Vancouver AI Community Meetup

For July’s Vancouver AI Community Meetup, we’re welcoming Dave Olson, community builder, storyteller, archivist, postcard-maker, poet, and long-haul keeper of strange and useful records, visiting from Okayama, Japan.

Also joining us is Dorothy Pang, a Vancouver visual artist, AI filmmaker, and creative director working across AI concepting, art direction, filmmaking, and motion capture.

Dave Olson

The present is an unfinished poem…

Dave has spent decades making culture from the raw materials of lived experience: zines, dispatches, audio, field notes, friendship cards, Olympic-era media experiments, travel stories, spoken word, and handmade archives that refuse to behave like “content.”

His work lives somewhere between the internet and the envelope, the campfire and the database, the typed page and the half-remembered road story.

This will not be a product demo. It will be a generous, analog-hearted meditation on memory, community, tools, care, archives, and what it means to keep making human things while the machines get louder.

Come for the stories. Stay for the unfinished poem.

Dorothy Pang

Dorothy Pang is a Vancouver visual artist, AI filmmaker, and creative director working across AI concepting, art direction, filmmaking, and motion capture.

Her work spans traditional/hybrid feature films, documentaries and commercial campaigns. She recently received an ADC Bronze Cube in AI Visual Design for "Love Hotel," and Leonardo.Ai named her one of its 2026 Top 50 Women AI Filmmakers.

Her practice explores how AI can expand cinematic storytelling while remaining grounded in craft, emotion, and visual design.

Kris Krüg

KK Storytime: How the Hell Did We Get Here?

It started with a room full of curious people trying to understand what AI was doing to our tools, jobs, art, institutions and lives.

Then the meetup kept growing.

It became a community. The community became a nonprofit. The nonprofit began sprouting chapters, programs, festivals, certifications, working groups, and increasingly ambitious schemes. Now all those threads are converging into FUTUREPROOF Festival.

Kris Krüg will tell the story of how it happened, including the accidents, relationships, experiments, mistakes and strange little sparks that carried the work forward.

Then he’ll turn the question back to the room: What should this community become next? Who needs to be part of the festival? What conversations are missing? What would make FUTUREPROOF genuinely useful, surprising, and worth showing up for?

Part origin story, part community briefing, part live design session.

BC + AI runs on one idea. You can be genuinely curious about what this technology can do and clear-eyed about what it costs, at the same time. Both hands full.

This is a working room for people paying attention: artists, researchers, builders, students, founders, skeptics, teachers, organizers, public-sector folks, and the AI-curious.

We gather to compare notes, test ideas, ask better questions, and meet people who care where this technology goes.

Event Details

Date: July 29, 2026

Time: 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM PDT

Venue: H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, 1100 Chestnut St, Vancouver, BC V6J 3J9

Format: Community talks, demos, conversation, and open networking

Who This Is For

People building with AI and people trying to understand what it is changing.

Creatives, technologists, researchers, organizers, founders, students, educators, and public-sector teams.

Anyone who wants a local, grounded, human room for sorting through the hype, the useful parts, and the hard questions.

What To Bring

Bring your questions, demos, doubts, experiments, and projects in progress. The point is not to clap for every new model. The point is to learn in public, notice what is real, and build relationships with people who can help make the work better.

Want To Support The Mission?

Interested in partnering, sponsoring, volunteering, or helping shape a future meetup? Reach out to the BC + AI team and we will find the right way to plug you in.

About BC + AI Ecosystem Association

BC + AI is the province-wide layer: a community-driven, nonprofit industry association built to create public-interest infrastructure for AI in British Columbia.

Not a corporate lobby. Not a think tank. A commons where meetups turn into working groups, prototypes turn into shared tools, and community values turn into governance.

Join / support: https://bc-ai.ca/membership/