We Don’t Do Panels. We Do Portals. Vancouver AI: March 2025 Recap This wasn’t a meetup. It was a lightning strike. A 3-hour detonation of mind, matter, and…
Notes & highlights
Published: · 2:24
We Don’t Do Panels. We Do Portals. Vancouver AI: March 2025 Recap
This wasn’t a meetup. It was a lightning strike. A 3-hour detonation of mind, matter, and machine where open-source fire met ancestral spirit, and the UFO building lit up like a neural rave.
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⚡ What Went Down:
Damian George (Steloston) & his son Ethan kicked the night off with a warrior's welcome—Indigenous songs from Tsleil-Waututh territory that cracked open the veil and set the frequency.
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Cai & Charlie spun lo-fi beats with a side of C++ sorcery. DIY synths, live visuals, and analog rebellion powered by AI hacks and imagination. This is what machine-human symbiosis sounds like.
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Michael Tippett dropped cinematic subversion with Mr. Canada, a gonzo AI-generated political series where satire meets social critique and deepfakes become truth bombs. (The king has a button that disables the F-35 fleet—yeah, that happened.)
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Cian Whalley, Zen priest & CTO, took us beyond the binary—teaching us how emotion, code, and consciousness intersect like neural lace. Toyota factory metaphors and Digital Buddha hotlines included.
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Philippe Pasquier, the SFU professor we don’t deserve, taught us how to train your own AI models on your art. No scraping, no stealing. Just artists owning their data and their destiny. Bonus: transparent LED cubes and a revival performance next month with AI-powered music agents. 🔮🎶
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Michelle from Women X AI showed us what a real grassroots intelligence network looks like: 45+ women in tech meeting monthly, giving back to the DTES, and building equity into the foundation of AI.
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Niels showed us what radical vulnerability looks like—raw stories of startup survival, burnout, almost crashing (literally), and choosing sustainable hustle over hypergrowth hype.
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Loki Jorgensen repped the new Mind, AI, and Consciousness crew—channeling 2,000 years of philosophical grind into one big ontological jam session. Curious cats only.
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Patrick Pennefather & Kevin the Pixel Wizard rolled out UBC’s AI video lab with student creators turning prompts into art and AI into cinema. Kevin’s mentorship = 🔥.
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Brittany Smila, our resident poet laureate, slayed the crowd with a poem that read like a bootleg instruction manual for being human. Typos included. Plum cake recipes too.
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Darby stepped up with real UX energy—running card sorts and mapping our collective brain to build a proper web infrastructure for the VAI hive mind. Web3 who?
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Rival Technologies’ Julia & Dale announced our first-ever Data Storytelling Hackathon. $2,500 prize, survey data that slaps, and a chance to show how AI can amplify truth instead of burying it. (Brittany wrote the hot dog prompt, you're welcome.)
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Cloud Summit's YK Sugi, Bibi Souza & Andre made waves repping an all-volunteer, all-heart community cloud event coming in hot during Web Summit week. Code meets care. Sponsors fund causes. Real ones only.
Fergus dropped serious policy weight—WOSK Centre for Dialogue BC AI report now live. If you want a seat at the government table, this is your guy.
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Kushal closed the night with a flamethrower. Called out UBC’s xenophobic DeepSeek ban. Defended open-source warriors from China and France (💥shoutout Mistral). No prisoners. No apologies. Just truth.
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Khayyam Wakil wrapped it all up with the keynote of the night: a design rebel’s journey from Saskatoon boats to LA VR labs to immersive media Emmys. Lessons in surrender, reinvention, and the real art of quitting right. 🔥
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📍Location:
H.R. MacMillan Space Centre — Vancouver, BC (aka the UFO mothership)
🪐 Astronomers on deck. Observatories open till 11. Community stays weird till 10.
🎧 Full audio, speaker list & projects: vancouver.bc-ai.net
🎟️ Next portal opens May 28: lu.ma/VAI17
🖤❤️✊🔥🏴
We don’t do TED Talks. We host real-time cultural reckonings. This is AI for the people—and it’s only getting louder. Bring your edge. Bring your stickers. Bring your weird.