Never Let Go of Your Dragon

After creating physical projects for many years there comes a moment that you are confronted with the size of your body of work. How did it come to this? What will happen to all my robots in the future? What is my role after I created them? How long do I need to take care of them? What do they expect from me?

This talk will leave you with more questions than answers, and hopefully you will learn something about robots and yourself along the way.

Transcription

(Music Playing) (Applause) Thank you so much.

So the title is “Don’t Let Go of Your Dragon”. What that means, hopefully, will be clear in about 45 minutes. We all have a dragon. Some of them on their back, some of them inside them, some of them in storage or in your hard drive. But also, like Linda said, many of the talks this festival and other festivals this year are about change and about turning corners in our lives. And I think that is also what it’s going to be about. But I have a mod man studio, and it’s called Slightly Overdone. And I will tell you about my projects. A lot of our robots. But I will also tell you about the wonder, the enthusiasm about it, the love for robots, the hope they bring, but also betrayal and the darkest moment in my career. I will show you towards the end. It’s the first time I’m going to show this to people. I hope it’s therapeutical because I can’t watch the video that I’ll show you in the end. It’s clickbait. It’s just so you won’t leave in the middle of my talk. But it’s going to be disastrous, I can assure you. To give you an idea of what Slightly Overdone is all about, I’ll quickly show you a show reel, and then we’ll get on with the story.

Sound.

Hi.

(Inaudible)

That’s why we did something like this before, right? Yeah. It’s in here. Yeah, yeah. It’s no problem.

I’ll just get on with it. Yeah. (End Playback) It’s just a small music playing here. So you can still see the video, but a lot of the dramatic effect is lost now. So I’m sorry about that. We’ll just replace it with awkwardness and my-- so this is the second worst moment I had imagined.

I’ll get on with it.

I turned 50 last year, and that’s the moment where you start considering what your career was all about, how you got where you’re at right now. And I guess when I was a kid, I was obsessed with robots already. So I saw many of the robots were fictional characters. In movies, I saw with Johnny Five, maybe the most actual robot there was there right now. Most of the others were just people in suits or puppets. But still, the story stuck with me. It would be amazing to have a robot in your life one day. And one of the cool robots, Twiki, on top there, he was, of course, a character in Burke Rogers. And Burke Rogers had amazing adventures. And he also flew in what looked like a space shuttle. A space shuttle was something that amazed me when I was a small kid already, because it was so tactile. It was black and white, and you could fly to space and just land. So as a birthday present from my family, we did a tour through the States last summer. And we wanted to visit as many space shuttles as we could.

And it was truly an amazing, emotional, even moment to see the space shuttle really for the first time with my own eyes, almost being able to feel it, seeing the details of this machine, which is no longer operating right now, but still the story behind it. And all the hopes and aspirations it brought are still here when you go visit this machine. So we saw the ones at the Kennedy Space Center, then in Washington DC, even the Enterprise in New York City. And the second highlight of our tour through the States was another amazing accomplishment, something I really looked up to from when I was a small kid, and it was this guy.

I’m still am the biggest fan of first Sesame Street, and then of course the Muppets. And it was, again, amazing how just some fabric and a pair of ping pong balls could become

such an iconic character with amazing stories and adventures.

So it’s obvious I liked working on physical things, and I started a long time ago in flash. I was a flash guy.

Yeah.

That’s the only festival where you get that response.

That’s why I call it that. Yeah.

By the way, flash isn’t dead. It’s just called Adobe Animate right now. I even delivered the project last year, made in Animate, just writing ActionScript 3. It’s not dead. It’s just zombie-like, really hidden, but it’s still there. My first project was on the frigates of the Belgian Navy, and we made a damage control system, just a kind of an intranet to show where ships could be damaged and what the situation was. And the army didn’t care about the technology behind it. It just needed to work. And flash was for me back then the most obvious choice.

But it gave me also the reputation with my clients of working on very physical installations. And that was how I got to work in advertising a lot. So this was an installation for Dodge, where we suspended the Dodge Viper on a Benji court. People could get in, fall to their debt, and then being filmed. And it was a really cool time back then, because you can see we had a lot of money to create this. That’s all gone, unfortunately. But this was also a very pivotal project, I think. It was the first-- it was an installation where we had a thick rope, and it was a mini countryman suspended on this rope. And there was an installation. You could push a button on Facebook, and a flame would go on. It would burn through the rope. The last person who pushed the button burned through the rope. Car would roll down, and you win the car. But there was a physical response to just a virtual button on a website. And many more projects came from that. There were just very physical representation of something you do just in the digital world.

This was a giant Sony PlayStation controller and installations to experience content in a museum, like you see here.

And also more personal projects, like the pine cap. It’s a cap you put on your head, and when you feel stressed, the pines would go up. And if you relax, you go down. Like right now-- with the woodie over here. But it’s OK.

So physical installations. And the second part of my work was about stories and characters.

Because I made in Flash, obviously, a lot of games and interactive installations and stories, the characters became very, very important for me. And that’s how I got in touch with a lot of other character designers, also here in Berlin with the Picto Plasma Festival, where I came almost every year. And that’s how characters became really, really important for me. But not just virtually, also physically. Obviously, after our visit to the Jim Hansen exhibitions,

we start making puppets at home. And last Christmas, I made a puppet for almost every person I had to buy a gift for. This is Tiberius here in the middle. He’s like the family therapist right now. So we have a lot of them in the family. I’m not sure if that is a sign of the condition in our family. But almost any stuffed animal can be a therapist at a certain moment in our family. The robots, they don’t feel like it. I’m not sure why. They keep their hands off that. But the stuffed animals and puppets, they really like that. So characters and physical installations. And then one day, I got a call from an agency. They said, we need somebody to make us a robot. You do characters. You do physical installations. You must be a robot builder. And suddenly, it all made sense. Ah, yes. I’m a robot maker. I never realized I had an agency had to tell me, we have three weeks. You need to make a robot. He’s called Yummy. He’s a kitchen robot. He sits in a kitchen. And we need to make a number of videos

to explain to kids how they can make recipes from all over the world. So kitchen robot, but he doesn’t cook. It just talks a lot, explains things. But he’s not practical at all. So I found a lot of materials in kitchen stores, thrift stores, to make a robot that looked like he belongs in a kitchen, but does it to anything at all of practical use for you. And I think that’s the common story for many of my robots. They don’t solve your problems. They will be there and tell a story. Can it vacuum? No, it won’t. Can it cook? No, it doesn’t. But it’s there, and you’ll have to deal with it. That’s what they’re there for.

So this is my son, Lucas. He’s the one on the left.

And everybody was immediately after the shoot and the project was finished. They just gave the robot back to me, which is a common story. I can’t seem to sell robots. If I sell them, they always come back to me because people don’t have the heart to throw them away. So they just come back. And I have a studio filled with old robots. So that’s part of the dragon story, obviously. I tried to learn to drive a car.

Didn’t work.

But why was going on here? Because not only kids liked Jimmy, but also adults. Anybody I met was really curious what is going on with this character. What is his purpose here? What is he doing here? Early this year, I was at an FTI, an innovation conference in Antwerp. And we did a small brainstorm. So we asked a number of questions, gave people a post-its, and they could fill in their answers. Now, this is very common.

There’s still a very negative view towards a future where robots will become very important in the world. So 75% of the people there-- it’s a small group. It’s not statistically correct. But still, are negative. What would the world look like when there were only robots? Not so fine. But at the same time, 67% said, yes, I want a robot to be my best friend, which is amazing. They’re afraid of the robots right now. But there is potential of people having good and nice relationships with robots. We need those robots friends for some reason.

So I started exploring what robots would mean as a creative medium and what they would mean,

especially for creative people and students when I was teaching in schools. But also at other festivals-- this is at Of Festival

more than 10 years ago, where we made small, herb-like, three-legged robot characters in just a couple of hours. We went to Doha in Qatar, where we had a little bit more time and budget to make more advanced robot characters. These are all students. They have no technical background, no programming, no electronics, just your fashion students’ interior design. And just in a couple of hours, we just skip all the anxiety about electronics and programming. Just focus on the character. What is the name of your robot? What should it look like? What does it do in life? And we’ll figure out all the technical details along the way.

Early this year, I went back and we made a little bit of a different project where we had small robots driving with a Posca pen around on one big canvas. And while we have a very obvious routine or software that makes circles or that avoids other robots, with a single robot, it is very predictable. If you place a lot of robots together in the same canvas, anything can happen. Chaos and beautiful results. It’s kind of what happens here right now. Putting a lot of creative people together, you never know what’s going to happen.

These are some examples of what I do at colleges when I teach physical interaction design, when we have a couple of weeks of time to finish a project. And maybe the most advanced we did was during the corona years, was a spot micro at the KDD school in Antwerp. I wouldn’t recommend making this robot. It looks cute. It’s like a little dog, but it’s really painful to watch it fall over and over again, breaking his legs. And I couldn’t stand it anymore. It just sits now in the corner of the studio and just relaxes. And he’s asking me, please don’t make me walk again.

Or learn how to program that this isn’t going anywhere.

Robots need to be engaging. That is what an awarded character designers often will use. What is engaging? You see a robot, just a glance, a small moment, and immediately you need to wonder what is going on here. What is the story of this robot? I have no context. But what is happening here? This is Jeff. You can see him at the exhibition. And he was created for an exhibition in Peru. He spent seven months there. And he was kind of a commentary on the fact that most people at events will experience reality through their phone, making a lot of photos. And he would just sit in the corner of the festival and just took photos and then posted it to Twitter just by itself when people approached him or when they smiled at him. And then you could just relax the party. And afterwards, the day after, you would see on Twitter, this is what happened. It was what Jeff thought was interesting. This is Herb.

He’s all about being cool. He doesn’t do anything. He got a skateboard lately. He just looks around and wonders why-- yeah, what are you doing here? He can’t really skate himself, obviously. But maybe one day, he will get his legs more advanced.

And this is Morbert.

And then the robots got bigger. This is Barkley. And you can see here, I was really getting into a synth wave and the synth wave aesthetic. I lived in the 80s, so I really appreciate that younger people are rediscovering this synth wave aesthetic and imagining that the 80s looked purple and red and blue and were amazing. But it’s fine to imagine that it looked really cool.

And Arthur was a project that he still developed. I wanted to create a robot that could cruise along with me in the car and then enjoy music. He would nod his head and look around. I borrowed a fancy car from a friend with an open top so I could prove to people he’s actually there, the robot. It’s not 3D.

And it was an interesting project

to work on because it’s amazing if you stop by stoplight and you see people watching in the car next to you and you see what is going on here, especially at night. But Arthur is still in development and he’s changed his appearance a lot because this is what he looks like right now. He’s still in the same idea, so he will express what he feels about the music on his face

and use the rest of his body to express body language and show you he’s also having a good time at the festival or just hanging out. But this is Rachel. And Rachel is also in the exhibition area here. She’s probably one of the-- I can’t have a favorite because they’re all my robots. They won’t like it. It’s like your kids. But she has the most interesting story, I think, on the mall. Rachel was created for the 10th anniversary of the Picto Plasma Conference here in Berlin 10 years ago. So she’s 20-- the festival was 20 years old this year.

So she turned 10 and she was created for an exhibition here in Berlin.

She was going to stay here for three months and then they left to Mexico for six more months. Rachel was-- somebody else had to take care of her. So I would deliver her here in Berlin and then somebody else would have to interact with them but also take care of them if something broke down. She was created by-- the inspiration was the movie Blade Runner. So any scene-- who has seen Blade Runner? Ah, yeah. OK. Also the right crowd to ask that question. You can pause this movie at any frame and you have a background. I can even hear this frame. Who can hear this frame? Yeah, OK.

We won’t go into that because I don’t have so many time. But anyway, Rachel in the movie, she has a really particular problem. She needs other people to feel real. And this is what is happening with our Rachel too. So when she was on travels, I got hundreds of messages and photos and selfies with people letting me know Rachel is doing OK. So you could consider Rachel to be just a machine that is painted black and yellow. But people won’t accept that she’s just a machine. They want to see Rachel as a real person. And the more people interact with her, the more she becomes that person, Rachel, which is amazing. You can’t program that. It’s just inherently in people this desire to have an emotional connection even with a machine. It helps, of course, if they have a friendly face and they look nice. But this is one of the examples of a photo I got.

They have a moment here and it’s something that is as a robot designer and a character designer, this is one of the best things you can hope for, obviously. So she went to Mexico for six more months. And then when she came back, they left to Moscow. And that’s why I created Robin. So Rachel wouldn’t have to go alone.

So they spent seven more months there. And then Robin was also there. She went on a tour with Vitra, the furniture company from in the south of Germany. And she really traveled the world for six more years. She was part of the Hello Robot exhibition from Vitra. And she was the first robot you would meet when they entered the exhibition.

And Robin, I knew when she was going to Moscow

that I had to make--

I took the opportunity to make some social commentary. And I made her gender fluid.

You can’t see Robin that she’s gender fluid. What is her gender? I often call her she, but often he.

And it’s not really clear, but it’s printed on the little sign that is accompanying the robot at the exhibition. So people entering the exhibition, we wanted to see a Gundam or R2D2. Suddenly, their kids are there asking their parents, what is gender fluidity? And what does this have to do with this robot? I like that. So the parents are then-- I wasn’t counting on this. I just wanted to see R2D2. Now I have to explain this to my kids. Well, the kind of robot is this. And that is interesting. So using a robot to bring a message that people weren’t expecting. Steve is the largest robot we have in the family. And he’s also over there. He’s also 10 now. And he was created for a movie theater chain to interact with people at festivals during the breaks of a movie screening to talk with people at events. And two years ago, I got a call from the company. I sold the robot. Again, I sold him. He ran the books. But the company said, this project is finished for us. We can throw him away. So we want to give him back to his father. These are the words they were using. OK, I’ll be there tomorrow with a van. And he came back. He’s still 80% the same parts as originally. And I don’t want to change too many parts because, yeah, it’s like the ship of thesis. What is the essence of Steve? I’m not sure. But I don’t want to change too many parts. That’s why he looks a little bit beat up, maybe.

That’s because he had interactions with hundreds of people, not only in nice, clean event spaces, but also outdoors. With a lot of kids wanting to hug him and things like that. And Steve, he is profiting from the AI hype right now, I think, because often at festivals, they want a representation of AI. And then Steve is there to give commentary on the events happening, often, of course, with the script from the event organizers. So it’s not always a positive story. But at least he gets out and meets other people. And we had a really great opportunity early this year to open the Anima Film Festival in Brussels, where he was really next to the stage, not on stage, because he’s 150 kilo. But he opened the festival. And you see all the people-- because the team was science fiction.

And you can see me sitting there with a remote. And the person next to me is holding a mic. So we are controlling the robot. It’s obviously to anybody. But people are blissfully ignoring all that. They see Steve. And he’s telling the story.

This is how Steve has worked for the past 10 years. Often, we’re controlling his voice with a script or with a live voice actor. When Tesla did the same trick two weeks ago,

it all went wrong. And we said, ha, somebody took notice of what we were doing. And it plummeted their stock.

Because for the people who were not aware of that, they saw a robot being controlled remotely and talking to people. Obviously, there was just an actor backstage in a mic talking for the robots. But they were trying to pull it off as AI and an autonomous operating robot.

It’s not just the robots in entertainment. And at festivals, I also had the opportunity to make a vault at the Audi car factory in Brussels.

And it was a cooperation with a number of companies. But I was good friends with a company that made robot vision systems, like 3D cameras. And they were going to integrate a cobot, the first cobot, in the Audi factory. So a cobot is a robot that you can walk next to it. And it won’t kill you or hurt you. While there are 500 other robots that just are ignorant to all humans, could seriously hurt you. So this was a robot that was kind of aware of people and its environment. So we wanted to take that a step further and maybe give it a face and a name and a character. So what my job was to create all the top parts here, his head and his neck and his face, obviously, that connected with the rest of the interface. And people, factory workers, could go in. And instead of just pushing a button, they said, hey, vault. It’s me. That’s my name. He would recognize them and then give them chest feedback and also some icons.

And then they could use their hands to give commands. And it was more of a fluid, more natural way of communicating with the machine. And he stayed there for 20 months. It was initially planned for eight months. But they stayed there. And this is the press event they had at the end. Of course, after 20 months, they stopped the project because they were afraid of-- they were going to replace all the humans with robots, which is a strange leap from this story, I think, but understandable in some ways. This wasn’t meant to replace humans. It was meant to make the relationship with the machine more human-friendly in a way that is more common of how humans interact with each other. And I think there is still a lot of opportunity there in many other fields.

But looking at vault here, I think there is a serious problem-- I’m not alone with that opinion, I think-- with more recent developments in humanoid robots.

There is a common problem here, as you can see.

What is the problem?

It’s the face, right?

Why is there no face? What are they afraid of? Well, I think I’ve been talking-- trying to talk with many people involved in the industry. And of course, choosing a face can make a robot less serious. You’re laughing right now. This is Remi. He’s the fun guy in the family. He doesn’t say a thing. But he likes to hang out and pretend he can read.

But you see, this could put people off of their really advanced humanoid robot they’re creating.

It needs to be serious in a way. It needs to look like a car. It’s the comparison they often make. It needs to look like it is worth the 50,000 euros they’re going to cost. And that is why they often ignore the character design part. But can you imagine sitting in your living room with one of these robots in the beginning-- it’s all funny-- hey, vacuum the floor or fold my shirts. For some reason, that is an important task for humanoid robots. I fold my own shirts or just put them in the drawer. But for some reason, this will solve all those problems. But after a while, imagine sitting at night or in the evening watching TV. And he’s sitting there next to you wondering what you’re doing. And you’re wondering, what is he planning? What is going on here? I better not watch “The Terminator” again this week. Because it’s not OK.

I’m trying to talk with these people. And this is not a new concept, that this is the hypothesis of the uncanny valley. While we can relate to simple characters that are almost human-like or very abstract, but then when they become more and more human-realistic, there is suddenly a valley where people don’t like these characters anymore. Because they become almost human, but not entirely human. So it becomes offsetting. And that is an interesting field to work on. I like to go more to the abstract side, if you look at the robot designs I have there. They don’t look human at all, but it’s fine. You can just have any other empathetic or just any other conversation with these robots without them looking exactly as humans.

We have a robot who did family therapy, which is Leo, also a very large robot who was in Düsseldorf five years ago. And he was an experiment for a telecom provider in Belgium. Kids could get inside the robot and they would control the arms of the robot and their parents would be on the side controlling the wheels. And together they had to solve a number of challenges in a short amount of time. And it was a metaphor for the ever-changing digital world, where kids often know more of the technology than their parents, so they have to learn to get on the same track as fast as they can. And Leo changed recently because he was recycled for Recupel, which is a company responsible for recycling all electronic equipment in our country. And this is him now, so you still recognize a little bit of the robot, but he has now a large screen and he explains to children and other people what happens to their old laptop or TVs when they go to the recycling point.

I had a desire for a very long time to use robots in theater plays. And that dream came true last year when I was able to work together with a theater company in Brussels to create a play about administration for kids, which is an interesting concept. So, as one human actor and he plays in an office environment, and after a while more and more of the electronic equipment comes to life. And I was puppeteering many of the robots in the first part of the tour. I’m really in the back here with all my remote controls, operating smaller parts, but also the dragon in the room. A really heavy 80 kilo copier machine that used to chase around the human actor at the end of the play. And then we were training this all just walking around on stage and yeah, watch out, don’t drive over my foot. And then during the premiere, I’m 20 meters away and I have eyesight of a 50-year-old. So, we often hit each other and they didn’t blame me. After a while, we learned to avoid the copier machine.

But it’s fun because you have a room full of kids that are going out of their mind if the copier comes to life suddenly and it’s really direct feedback and that’s really nice to work with.

This is a robot project I did with the city of Ghent and I’m gonna play a video, maybe with sound or maybe without, but it doesn’t really matter because the sound will be in Dutch, so there are some Dutch speaking people here, but it’s just a tone of voice that may be interesting, so I’ll show you the clip.

Okay, no problem.

So, what is happening?

This is a trash can in the city of Ghent and he drives around and he tells people to put their secret butts inside of the trash can. He is an exact copy of the regular trash cans they found on the street there.

But the problem of many people not finding the ashtrays in the trash cans and just throwing them on the street and instead of just pointing at people, “Hey, you can’t do that” or give them a fine, this robot would just roll up to them and really in a funny voice and just really tongue-in-cheek telling them, “Hey, just give me the secret but I really like secret butts, this is what I live for.” And people can’t help but just smile with the story, they don’t get mad, “Oh, obviously you can have my secret but wait, let me smoke really fast so I can give you my secret but...” And this is, I think, a very good way of communicating these sometimes difficult messages. It’s okay. We found a lot of during the campaign period, there were a lot less secret butts on the floor reported to us and that is nice if you can bring a smile to people’s faces and also bring some joy on the streets. So usually that would be just a day we drive around in the city stalking people who are smoking. But unfortunately, last month, there was something that went a little bit wrong with one of the campaign days. Now imagine this, somebody comes up to you and they say, “Hey, you know you’re trending on TikTok, right? And you don’t know what they’re talking about? It’s never good news.” Try to imagine it, it can be good. There is no scenario where that could be positive. So that is what happened. At a certain point, we were with Fons, it’s a trashcan robot in an area in the city of Ghent where many students are. They were drinking a lot, it was the beginning of the academy year and at a certain point, one of the students puts a beer on top of the robot and people accompany me, “Hey, is this okay? I’m really cocky, it’s fine, it’s just a beer, let them have fun.” After a while, of course, the beer tumbles down and then it is the beginning of the perfect storm. The beer falls on the floor, some of the beer splashes up and finds a really small corner of an exposed wire in the bottom of the robot. I take care of a lot of security in the robot, there are many emergency stops and everything should work out. When I switch off the remote, they should stop. But this clip I will show you now shows you complete utter panic. You see me minutes, it looks like minutes, it’s going to be seconds of me just not knowing what’s going on. How can this happen? I make sure everything will work as it should and still it won’t happen. At a certain moment, I can stop the robot and I have no idea what happened, it’s just an outer body experience. At a certain moment, two stops but I’m not sure I can watch the video but it’s not me, it’s a very strange experience we have here. This is a bad situation.

This is me, I have no idea what’s going on, he will lose the board at a certain moment. People are starting to panic because he hit some beers.

And the emergency button is on the back there but cannot switch it off.

So then I get between it and I can press it with my foot and that’s where it stopped.

Thank you for laughing because this is really

therapeutical for me. I couldn’t watch it the first weeks, it’s just so bad. And it betrayed me, I was really mad at him. It wasn’t okay, Fons, you shouldn’t do this. I was checking and checking again what happened after a few days. He could point me to the fact that you left a wire exposed here. What do you think is going to happen when they splash beer into this? We share the responsibility. No, Fons, it’s all your fault, you created me. Okay, you’re right. So we reestablished the trust. I added a number of extra emergency stops to him and it hasn’t happened again. We had two more successful days in the campaign and after a while it will get better, I hope. But yeah, that was the darkest moment in my career.

And it’s been 12 years now that I’ve been creating robots. So by the end of last year, I got this call from Anima, the film festival, and they asked me, can you make an exhibition for us? The festival is going to be about science fiction and they had some budget for it. So it was a really cool opportunity. So I created these flying saucers so the smaller robots could have a bigger base so they wouldn’t just get lost on a table or something. And we also had Remy here in his UFO setup we brought to some festivals. And it was really nice to see how people responded to this body of work or the many robots bringing them together in one space, but also very confrontational. Because here, this is a photo of the Flanders Technology and Innovation Festival in Antwerp. This festival was supposed to be about innovation and about the future of technology. And all my robots are 10 years old at this point. So is this innovation or obviously they didn’t find any other robot builder in Belgium. So I was the only choice they had. All the other robots in the festival were imports from China or there was one Boston Dynamics spot, but nobody’s making, producing the robots in Belgium and certainly not humanoid robots that are friendly looking like I am. So maybe at this point, maybe I was thinking this could be the nice end to a chapter to just close down this part of my work. The robots are all doing fine. They’re more or less good shape except for phones, but they’re all in a good place. And this is a nice moment to end this part and go look for other opportunities. And I think not everybody has the luxury to do that. I’m really aware of that, but it’s also a good way to protect all the creative energy you’ve put in your work. Everybody has the luck to be involved with the project where thousands of people are working on one space shuttle like here and that is then conserved in a museum where still thousands of people every day can experience this work. Not everybody is so lucky, especially with Jim Hansen here where he’s still inspiring millions of people with just some green fabric and the ping pong balls. You have to be lucky, but that doesn’t really matter if you’re lucky or not, really successful or not. It’s your work you have to deal with and that is your dragon. A dragon is a metaphor for your creative sparkle when you start out, when you get out of school, it’s a really small animal and you raise it up and it can become anything you want. It can become a fiery dragon that flies around or another dragon that is more about a really delicate creative work or illustration or just programming or animation. It can be anything you want, but it’s still your body of work and if you choose after you’re 50 or 55 to do something else,

that is your right to do so, but somebody will have to take care of this, your portfolio, your work. Not everybody has the really physical effects of that. My studio is filled with robots that are sold but then come back, so I have to take care of them. That is the reality of them. I cannot throw them away, but sometimes your dragon, your creative work can get tired and you feel like you’re retiring and just saying, “Sorry dragon, somebody else will take care of you. It’s going to be okay.” That is your choice to do so, but I’m not going to leave those robots just by themselves. That’s why I’m going to find another profession right now and find another way to fund their existence and keep them in shape and see the robots as more of a side project

because that is more important than just making a living. Your body of work isn’t you exactly, but it’s also not just a way to make a living or to make money. It’s more than that for creative people. I think that it’s really important to consider, especially today or this week, that we’re all creative people here. The world is changing really hard this week and I think we’re very fortunate that we can be together here today at the creative festival because there is nothing that brings, in my opinion, more hope to the world as creative people, inspiring each other and telling each other it’s going to be okay. It’s going to be fine. We’ll just do what we do for a living or as a hobby, but keep on creating and keep that dragon alive. That is the most important thing, I guess. That’s it for me. Thank you.