what could we learn from the Americans to apply it to Quebec, that we don’t yet do well enough, where we can improve?

But we can’t, we can’t compare the size of the market and the economic engine behind that, the size finally of the users and so on and so on. There you go, I think that trying to make direct competition on all levels, we’re going to fail, you have to choose what’s important to us and where we’re going to intervene. Yes, there are alternatives to the very, very, very big players, but at the same time, there are prices to pay. In exchange for that, you have to see where we put them.

Does it, in the end, does it, how to say? Does it put limits on our productive capacity to advance on other things and so on and so on. How many Quebecers are we? We’re 7 million.

Yeah. To say that, it’s, yeah, it’s, it’s not the same game. We don’t have the same types of capital, there isn’t the same type of info-system, it’s not comparable. So yeah, in fact you have to ask the question the other way around: what could we do better than the Americans? And I think Orio does it exactly, I think it’s also to develop that culture of wanting to be independent, of wanting to be sovereign.

I think the United States has a lot of it. They have all that pride that we’re just starting to develop here in Quebec. So it would be to develop that more and more, and I think that’s where we’re heading too. Yeah. Yeah, that’s very good.

OK. Well exactly, we can move to the virtuous circle for part 4. The throughline of the conversation is that the local ecosystem makes you stronger, helps you distinguish yourself notably through the experimentation it makes possible. Because that’s something that also came up a lot, it’s that Montreal in particular is a city known for enabling experimentation and that has a good reputation internationally too, notably from all the companies that come out of it.

You, Mouna, you’ve been, so as co-founder of Daily, you’re on the board of the SAT, you, you participated in La Piscine? Is it a coincidence? Is there a link in all that? Is it something that you wanted to put in place voluntarily?

What’s the throughline regarding all that? No, I think we’re the product of the environment in which we evolve, of the context, the studio at the base, we’re interested in being in response to what’s around us and in echo to all that. So it’s sure that at a certain point, I spent a few years in New York. Melissa Mongiat, my partner, was in London.

If we’d stayed there, we’d have created other, other companies, we’d have done other types of projects. So I think it’s undeniable that Daily tous les jours is the result of the context we’re in, of an ecosystem we work with. Me, I believe enormously that we’re stronger together than separately. It’s part too of what we try to express through the projects we do, that exactly because we’re smaller, because we have fewer resources and fewer means, but because we have big ambitions collectively, and we can’t survive if we work only on the market here.

We need to ally ourselves, and we work in fields too that are very multidisciplinary. We need all sorts of expertise, and in that respect we need to be able to collaborate, to know how to do it. So that sometimes you’re kind of caught with exactly your desire to contribute and the rush of the job. How do you manage to balance that sometimes? Does it happen, or do you manage it?

No no, it’s sure it happens. Sometimes you’re in your bubble and you advance and you disconnect, and at other moments you have more availability to be in exchange. But I think most of the time, the exchange pays off. After that, it stays something to keep working on.

You were talking about the XN summit, so the association that represents producers and creators in the digital industry. We still have work to do to reflect on that synergy. What does it really mean? And how can we put in place more projects, initiatives that make that bridge. You’re not just giving toward the outside, but that gesture of being toward the outside, it’s directly connected with what you have to accomplish in your day.

Have you seen direct benefits, notably with recruitment, or is it, we couldn’t do what we do without other skills we go find, without collaborators we work with regularly. For sure, we wouldn’t be 20, we’d be 150. Oh yeah, I’m exaggerating, but not by much. You really have super complete profiles compared to what, no, no, what I mean is that we have the core of the skills in-house, but we can accomplish what we do because we’re able to go find complementary skills around us, and we develop affinities, habits, work habits together.

It echoes open source a bit, where you go find modules, in quotes. There you go, they’re humans, it’s not the same, but, and it lets you be more resilient too. For open source, we can cite the example of Blender, which is a big success right now. I think, well, not right now, it’s been a while, but I hear about it more and more.

And there are big companies that are starting to adopt it and train their artists on it. What would be the difference for someone who adopts Blender compared to someone who keeps using, I don’t know, Maya or a proprietary software? If I put myself in the position of, let’s say I’m a small VFX studio that’s starting, or an animation film studio, you don’t work at Blender, but could you tell, for them to really understand in a pragmatic way, because there’s still often the trade-off, do we go with Unreal or Unity, or do we go with Blender? And I have the impression the balance is changing a bit right now.

So do you have an opinion on that, an opinion? I think Mouna put things pretty well. I think it depends on where you want to go and what it’s going to bring you. It’s sure that these different technologies, Unreal, Unity, Blender, aren’t going to perform the same way in different contexts.

Yeah. So maybe Unity is the right choice in certain cases. There’s, I’m going to mention Godot too, which is an engine that’s an equivalent of Unity but that’s open source, a bit lighter than a game engine. OK.

Which we use a lot, by the way. But that’s it, what’s the difference between these different tools? Well, take for example, if we take Unity versus Godot, which are still pretty equivalent, they’re game engines that let you make 2D games, 3D games and so on. Well, if you choose Unity, well OK, there are already often a lot of assets that come with it.

So you have, like, you can quickly get to a decent result, because there’s the happy path that’s been all traced out and all that, and yeah you’re going to be able to produce something quickly, except that if you want to do somewhat experimental things, with, let’s say, you want to say, it’s not a video game I want to make, it’s an immersive installation, ah OK, now maybe I want to receive video streams from the network because I’m doing telepresence, maybe I’m going to want to add a tracking system, how do I receive the, so there in fact these tools are sometimes harder to make interoperate with others, even if in the end we manage it, but there it’s harder than in the open source alternatives, let’s say Godot, where it’s already, it’s part of the DNA of the open source culture to say, I know it’s easy to write a new plugin to do something, or like what I was saying about Arduino, a board with a chip, but in fact it’s not made for a single thing, to open, for a single thing, to open the door when I stand in front of it. No, it’s made to be programmed. So you can program whatever you want. There you go, that’s a bit the, the deal.

And with Blender in particular, Blender versus others, in, there’s the, because contributing to open source isn’t only on the development side, it’s also on the user side. That is there are a lot of people who are going to, there’s a culture in fact with Blender, so people who are going to give asset banks, asset banks for free, because they put licenses for fonts, typefaces, things and so on that are of very good quality. Yeah. And for example, they’re going to say, “OK, but I still need to sell, to make money.” So maybe they give a lot of things for free, but if you want service modifications or more advanced fonts, well for that, call me and I can help you and so on.

OK. Yeah. So there’s also, spontaneously, users who are going to feed forums, who are going to give things, make YouTube videos and so on. The community in fact is already in the culture of, I was given, I give back.

OK. Yeah. You see? And if you want more, we can, for a fee, charge, it can be a way to do biz dev too.

So it can give an idea to some people? Well, let’s say it’s, I, yeah, that’s biz dev. There’s, in fact what you generally do is, it’s that you talk to people, it’s that when you talk to people, it’s not, it’s not just clients, it’s, you make an exchange, you give, and then they’re going to, an interest, you build, you build a relationship and something. In fact, it’s generally, by the way even the, the big guys, women, do that.

They give, Google gives access to Google Drive. Yeah. Except that once you’re stuck in it, bam, there, you pay. That’s it.

But there’s, there’s this, in fact it’s, I think it’s human, quite simply. It’s not, it’s not just open source, it’s, we all want to give because we receive, and then, there you go, but we also want to make a living from our work. So it’s, so indeed yes, it may well be open source, there’s a moment where, well maybe you don’t want to install the software, you buy a server, maybe you take a service to get help, maybe you take hosting somewhere where you can put your stuff, maybe at the source. Yeah.

Yeah, but it’s interesting because even at the level of, there you go, business development, it’s a model a bit different from the classic one, and it can work. What’s the future for Orio? Well, Orio, it’s to keep developing data centers, finding other partnerships, first in Quebec, buildings where we’re going to keep installing our data centers to be able to grow, serve as many people as possible. For now, we’re aiming mostly at the creative industry, the VFX studios, animation, all that.

But also we’re open to plenty of other sectors that use our services, and eventually we’re looking at other places in Canada to open more data centers. It’s already something that’s in progress, to talk with Exin, which helps us at the level of infrastructure. OK. So what does a day in the life of Isabelle, who develops Orio, look like?

For now, it’s a lot of brainstorming, it’s a lot of excitement too, because we’re starting something that doesn’t exist yet. And we have a bit of carte blanche, we have a lot of creatives who are on the board. So it’s really designing the services we want to offer, working directly with our clients to receive their feedback too on what they really need. So we’re really at that stage where we design our services more and more, and we keep expanding. Nice.

You wanted to talk about La Piscine? Yeah yeah yeah, that’s it. I have a little blank, a little sugar crash. La Piscine is great.

La Piscine is great. We took the big plunge. Come dive in. We did what?

Which program? No wait, we did one, I forgot. It was the Deep Dive. Ah yes, we did the Deep Dive with La Piscine in 2019, which helped us at a certain point to manage the growth of the studio, to professionalize and move a bit to the next step.

And what does it look like, for those who don’t know La Piscine at all, what’s it for? La Piscine is to learn to swim, or perfect your skills so you don’t sink, and also sometimes so you don’t sink even when you can swim. Yeah. And so it’s an accelerator, eh, not an incubator, I think it’s an accelerator, I believe, of projects in the cultural sphere in the broad sense.

I’m not a spokesperson, I’m an occasional user, in fact for a year or two, we were mentored. So we had, there was this program for companies already in existence. So the studio had existed for almost 10 years when we got on board with this program, which was more intense. They assigned us one or several mentors to support us in a phase of transition, with objectives for us, really, of professionalization and expansion of commercialization.

They also activate their network, I imagine. There you go, the network, it was a springboard too to get access to financial services, to HR services, to support services. The ego, and then it was a nice moment and a nice exercise in reflection. Well, in our case, we did a lot of projects, we were ready to launch all that in March 2020, like a lot of companies. After that, we had a little detour, eh, and the plans changed, but it stays, it stays an interesting player in the ecosystem for us, which is important, which is in relationship too with the governments, which is able, in a different way than XN Québec still, to do advocacy for cultural companies in the broader sense, which isn’t limited to digital either, I think, but they have a field of expertise that’s bigger.

So there for example, I teach at Concordia University to design students. I’m going to invite someone from La Piscine to come present the program, because it’s also opportunities for young entrepreneurs who would be starting out in the creation field. Yeah, they’re also very open to those who are starting. They have very, very advanced companies.

I think of Felix and Paul. But there, it’s also what we’re discussing for the podcast, maybe doing it in public, to bring in students who see the place, who see the programs that are available for later, maybe when they want to launch. Yeah, I think back in the day it was called Plouf, I believe, at the beginning. Ah yeah, I don’t remember anymore.

So they revised the names. Do you recommend it? Do you, you see? Yeah, for sure.

But as you, you saw, I said earlier, me I take what’s there, I explore at least, at minimum I don’t close the door, and I see if there’s something there. We’re still, given exactly the size of our market and how everything works, even at the level of economic development, we still have an ecosystem that’s supported by the government for plenty of reasons we can discuss, positive or not. But to have an organization like La Piscine, it’s also a gateway to be able to understand how we can seek financial support and so on. We don’t have a huge number of options for cultural philanthropy, we don’t have a huge number of, the banks aren’t going to easily finance projects in creativity X, Y, Z, in startup phase. So it’s important to have access to these resources, these skills, develop a network and so on through an organization like La Piscine. We’re going to move toward the conclusion.

Is there something we didn’t cover that you wanted to address before we finish? Yeah, me maybe on the, to come back again to open source, in fact. Well, there’s the, what’s interesting as a user about open source? Because there we see the differences and so on, the, let’s say, moral side, but on the purely operational level, using open source tools versus using cloud systems or something like that, we touched on it a bit with AI in particular. Yeah. It’s that, in fact, from the moment you grab a, you integrate an open source tool into your work pipeline or into your system, well, you, it means that you can freeze its version, which means that once you’ve tested, you’ve done all your tests and so on, you can say, “This doesn’t move, I’m just going to do bug fixes, security updates.”

Yeah. As needed, and tech check, that is you have control, you have control over your technology over time. You know, if you make, for example, an installation, you know it’s going to run for 2 years. If behind it you have a proprietary tool that’s connected to the internet to function, well, you can find yourself blocked more or less overnight. You have control there over your, over the tool that’s, that’s there.

Already, you have control, you can freeze its version, but if in your process of reflection, of product development, things change, you can go into the source code of the software and you can modify it. You can add or remove the things that bother you. It’s repairable. Hm.

That’s it. It’s repairable, the tool. It reminds me a bit of old cars that you could repair yourself, that now everything’s electronic, you have to plug something in and you can’t do anything. That’s it.

It’s a good analogy. Yeah. And then so afterward you, so it’s archivable too. That is you can say, well this computer, this, this code and so on, I can keep it, and then afterward if you want to bring it back out in 10 years, well yeah, you’ll have trouble making it work because the machines will have changed, but everything’s there.

You’ll be able to either repair it and bring it to what you want, or understand how it was built and remake it. So that’s what it offers, and that’s what you can’t have, in fact, with tools that aren’t, that aren’t open source. Exactly, if someone wants to benefit from each of your services, how do they go about it? By, well, you need a little check.

There you go, they have, I’m joking. But they contact us, hello at dailytouslesjours.com. We discuss the project, for creation, for existing works, for the catalog, for consultation. In general, your clients are cities, are museums, it’s going to be private companies on occasion, real estate developers, cities, cultural institutions, botanical gardens, all sorts of organizations, bodies that have a relationship with the general public or who are interested in having one.

And I was going to say we’ll surely see you at Hub, but I heard that Hub maybe won’t take place next year, so we’ll see. But there are other events, I imagine you participate. We’re there, we’re available, we participate in Montreal and elsewhere too. Yeah.

Nicolas, us, well indeed you need to, you need to contact us. We develop quite a few demonstrations that are rather technological. So the best is to contact us, to come see what we have, what we’ve developed. We also have an immersive studio that’s, that’s with projections on four walls, and a nice playground, and the floor.

Yeah, that’s it. With a nice projection height too that lets us test things. And then, well there you go, generally, well in fact our clients are often people who want to do the creation. Yeah. And us, we come help on the technological side, so either to build the technological system, or to make one piece of it, or purely consultation on different, different things.

And then, well that’s it, we have a product offering that’s based on servers that install open source software. We have a range of servers that are light servers, so that consume pretty little electricity, and, ah, so you can host things yourself too. That’s it. In fact, they’re tracking devices for sound and visual.

So there’s the camera system, and then there’s the little computer, and so we optimize to reduce the material footprint. So we don’t have big servers that weigh kilos. So we have small servers, and then it’s optimized, and then it talks with the usual types of clients. The types of clients are, well, that’s it, they’re creators who are going to develop installations like, for example, Daily tous les jours.

Yeah. It can be people who are more on the artistic side who want to develop experiences of dance, theater and so on. Yeah, it can also be certain presenters who are going to, who want to create an experience to showcase their venue, their archives and so on. So like, for example, well, Oasis, who we worked with, or the NFB, who we’re working with right now.

OK. And your site is AP 148. Lap 148. It’s the best place to reach you.

Isabelle? Yeah, in fact on our site Orio Cloud, you can get in contact with us. We’re first going to have a meeting to define the needs that are really applicable, custom, and we’re going to come back with designing the precise machines we plan to use to handle a certain project or request, and come back with a cost estimate. Again, what we look at is more companies for now than individuals, because we really have a lot of storage, of render space and all that. So like I was saying earlier, VFX studio, animation studio, or whatever kind of creative studio that has needs in storage or in rendering or in virtual machines.

Ah yes, OK. Yeah. And before we part ways, I have a question for you, in any case for the listeners. Do you see something in your life, a business idea that’s missing, that’s tied or not to creativity, that you say, “Ah, if a person made that, I’d buy it right away”? In fact, I’m going to go with my experience in VFX, where we had needs for resources that fluctuate enormously over the course of a project, and schedules that fluctuate enormously over the course of a project, which puts enormous pressure on VFX studios.

And if there were a tool, and I’m sure that now with the, we’ll get there, a tool that lets you rework those schedules, because when we talk about VFX, we can talk about 10, 12 specialties that chain one behind the other, a bit like in construction. Well, it’s like, so it’s not straightforward when there’s a schedule change that happens on 500 shots at the same time with 12 different specialties per shot. 8,000 tasks to manage, it becomes kind of physically impossible for a project manager to make those changes. So if there were a tool that was able to understand all those interdependencies between the tasks, the people, the amount of time, and that was able to help us rework that in a magic way. While taking into account the skills and competencies of the artists.

Well, word to the wise. Me, I’m pretty frustrated by the way we receive the music that’s produced by music artists. Oh yeah. So there’s, I know there are alternatives to streaming platforms like Bandcamp that offer the, but so, OK Bandcamp, but overall artists, well, it’s like it seems they choose their thing, either they’re forced to go into, yeah that’s it, into streaming platforms, and then they get a bit devalued, it’s, I find it, I find it hard to have access to the music of Montreal people, of people of something cultural, and not some kind of global, worldwide culture music.

Yeah. To drown in the average. It’s true that I tried to do that with BC in particular, you can filter by city, it’s pretty cool, but then it’s a bit less well managed than the other platforms. So I lose a bit of interest over time because, but something that would be, but that’s it, you, in fact you give your money to a system but you don’t know to whom it goes, because if it’s the number of views for example, OK, maybe I listen to Madonna 200 times in the day because I was in love with her when I was a teenager, like, but maybe I’d prefer that my money go to a little group from Quebec, and then, or yeah, it’s, it’s not because I listen more that, and so I don’t know, there’s a model there of discoverability, of distribution of the money that I pay as a listener toward the artists in music in particular, that I find really, there’s something that’s missing. You gave me an idea.

Me, what I’d like to see is a network that works. I’ve seen prototypes of that. It looks great. They’re networks that work just with Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, but they’re networks that create themselves without, there you go, neighbor to neighbor.

So that’s for the physical support. But then you also have info that you can exchange locally. Let’s say at one point, I had the idea of making a platform where you can borrow, I don’t know, an expensive object that a neighbor has, that they store but never use, and that it be pooled, but at a really local scale. And often the tools, I don’t know why, they go toward the global, the general, and you lose a bit the side of, I could interact with my neighbors, know their name, I don’t know, something like that.

That would be cool. It’s true. I think we talked about Microsoft earlier, but being able to have natural alternatives for big exchange platforms. Why are we forced to?

Me, I’m still on Facebook just because of school and the neighbors. And I don’t understand what, what, what we’re doing there. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Because you’re drowned in the mass a bit, whereas you could have your little cozy nest. Yes. Yeah.

And then we’d really like to disconnect from these platforms. We don’t need them otherwise, except for very specific things that stay important. So we stay there. Well, that’s perfect.

We covered quite a lot of things, but it’s true that we were able to make the link already between your three philosophies, your three products, if I can say it like that. And me, I learned a lot, and I think the people listening did too. So thanks for your participation, thanks for the invitation, and well, that’s it. Yeah, I have no closing word. We’ll do it like on TV, you play the music and us, we laugh.