Futureproof has been living in my head for a long time.
Long enough to change names a few times. Futureproof Creatives. FITAL. Fatal Festival. FATALE. Futureproof Festival. Same voltage, different label on the jar.
Underneath all those names was a pretty simple itch: I wanted to build a future festival in Vancouver with teeth.
Creative technology. Art. Business. Code. Film. Music. Ethics. Weird demos. Proper talks. Beautiful rooms. People who can build things sitting beside people who can smell bullshit from across a ballroom.
I had the taste before I had the money.
I had the room in my head before I had the community that could hold it.
So we built the community first.
Ringside Seats
I spent more than a decade photographing some of the best gatherings in the world: TED, the Olympic Games, South by Southwest, and a long parade of rooms where people arrived as one version of themselves and left a little rewired.
Event photography is a weird education if you are paying attention.
You are close enough to see the stagecraft, and invisible enough to notice what actually matters. The green-room nerves. The sponsor politics. The person in the back row who came alone and leaves with collaborators. The hallway conversation that beats the keynote. The moment an audience stops consuming content and starts becoming a temporary culture.
That is the part I got hooked on.
Logo walls are whatever. Lanyards are lanyards. The official program matters, but it is rarely the whole story.
The room is the product.
If the room is lazy, the event is dead no matter how pretty the website is. If the room is alive, people forgive a lot. They forgive the weird AV glitch. They forgive the coffee. They forgive the fact that someone, somewhere, definitely used the word “innovation” when they should have just said “we built a thing.”
The Meetup Was The Bootstrap
The Vancouver AI Community Meetups were the bootstrap path.
We needed a room before we could build a festival. We needed trust before we could ask people to take a bigger swing. We needed artists, engineers, founders, educators, researchers, filmmakers, policy people, students, skeptics, optimists, and the gloriously unclassifiable local weirdos to keep showing up in the same place often enough that the scene could see itself.
That is what the meetups did.
It was messy in the way real things are messy. The scraps, transcripts, half-built demos, WhatsApp voice notes, five-minute rants after the event, sponsor experiments, failed ideas, and people who stayed to stack chairs all went into the pile.
Keep turning the pile long enough and the soil changes.
The meetups became working groups.
The working groups became film nights, ethics labs, hackathons, office hours, education conversations, artist experiments, and late-night planning docs with too many tabs open.
Then BC + AI became the nonprofit container. Paperwork is where good ideas go to either become real or die of neglect.
The nonprofit gave the thing a skeleton.
The community gave it a nervous system.
Futureproof is the next body.
Why A Festival
AI is too weird, too powerful, too intimate, and too everywhere to leave inside the usual conference lanes.
Builders need artists in the room before the interface is baked. Teachers and students need a real seat. Public-interest people and startup people need to be able to talk without everyone performing their assigned costume. Indigenous governance, creative rights, labour, climate, computation, film, music, education, and business already overlap in real life. The event should admit that.
That is why I keep coming back to the festival frame.
A good festival lets the lanes collide. It makes room for the keynote and the hallway confession, the demo and the film screening, the serious policy question and the strange little art thing that gets under your skin and stays there.
That collision is where the useful stuff lives.
What Is Actually Happening In 2026
The first public Futureproof edition is locked for October 28-30, 2026 at H.R. MacMillan Space Centre in Vancouver.
One opening night. Two program days. A focused founding room.
I can already feel the part of my brain that wants the week-long version with hackathons, design jams, immersive art, field trips, film screenings, strange dinners, performances, and enough cross-pollination to make the city feel electrically unsafe in the best way.
That version is still the long arc.
This year is the first clean plant into the soil we have spent three years making.
The Futureproof site is up. The Luma registration page is live. The Space Centre is real. The dates are real. The community is real.
I have built enough fantasy castles in Notion to know the difference.
The Part I Care About
The world does not need Vancouver to mimic San Francisco with better mountains.
We win if we build rooms that make better questions normal. We win if artists have power in the conversation beyond a cute performance slot after lunch. We win if the people affected by AI get a voice before the systems harden. We win if the business conversation can sit beside ethics without everyone getting allergic. We win if the local scene keeps enough ownership of its own story that the value does not all get extracted into some distant slide deck.
That is the non-extractive piece.
That is the original intelligence piece.
That is the part I do not want sanded off by conference logic.
Futureproof is a public square for people with both hands full: the hand that sees the possibility, and the hand that refuses to ignore the cost.
Come Build The Room
If you have been coming to the meetups, you are already part of the origin story.
If you have never come, good. Fresh blood. Bring better questions.
Start here:
- Visit Futureproof
- Register on Luma
- Explore BC + AI events
- Find BC + AI communities
- See where else I am speaking and writing
I have spent a long time trying to get this thing out of my head and my heart and into the world.
Now it has a date, a venue, and a community.
That is a hell of a place to begin.
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