 Good morning everybody. I am really excited to be here today. This is my first DC-DC conference So I'm really excited As Jeff said, I am the director of arts technology and innovation at Arts Council and that is a new role And what my role really is about is thinking about how we use new technologies to create new types of content for our audiences So it's really exploring how do we extend the type of experiences that we give to our audiences using our content and using new digital technologies I sit alongside two other directors who are focused on innovation One who's who's focused on enterprise and business operations and another who is focused on audience and data culture And so the three of us really are kind of trying to put together an agenda that thinks about digital technology from a 360 point of view but what I thought I would do today is Since it's the first first session of today kind of get our minds open thinking out of the box one of the great Joys I have of Arts Councils being able to go across the country and see great artwork And so what I thought today is I would explore some of the challenges and issues around digital technology and making the digital shift through Artistic projects or contemporary art projects that seem to either raise issues about digital technology or try to address them in really creative ways so that's what I'm gonna do in the next couple minutes and I've got a couple videos to show you but I thought what I would do first is take you back to Washington, DC where I'm from This is Gaithersburg library public library in Maryland in the United States Right outside Washington DC. This is my library. I went to this library as a kid It still stands today and every time I have to come back and forth home to my parents house I pass by it and so I was actually in these states last week in San Diego and then Washington And so I was when I was thinking about, you know, what I was gonna say today I started thinking about what did that library mean to me? What was the significance in my life and how has that changed since you know, the kind of emergence of digital technology? And three things came to mind First, it was a sense that library gave me a sense of discovery that library kind of opened up the wider world to me Go going through the different stacks. I'm not I can't say I'm a prolific reader I'm not don't read everything, but I definitely look at a lot of book labels looking at the catalog really kind of shaped What is the outside world outside my neighborhood? And in my region so discovery was a big part of why I was so attracted to the library Second it was a form of empowerment in a lot of ways for a young kid It was a one place my parents would leave me by myself and I could kind of stay in the library by myself So I got my autonomy there. I had a you know library card I was able to borrow books if I wanted to but also I was very much a believer in knowledge equals power and You know, I you know, I would kind of you know use the library to You know write my reports for school and that type of thing and I always thought you know with all access to all this information I'm gonna write the best get the best grades write the best reports that kind of thing So it was a form of empowerment for me But it was also a place where I formed my ambition so I got to see what everybody was doing in the world I you know I've it helped me think about what are the types of careers out there outside of what my family was doing What are those kind of careers and also shape my ambition? I said one day I want to write a book That's in this library. So it was a way. I really shaped my my my ambition So fast forward 20 years and we've got you know emergence of digital technology and we've got now The ability to actually have infinite an infinite amount of information, right? So I thought the library world was big But obviously the digital world is big and it really expanded my horizons being able to access information online And obviously it gave a wider set of perspectives So what I thought was the whole world of perspectives in my local library actually Eliminated or did not include perspectives around a lot of minority issues People from marginalized communities, you know, we're not represented in my local library But online you could get those wider range of perspectives And also provided obviously new distribution channels new ways of Exchanging information and distributing information. You didn't have to become a formally published author in order to get your ideas out there So yes, digital technologies brought us lots of new opportunities And it's really shifted the way that Museums museums libraries and archives are positioned in what their kind of value in USP is But you know, there's obviously a lot of challenges associated with digital technology And so what I'm gonna do now is go through a couple of examples of projects that I've seen that really kind of highlight a Lot of issues we have in terms of making that digital shift Challenge one making sense of information. So we live in a world now where we're inundated with information So how do we make sense of it? The first project I wanted to highlight was a project by a woman named Anna Riddler. She's a contemporary artist and this one's called mosaic virus and what you're seeing here on this image is 10,000 images of tulips during the kind of growth season of tulips So she took all of these tulips all these images of tulips and then she by hand cataloged them And that was part of the presentation of her artwork But what was interesting about this is she took that catalog of tulip images and created videos that was actually The videos were would change and evolve based on an artificial intelligence Program that she created that linked The growth of a tulip and the emergence of the tulip to Bitcoin currency valuing and pricing And so what she was trying to do in this artwork is start to think how can we use kind of the economic theory around that? You know the tulip mania in 17th century Dutch culture that was kind of what we get what some people consider the first kind of economic bubble And how can we link that to the you know the economic bubble of Bitcoin currency? And what I think is really interesting about this is kind of using historic data using his using history drawing on history In order for us to make meaning out of something that's new a new technology that is emerging And I think that's something we should think about As professionals within with collections This second work is by an artist Refik Anadol. He's a Turkish artist and he really is very focused on the idea of using archive Information and again visualizing it. I think we're all now quite comfortable with the idea that of data visualization And that we have to do more to be able to articulate information in meaningful ways This work, which I'm going to show you as a video Works essentially takes meteorological surface data information from the black sea and reconceptualizes that That data as what he's calling a data sculpture of of the black sea So you get a sense of what that what it looks like what does he looks like but that is all formed through actual data So again, I think this idea of a digital sculpture Something about that, you know, can you feel can can can you feel the bounds of data? Can you in a way make meaning from it? Can it become solid instead of so ephemeral? The next project I wanted to talk about is one called resurrecting the sublime and this is really interesting Because we do talk a lot about and Jeff said, you know, we talk about how new immersive technologies can help us get a better sense of Information in the world around us. It kind of engages different senses This is a project that uses technology to engage our sense of smell. So I'm going to show this is a longer video It's about five five minutes, but I just wanted to get you give you a sense of this This project was one of the winners of the lumen prize, which is a digital art prize this year sudden slopes of Mount Haleakala the island of Maui, Hawaii The turn of the 20th century The forests are being lost to colonial cattle farming One tree will be lost forever The Hibiscus Delphus while the Rihanna The Hawaiians called it Maui Hau Kauaihevi the mountain Hibiscus By 1912 it will be extinct The habitat lost the plant lost the relationship between the two Lost could we ever regain a glimpse of what was lost a few years ago a small group of synthetic Biologists at Ginko Bioworks a bioengineering company in Boston set out to resurrect the smell of extinct flower Christina Agapakis Ginko's creative director went to the Harvard University Herbarium in 2016 Where over five million specimens are stored Searching the collections for extinct plants with her colleague Dawn Thompson they found 20 Two would hold enough information to unlock the sense of their flowers each lost due to human destruction of their habitat A third would reveal what may be an even greater loss The first specimen was in the Malvesi cabinet It was the Hibiscus Delphus wild Rihanna's from which she cut tiny tissue samples The second was the Orbexilum stipulatum or falls of the Ohio's scurvy Last seen in Kentucky on Rock Island in the Ohio River in 1881 Before a dam finally raises habitat in the 1920s The third was the Lucidendron ground of Florum the Weinberg cone bush It was last seen in London in a collector's garden in 1806 It's habitat on Weinberg Hill in the shadow of Table Mountain Cape Town already lost to colonial vineyards But this flower may prove to be completely lost The project is bringing to light that Harvard's specimen and possibly specimens in other collections may all be incorrectly labeled An old feud between two 19th century botanists exposed again Back at Ginkgo Bioworks, the scientists could begin working with the DNA Once it had been extracted from the plant tissue and sequenced by paleogeneticists at the University of California at Santa Cruz The Ginkgo team identified gene sequences that might encode fragrance-producing enzymes These sequences of DNA were printed and then they were inserted into yeast Which were cultured to produce the smell molecules The identity of those molecules was then verified using mass spectrometry Giving a list of the smell molecules that each flower may have produced Those lists were sent to Berlin to the smell research and artist Cissel Tollas Cissel began to reconstruct each flower's smell in her lab Using the same molecules from her collection or finding comparative ones to approximate those that aren't available We can use technology to reach back into the past giving us a glimpse of each flower, but we will never know their exact smell Science can tell us which molecules they made, but the amounts of each are also lost Building on that contingency in London, the artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsburg designed a series of immersive experiences to reconnect the lost flowers to their habitats These draw on the idea of the sublime, the sensation of the unknowable, and exposure to nature's immensity that makes us consider our position in it Using genetic engineering so we can once again experience a nature that we have destroyed is both romantic and perhaps terrifying It is sublime Artists tried to express this aesthetic state in 19th century landscape paintings But like these images Even the most advanced technology can only give an incomplete representation In a natural history museum nature's contingency is trapped in time the clock of creation and destruction stopped for us to look at In the installations each landscape is similarly reduced to its geology and the flower's smell The human connects the two and by stepping into this abstract nature they become the specimen on view The smells are diffused and fragments and mix in each installation so every inhalation is slightly different We can never fully experience the flower in the present without its past context This is not de-extinction, but a technological sublime Allowing us a glimpse of a lost flower blooming on a hill On a wild river bank Or on a volcanic slope The interplay of a species and a place that no longer exists As the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy says The sublime is not so much what we're going back to as where we're coming from But the point is that I think the three examples I just showed just to wrap up that kind of section Is around you know, how can we help people make meaning of information? Is that our new role as museums and libraries and archives? How do we create ways of making data intersect with each other in order for us to be able to Discover new things is that sense of discovery around the intersection of data not just access to data Can we create new ways and and and help people visualize data and information in new ways? And how can we engage different senses? And how does that lead to new types of knowledge when we engage not just our reading, you know Our vision in terms of reading but in terms of site smell and sound So The next challenge is how do we kind of transform information into power? So, you know We now have lots of information at our fingertips But actually how do we help our audiences the people who come to us transform that information into power So that they can use it to change your communities And so I wanted to show you a couple of examples. This is a quick video by the Cleveland Museum of Art Where they this year launched an open access program And I think there's a lot of you know talk about open access And kind of open reserves But I think what's interesting about what cleveland museum of arts doing is they're really trying to push people To not just have access to this to the information and to their collections, but to use them in interesting ways So i'm going to try this video. This is only one minute Really thinking very hard about how they're going to make their open access Program one that's usable by different types of communities and different types of people Now the next example I wanted to show you was actually from the british library So I know you're having a keynote this afternoon from the chief librarian But this is a project called imaginary cities And the artist was micho takeo magruder and what he did was he used and leveraged the Map archive that they have at the british library selecting four or five cities in new york city paris Some major cities and what he tried to do is Use digital technologies to help imagine What those cities could be like or new forms of how that city could work So what he did is he put the digitized versions of these maps online and allowed people to interact with them Focus down on them tag them do do different things with with With the map and digital digital form As well as he mapped kind of the progress of those cities And with the intersection of those pieces of data He created 3d replication in terms of 3d images And immersive experience that would allow you to see what those cities might look like in their new form So I think what that project really does is help us think about okay How can we create again platforms and systems in which people can create the future based on the archive material and collections that we have Now for my next example, I'm going to switch gears into theater and performance This project is called justice syndicate and it was developed by a computational artist Theater professional named joe mccallister and what it does is is an immersive performance In which 12 people act as a jury and they have to make a decision as to whether Somebody is found guilty of a crime Now what's interesting about this is that everybody's given an ipad that has lots of evidence and information on it And they're asked and they're given information at particular periods of time during the performance and asked how it changes their judgment About whether the person should be convicted or not convicted There's an ai system that's driving this behind behind this that actually will give Each audience member a different piece of data based on information It's drawing from them of how they're interacting with the system whether they're making a slow decision whether or not You know the way they voted in certain certain situations I think what joe is is kind of kind of Set upon here in terms of this project is this idea is that we all are inundated with so much information How do we process that information and how do we interact and talk to each other about the information that we are given And I think we live in a world now where we're actually there's tons of misinformation People find it very difficult to navigate Through you know information that is in some published non-published Format and having different Difficulty having discussions about what they're reading And so I think that might be something that we consider as libraries museums and archives How do we help people digest information make decisions about it and have conversations about it? And finally, I think the third challenge I wanted to talk about is kind of How we support new forms of authorship? so As I said before, you know digital technologies allowed us to to be able to Have access to different perspectives and different views and one thing that I was really surprised about When I got to the arts council is the knowledge that many people who have been marginalized in the world of literature and poetry Have used instagram as a way of publishing their poetry But there still is this kind of divide between the real poets and the non real poets the ones who are able to publish Their poetry and ones that are just using instagram And I think a challenge to us is you know, how do we capture? How do we preserve? How do we? How do we capture the type of work that is being produced on the social media platforms and other types of platforms? How do we make sure that that information is accessible to future generations? Also, I mean machine learning is going to present lots of challenges for us In terms of how our collections are used as training data And how we protect copyright IP associated with information that is used in machine learning And I think a project that is being developed by Wayne McGregor Who is a contemporary dance artist kind of throws up a lot of challenges associated with machine learning What Wayne McGregor has done is taken his whole archive of dance videos That he's produced And he's trained a machine to be able to help him choreograph future dance works And so this is a very interesting Kind of project because it brings up a lot of issues around authorship So, I mean what will happen in terms of if Wayne decides to License his machine to somebody else to create dances in the style of Wayne McGregor What will happen what are what are the rights of those dancers in which he's collected an archive of their movements And now he's using it to produce new new work. What are we going to do about that type of thing? I think we all now have the possibility of creating having our own archives and be able to use machine learning to Reproduce ourselves in certain ways and other people will have that ability as well So how are we thinking about that? How are we going to manage that? How are we going to? How are we going to make training data that underlies machine learning accessible so we can understand if there's biases in it and And and to make sure that it's transparent the processes that are being used This is an example of where I think Machine learning can have some problems and where we have to continue to cultivate In our our practice Making sure the voices of marginalized communities get involved in the practice of artificial intelligence and museum and machine learning So this is a picture I took at an exhibition in Paris. It was an exhibition called black models And the whole point of the exhibition was to uncover the identities of black people who are represented in in an old master painting That we see in our in our Museums now I took this picture and I took a picture and there's a woman standing in front of the painting And I put it into the google cloud api around computer vision and as you can see here It identified the woman who's standing in front of the painting and Olympia But not the subject of the exhibition, which was the woman who's in the painting So we can see here while our kind of actions and trying to uncover And develop information about marginalized communities or people who haven't been represented In our museums and our collections can be totally kind of taken back by machine learning if we're not careful We're not guardians In terms of the way that machines are being trained and the data they're using and being very transparent about it So those were just kind of three kind of main issues. I wanted to address through artwork, but you know I'm still on the process of kind of formulating my agenda as head of digital Art technology and innovation. So I'm really interested to be here today and hear from you But I had a couple of closing thoughts about what is the kind of evolving role of museums Archives and libraries And I had a couple thoughts First of all, is our role to be kind of having moved from being people who provide information to being Information laboratories where people can have access to information But also process that information to make it meaningful for themselves Can we start to figure out ways and give tools that that to make information Intersect to create greater meaning and create and opportunities for discovery We all think about our spaces and we think about how to how to organize our physical spaces in a way that respond to community needs And the needs of our audiences What should we be platform innovators in terms of our online tools? So, you know kind of referencing back the Cleveland Museum of Art, you know, should we be partnering with organizations to create better platforms for For providing access to information as well as being able to manipulate them so you can create new works of art or new outputs based on online collections And finally, should we be places should we be sites for activism around data culture? It is the biggest one of the biggest issues that face our country In the world, you know about how we process data in terms of privacy how we're going to train machines What are the data sets used are their bias? Is are we a place in which we can actually help people become activist and be engaged in these issues and help in terms of making sure that all those The way data is used is transparent and that we have a way of understanding underlying data sets Those are just three ideas that I that I have but I'm really really happy to hear from you and have hear from your questions and actually hear what's going to happen during the The conference the next two days So with that I think that's it. I'll end. Thank you