The Vancouver AI Community Meetup #16 vibrated with creative energy, blending indigenous wisdom with bleeding-edge tech, grassroots community-building with critical thought. As I declared at the opening: “You are the BC + AI ecosystem.” and what followed was a vivid demonstration of that ecosystem’s diversity and momentum.
“Friends, we live at a time where new forms of expression are emerging right under our very eyes… whole new forms of expression.” —Kris Krüg
Cultural Grounding & Community Foundations
Gabriel George Sr. of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation brought the room into sync—with land, lineage, and each other. He shared stories of his great-grandmother who lived right here, on this very patch of earth, back when it was still shoreline.
Then he dropped a new song—one we’d never heard before—that bounced around the round room like it had always belonged there. No mic. Just presence. Just power. Just Gabriel doing what he does: weaving the ancient into the now.
British Columbia Artificial Intelligence Community of Practice
Patrick Pennefather followed with exciting news about published academic research in BC Studies Journal on the community itself. “Building a grassroots AI community of practice, a Vancouver centric use case” documents how this thriving ecosystem has formed organically.
Pennefather emphasized that as we explore this technology “with all the known unknowns and unknown unknowns of where it’s gonna go, we need to actually be centered in our own values.”
“We are a community and as we start to build this technology, we are not individual lone wolves. And if you are, cool, and talk with people because it’s always better to belong to a pack.” — Professor Patrick Parra Pennefather
Emerging Sub-Communities & Initiatives
The ecosystem continues to spawn new offshoots. Ryv Valiquette shared updates on the Surrey AI Meetup, now in its second event with interactive games comparing real vs. AI content. The smaller setting offers a unique benefit: “The best part is circle time. Yes, it’s smaller. So we actually get to have a circle and go around, talk about stuff and share and it’s pretty awesome.”
Other emerging groups include Mind, AI & Consciousness Reading Group, Womxn AI, Squamish AI, and the emerging AI.edu group exploring AI usage in learning and classrooms.
Vijaya and Madhavee announced their upcoming AI ethics and governance conference (October 24th), emphasizing the need for values alignment and human-centric approaches. “AI is a huge thing,” they noted. “It can be a great monster, it can be a good monster, bad monster. So how do we really do that value alignment and the ethics part of it, the governance part of it?”
Carla Ritchie from Vivo Media Arts, one of Canada’s oldest artist-run centers (founded 1973), shared her dream of building “a media hub where we’ll have the machines so that any person can get access to this technology and to be able to train it for themselves.”
She credited the community with connecting her to AI funding resources: “Being part of this community gave me access to other resources of funding. So I’ve already applied or sent letters of interest to four funders to build this dream.”
Creative Explorations & Performances
The meetup spotlighted several innovative projects. Lionel Ringenbach (aka UCODIA), an experimental software artist, demonstrated his transition from a 15-year software engineering career to creating 3D models of mushrooms through photogrammetry.
He explained how coding transformed his relationship with creativity: “I didn’t feel I could use my hands to make art, but all of a sudden code became like a paint brush.”
His application “Compovision” allows users to generate images with AI “without using a single word, but instead using your hands and objects that are around you. And it’s able to create what you can imagine without any words.”
Philippe Pasquier and his team from SFU’s METACREATION Lab for Creative AI previewed their performance for Montreal’s Mutek Festival, featuring musical AI agents “maam” and “Spire.”
Their work focuses on small data and model crafting: “We’ve been developing a bunch of tools based on this idea of small data and model crafting.
We notice that artists don’t really want to use big models, trained on everyone else’s data… For-profit AI is all about uploading the data and using big models. And if you look elsewhere, there’s pretty much nothing.”
“We notice that artists don’t really want to use big models, trained on everyone else data. They don’t really want to upload their data online. They don’t really want to learn how to program in Python to make some art with AI in California.” —Philippe Pasquier, METACREATION Lab
Lionel later revealed another project measuring AI energy consumption—an “AI energy counter” not designed to blame users but to “help people guide to more ecological product maybe.” At MUTEK’s AI Ecologies Lab, he’s prototyping new ways to track and surface the energy footprint of AI systems—not to shame, but to illuminate.
This isn’t about optimization; it’s about awareness as agency. His lab project is a sensorium for seeing the carbon ghosts in the machine. Lionel’s work blends punk engineering with planetary mindfulness.
The Data Storytelling Hackathon
The centerpiece of the evening was the data storytelling hackathon sponsored by RIVAL Technologies. Andrew Reid approached me with a problem: market research data typically ends up in boring PowerPoint slides.
As I explained, “We do this amazing work for these biggest brands in the world. They spend huge amounts of money asking tens of thousands of people questions about all sorts of stuff. And then we get all this rich data back and the whole industry puts into PowerPoint presentations and bar charts and graphs and like it’s the AI age. We must be able to do something more.”
The judging team included Dale Evernden and Julia Morton from RIVAL, along with Brittney Smaila who built the judging rubric. Twelve teams submitted creative interpretations of survey data on the quirky prompt: “Is a hot dog a sandwich?”
“I’ll just encourage everybody, if you can take a look at the submissions. We had 12 submissions. Five of them really stood out, and I was blown away by the kind of care and attention that went into the ideation process and the conceptualization of those thoughts into a deliverable.” —Dale, RIVAL Technologies
Sev Geraskin of Past5 took home the $2,500 prize with his comprehensive Orchstr platform that classified respondents as “sandwich traditionalists” or “sandwich expansionists” and developed a “controversy score.”
The judging was unanimous, as Dale explained: “We put our top three on there and there was one that was on the first place of all of the lists, plus Andrews, the five judges all had this one on top, so it was easy.”
In the true spirit of community, Sev’s victory speech focused not on his own accomplishment but on highlighting another community member’s work: “I wanna talk more about the kind of talent we have here. And as I’m working on this exercise and I’m meeting more and more people, I’m impressed with just the quality of builders that we have in the city.”
Swathi’s runner-up project transformed the data into a comic book courtroom drama where a hot dog stood trial for its sandwich status.
She built an impressive pipeline using only open-source models: “I built a pipeline where like after all the data insights are derived, there is a CSV… and you just hit play button and what you get output is… a comic novel.”
Brittney closed the hackathon segment by announcing the next round’s theme: Canadian identity. Using data from Angus Reid polling, participants will explore “What does it mean to be Canadian?” with winners announced just before Canada Day.
Beyond Chat: The Future of Interfaces
Allen Pike of Forestwalk Labs delivered a captivating keynote on the future of AI interfaces beyond chat. He traced the evolution from text terminals to GUIs to chat interfaces, and now to what he calls “post-chat interfaces.”
“We’re at the beginning of a really incredible generation of software and products and experiences that when we think of AI, we might often think of this chat experience, which isn’t going away, but there is so much more to come.” —Allen Pike
These emerging patterns include contextual right-click menus, natural language search fields, and AI that anticipates the “next obvious thing” a user might want to do. “The way that you can just start making a change and it’s immediately ‘oh, obviously you’re doing this, just press tab’… It’s so powerful,” Pike explained. “It makes all your rest of your software feel broken.”
Perhaps most provocatively, he described a future where interfaces might be completely generated on-the-fly for each user’s exact needs: “We can now generate a completely custom UI exactly for you that is unique to you in the moment right now… This is either the complete future of user interfaces and that all the stuff I just talked about, the computers will just generate it for us… Or this is completely deranged and will confuse everyone and be impossible to actually get working.”
Community Spirit
The event closed with a surprising twist: the community’s resident critic, Kushal, who traditionally closes with a rant, found himself with nothing to complain about. “I have been in the last while, like a month plus and so on completely detoxing, if you will, of all closed source proprietary shit completely… I honestly think nothing is pissing me off.”
Instead, he celebrated the open-source movement and the educational impact of the hackathon: “You got everyone to start playing with these technologies on their computers… I saw some of the people that won… doing stuff with models, some of them open source, and it just builds education. If you know about it now, you now know how to talk about it.”
Throughout the night, Krüg highlighted the community’s growing influence, from academic validation to government recognition. With sponsors including Dmitri Schwartzman, SEGEV LLP, METACREATION Lab, RIVAL Technologies, and Creative Mornings Vancouver, the ecosystem continues to blossom, proving that AI development doesn’t require selling our souls—just passion, creativity, and human connection.
“When I walk into the JEDI’s office or InnovateBC, and I say that we have grown from 0 paying annual members to 50 in one moth, and that we have more than 200 people show up monthy… they really start paying attention.” —Kris Krüg
As the group looked ahead to the next meetup during Web Summit Vancouver on May 28th (featuring 10 community startups), and the June 25th gathering after that, one thing was clear: this is no ordinary tech meetup, but rather a living laboratory where art, technology, ethics, and community converge to shape our collective future.
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