 Welcome to the afternoon session of the Fitch Colloquium. Allow me to briefly introduce the moderator for this afternoon's panel. Professor David Benjamin is the founding principal of the Living and Assisting Professor at Columbia GSHPP and also just received tenure. So like this just happened, so we need to give him a round of applause. He's really an amazing practitioner, and his work combines research, practice, and involves new ideas for prototyping. But really what is amazing about his work and so relevant for this afternoon's session is that he focuses on the intersection of biology, computation, and design. He's articulated frameworks for harnessing living organisms for architecture into bioprocessing, biosensing, and biomanufacturing. His practice, the living, has won many design prices, including the Emerging Voices Award of the Architectural League, New Practices Award from the AIA, and the Young Architects Program from the Museum of Modern Art, PS1, where he did that PS1 installation. He's also won prizes from the Wholesome Sustainability Award and has collaborated with a number of different industry partners, including Boeing, on the development of new materials for architecture and aeronautics. So please welcome David Benjamin. Thank you, Jorge. So it's great to be here. I'm very excited to be part of the colloquium, and in particular to be part of this session, which is called Remaster, as you can see. And I believe this session, as you would expect out of Remaster, will involve a kind of hybrid of the old and the new. It will involve examples of kind of making visibility invisible, uncovering new features in the old, and offering fresh perspectives on buildings and cities. Perhaps more specifically, the five speakers here engage a number of very interesting things, including drawing and visualization, computation, making and physical prototyping, including the use of new materials, and a complex balance of the quantitative and the qualitative and the issues that those include. And I personally find this very exciting because this same list could also describe some of the key topics for current students in the architecture program here and for current architecture professionals. So for me, this panel and the colloquium more generally represents a very productive overlap between architectural preservation and architectural design. So with that, I would like to introduce our first speaker and as in the first session, we'll introduce the speakers in order. Each one will present, and at the end, we'll have a kind of discussion and open it up for questions. This first speaker is Chance Koganor, who is a digital archeologist and program manager at the Google Arts and Culture Initiative, where he coordinates cultural heritage and preservation efforts. With his collaborator, Matthew Vincent, he launched Recre in 2015 after witnessing the destruction of heritage in northern Iraq. This open source volunteer initiative strives for the digital reconstruction of lost heritage critically here through using crowdsourced images combined with photogrammetry. Chance has worked on research projects throughout Europe and the Americas. He is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Photogrammetry at the University of Stuttgart. Please join me in welcoming Chance. Thank you for that warm introduction. And I'd like to thank the organizers for the kind invitation to join you today. It's quite an honor to be speaking to many colleagues and people that I know or some new faces that I hope to meet over the course of today. So I'm here to speak about storytelling and preservation. From a 20% project at Google over eight years ago to a platform now used by cultural institutions in more than 80 countries, it's been quite a journey. But first, you might be wondering, what is Google Arts and Culture? Our core mission is to provide technologies that make the world's culture accessible to anyone anywhere for free. There are four key challenges that we focus on with our partners from around the world. And those can kind of be separated into these four categories. The first being collection, as well as many of you know and has been discussed before and probably after my talk today, about the digitization and the uploading of images, artifacts, artworks to the net at scale, which is something that we love to do. What Google is think big about scale. So we work with our partners around the world to do that. Also with storytelling, we explore the new ways to explain culture and art digitally through our partnerships and collaborations. Basically, as a way to find unique ways to make the messages and stories of their incredible collection more impactful and more people so that more people can see it online. As well as reaching an audience, making it easier to find culture online, which is very important. And finally, innovation, which is really the core part of Google and Google Arts and Culture is providing Google's cutting-edge technologies to the cultural sector. So taking a step back in 2011, which began, as I said, just a 20% project with a handful of engineers that has now evolved today to Black History Month, which is being celebrated throughout this month, of course. But online on Google Arts and Culture, you can find that we did a particular focus on dance and the history of Black History and culture related to dance. But it started with art, and it still was very much focused on art. But as you can see in 2016, for example, we did a global project related and focused on natural history, as well as fashion. The project called We Wear Culture, Frida, Indian Railways, and some others that I will mention here briefly. In around 2016, we began focusing more on heritage preservation. And I will give more examples, I will deep dive into these examples in a moment. But I just want to take a step back and give you more context to what Google Arts and Culture is and what we do. As many of you know, documenting, researching, and presenting the world's art and culture is a never-ending task. And since the very beginning and now until today, we have over 3,700 expert exhibits that were curated by museum curators or the NGOs that we work with around the world in more than 70 countries or more than 80 countries now. Some of that material is also produced and used to create immersive online tours using 360 imagery, virtual reality videos, Street View, which you're probably familiar with that term, and the Google Cardboard itself, which was invented in our lab in Paris. For documentation and digitization, these are the three core parts that we offer to our partners for free around the world. The art camera, which was developed at the lab in Paris, is a way to, it basically creates and takes gigapixel images of artworks. Street View has been taken inside, so apart from Street View that you explore on your phone to find your directions how you arrived here today, maybe. We took Street View inside of museums, inside of theaters, and other locations that are maybe a little difficult to explore, like 10 Downing Street or the White House or even the International Space Station. We're also rising to the challenge because we understand that many institutions have a lot of archival materials, and sometimes in that case it can be glass plate photographs, which I will explain what we're doing in that regard in a moment. We create new ways to bring culture and people together online. That's really one of the core additional, one of the core missions of Google Arts and Culture. We do that through a web-powered app on your phone, tablet, or PC, browser. Also through search, we just basically wanna make it easier for people to find information. So if they type in and they're searching for Klimt and they wanna see the KISS, for example, well, because we've digitized it with the art camera, you should be able to click and zoom in to the extreme detail from within only two clicks. That's what we're trying to make information more accessible, which is part of the core mission of Google, as well as our collaborations with Google Maps. We also work with YouTube creators to reach a younger audience that may think that high art is not for them and basically find different ways to engage with them. One example, recently launched, is if you ever wanted to see all the Vermeers in the world, that's 36 paintings and 18 museums, you now can in one place online. So in collaboration with partners around the world, we made it possible to explore a virtual gallery on your phone using augmented reality, which we call Pocket Gallery. The director of Marie's house in The Hague said that this is one of these moments when technology does something that you can never do in real life because some of the 17th century paintings are too fragile to travel, while some are in private collections and one was also stolen in the 1990s. It's also included in this collection. In addition, photos from before. In addition to the published stories, we worked together to reach a younger audience with the Vermeer coloring book on Instagram and YouTube creator series and much more. As you can see, we love to experiment with the fun connections between art, culture, and technology, and that usually translates into things that we call lab experiments where we experiment with that at the lab. A great example of this was the release of the art selfie feature on the app a year ago. Some of you may remember. Thanks to the app going viral with everyone wanting to find their art doppelganger, people around the world were exposed to art in a new way on late night television or maybe even a celebrity that they follow on social media, which thanks to Kate Hudson and her millions of social media followers, they were exposed to art in a different way, in a fun way, and there were also some surprises like Kate Stewart on the right. A newspaper in St. Louis reported she was having fun with her six-year-old daughter on the weekend. They were playing with the app making faces and surprisingly it matched her to her own great grandmother in the painting Emma in the Purple Dress. So this was released just a few weeks ago, last month actually, the camera tab in the Google Arts and Culture app has a few different features. In addition to the pocket gallery and art selfie that you can explore on Google Arts and Culture, we also have Collar Palette. This was completed in collaboration with Paul Smith, the British fashion designer. It basically allows you to take a photograph and it finds the Collar Palette of the colors in that photo and matches it to other photos in the collection, just a new way to expose and to show artworks of our partners' collections in different, in two new audiences. As well as the art projector, if we're using augmented reality, we can also position a Frida Kahlo painting like this in your living room and because we know what the real size is because the museum added that in.