I think at the beginning it was more of a challenge. We ourselves were wondering, is this kind of work really the most important work we could be doing right now? If we want to engage and respond to the world that we live in, is it enough to bring play and joy and smiles?

But there was really a shift with the pandemic. Our cities became joyless. They became lifeless. There were no more opportunities to engage with each other and play or do anything for that matter. And this is when we started realizing that the proposition was becoming a bit more radical. We are all in our echo chambers, in our separate worlds, increasingly online, increasingly with people we agree with, and we’re less exposed to all the diversity of life. So the apparently frivolous work around play and joy is really critical right now, so that we can start coming together again. The pandemic really underlined that there was an urgency to it. And it’s just been accelerating since then.

I think that it comes from our culture here. Play is very much relegated to the realm of childhood. But play is crucial to how humans develop. It’s how we learn to negotiate and build inter-relational skills of all sorts. It’s how we build muscle mass and stay healthy. And it felt strange to us that play is not considered to be more of a part of our lives. For us, play is a vehicle to bring more joy, and we know how critical it is to have these shared moments of joy together as a society, as neighbours, as inhabitants of the same cities.

I did an MA in narrative environments at Central Saint Martins at the University of London.

And I was doing an interactive telecommunications program at New York University.

So we were in two big cities, we did not know anything about each other, but when we went back to Montreal, people were telling each of us about the other girl who was doing strange things.

Melissa already had a practice where she was doing a lot of work in the public realm exploring what it means to create successful participation and engagement. And I was really interested in the role of technology as a driver for societal change. We knew the world was going to be radically transformed through tech. And so I was investigating how we can all, collectively as citizens, become more active participants in that transformation and give agency to people.

So I think our practice really emerged from the intersection of these two interests and explorations. One conversation led to the other, and I think pretty quickly we knew we were interested in similar things and in working together. And Montreal was at a good moment in time.

It wasn’t as affected by the financial crisis as other places, and there was already a culture of using the street, of taking it over and celebrating the summer in different ways.

The Quartier des Spectacles had been refurbished and was reopening, and they worked with [digital arts and electronic music festival] Mutek to find out how to bring the festival to the streets.

There was also a local expertise that had been built up over the years in new media and technology, with the SAT [Society for Arts and Technology] and [new media festival] Elektra, and Cirque du Soleil with their engineering competence.

It really worked. The success was such that we built from that and this experience nurtured a new experience and another new experience.

This is where we believe innovation can happen, in these encounters between a little bit of urban design and landscape architecture and public art and performance and storytelling.

It has to do with social closeness. We use music, dance and stories as our main tools for re-enchantment. And we did all that very intuitively. But through the years, we’ve started looking at the science behind it and it all leads to happy hormones in the brain, and people reporting feeling a sense of closeness to one another. There is this anthropologist, Edith Van Dyck, who was talking about rain dances and how they are all about keeping the group together, like when there’s droughts or different types of crises that a community can face. We need to keep the group together when the times are hard.

When we share a moment of joy, we’re more inclined to to trust each other, and for us, that trust is really the foundation of a more resilient society. So ultimately, we feel it’s a vehicle towards restitching the social fabric.

Both Melissa and I come from the DIY movement, the early days of the internet, when there was a sense that everything is possible with tech. We saw the tech as an enabler for providing magic, creating magical experiences for people, knowing that we’d have to eventually streamline concepts to their essence so that we could figure out how to execute them. 15 years down the road, there’s less experimentation. We’ve developed our own toolsets and platforms and code bases to be able to work in a more permanent fashion and ensure sustainability over a long time.

It was our first musical pavement. We were creating an underground network of technological components that were going to be permanently a part of the infrastructure. And concrete seemed like the best thing to use. So when, you know, [suppliers] said that this colour was okay for outdoors, we thought it would be fine. It turned out not to be. It’s like, when you’re looking for too long in one direction, there’s always something that goes wrong on the other side.

We like to tell the stories of the musical chairs [in 2011].

It was our first entry into hardcore maintenance. We had an engineer come in and approve our design. We saw the tests being done. But there were still issues on day one.

It was the wear and tear of the motion back and forth, the swing going up and down 20,000 times a day — it was brutally failing many components. For the first two years of the musical swings, we had them live during the day and went to fix them at night. We hoped nobody noticed.

It was consoling to have all these engineers come to our door and say, “We can help you!” It took many of them to finally figure it out. And it was something that robots could not reproduce. It was a very finicky gesture that humans do when they swing and pull the cable and push the seats [that caused the wear and tear]. We’ve had to push the testing further since then. We actually pay people to come to the studio or to a lab and swing. We tell them to have fun, play, do whatever you do in normal life. That’s the best test we can do.

It’s the ability for people to play around with what you’re offering and to create something of their own, or to create something together with others. The ultimate gimmickry is when you just push a button that makes something happen.

It’s the difference between interacting with something just because you want to figure out what it is, and interacting with it because you are living an experience on your own or with others.

It has to have the capacity to make people reflect.