The Pulse: Aug. 11, 2022

Digital creator Evan Pearce says the pandemic gave him a much-needed reset, and a creative flourishing has followed.

While the damage wrought by COVID-19 created a brutal interruption in the careers of many artists, the first couple of months of isolation gave Pearce, 30, time to re-focus his life and his art. He says he doesn't recognize his pre-pandemic self.

"I was partying way too much. I was lost; I had all this energy I was putting into the wrong things," he told Taproot. "I'm comfortable now, whereas before, I felt I had so much to prove, I wanted to scream. I still have a lot to prove, don't get me wrong, but I am confident in my work, and I let it speak for me."

Pearce's work explores the possibilities of extended reality (XR), an umbrella term for virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), coupled with the use of artificial intelligence.

His primary artistic disciplines are VJing and new media. Using live editing and projection mapping, he manipulates images to "cultivate a generative, displaced, and distorted sense of reality for the audience," says the description for his Emerging Artist Award, presented by the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta in 2020.

The recognition was gratifying, but so was the money. "It came with a $10,000 award," he said. "My rent for the year was paid. It was such a relief."

He was named one of the XR artists in residence for Alberta Media Arts Alliance's Out Of This World media arts conference in St. Paul earlier this summer, at which he and fellow artists Laura Anzola and Clea Karst created projects inspired by the UFO landing pad in the northeast Alberta town.

Among his next gigs is doing art direction for the stages at the Purple City music festival on Aug. 26-28, he said.

• After hearing dozens of people speaking for and against the proposed Prairie Sky Gondola, executive committee pushed the decision on whether to approve a land agreement with the developers to next week's city council meeting. The company has agreed to pay about $1.1 million annually to lease public property for the project, saying it would be 100% privately funded, not integrated with ETS, and meant to be running by 2026. Many questions were raised about whether the development would disturb the burial grounds on the Rossdale flats and what would happen if remains were discovered during construction. Mayor Amarjeet Sohi told Postmedia he couldn't support the gondola without certainty that the burial sites would remain undisturbed, given the city's commitment to reconciliation. Coun. Aaron Paquette also questioned whether Prairie Sky was committed to consulting with Indigenous communities or just determined to "get to 'yes'."
• TransEd says construction on the Valley Line Southeast LRT line has been delayed once again, this time indefinitely, due to cracks discovered in more than one-third of the track's support piers. "On behalf of TransEd, I want to say how disappointed we all are, and that we deeply regret the inconvenience this unfortunate and regretful delay may bring to Edmontonians," said CEO Ronald Joncas. Mayor Amarjeet Sohi said he wants the city to review the management of public-private partnerships. "TransEd, as a public-private partnership, has not delivered this project as expected," he said. "They are responsible for all the cost overruns if there are any (...) but that is no consolation to people who have been waiting for this LRT for 30 years." City manager Andre Corbould confirmed that TransEd is responsible for the costs, and said information about the timing of repairs and service commencement "will be shared as it becomes available in the coming weeks."
• Ben Stelter, a boy with glioblastoma who became part of the collective rallying cry for the Oilers during their Stanley Cup playoff run, has passed away at the age of six. "We are mourning the passing of our dear friend, number one Oilers fan, good luck charm & inspiration, Ben Stelter," the Edmonton Oilers tweeted. "Although small in stature, Ben's impact on our team & community were massive."
• One of two mobile mammogram clinics run by Alberta Health Services is making a two-day stop at Enoch Cree Nation to give women who live there a chance to be screened for breast cancer. "(We) want to provide every opportunity for better health for our Indigenous communities," said Dr. Tracey Hillier, U of A radiologist and member of the Qalipu First Nation in Newfoundland, who added that a history of trauma, discomfort, or language barriers could keep Indigenous women away from bigger hospitals. Colleen McDonald with Enoch Health Services said mobile clinics provide "a safe and ethical space" and have resulted in more women arriving for screening appointments.
• The University of Alberta has demolished the near-century-old dairy barn at the south campus, to be replaced by tennis courts. Former historian laureate Marlena Wyman criticized the decision; the university says the barn was not a designated historical building and doesn't meet its teaching and research needs.
• West Edmonton Mall is looking for name suggestions for a recently born sea lion pup, which CTV News reports is vocal, energetic, playful, and now learning how to dive. Suggestions can be made on the mall's Facebook post, and whoever suggests the winning name will win a one-year pass for all WEM attractions.

After two decades of building TIQ Software into a successful e-learning provider for enterprise clients, Jason Suriano wanted to see if he could spin his company's expertise in gamified learning into a software-as-a-service product for smaller customers.

The pandemic provided the spark he needed, he tells Episode 26 of Bloom, Taproot's podcast about innovation in Edmonton.

"Like a lot of companies, it all got triggered during COVID," he said. "Some of our smaller customers fell off for financial reasons. And it let the team and myself really focus on, 'OK, if we gave ourselves a year ...could we take everything we had in enterprise and build a minimum viable product that was SaaS-based and actually get it out?'"

They did indeed, starting at the end of 2020 and launching around the end of January 2022. Then The Alberta Innovates Revenue Accelerator (TAIRA) from GrowthX arrived, just at the right time to help him learn how to sell what the team had made.

"This opportunity came up, and I looked at it as a chance for us to learn from people who had done some work in the SaaS space," he told co-host Faaiza Ramji. "That's kind of cool for me because while I'm familiar with how it works, I'm kind of a noob there."

The key takeaway, he said, was narrowing his focus to help customers solve a very specific problem — in this case, creating product training to empower retail teams to make sales.

"Saying, 'We're the Squarespace of e-learning' helped us set a North Star for the product," he said. "But what GrowthX is helping me do now is say, 'OK, even though you might have said that, if you're a SaaS, you need to niche down and really figure out who is your ideal customer profile, and who the ideal buyer is, and why they're buying.'"

Learn more about Suriano's journey from enterprise to SaaS in the Aug. 11 episode of Bloom, where you'll also hear a roundup of what else is happening among the accelerators that have come to Alberta in recent months.