Vancouver AI Community Meetup #16 - April 2025

Post-Interface Culture, Fungal Code & the Sandwich Tribunal

Welcome to the living archive of Vancouver AI Meetup #16—recorded in a round room built like a woven hat, vibrating with ceremony, creativity, and code. This isn’t a recap. It’s an artifact.

🧠 The Night in Signals:

• Code as Paint, Code as Portal An ex-engineer turned software artist breaks open the idea of creative coding as ecological interface. Think: 3D mushrooms instead of static field guides. Not “apps”—living systems.

• Document Everything, Especially the Rituals Our community’s unofficial archivist has been capturing every meetup, reel by reel. No hype. Just memory. What doesn’t get documented gets erased. This is how resistance gets remembered.

• AI Grounded in Land, Story & Ceremony The night opened not with a keynote but with a drum. An elder shared sound and story, tying our tech rituals to place and kin. The room resonated with more than just electricity.

• Field-Notes from the Edge of AI Culture A researcher shared a new study chronicling how grassroots AI communities are self-organizing—not waiting for institutions to catch up. The themes? Mutual aid, obsessive documentation, values over velocity.

• Governance Isn't a Buzzword, It’s a Battlefield New organizers are convening a summit on AI ethics and governance. Less about frameworks, more about power mapping. The questions aren’t theoretical: Who decides? Who benefits?

• Subcultures as Infrastructure Spinoff meetups are forming like mycelium—women-led nodes, philosophical deep dives, pedagogical experiments, satellite groups from the suburbs to the margins. This is growth by propagation, not scale.

• Hackathon, but Make it Absurd The first round of a new storytelling hackathon used public opinion data to ask serious questions disguised as food fights. Is a hot dog a sandwich? Is cereal soup? One entry turned survey data into a full-blown courtroom comic. Another built a multi-agent visualization platform that made the absurd look transcendent.

• Small Data, Big Resonance An experimental lab previewed tools built not on surveillance-scale AI, but on localized, artist-built, micro-models. Sonic agents. Generative instruments. This is AI as co-creator, not colonizer.

• Interface is Dead. Long Live Interface The closing keynote made it plain: we’re past chat. Right-clicks are becoming actions. Filters are becoming conversations. The future interface is ambient, assistive, adaptive—and totally invisible until you need it.

THE THREAD THROUGH IT ALL

This is not a meetup series. It’s a counterculture.

• Rooted in land.
• Documented like folklore.
• Built by people, not platforms.
• Run on open source, values, and straight-up stubbornness.

The theme of the night wasn’t AI. It was agency.

Not artificial. Not delegated. Lived. Distributed. In motion.

Hit play. This is your dispatch from the edge. And if you’re not part of it yet, you’re already late.