The short version: Jordan Dack hosted me for a live TELUS STORYHIVE On Location episode at Haus of Owl in downtown Victoria — unceded Lekwungen territories, acknowledged on air before we got into the creative-or-die deep dive. We played facts-or-fiction, skipped the résumé parade, and spent about eighty minutes on what actually matters: both hands full, AI as mirror not replacement, the admin swamp around art, why I won’t fake the people who showed up, voice-first workflows, and why trusted physical rooms like the Hoot Nest become infrastructure when the feed turns synthetic.
Watch the full segment below. This post is the cited companion — names, links, and the ideas in one place.
The Room: Jordan, Haus of Owl, and STORYHIVE On Location
Haus of Owl is not a generic coworking loft with better Wi-Fi and a neon sign. It is a creation club for musicians, filmmakers, photographers, dancers, and poets — studio access, mentorship, the Garden as communal core, and a downtown Victoria address (780 Blanshard) that treats underused city space as creative infrastructure. I have history in that building: the Music Elevation Series conversations, artists testing AI in public, the kind of room where you can say something unfinished and nobody treats uncertainty like a personality defect.
Jordan Dack produces and hosts Creative or Die — poet, songwriter, and the kind of interviewer who sends you thirty real questions before you walk in, then opens the broadcast with a facts game where Alaska is false, “Peter” is false, and the Vancouver AI meetup headcount is “more or less” true because we have skeptics on the roster too, not just enthusiasts.
The episode is part of STORYHIVE On Location — TELUS’s documentary and creator funding lane — produced here in partnership with Haus of Owl. The public video title is STORYHIVE On Location: Victoria. If you want the vibe before you commit to eighty minutes: territory acknowledged, warmth, jokes, then the hard stuff.
Both Hands Full (The Spine Jordan Named On Air)
Every AI conversation tries to sort you into camps. Boosters with pompoms. Doomers with pitchforks. Hype without critical dialogue is lazy. Purity without a roadmap abandons the room to whoever already owns the microphones.
Jordan literally framed the middle as Both Hands Full — skepticism in one hand, curiosity in the other. That is not neutrality. It is stewardship.
If you get up and walk away, you abdicate the throne to the tech bros and venture capitalists. We need you in the room.
That line is why I keep building public rooms instead of only writing essays. The essay matters. The room stress-tests it. If skeptics leave, the default story wins without a fight.
I have been saying this on stages from LaSalle College Vancouver to Bass Coast Brain Stage to the Vancouver AI March 2026 meetup. STORYHIVE is useful proof that the framework lands on camera, not just in slide decks.
Related on this site: Both Hands Full, Web Summit Vancouver 2026, and the public Vancouver AI March 2026 talk on YouTube.
Galiano, Midjourney, and the Orbit Around the Art
Jordan let me tell the origin story the way I tell it in public: end of 2022, Galiano Island, greenhouse energy, someone showed me Midjourney during a week that was supposed to be about distillery hardware, not the future of photography.
Ten minutes later I knew two things.
First: I am never running another big client shoot without generating and approving comps before models, lights, producers, and catering get booked. My creative time is too valuable to waste on exploratory production when imagination jams are cheap.
Second: the tool was not coming for the sacred center first. It was coming for the orbit — briefs, budgets, contact sheets, captions, invoices, filenames like DSC_4837-final-final-realfinal.jpg, and the archive chaos that eats the week before you touch the thing you actually care about.
That is the art-adjacent pile: selects, metadata, releases, gallery delivery, grant language, festival bios, CRM wrangling, clip pulls, rights notes. Not fake work. Travel work. The machine can chew there first so you can get back to the art with your soul still attached.
AI as Mirror (Not Oracle, Not Replacement)
The most useful thing AI has done for my creative life is act as a mirror on decades of work already out in the world — blog posts, talks, photos, half-finished ideas — so I can ask better questions about my own patterns instead of outsourcing the asking.
Ground prompts in artifacts you actually made: worldview docs, voice guides, policy, your real archive. Playful inquiry, not oracle worship. I have used the “who am I?” meditation parallel on air: the machine reflects; you still have to not believe your first answer.
That is different from replacing community portraits, meetup documentation, or the witness function of a photographer in the room.
I Won’t Fake the People Who Showed Up
Jordan asked the musician-in-the-studio question: will AI take the mixing job?
My split: creative professions versus art. Jobs get disrupted. Art is weirder — process, embodiment, relationship, the thing that does not compress cleanly into a productivity metric.
On documentary practice I am blunt:
- AI can help plan a shoot, search an archive, draft captions, map transcripts, build proof packs.
- AI does not get to replace the portrait of a community member who trusted us by showing up.
A portrait is not an image of a face. It is a record of attention between people. In the synthetic age, somebody actually stood there becomes part of the value.
See also the Vancouver AI March 2026 Both Hands Full talk on YouTube and BC + AI events for the room we are building in public.
Vancouver AI as Cultural Infrastructure (Not a Side Quest)
We talked through the Vancouver AI Community Meetup format: roughly four hours — networking, two-hour program, networking again. Indigenous welcome and ceremony before hard topics. Demo pit surprises (ASL translation, lidar Xbox robot, whatever the month brings). Chapters from Comox Valley to Squamish. BC + AI as the front door — membership, events, and the wider ecosystem map.
This is the same civic infrastructure argument I made during Web Summit Vancouver 2026: global conferences rent cities; communities metabolize them. Haus of Owl, Eth??s Lab, 221A, and rooms like the Hoot Nest are not “venues.” They are trust infrastructure when synthetic everything floods the feed.
Voice-First and Agentic (The Current Epoch)
The interview tracked my pipeline epochs — Midjourney jams, knowledge bases and named assistants, then agentic workflows where I speak tasks into existence and named workers (researcher, coder, documentary editor) execute against grounded context.
Your fingers are a filter between head, heart, and machine. Voice carries cadence, urgency, slang, self-correction — the mess typing often strips out. That is not speed for speed’s sake. It is fidelity.
If you want the practitioner lane: The Upgrade AI creative professionals training, Developing an AI Mindset, and the Responsible AI Professional certification we built with BC + AI — trust, disclosure, and human relationships as curriculum, not slide-deck garnish. On this site: Applied Ethical AI / RAP.
Ethics on Air
The through-line on air: measure twice, disclose everything, protect trust. Same lesson I use in climate and systems work: you can participate in a system and still hold it to account. You do not have to live in the woods to critique the woods.
BC’s Lane (Culture, Compute, and Copy-Paste Silicon Valley)
We touched the West Coast argument: SFU METACREATION Lab, artist-trained models on your own work, supercomputer politics, and why BC should build a public-interest AI identity — green where possible, Indigenous-led data governance where required, culture reserved a seat at the compute table — instead of photocopying Palo Alto.
That connects to the accountability work in Sovereign AI for Whom? and the wider BC + AI ecosystem. Steel, concrete, and code without culture in the contract is just another enclosure.
How Jordan Closed It (And Why It Landed)
Near the end Jordan asked what is sacred right now.
My answer on air: human connection. Walk into the future holding hands. The next models will increasingly be built by models; the life raft is not faster dashboards — it is trusted rooms, honest witness, and communities that can process change together.
That is why I said on the broadcast that if legal systems, education, and institutions cannot keep pace, you better be glad you can get together in the Haus of Owl.
Grateful to Jordan for holding space with rigor and warmth. Grateful to Haus of Owl for being the kind of room where creative practice and tech future can argue in public without pretending the argument is easy.
Watch and Go Deeper
Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxDwQRTZfCA
Haus of Owl: https://www.hausofowl.com/
STORYHIVE: https://www.storyhive.com/
BC + AI: https://bc-ai.ca/ · Events: https://bc-ai.ca/events/ · Vancouver AI Luma: https://lu.ma/vancouver-ai
RAP certification: https://bc-ai.ca/certification/responsible-ai-professional/
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