Portal · Travels in Intertextuality · Personal Research Narrative
The Portal — Route 66
The entry point to twenty years of experimental research — backward to the 2006 MASc thesis, forward into the 2024 Soundtrap sessions. A designed sequence that is itself a tertiary artifact.
Route 66 · February 2026 · 66 slides
Sound Register · Personal Research Narrative · S/E/E/D Evaluate
Route 66 — Travels in Intertextuality
Route 66 is a 66-slide sequential portal into the full experimental research lineage — the number itself a content decision, the road metaphor inseparable from American rock and roll, both of which run through the research from 2006 to the present. Each slide functions as a container of content and/or a link to other objects: a designed sequence that is itself a playlist, itself a tertiary artifact.
The portal reaches backward to Travels in Intertextuality: The Autopoetic Identity of Remix Culture (Flynn 2006, SFU MASc thesis) — specifically to the Desolation Sound System (Artifact 5.12), an extended iPod audio piece constructed from recordings of a Campbell River fisherman, film samples, and songs by Jason Webley and the Pogues. Audio was the primary continuous layer; sequential images appeared at chapter-marker time codes, restructuring perception of the audio without displacing it. The first deployment of what the PhD would later theorize as the Sound and Light registers operating in coordination.
The portal reaches forward to Travels in Intertextuality '24 — 111 Soundtrap sessions seeded by the Bulwark podcast catalogue, the Seven Inning Stretch episodic series, and the Box Set 2026. Route 66 / Travels '24 is the explicit sequel to the Desolation Sound System: same structural logic, same intertextual travel metaphor, platform-shifted from iPod M4A chapter markers to Soundtrap and crooney.ca.
Presented at the Vancouver AI community on February 12, 2026. Personal research narrative — not on a Mitacs formalization path. In the sense that Anne-Laure Le Cunff means by becoming the scientist of your own life: this work has accomplished what it needed to accomplish at this phase without requiring a funding instrument to validate it.
Platform Experiments · S/E/E/D · Explore Phase
Platform Experiments
Platform prototypes and participatory formats in active exploration. Each is testing a research question across real conditions — cultural-historical environments, seasonal contexts, distinct field sites. Crossing to projects.crooney.ca requires the full portfolio to be coordinated, not just a single component.
VanIsle · Access Layer · Place-Based Experience
IslandCamp
Operating system for car-free camping on Vancouver Island. Coordinates transport, gear, and multi-day travel logistics for visitors without vehicles — addressing the access layer of the VanIsle experiential economy. The research question: can a platform governance model make car-free wilderness access viable as a repeatable product rather than an exceptional experience?
When composed with VICSS (→ VanIsleCamp) or Megaband (→ CampfireJam), IslandCamp gains the Food + Drink and Sound registers respectively. Both compositions are in the lab pending IslandCamp's empirical grounding.
Sound Register · Live Hospitality · Place-Based Participatory Ritual · crooney.ca
Your Local Crooner
A live hosted music experience built around audience participation, seasonal playlist curation, and the question of how a participatory ritual changes meaning when embedded in a different cultural-historical environment. "Your local" changes depending on where you're standing — the Cambie Village Crooner in Vancouver, the Campbell River Crooner on the Island — with crooney.ca as the platform connecting both identities and both audiences.
The format is a structured three-set arc shaped by the room and the season — not a generic playlist. A lightweight phone-based request system (crooney.ca) lets guests influence the penultimate song in a set through what is being developed as the Fishing for Songs mechanic: participants "catch" fish on screen, each corresponding to a song in a bounded pool, generating collective audience influence without surrendering curatorial structure. The selected song lands like a keeper — caught, not just chosen.
Proof-of-concept established at Fionn MacCool's, Vancouver — Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve 2025. Three-set arc, live request system, HeadsUp Guys mental health fundraising integrated as ethical infrastructure. Campbell River Lodge (Goose and Gander) is the first iteration in a distinct cultural-historical environment: fishing season, lodge culture, coastal place identity. The research question shifts from "does the format work?" to "how does it change when the room is somewhere specific?"
This is one component of a larger system being coordinated across the portfolio. Megaband is the natural next layer — when that surfaces in this field site, the Crooner + crooney.ca + Megaband compose into something fundable. That composition is what crosses to projects.crooney.ca. For now this remains in the Explore phase: testing the platform prototype and the participatory ritual logic across two distinct seasonal and geographic contexts before the full picture is ready for external evaluation.
National Archives · AI Restoration · Sound Register
The National Archives
A 20-year archive of filmed live performances — AI-assisted restoration and multi-pathway commercialization. Mitacs Accelerate Entrepreneur proposal in development.
Sound Register · AI Restoration · MML · 1730 Technology Consulting
The National Archives
A long-term applied research project developing an AI-assisted workflow for the restoration and commercialization of a 20-year archive of live performance recordings of American indie rock band The National, captured by Joel Flynn between 2005 and 2011. The archive comprises 19 filmed live performances — including four multi-camera productions made in Vancouver — spanning club, theatre, and festival venues across North America.
The lead project is the Commodore Ballroom, Vancouver, October 3, 2007: six cameras, soundboard audio, the band on tour with Arcade Fire four months after the iPhone launch. The full archive is accessible via its research portal at thecommodore.com. The research focuses on AI-assisted audio restoration — specifically the isolation and restoration of vocal and spoken word from degraded live recordings using platforms including fish.audio — as the base layer for future visual enhancement and commercialization across documentary, installation, platform content, and live document release pathways.
Formal Mitacs Accelerate phase planned for January 2027. Industry partner: 1730 Technology Consulting Inc. Technical partner: Multimodal Media Lab. Grammy-winning producer and vocal engineer Sean O'Brien and live sound engineer Jeff Byrd — both with deep working relationships with The National — identified as target industry collaborators for the restoration phase.
Immersive Pre-Visualization · MML · ClearLED · Evoke · All |F|D|S|L| Registers
Immersive Pre-Visualization
Experimental event pre-visualization work — testing the |F|D|S|L| schema in live hospitality contexts through themed event design. Both projects in the Evaluate phase; Mitacs proposals in development pending partner confirmation.
MML · ClearLED · Pacific Design Academy · Evoke · All |F|D|S|L| Registers
"As Time Goes By" — Casablanca Immersive Event
Immersive event pre-visualization workflow development through a Casablanca-themed case study across four Vancouver and Island venues — Painter's Lodge (Campbell River), The American Bar (Main Street Vancouver), Relish Bar (Downtown Vancouver), and Hollywood Theatre (Broadway Vancouver). Partners: Multimodal Media Lab as primary pre-visualization partner; ClearLED as transparent LED display technology provider; Pacific Design Academy as set and stage design partner.
The case study deploys all four |F|D|S|L| registers simultaneously — Food + Drink (Moroccan-French fusion menu; cocktail program), Sound (live jazz; "As Time Goes By"), and Light (ClearLED transparent displays showing Casablanca scenes and Morocco imagery; Evoke in-venue graphic integration). Theoretical grounding: Eco's hyperreality framework (Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage, 1984) and Bourdain's multi-modal cultural encounter methodology. Target activation: late June 2026, anchored to Anthony Bourdain's birthday (June 25) as a commemorative cult value activation.
MML Partnership · Hospitality Pre-Viz · Campbell River · Light Register
Lodge and Lab — with Chips
A collision of two tertiary artifacts — Campbell River Lodge (1948 post-and-beam heritage fishing lodge, the oldest in Campbell River) and Multimodal Media Lab (Vancouver) — producing a previsualization case study that neither could generate alone. The experiment: using MML's AI content pipeline to rebrand the Goose & Gander pub as Lodge and Lab, with a Labrador retriever named Chips as mascot, demonstrating how AI previsualization tools rapidly create new value propositions over existing constructions and spaces.
The "Lodge and Lab" name is a double-barrelled British pub convention — Lodge (the heritage property) and Lab (the Labrador mascot / Multimodal Media Lab — the studio whose tools generated the rebrand). Chips is named after fish and chips — the Goose & Gander's signature dish — and after the microchips running the AI pipeline that made the concept visible. The in-joke and the authentic reading are identical: both hold. Output serves three simultaneous functions: feasibility instrument for River Lodge Whisky and the Clearwater Spirits distillery concept; marketing asset for Campbell River Lodge and Vancouver Island tourism; and MML portfolio case study generating discovery reach for the Campbell River region among hospitality clients.