Vancouver AI Meetup #31: July 2026

Vancouver AI Meetup #31 filled the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre on July 29, 2026. Kush held registration so the host could barbecue. Sake and a kimono marked a best-friend return from Japan. The night moved from lobby smoke into ceremony, hybrid cinema craft, analog archive wisdom, and a packed community runway into Futureproof Festival (October 28–30).

Counselor Anthony Joseph of the Squamish Nation brought the room onto one frequency before the pitch with journey song and support-boat memory. The public program is preserved in the full-night recording. We keep ceremonial language here as context rather than excerpting it.

Host remarks stacked why the tent still exists (excited and scared at the same time), plus BC + AI’s membership spine, west-coast centre-of-excellence ambition, and an early-ticket push for Futureproof. Between the big beats, the community runway carried Comox Valley AI, enterprise and sales craft, human–robot research, Agentics Foundation, housing power, and another animation hackathon win.

Kevin Friel introduced AI filmmaker Dorothy Pang. Her arc ran from fashion and tech through Midjourney-as-canvas, create-in-public competitions, commercial work, and creative leadership on hybrid film work with actors on set and months of AI/VFX problem-solving in post. Slides mostly died; paper notes lived. She killed three myths: “just write a sentence,” “AI removes creativity,” and “making an AI film is easy.” Agentic end-to-end tools still lack soul unless a human puts vision back in the script. Then the room screened her short: positively haunting and beautiful.

Dave Olson keynoted thirteen years after his last talk on this stage for Northern Voice. Cooler of drinks. Typewritten handout. Opening line: this is not his first apocalypse. Tools for the end of the world ran from lighters and paper maps to friends who stick. The Library of Alexandria became a Terms-of-Service parable (seize the originals, hand back the Kinko’s copy) and a warning that libraries do not always burn; sometimes they just stop getting funded. Personal media archaeology carried mimeographs, mixtapes, free Wi-Fi, telegrams, and payphone postcards into a practical ask: AI that tidies archives and does janitorial civic work. What he wants out of life: sleep and poetry. Friends crowd-surf you home.

In Q&A, Andrea Mills of Internet Archive Canada closed the loop with Dave on stewardship. The AI Builders Fellowship ($5,000 to build on archive and government data) is live. Eliza and Noah laid out about two hundred cookies. Kush closed. The room cleaned up.

Photography: Michael Caswell. Editing: Kris Krüg. Watch the full show, browse the full photo gallery, and find the next gathering on the BC + AI events page.