Today we’d like to introduce you to Keram Malicki-Sanchez.
Hi Keram, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
My earliest memories are of playing the piano and enjoying hearing my grandfather and father as they played, music filling the house. It helped me express my feelings and impressions by way of music.
In second grade, I was invited to join a private music school. I spent seven years learning Gregorian chant, 20th-century composition, and harmony while also performing in dinner and musical theater.
At the age of 14, the artistic director of the children’s theater where I was constantly working invited me to do a pilot for a television show about a band. Some of my fellow actors from that pilot later joined in creating a real cabaret punk band with me called Blue Dog Pict that went on to tour for several years, including playing at CBGBs in New York. I also started working in television and radio drama for the CBC in Canada.
At the age of 17, my experience on the road landed me a new role as band leader on a TV series called “Catwalk,” opposite Neve Campbell and J.H. Wyman, which went into reruns for the better part of six or seven years.
Meanwhile, I moved to Los Angeles in 1996 for various reasons. Through a friend’s referral, I quickly got an agent and booked a part in “American History X,” continuing to work in Hollywood films for another 15 years. My interest in cutting-edge new media led me to launch a review site for indie game development – indiegamereviewer.com, reminiscent of the record label I ran in the mid-1990s, and where I curated works from a variety of eclectic artists.
These curatorial experiences helped me to launch a virtual and augmented reality festival (FIVARS) in 2015, followed by a spatial media world conference (VRTO) the next year. This conference discussed virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and robotics across various sectors, including education, entertainment, mental health, enterprise, and ethics. I have been running it for now 10 years.
One of the things I am most proud of is that we are simultaneously operating it as a successful startup. We have never dipped into the red, and we have built global brand equity. I am in debt to the people on my small but mighty team!
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The whole thing is a struggle. I had a friend who had a tattoo with the axiom Per aspera ad astra, which literally translates to “through suffering to the stars.”
This is echoed in a great book I recently read by Ryan Holiday – “The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph,” inspired by the Stoics.
I don’t seek the difficulty, but I definitely lean into it. I grow up to meet it. I take the course in the thing I know about the least. I tell my siblings, it’s not what happens to you; it’s how you react to it. It makes you stronger, and more confident that you can overcome your adversity, discover your blind spots, and learn about things you didn’t know you didn’t know.
Not being challenged to my limits gives me anxiety. I learned that all those years of doing auditions with no bookings, no validation, no thanks or replies prepared me to easily talk to investors, sponsors, folks with PhDs, and CEOs of multinational corporations. We build on what we attempt.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
You offered me the choice to talk about business, professions, or artistry and creativity, and today I chose the last of these in the list because I have been doing lots of business talk lately. Look, I don’t think all of these things do not overlap. They do.
But talking about creativity in this new massively disruptive age of generative AI – I have a lot of thoughts and feelings. I tend to be a centrist in this aspect of the public dialogue. I respect the concerns of those whose works were recognized as being of cultural significance and thus included in the data sets used to train the machine learning algorithms. I also note that all of art is always derivative in some way, building on what came before.
There is a well-known old saying about those who borrow vs. those who steal, and the point is that in work, you are invariably drawing influence and paying homage to something, whether you know it or not. This is Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence. The question is whether you take ownership of the process and the output by investing yourself in it wholly and contributing yourself therein or if you are merely passing it down the conveyor belt and stamping your name on it.
It is an unthinkably powerful new shift. In fact I have run several workshops/lectures about how to understand this movement around generative AI at UCLA Extension, where I am an instructor.
But let’s return to more innocent times before the robots came for us. (By the way, I created an event called Robot Pride Day back in the 90s, which was a harbinger for times like these) when we made music with the hopes of having others hear it.
I let my recordings keep all the flaws. Sure, we polish and buff some out, but mainly, recording is holding into position an aural hologram of a series of moments that came from us. Live performances are soul-stirring interpersonal dangerous tightrope walks.
Art is meant to break things and make us look at things, places, people, and eras differently. To make the mundane sublime. To express the phenomenology of being alive, of existing. I like it, and I build platforms to showcase and encourage the work of those doing that.
Are there any books, apps, podcasts, or blogs that help you do your best?
Books that I think about all the time and that modified my outlook:
– Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse
– Conversations with God – Neale Donald Walsh (ps I am not religious)
– VURT by Jeff Noon
– VALIS by Philip K Dick.
– How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie
– DUNE by Frank Herbert
– Riddley Walker by Russel Hoban.
They’re all pretty ontological/about exploring the mind and the meaning of life.
For Podcasts, I love Kent Bye’s Voices of VR where he takes a philosophical and ethical approach to speaking with hundreds of creators in spatial and immersive media and asks them what the ultimate potential of VR might be.
The fact is, it’s not about VR. It’s about creating profound state-changing experiences that we can communicate with each other. It’s not about VR any more than writing is about Microsoft Word.
I also really enjoy The Movie Loot by my friend Carlo, which shares a community-minded and truly insightful love for cinema.
Also, breathing through your nose is really good for you when you are stressed or overwrought. Read James Nestor’s book Breathe. Also, I did about 20 years of dedicated Kundalini Yoga, so I can vouch for this.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.uclaextension.edu/instructors/keram-malicki-sanchez
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/keramsongs/r
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kerammalickisanchez/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keram/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/keramsongsofficial
- Other:
Blue Dog Pict: https://bluedogpict.com
Robot Pride Day: https://robotprideday.com
Strange Obscure Stories – Keram’s YouTube documentary shorts channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9jfv4-92FDULdGRjw0vrTQ
Image Credits
Jaime Espinosa
Christian Bobak
