Vancouver AI Community Meetup - March 2025

This episode captures an unfiltered night inside the Vancouver AI community—where analog gear hums alongside AI-generated visuals, and Indigenous songs echo through a room full of technologists, artists, and systems thinkers. This is the sound of a grassroots AI ecosystem growing in real time.

It’s less a conference and more a convergence. A gathering of those building tools, telling stories, and raising essential questions about what kind of intelligence we want to build and who gets to shape it.

Episode Highlights

• OJA, the AI Band — Combining hand-built synths and generative visuals, the group shares how AI helped translate code into collaborative audiovisual performance.
• Damien George of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation — Offers a powerful welcome, history, and song rooted in this territory. A reminder that this is not neutral ground, and that memory and ceremony are part of technological futures.
• Mind, AI & Consciousness Group Launch — A new working group exploring questions around consciousness and machine intelligence, emerging from this community and led by Loki Jorgenson.
• Community Announcements — Projects growing from the roots: a Women in AI series, a Surrey meetup, an AI-powered emotional health video lab, and the formation of a member-led AI association.
• Mr. Canada Premiere — An AI-generated satirical series that blends geopolitics, song, and synthetic imagery to provoke discussion about civic identity and digital propaganda.
• Workshops & Microcredentials — SFU’s Philippe Pasquier announces open-access AI workshops, local model training sessions, and new microcredential pathways for lifelong learners and creators.
• Zen and the Future of AI — Ian Waugh, a Zen priest and CTO, offers a model for how emotional responses in AI might evolve if embodied, and what we can learn from our own interruptions.
• Closing Reflections from the Floor — From Myra to DeepSeek, a debate unfolds over open source, security, and institutional power. Community members speak candidly about how AI policy intersects with politics, privacy, and perception.

Major Threads

• Emergence over Management — New groups, themes, and relationships are forming through participation, not planning. This isn’t a program—it’s a process.
• Decentralized Culture — From community libraries to donation-based infrastructure, the Vancouver AI movement is building its own operating system—resourceful, improvisational, and community-owned.
• Territorial Intelligence — Indigenous knowledge and presence aren’t an add-on—they are part of the core logic of how this community operates.
• Open Source Tension — Debates around DeepSeek, security, and institutional censorship highlight the ongoing friction between open models and closed systems, especially in academic contexts.

Calls to Action

• Join or start a local AI meetup—Women in AI, Squamish AI, Surrey AI, and more are forming.
• Add a book to the AI community library. Share what shaped your thinking.
• Participate in the Rival Technologies x BCAI Hackathon — apply your tools or storytelling instincts to real data.
• Volunteer, build infrastructure, or contribute to community-led experiments. It's not about perfection. It's about participation.

Context

This event was recorded at a Vancouver AI community gathering hosted at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre and curated by The Upgrade Academy. It represents a slice of the larger BC + AI ecosystem—a unique zone where creative tech, grassroots values, and critical inquiry intersect.