 Thank you. So welcome to the to the last panel of the of the day replay we heard record remaster and now we're gonna talk about replay. What do we do with the data? How do we interact with the data? How do we? Bring it back into the real world in some ways. So our first speaker is Ian Bogost who is the Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and professor of interactive computing at Georgia Institute of Technology and founding partner at persuasive games LLC and You probably have read his column on the Atlantic. I came across Ian's work Many years ago when I picked up a book called alien phenomenology is I you know, I think phenomenology is what sort of got us got us together and just really blew my mind that one could think through through phenomenology into all sorts of different sort of realities and he's followed up with it really an incredible book that is that has brought the whole notion of gaming to the broader public called play anything and This book takes the notion that that playing Gaming can be a way not as we mostly most of us that have kids think about it You know put down your iPad. Damn it. You you know engage with us, you know But we think of gaming as a way to sort of cut us off from the world There's something that is detaching us from the world and Ian has really turned this on its head and and really helped a lot of us to think about gaming as a way of Engaging the world of getting deeper into the world and that is really quite an extraordinary Sort of reversal in our relationship to technology that yes, of course It's a form of mediation, but it doesn't have to be an alienating form of mediation It can actually be an engaging form of mediation and this book has had a tremendous success in in in the field and in the general public and in some ways The this conference was in a way inspired by this book The the notion that technology can be a way of actually rethinking our our discipline So it's very exciting to have Professor Ian Bogost here today. Please join me in welcoming I'm so I'm so grateful to be here. Thank you so much for coming So many many years ago now I was running an errand at this mall in Atlanta where I live and and it was you know crowded and awful like malls are and all I wanted to do Was was get out but I had I had my daughter with me and she was about four years old And so I was kind of like dragging her around the mall trying to finish my errands And she clutched my hand and I sort of steered her through the throngs of shoppers And she was having a really hard time keeping up and I was annoyed and and then finally I looked down And I saw what was going on She was staring like straight down at her feet Trying to time her footfall so that they would they would fall within the boundaries of the white the square white tiles that lined The mall floor and the sensations that I'd interpreted as these tugs were just her trying to avoid Like violating the grout lines as I pulled her Through the crowd now This isn't you know nothing new in some ways just a rediscovery of the the step on a crack break your mother's back Victorian superstition that eventually developed into a game for sidewalks But her her version added something to it added something new because I was leading her by the hand She didn't have to look where she was going and that limitation Actually created a new freedom and then it allowed her to focus on her feet instead of the human obstacles And this was like a completely vertiginous experience. It was challenging and pleasurable and delightful Much more so than the experience. I was having on my my dumb Trip to the mall. She had made the most of the situation and I had completely Failed to do so and this was maybe a dozen years now. I've never stopped thinking about it It's the opener of this this book that Jorge mentioned And you know on first blush it might remind you this sort of advice might remind you of one of the maybe the best known philosopher of games Mary Poppins who has this this spoonful of sugar and nonsense and Spoonful of sugar makes the helps the medicine go down. She advises but but if you think about this The problem is that this theory it just doesn't make any sense Actually, you know, there's a robin that sings a song while making a nest and a honeybee that enjoys a Sip of nectar while buzzing from bud to bud and we might just ask, you know Are like our is this really what's going on with robins and bees actually worker bees store Their nectar in a in a pouch. It's called a crop and they regurgitate it back up when they get to the hive Which doesn't seem like a kind of prim Victorian activity to me at all Instead what's happening with this is that this spoonful of sugar type advice it presents play as something that covers over a Drudgery, you know, it's like hiding the work in the in the in the song of nest building or the Poppins song of Cleanup and this idea it's had a real impact even if not directly even if not in a way that you think about people really do Assume that play amounts to how people overcome The circumstances that face them rather than from those circumstances Themselves the circumstances that we encounter those are assumed to be inert They're only activated in our imaginations by by our own human ingenuity, but even like dumb Accidental experiences like this one they show us that something else is going on actually fun doesn't come from escaping something but from Embracing it and meaning and pleasure arises then when you allow things to be Exactly what they are and when you participate actively in the process of using them even when those things seem arbitrary Or stupid or worthless and perhaps especially then The philosopher Bernard Suites called play the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles So play is something that's good enough on its own It's something for which that on its own nests is exactly the point and yet a name for this stance the Lucery attitude and that attitude that lucary attitude applies to more than games to you know We say that a mechanism like a steering assembly has has some play in it a space through which the wheel turns before the shaft Turns the pinion or we talk about the play of light or the play of waves or a play on words And two friends of mine that the game designers Katie Salem and Eric Zimmerman have a take that a great take that accounts for all those Senses they call play free movement within a more rigid structure So play isn't a process of extracting enjoyment, but one of manipulating the structure of an object players Don't don't seek to overcome that structure, but to subject themselves to it And that means that play isn't it isn't a free-for-all It's not doing whatever you want as we sometimes think stop playing stop playing around don't play with your food It's not the opposite of work either. It's it's work of a different kind It's like the work of woodworking, you know the work of working a system rather than the work of clocking in and if you want you can use terms that are more familiar to the design disciplines play as the Encounter of limit limitations and constraints for example in which something's structure opens a space of Possible interactions for the people and things that might encounter it and you can apply this to anything I mean think about a guitar, which is a thing at least in English that we say that we play and When you play a guitar you hold its threaded fingerboard in certain patterns while strumming its strings in others in order to produce sounds You don't do whatever you want with the guitar and you certainly don't sing a song about how miserable it is to use one So that makes play a property of material things It's not a thing that people do to escape those things. It's rather a name for what happens when you exercise their capacities And that further means that play applies to anything whatsoever not just to toys or to games You know to transmissions or yarn or language or gardens or dishwashers or relationships or buildings for that matter And to understand the implications we have to be willing to pay serious attention to anything whatsoever and that's a philosophical project as much as a design early one and here's where we enter this domain of alien phenomenology and so Forth, so I've been running with this group of philosophers who embrace the idea That anything is worthy of attention and we've been calling ourselves object-oriented ontology or sometimes triple O which I apologize for but these are just names you can ignore them and One of the contrarian takes of this triple O position is that Existence is the same for anything that exists which we sometimes call flat ontology Which is a term just brazenly stolen from Manuel de landa and one way that I've put this is like this everything equally exists But not everything exists equally and Another a position and the philosophical position central to this theory is a kind of opposition to Relationism the position that associations between entities are more real than the entities Themselves and you know the privileging of flows and becoming and change and flux And and as you probably know these philosophies of relation have been popular in architecture for many years You're mostly adopted as sort of firm formal interpretations of the philosophical traditions rather than as attempts to implement those traditions You know so we have something like parametricism Which is a relationist response to postmodernism is probably the one among the most influential and like most Relationisms this position thinks that it's on the right side of history of course because complexity and dynamism or the way of the world in the post-fortis global knowledge economy and someone like Patrick Schumacher has been you know a theoretical proponent of this idea But it's its influence has also spread through the tools that we use things like grasshopper that use visual programming to do design by coupling changes in inputs and outputs And you know this this theory is kind of maybe a little bit on the wane Like even though Schumacher has himself warned against using it as a kind of mass so-called master discourse He's also gotten into trouble especially lately about you know starting to look like a totalitarianist on positions of the of the built environment Which is maybe suggesting some openings to new positions And now like I am not an architect or or a planner or or a preservationist really at least not in a train sense I'm really a scholar and critic of media and technology, but but just by weird happenstance I collided with architecture and urban design through an accidental Descent into land-use politics in Atlanta where I live and I do a lot of work in local historic preservation And one thing that I noticed when I started doing this work is how useful it turned out to be to adopt This playful methodology as an approach to preservation design and another thing That I learned which I'm somewhat anxious about talking about in this room is how how ordinary and mundane The objects of play in that context become you know that the work that all of you do is just remarkable and completely Inspiring but but on average in practice It seems to me that historic preservation is less often a practice of documenting and restoring and preserving Monuments and landmarks and more often one of you know managing the pedantic details of design and influence in specific protected contexts of which there are there are hundreds and hundreds of these and even like the most basic of the of these Of these design elements these things that we don't even think about anymore end up being profoundly at play So like just take like the most boring example you can think of which is something like setback Which might seem completely straightforward like how do you match the average setback in an area of influence? It's just like a calculation. You could you could you don't even need a computer to do it But you know even establishing that notion that area of influence the region that's going to be visually impacted by a change Isn't so easy It's about what's visible from where and when during what time of year and all sorts of factors that that are difficult to automate come Into play and it makes these like plan style summaries of the idea in sufficient They only make sense in specific Circumstances or you know like establishing the rhythm of perceived massing is sometimes difficult because it's a function of on the Ground perception not not measured information and I think it shows where the attention to entanglements of particular entities at play Is essential and also why it's difficult especially in context So I want to show you an example From a special character area within the district that where I work most Which is even more squirrely because it's subject to these kind of random bad Guidelines that are different from the ones that are normally handed down by that by the secretary of the interior And I'm actually purposely picking an example that is the most edge case possible It's this sort of hangar on to a truly historic Frederick Law Olmstead designed a neighborhood And I don't have time to go through this in detail But here's a little bit of context that we have this thing that's called a recommendation Which is actually a it's kind of a non guideline It has Jeritical implications that are much softer than than those of a traditional guideline or a law or zoning or what have you But what it calls for here You don't have to read it is Minimization of perceived scale for infill consistency and height of new construction No more than two floors from the primary street frontage and acknowledges a number of implications of hilly topography That's that's sort of the summary of this. So there was this plat It's it looks like this that was targeted for redevelopment in this district And it's surrounded by mostly these one and one and a half story pre and post war ranch and minimal traditional homes and Like this is just a completely different context than everything we've heard thus far today But the issues arise really quickly like like this you can see there's to this is a corner lot What does a recommendation about primary frontage imply about secondary frontage or what is a two-story home for that matter? And how should it be, you know interpreted in relation to its neighbors? So this is a horrific horrific design that got floated for this lot this sort of ghastly Engorged faux prairie spec design kind of thing That's that seems to be replacing engorged faux craftsman spec homes in residential construction these days And I've picked it partly because it is it is it is so horrifying in some ways like this is not the Parthenon But these are the kinds of structures that actually get get built every day in the world and this particular one was rejected Thank God Not because it's ghastly but because it appeared to have three full stories on the secondary street frontage And you know when I look at it I kind of think okay. Yeah, like that seems right, but like why is it? Is it the hip gable outcropping there on the on the left? Is it the the narrow casement windows above the double-hunges in the center? Is it is it just the overall impression of height created by exposing the garage via these retaining walls? And then there were other things like the height and the rhythm and topography of the of the street that introduced different elements So you look at the streets streetscape view. This is a different design And you kind of think okay. Well, like, you know, that that might look okay Like maybe you could bring the ridge down a foot or something But if this is the only evidence you have then it's less credible It actually the street goes uphill and there's this this this rhythm of of one and a half story mass and void And so if you start to ask questions like well, there's the hypothetical Front elevation at left violate that pattern then why would it do so? You know, is it what is the nature of the problem, especially given that we've been told the two-story homes are okay Is it is it the the 12 and 12 slope with the shed dormer? Or is that a half story or a full story? Like, you know these days architects seem to think that any upper floor with without full height ceilings is a one and a half Story structure like is that the case or not or why and if you imagine trying to like account for those for those Questions parametrically let's say then I guess you could you could imagine some some madman designing systems Like we've heard about today for blocks like this where they would you know be able to adjust like height or plate height or something That would dial in a solution for the street, but but of course, that's a nonsensical idea really you can't alter the environment in that way I mean you probably are not gonna fly drones to do 3d scanners for later perceived massing analysis You probably won't run like some sort of machine learning algorithm to automate the process of doing so And even if you did would you have enough data to build a model that would be credible like this is this is not Venice This is the opposite of Venice And on top of it all you know the whole issue is still implicated in the local legal Interpretation of this notion of a recommendation This is just like a complete and utter mess, and it's just a simple stupid residential home So there's still to me this kind of dream of this like friction-free solution to problems like this where we know We just we just throw enough technological tools at the at this at the situation and the answers will become clearer Like you know we get enough, you know shadow modeling and mass modeling and zoning compliance tools Like you know geodesign kind of approaches and they would point the way to solutions But then you look at even monumental structures, and they run into similar kinds of problems I remember when the Gary Disney concert hall had to be buffed down because it was blinding Nearby residents or you may or may not know about this This is the the museum tower in downtown Dallas that was literally melting sculptures at the Nasher next door So there's not there's not just play in Individual elements like between the fingers and the guitar between you know light and shadow But even in this like meta designer Lee question of what elements are relevant and possible to consider in a particular context and The possibility space of most design projects like even rebuilding a modest Single-family home is just it's so enormous and so grotesquely tangled that it always hides some secrets And it's us to sort of tease them out to be willing to look for them And you know in the key in the example I showed you in my in my neighborhood the ultimate object of design isn't even really the house Is it it's the overall streetscape environment of the area of influence, which is a thing that we almost can't design Or at least not directly so it's kind of no wonder that it would be easier To to adopt some sort of totalitarian position on design It would be a much easier answer and another easy answer is to just focus preservation efforts on on you know Stuff that deserves it on on real landmarks the ones that are worthy of of the time attention and investment of advanced technologies But you know if we return to the to the mall floor and the guitar and sweets Loosery attitude they offer to me reminders to us that all design and all use involves the same kind of play Respecting the play at work in in any particular circumstance and that can help us activate every object every single one as worthy of designs Attention so instead of seeing play as activities if instead you conceive of it as as conditions that are brought about when people engage Seriously and deliberately with specific objects in specific circumstances Then you're getting somewhere and you can think of design the same way to really design and play to mirror the same But the problem is we kind of look down our noses at many of these things and many of these circumstances Like people just don't care about an ordinary streetscape like they care about an exceptional landmark I mean, I'm like a little embarrassed to show you these examples even in this context today You know like what's what's the point really a shopping mall floor or a faux prairie residential home or are they're considered jokes? Things to ignore things to disdain and you might reasonably ask like what kind of crazy person would care about? ceramic tile or the rhythm and massing rhythm of massing and void on this dubiously significant post-war street But it just strikes me that you could point that sneer at anything at anything whatsoever Whereas instead our world is is just filled its jam packed with splendor and mystery most of which we never notice Because we only dream of mastering bigger and supposedly more important things with ever greater leverage and technology is only fueling that capacity So play offers an invitation to pay attention To anything at all in the hopes of like bringing out that things unique use and value and meaning and play or design If you want isn't about you really it's not about your own pleasure or cleverness or achievement It's about what you manage to do with the things that you find So this this philosophical idea this flat ontological principle isn't just me blowing hot air It allows or invites a different perspective on the built environment as discreet instead of continuous And thereby it allows play to become I think a design strategy help identify specific elements that we could work on It's not just a metaphor Tom Wiscombe has been arguing for example that coherence in design doesn't come from literal continuity anyway But by understanding the built environment as objects wrapped in objects wrapped in objects Or this is his quip for it discreet things acting upon one another You know and so far this this triple-O influence on architecture in particular I don't think it's really hit planning or preservation But the architects love a new philosophy of course And it's led mostly to Provocations, you know Mark Foster gauge has this bonkers Neolithic neo-gothic skyscraper which gives the sort of like the finger to all the delizion folds that we're used to and just Crusts the whole fucking building with stuff and and you know and then wisdom has these These studies of form the ways that the ground and mass can be made distinct from one another and those are interesting You know provocations to me, but but I wonder what other interpretations Might be possible of this philosophical approach, you know that might Invite us to see design in a way that makes it a process of focusing deep curiosity and care on specific objects in specific circumstances rather than a process of Realizing a pre-established vision that assumes that there's ultimate Independence and ultimately resonant value and meaning in everything whatsoever Anyone that has Done a preservation project connected with with with with the Really the importance of the vernacular that you're you're pointing at so thank you for for that I'm sure there's plenty of questions But we'll have to wait Till the end for those and our next speaker is Arnaud Barnhoff producer for virtual and augmented reality content experiences And who throughout his career has delivered content for brands and agencies across many aspects of production is somebody that has worked on Enhanced virtual reality and I became really interested in his Work when I heard about a project where they had gone in to the Amazon and try to Understand intangible heritage to begin to document intangible heritage through these new technologies and To get the whole realm of experience and so get beyond the optical Let's say Paradigm that we were talking about this morning and what is amazing about his work is his emphasis on playing back This information in a meaningful way that allows users from all backgrounds to engage with it So please join me in welcoming Arnaud Barnhoff Thank you first of all for inviting me here It's been a real pleasure listening to everyone talk and it's been so fascinating to see how relevant Everyone's topics are and especially to what I'm going to be talking about is Extremely different because I'm taking the approach to how to talk about preservation, but on a different level So actually so what I want to say first is something that just came to my mind is a few of the last talks I've been doing have been in VR and not in real life So suddenly now I'm feeling that this is actually quite different doing a talk in real life I had done them before but I've done the last ones in virtuality and not saying that it's different because People are not like glitching out of the room and going through the floor like it was a bit weird and and people don't enter through the door They literally disappear here and it's quite it's quite freaky But that so But it's more the the sense of what I'm going to talk about and I think it's quite relevant to that feeling that I'm having between doing the talk in virtuality and doing the talk in real life is the sense of Emotion a sense of connection with you and the sense of empathy And all those senses of emotions that we have that I can only that I have in real life and not with avatars and that's something I want to talk about which is virtuality being an empathy and empathy machine and This is a term that's been used quite a lot for virtuality it's been a term that's been used for for a fair amount of time comparing virtuality to a to an empathy machine and For those of you have tried virtuality or experiences that I've really connected to you. You'll understand that Why why it's called that because it really can make you feel it so I'm first of all, I think just I'm sure that just by reading this you might all have these these these words or sentences or things that you might that you think are Connecting now virtuality and empathy. I'm going to put a few words on here that that I have That people have told me for watching experiences that that I produced or things that that I think are relevant to us And there's a lot more of them and I thought I'll just put some of these and then and then use this as a guide for just defining a bit of what I want to talk about around emotion and empathy within Experiences so the first one is creating and using empathy or and giving great understanding of the world There's an experience that they did inside the human Inside the human heart to give An understanding of what happens inside your heart and it wasn't us. It wasn't an animation It was a simulation So you created the actual architecture of the heart and then put blood flow into it and let it do its thing So it wasn't pre-animated it was really just making it So you were in there and experiencing what it was like to see the inside Of how the actual heart works and that gives you again an understanding and a connection with it. Here's an experience around Seeing life through the eyes of of bees or it could be anything insects animals And that's also creating a connection a great understanding of how something else it could be an object It could be an animal an insect another person how those how those things connect to you and how them could be relevant to you And to understand what it's like to be something else or to be connected with something else and here's another one We did around a descent well actually one of the one of the the the most dangerous trips known to man which is descending from the ISS down to earth and This was also to give you a more personal experience This is how you you could feel to be someone else and Experience their trip a very specific thing that has happened and the experience in your own way and understanding. Oh What would I have done or how would I feel if I was doing that other thing that someone else did and that's something you get to do in virtuality and then another another section is also time travel I was really happy that Freddy spoke about time travel because it makes me look a little less insane talking about time travel, but Be honest, I think I voice and I'm sure like a lot of other people when I was a kid I used to dream a lot about time traveling it was in cartoons and movies It's something that I thought was this impossible but really cool thing and now since I've been doing virtuality for Since probably 2013 now producing virtuality content. I see time travel is just a different thing now It's it's something that I can do if it's tangible and I can touch it I can smell it and I can see it and I can hear it It's almost as close to time travel as we'll get and we'll just get better at doing that and and and then You know, we'll see it as as change in the future by understanding more the past or the present so what I want to do is talk about a very specific project and that will have to sort of mentioned early on which was In the Amazon forest and and the reason I want you to because it encompasses all these ideas I just mentioned rather than just one of them and this case study is Is is around a tribe called the Manderuku who are Manderuku a tribe in the Amazon forest and They were going to Why is the Brazilian government basically was going to build a series of mega dams around the territory of the Manderuku Try and the territory is roughly the size of Paris, Amsterdam and London all put together So it's a very big territory and then the dams would have flooded the entire area and So we collaborated collaborated with Greenpeace and a company called the Phillies to To create an experience that would connect you with the tribe that would connect with them because we wanted to make a difference We wanted to drive action for for for this tribe and what was happening so Again, I'm gonna put through some words again here to show what a thought process could be and how we're gonna make those Emotional connections and make that why we would make that connection and how we think about it So first one is see we start with that flooding of the Manderuku tribe territory That's the basis of it. The second one is how do you create a connection with the Manderuku? We've got to create a connection with them. It can't just be you're there and That's it. You know, you've got to have some sort of connection Otherwise, you're just gonna take a headset. You're gonna look away. You're not gonna find it relevant to you And and another one is you know, why should everyone care and again? These are just thoughts that might just come to you just suddenly when you're trying to figure something out These are just thoughts like that. Why, you know, why should everyone care? How to make everyone care? Is it too far away to affect us and how close and how to close that distance and these are some amongst a lot of other things I find these ones quite important because these are the ones that that create that emotional connection and create Why we would feel connected and why we want to drive action or make differences So what we did is we went over to the Amazon Forest spent two weeks over there with with some specialist VR equipment special or audio equipment as you would do for those type of productions and We filmed the way they live they dance they eat they cook and and they hunt and we filmed all those Events without scripting it just to see how how so you could experience What it's like to be part of their tribe now So this is me explaining a very very a very simple concept of of the VR production or film production for that matter Which is very familiar to a lot of us, but what we did in this one, which was very different was we recorded more than just the visual or the audio we recorded the heat levels and the humidity and the smell so that we could capture what it's like to be Present in that moment to be present in that environment emotionally Because and I can give you action and I again I thought about this when I was walking around in in New York yesterday, I Had this moment where I was walking on Street, and I thought wow I'd love I'm gonna send I want to send something I wasn't at the moment I wasn't sure what it was to to to someone else. I this is this is I really like this moment I'm gonna send this I take on my phone like most people and I'm like and I'm like wait a minute What is this moment that I'm trying to send? Is it actually a picture because this is just a reflex and playing out my phone But actually the what I wanted to send was the moment and I realized I couldn't do that because we don't have I couldn't send the I realized it was the smell and then the the heat and the wind and then and everything and I and I thought oh Actually, I can't send that so I didn't send anything because I thought a picture Didn't encompass that feeling that I had at that moment It was more it was much more than just that photo so therefore just sending that picture to someone would just not mean anything to them It would mean 10% of maybe what I felt at that moment So this is kind of what what we would we were capturing was much more than just the image We were capturing all the things that make a moment emotional for us and drive that empathy Towards towards other people. So we had a classically trained perfumer on with us amongst our professional crew who captured the sense The way he did that was amongst other things with right poems about them So he would smell them and he would write a poem he was there with this thing and you'd write it and it was fascinating because you think that That you wonder how how that comes about how do you recreate smells and there's obviously a variety with knowing and I'm not a I'm not a professional in in recreating sense and But the way that was his technique for doing it and and we created six distinguished sense for the for the experience And some for inside the village some four inside the forest and for them with our cooking You've got these scenes where you have you're having breakfast with the Mandiruku tribe and they grind their own coffee And you can you while you're watching it you can actually smell their coffee while you're in the experience So you can really smell you can smell what they're cooking and what they're giving to you and and suddenly that connection is extremely powerful and What I want to talk about is is that The the sense we went into the project was that These are people just like us and Before that moment it was more that they were going to just get flooded their territory And if no one did anything about it And we didn't create those connections with Greenpeace and the feelies to create a project that would drive empathy We you know, it's there wouldn't have been an understanding that there are these are just these are people just leaving lies like we do and I Find that this is quite an important one here that temporary empathy Wouldn't change a thing and I think that's quite important when we were planning it is that we weren't looking to create something That's just temporary where you're gonna be in there and just feel that oh, I watched the Mandiruku tribe live That's not what we wanted We didn't want people to feel that they just watched a tribe live or just watched people dance or watch people have breakfast We wanted to feel that you were with them living with them or having breakfast with them and dancing with them That's the purpose of it because then you feel connected with them and you feel you feel a Bond and then that drives action and when you finish the experience you still have that empathy It's not temporary you bring it with you and then you talk to other people about it And that subconsciously the way you talk about it with other people will be On a level like you that you did live with them and not that you just saw a movie about the Mandiruku tribe Which is very different you live an experience or you watch a movie about experience the way you talk about that experience Even if they're the same Will be very different because you lived it and that's what we were trying to do with this and What we thought was it's it's Not saying here again that that empathy without meaning is just entertainment that it's not good to use empathy for entertainment I'm talking for the purpose of this experience. It's not what we are looking for There is entertainment embedded with it, but it's not it's not the core part of the project And if there is no meaning behind the empathy that you can do because we can drive them I can drive empathy in a Without without it having any meaning as in real life meaning That's not it's not complicated. We can get script writers. You can get directors. You can do that That's what movies do they drive empathy, but usually it's quite temporary And so what we're trying to do here is understand how they live and how they do things and how how they how they go about their life So that we can create that non-temporary experience and that is very very important for It's almost like now that we've said preservation a lot and that's normal over the course of these talks It's almost like preservation of the senses preservation of that space of For example, their tribe their forest their village Preservation of the smells and of the heat and the humidity because that's what makes them be who they are there And how they feel that and you couldn't feel how you do feel there without those elements if it was ice cold It would be very different than if it's hot But if you can't feel those you can't feel the temperature then you can't really feel how you would feel over there. It's not possible so that's That's part of the things that we that we thought were very important in terms of and at the time I think we never really thought as preservation I think it's more over the course of doing several projects and doing them that we realized That it is it actually is very close to that. It's archiving senses. It's archiving an emotional emotional spectrum for for an actual space in the world and I think that that I'm actually gonna I'll talk about actually how I think that connects with the other with the other projects after and in a second section These are the these are the pods that we used for for the experience so they were There was a Pods for a single person to come in and they would sit down and you'd put on a virtual ID headset And then there you would feel heat humidity You would feel wind you'd serve sense so it really just trigger all your senses and throughout the experience you would be All those would be triggered and as we got all the different it wasn't just we just got humidity in general over it We got we got the different Humanities and sounds and smells of all the different areas and all the different positions that we place the viewer in So those changed throughout the experience So you really felt that you're going through an entire spectrum of their village and their forest and their hunting and their Dancing and their cooking and all of that and you've got to experience the whole range and what we had was that a lot of people would come out A huge amount of people would come out very emotional not They went in with the notion that that what was happening to them So you already had you already had this notion before that they were gonna get flooded You already knew that you knew it's gonna happen and you go in there thinking okay. There's these people that I don't know I Don't know them I just know the name now I'm under Ruku and I'm gonna go in here and try this experience and then suddenly during the experience You know these you know them and then you know the problem that's happening. So people would come out crying They would come out extremely emotional and and they would not They would not understand after when you said, oh, they're gonna get flooded and the whole territory is going to disappear And it's massive territory bigger than you know as I said, it's London Paris, Amsterdam all together some massive land for a lot of people And that was the difference initially they weren't suddenly crying when you told them under Ruku tribe We're gonna be flooded. There's no one cried. So when you said that before the experience is just that It almost doesn't wouldn't make much sense. They might feel a bit like oh, it's not very nice or you know But they wouldn't feel really really emotional about it But they would want to come out of the experience and that proves that And for those who are wondering The the dams did not get built so not saying that this is the the driving factor of that because Greenpeace had a big initiative to stop That but where we like to think that that had a big pass in it because it did tour it did go to a lot of places and it did drive a huge amount of empathy and the connection and a sense of of Then belonging with us and us belonging with them that sort of human connection that that I think virtual reality is really Good at dying really good at creating those links when you can when you can do them well and Not to say that just dying a film on its own without all the senses doesn't create that But they said it tends to be and I've done a lot of those again before multi sensory It tends to be quite temporary and it tends to be quite that some it's more of a some conscious level It's more of a you don't talk about it the same way as I said It's not it's not a it's not saying it doesn't work It just you won't it's about how you talk about it after with other people And when you when they come out of here and they're emotional and they're crying and they talk to you about it And you tell them what's happening and you talk more about it And they want to suddenly know more about them They want to know how they can do a difference make and make a difference for for what you what you've just told them before the experience And then they suddenly want to take part in it and understand know about Greenpeace know about feelings know about a project What else are we dying and who else are we saving you know? And it's just it becomes a whole thing because they feel like they're part of it now It's too late. They've lived with them. You're one of the tribesmen It's just you're you're you can't get away from it anymore And again, you could feel that this could be a you obviously people can use this as a trap in a sense We don't have to use it for good. You can use it for bad like most things You know you can control people's emotions to take things from them But I'm saying that that if used carefully and use them in in in this way for example and there are very very good things that can come out of it and I think I Would like to talk about very briefly and I think this is Quite quite important and I What what I think is going to come next and I think that that's why I said at the beginning that I really enjoyed Everyone else's talks before and I'm actually quite happy that I was after everyone now because it creates that that link because then they would have created the link and I prefer it's me this way now so the the When we're talking about a conservation of sites or conservation of of audio or also other other things Combining all those together is how I feel that there is what's next I feel like this wouldn't be a presentation without talking about Eve. So this I Feel like yeah, someone might have not done it. He didn't get the memo, but everyone else has spoken about you so This is actually at the the top the the bed and This just as an example. There's a lot of other different sites I so happened to pick this one because he could almost talking early on and It's just say you you've got this site now and and You've you've this is a concept. This is a preservation. This is recreation of it of a real of a real, you know a real real life Place a temple and and then if you could actually conserve and recreate the Sense and the heat and the humidity and the winds at a certain period of time Then you'll be able to go there and visit it and actually feel what it would be like to be there at a specific point of time Emotionally not just there Just there visually again I think always talking about what it's like to watch the temple but more like what it's like to actually be there in the Temple which is very different because I could put you by that door right now You wouldn't feel like you're actually there you'd feel like you're watching it You know after you'd have a memory of just watching it but not actually being there and living There and so this is currently where the stage route now you go there. You can visit it and walk around it I mean, I think combining these amazing technologies with things that are recreating recreating the sensors and recreating The sensor smell and touch and heat are really important and I thought what was fascinating is that we revisited the audio are up yesterday and there are there are team guys in in New York who do recreation of It's the also the resonant frequencies of room so how you can how you can It was briefly spoken about early on actually how you can recreate What a sound would sound like in any space so you could pick a space and re replay an audio and that's Digitally an audio and it could make it sound like it's in any space that you have recorded And I feel that they're using those technologies as well combined with these technologies We could recreate a digital version of pretty much the entire planet emotionally and also Digitally our actual assets and I almost feel that that's what's gonna happen very soon That's kind of what Google of working on very hard as well Is it's creating almost like a digital backup of the planet and not to say that that means you spill a coffee in the morning I know you can just get that back from the backup. It's not it's not that it's even though that would be really cool And I I'd really like that because it happens quite often. I would I would I think it's more it's more a Backup in the sense that we can go through any point in time and visit it and learn about it And that inducts how we're gonna do things in the future How we're gonna design something in the future by understanding better the past and as and I'm putting the emphasis on what my talk about is Understand the emotion values and the empathy of that moment is how it's gonna teach us more about the present and the past And how what we can do for it and I think recording those it's quite important So here's just a shot and of what the interior would look like and just to say this is kind of where we are now On how you do it you sit down You've got the heat sensors and the wind sensors and all those things and and you can and this is how you experience it And I think that moving forwards now in the next five ten years We will have a lot better systems where you have either the full haptic suits or we'll do it through other other ways Like ultrasounds or things like that which you don't need to wear anymore and to feel all those things or plug straight into with neurosensors and such and To be able to experience Going back to the time travel to experience or teleportation to experience other places Emotionally and and and get value from from those That more emotional connection and value from from places which will drive us to take action again in the in the in the context of charity To drive action within within those and to make a difference Because we feel emotionally connected to those and I feel that's very important in Virtriety and again are very important for preservation because making people care about those areas and feel that they belong there as much as it belongs with us Emotionally is very important. So it's not temporary You don't show them a 3d asset and they're like, well, I love that and then walk away and they just completely forgot about that It's more just like well, I love that night. I was there That was me in the temple walking around and I feel like I lived in there and then you've created now that link And it's forever with that person It's a virtual memory for that person now And then they will take action and they will talk to about it with their children And they talk to it and it will become a way of life where we have visited the past and we've lived in the past emotionally As well as in the present and as well as designing our future emotionally and I think that's quite important to use the virtuality for those things Yeah, so that's our next speaker is Carlos Ben-Aim and We are I'm just so thrilled that Carlos is here so thrilled because he really is a legend of perfumery and those of you that know me know that I am obsessed with smell and That you know the the preservation of smell and the use of smell in preservation and I met I was fortunate to meet Carlos Somehow I don't know I think it was a conference sort of like this and then we just Struck a friendship which I Which is really dear to me and I've just been able to be to witness the the art of perfumery through him and through his eyes and His work is really at the intersection of science and art and this is you know We have been talking a lot about technology, but I think in everyone's talk there has been an element of art and when we talk about the kinds of legitimate disciplines that are allowed to be in preservation certainly they're architects are planners there are historians there are You know legal experts and so on and we seldom talk about artists and artists are a really important component of of preservation and and help us see and make different kinds of connections and Carlos is one of those artists And also one of those scientists So he's one of the lead perfumers for international flavors and fragrances and if you've ever bought a perfume He probably designed it If you Wait to smell that until he tells you to smell it you got it. You're getting a little ahead of yourself here Right Carlos, they need to wait So I'll make it short and just to say have you started to smell You've already started to experience the work Carlos But you've already experienced it for many many years if you've ever picked up a perfume bottle He was either the designer or help that designer make it what it was So, thank you Carlos for joining us and please join me and welcome Thank you for that's a very generous introduction. I'm gonna get a bottle of water so the first thing I'm gonna do is to Awake on a little bit your sense of smell and For those of you who have never used those strange strips that were given to you. They are called blotters You basically hold it by the thick end and you smell the triangular end Where which is dipped in the substance? So and don't put it inside your nose just next to your nose Is it now? So So, thank you Jorge for this wonderful invitation. I really enjoyed it memories have been a major inspiration for my work and Today I want to convey some my personal memories of the sense of the Morocco of my youth and my attempts to reproduce and interpret them and I will give you also a glimpse of my creative process and Then I'll move to collective memories and To a description of an experiment we did at the Morgan library and I will conclude with my perspective about reinventing the past The unique interaction between scent taste and memory constitutes my inner life when it when it comes to smell. I Know you can smell the blotter As part of my early training as a perfumer. I had to identify Fragments ingredients with my eyes closed One in particular Smell like blood in an incomprehensible way It had none of the elements people typically associate with blood and yet not only I was seeing red but the sensation also brought up an easy associations to violence and What was that? Years later, I put the pieces together Accompanying my mother to the butcher as a child. I was horrified by the bloody carcasses hanging from the ceiling The most striking aroma was that of the Moroccan Cedarwood chips covering the floor Scent memory response all connected The sense and taste of my youth in Tangier were marked by the rhythm of the season and the religious celebrations In the summer the orders would reach the maximal expression All my senses were engaged when taking a walk in the Soco the old Arab town I remember seeing the Berber peasant woman coming from the reef mountains dressed in the colorful folkloric attire they exuded a rancid order of butter of Azuda and of leather They sat with their legs crossed peeling prickly pears with their naked hands and offering the juicy fruits to us and The animal and fickle smells of the mules and donkeys Walking nonchalantly in the alleyways We're so familiar that we hardly paid attention to them and Every Friday the Muesin's prayer call to prayer in the alleys in the call to prayer Merge in memory with a butyric smell of hundreds of shoes left at the entrance of the mosques before prayer In the alleys of the old town Lamb macerated in cumin paprika pepper and curcuma was grilled in wood-burning fires The blinding and perfume smoke would envelop the whole street making you tear Tear and salivate at the same time The water cellar dressed in the bizarre costume typical of his profession What offered us water from a gold-skinned pouch and the inside of the pouch Was covered with tuya wood tar from the reef mountains Giving water and indescribable freshness The most anticipated adventure of the summer Was the harvesting and distillation of peniroyal mint in the fields Used to manufacture menthol My father had a business extracting aromatic plants oils With distillation points dispersed all around Morocco And we traveled by jeep Into the countryside to visit them in overwhelming heat The orders of eucalyptus, spearmint, rosemary, thyme, verbena, Myrtle, laurel and fennel Would accompany the deafening sounds of the cicadas My father would come home in the evening with his hands impregnated with the essence of peniroyal mint And yellowed by his cigarettes, cravena A British brand of blonde tobacco And to me this combination is more evocative of him than his real portrait All these scents and the memories associated with them are part of my old factory repertoire But how can I transmit them to my American-born children? How to communicate to friends, loved ones or new generations What I have felt in my anymore self Are these sensations not isolating us if they cannot be shared? The scents and taste of my childhood are a powerful source of inspiration for me Generating themes that echo in my creations My work as a perfumer enables me to recreate those memories Inextricably linked to my past and to pour these drops of memory into perfume bottles I can deliver an experience that connects To customers in the here and now and in the process transform the intimate Into the universal Having said a bit about memory, let me turn now to the creative process Beginning with how an original idea is born Moving to how it is developed and elaborated to generate a fragrance Inspiration begins with a gut process that seems to emerge from the realm of daydream of fantasy However, this raw material must be filtered through critical thinking to transform my whimsical notion into a formula I have found that my continual mental dialogue with nature to be a rich source of inspiration For example The scent of orange flower And that will be your second blotter coming around The scent of orange flower Takes me right back to 10 years in my native morocco I remember walking through the groves of orange trees and smelling the orange flower water that filled the air when people celebrated in the streets I remember savoring the candid orange flower petals. We call letwario It is a scent that I will forever associate with my experiences thoughts and feelings An olfactory invocation of an atmosphere Another aspect of inspiration comes from attraction and sensuality The reality is that flowers alone cannot convey the full range of emotions emotions and desires And that's why perfumers turn to other notes such as wood ambers and musks To give flesh to our ideas Nor is the creative process the exclusive province of daydreams Science plays a significant role Our researchers continuously generate new aromatic ingredients Which in turn trigger novel responses in the perfumer For example 30 years ago a powerful green note al de haide a was created in our labs And the way it interacted with patchouli oil Fascinated me and that inspiration part science and part art Let me to design a fragrance known as polo by rough loran So once inspiration has been found how does creation begin? The first step is to allow the mind to play freely I daydream often straying into an irrational mental realm Eventually an olfactory image emerges in my mind And Picasso said First I find then I seek And this describes the working backwards to find the unique blend of ingredients To express my idea As my thoughts wander new accords emerge by association and reaching the original theme And Emile Zola once said the artist is nothing without the gift But the gift is nothing Without the work When I create a fragrance my concern is not only the character or theme of the accord My construction is guided by attention to several structural concepts The majority of the fragrance is the base composed of the less volatile more long lasting big blocks The rest of it the top note includes lighter more volatile ingredients The proportion among the ingredients is essential The trail which refers to the volume of space perfume around the wearer Is constantly considered We borrow the vocabulary of other senses to better describe the olfactory experience for example We speak of light and dark transparent and opaque loud and quiet perfumes At every stage the perfumer critiques and evaluates the fragrance in progress The fragrance is weighed and studied on blotters and skin and subjected to thousands of hair splitting experimental variations Even one part per million can significantly alter the final product And that's where art and science meet Each chemical element has its own character affinities and antagonism And no amount of artistry can replace the deep understanding Of each ingredient involved And by setting these facets in the creative process I hope I haven't given you the impression that they operate in a predictable sequence In fact, it's the constant Iterative Interplay of scent memory Personalities intuition scientific data and consumer understanding That result in the transformation Of a creative idea into an innovative fragrance Having spoken about scent memory and creativity I would turn now to the element of new technology And devote the rest of my talk to new frontiers in our field First, let's look briefly at the living flower headspace technology Living flower technology Is a research method created by Dr. Braja Mukhaji at international flavors and fragrances where I work More than 20 years ago It allows us to study the scent of living flowers While still in the plant To identify its key ingredients A globe is placed around the object to study Usually a flower to concentrate the molecules around it A micro extraction needle coated with a wax that binds to the molecules in the air Is introduced into the globe After a few hours of collection We then inject the needle into a gas chromatograph Which connected to a mass spectrometer separates and identify the components The work is very painstaking Each analysis yields more than a hundred ingredients And you have to decipher which ones contribute the most With this in hand, you can attempt to reproduce the smell And the process can take several months, but it's a sign of things to come A particular twist on Je trouve plus je cherche In this case, we started with a found object And searched for the formula And well done, it can unlock not just scientific knowledge, but creative possibilities The second frontier that I have explored personally Is the interplay between fragrance and painting The antique Chinese ancestor portraits that hang in my home Have always intrigued me So I decided to create my own ancestor gallery Integrating photography, painting, technology and fragrance to create a multi-sensory representation That captured my olfactive memory of the ancestor I've told you about my vivid memory of my father coming home from his distillation fields Smelling of pennyroyal mint and tobacco I searched far and wide for his craveness cigarettes to remember the aroma No longer sold in England A kind friend eventually found them for me in Turkey But reproducing the scent of tobacco Of tobacco leaves with more than 400 components identified Required more than just science I think you can smell the third blotter Living headspace technology allowed me to identify some of the key ingredients To which I added pennyroyal mint essential oil produced by IFF in Spain And the result vividly evokes my father aura Now my own ancestor paintings hang in my home And if you gently rub the paint You unlock the embedded scent Evoking the spirit of the long gone relative And for me, it's part of using art to connect the personal with universal Where I came from, from where I live now The past and present with the future And let me now finally turn to the mix of scent, memory and technology That is the Morgan Library Project In 2016, my friend Jorge Otero Pailos, Professor and Director of Historic Preservation here at Columbia And Crystal Nelson, the Drew Heinz Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts at the Morgan Library Invited me to partner with them on a project Our mission was to collect the smells of objects, spaces and old books in Pierport Morgan's library And to study their composition scientifically Using the Living Headspace Technology Our team, including Subba Patel and Penelope Bigelow, was to collect and analyze the scents of the Morgan And I thank each of them for this fascinating challenge and opportunity and for their hard work Why the Morgan? I quote here Jorge People in my field are interested in what makes building significant And in fact, people's minds are very much in the same place And their memories are what makes building culturally significant And smell is the most direct way to those memories and we pay so little attention to it Also, this building is one of the places where the shape of the American economy was decided During the financial panic of 1907 Morgan locked a group of bankers in his study until they came to an agreement to save the American economy The Morgan Library and the West Room had never seen anything like our project At times it resembled a scene out of Law and Order or CSI With people sniffing hidden staircases, old cabinets, 500 year old books in the vault We were also given an old cigar box containing Pedro Muria's Cuban cigars that had been used by Pierport Morgan himself Here's Jorge enjoying it And I must confess that they still smell pretty good a century later Our second visit was with Jorge's preservation class to continue our study and have the students reconstruct the 1907 scent of the Morgan Now the results of our study in the headspace of the famous book And it's hard to pronounce in Jesus the flower of the commandments of God printed by Wiccan with the word in 1521 Clint Wormers the IFF analyst identified 86 volatile components In the leather book binding of the golden legend also 1521 Volatile ingredients were 75 volatile ingredients were identified 102 components were found in Pierport Morgan Pedro Muria's Cuban cigar box And in the bookshelves analysis 66 ingredients were identified We used the headspace technology described above And once the identification had taken place The reconstitution was a lengthy complex endeavor Many of these ingredients were not in the perfumers palette And some had never been synthesized at all We then decided uh to which one were the most salient ingredients and start harmonizing them And because we had so many unfamiliar molecules The technique that was so successful with living flowers Proved its limits in reproducing the smell of the objects of the library Working in conjunction with my trainee perfumer Andrew Everett right here helping me We decided to recreate a fantasy scent of the 1907 scene when all the panic bankers were locked in the west room We used our imagination The scent of all wooden furniture the headspace of the open page the cigar box the leather binding As well as a whiff of a men's cologne popular in the turn of the century But last by no sleast The smell of fear Technology can only and that's what I would like you to smell. I think it's the fourth blotter Thank you Technology can only capture a facet of reality Other facets reside in our sensory perceptions and memories But it is only when you unleash the emotional component that you can get closer to evoking the past The artistic interpretation of the painter writer poet filmmaker architect Or perfumer are essential to reinvent the past And that's why at this intersection of scent memory art and technology I believe that personal creativity Can never be replaced as a vital ingredient Because these elements are linked together past and present scientific and imaginative chemical and subjective Beauty and even memory Will always be in the nose of the beholder This room has never smelled better Is Really like could we just hold that Our next speaker is Emily Spratt A Byzantine and Renaissance Baroque art historian cultural heritage specialist and strategic advisor in the art tech sector She's currently finishing her doctorate in the department of art and archaeology at Princeton University On the legacy legacy of Byzantium in the early modern period and recently completed a fellowship at the Frick collection art reference Where she consults and conducts research on computer vision technology Emily also advises startup companies that employ machine learning techniques for the analysis of visual media And was strategic advisor for artory Which she helped pivot into an art market and blockchain based business With a background in cultural heritage management having worked for the Hellenic ministry of culture and museums in Greece Emily has taught in the departments of art history and the program in heritage and preservation studies at Rutgers University And has been a member of the art and AI lab at the department of computer science In 2017 Emily curated a pioneering exhibition Unhuman art in the age of AI Which showcased the art produced by the icon algorithm In la frankfurt and was featured on cvs news Last year Emily organized with her colleagues at the Frick symposium the Frick symposium searching through scene optimizing vision technology For the arts and was the honorary guest editor for the special magazine issue on computers and art for the association of computing machinery and Her work is really at the forefront of this idea That artificial intelligence can help us rethink what heritage is And not just in the in processing the data, which is very important, but I think one of her Important contributions is in helping us figure out how to actually understand it ourselves how we how it gets played back to us so Please join me in welcoming Emily Well, it is my honor to be here today. Um as a part of this very compelling colloquium Thank you very much to all the organizers of the event In his 1995 essay archive fever or mal d'archive Jacques Derrida critiqued the role of technology in the construction of the information archive Largely as a response to the birth of mainstream email culture and the alarming potential of this digital record keeping system According to Derrida the archive was a pledge to the future of society as archival technology anticipated and fostered its very development Although the essay was written before hot mail Yahoo mail and gmail were even launched Almost a quarter century later. We exchange roughly 260 billion emails a day And the growth of data is outpacing the development of the computing technologies that can manage it This was anticipated although not quite on this scale Today the size of the data universe more than doubles every two years And machine produced data is increasing at 50 times the growth rate of traditional businesses The data explosion is so significant that industries of every variety are reshaping themselves to incorporate data collection and analytics into their practices And data scientists are widely sought to manage previously unimaginable collections with the tools of artificial intelligence Big data has become the ultimate archive But the records are so vast and challenging to interpret that the defining question of our time has become one of curatorship How do we curate this growing repository of digital information and what tools are needed to do this? In this presentation, I will discuss one component of this repository the visual data related to art and cultural heritage By examining some approaches to the ways that digital image and video collections are being managed I will suggest that the ontological function of image archives in our society Are undergoing a radical transformation Yet eight foreseeable trends may be observed as new types of engagement with visual data are being explored largely experimentally This metamorphosis is indicative of not only the visual landscape of our future digital world But also the structures of power inherent in the custodianship of the interpretations of these new collections Furthermore, it is important to underscore that the management of visual data Is increasingly being developed outside the parameters of the traditional archives location in a museum university or library As physical archives are increasingly being digitized and made publicly available The commercial world is quickly building the infrastructure to manage this information and this is not without political consequence Indeed as Derrida stressed the concept of the archive is at its etymological root inextricably tied to the notion of legal authority and the archons who delegate the law through the power of records Derivative of the ancient Greek word arheon the term archive refers to both a commencement and a commandment of the law And as is the case with all directives. There is an element of hubris in this assumption of authority For example a recently released a vodafone commercial demonstrates the confidence we have in the speed of our connectivity data streaming and vision technology to stand in for human sight itself Here a stuntman on a motorcycle is blindfolded by the Vodafone team so that he is entirely reliant upon the machine eyes of his mobile device to navigate a treacherous path He manages unflinchingly and impresses us with his expert handling of the bike We are left somewhat assured of the power of machine eyes to stand in for our own visual experiences of an event For Derrida however, this would be considered an unnecessary concession to the machine and a harbinger of shifting societal expectations of technology Today a very different type of computer vision than the one illustrated by the vodafone commercial is influencing our interactions with digital media This is a subset of ai called machine learning which emphasizes deep learning by using algorithms and statistical models to perform a specific task through the computer's examination of patterns and inference based observations of data without relying on explicit instructions on how the task should be accomplished What is remarkable about this burgeoning field is that the forefront of research is happening through the example The example of images and the concept of visual analysis in our digital world comes down to what I coin the machine learned image Let me clarify The archive preserves artifacts which constitute a collection and these artifacts are digitized to represent the physical archive Yet not only do these digital images take on a secondary role as artifacts in and of themselves They have become data points amenable to machine analysis These concepts come to life in the art installation by Ray Fiek Anadol from 2017 Once the digital images of artifacts are analyzed with machine learning This data becomes a part of a new interpretive constellation One that is not fully knowable yet posits all the structural elements of the singular image to be indicative Of its relationship with other images. It has encountered other machine learned images My first observation of the future of the archive is therefore not only the potential of machine learning techniques to reveal new relationships amongst its constituent parts Relationships that are dependent on other machine learned images But a growing emphasis on the relationships of data over the focus on a singular digital artifact Indeed my second anticipation of the future of art and AI is the trend toward valuing the entire Repository of visual information over the singular digital record The whole therefore becomes more significant than the parts and the collection gains significance Not for its masterpieces But for its potential as an interactive interrelational totality By extension the availability of a given data set becomes essential And in a world where fully digitized and publicly available collections are the exception Not the rule how this area of research takes shape will depend on which cultural institutions Make their archives digitally accessible This installation archive dreaming was commissioned by the salt research center in Istanbul To bring attention to its image rich collection of digitized Modern documents pertaining to turkey in the southeastern mediterranean world Using machine learning techniques anadol and his collaborators analyzed 1,700,000 records to produce this user driven immersive media installation that took place in san francisco in Istanbul Another exhibition currently in formulation for the williams college of Williams college museum of art by studio the green isle employs data from the metropolitain museum of arts open access initiative to display entire digital collections of art with a similar Encyclopedic approach to visual engagement with object records as we saw in the previous example aptly titled All at once the exhibition space is transformed into a digitally rendered kind of kunzkama or cabinet of curiosities A place where man's mastery of the world is articulated in his expansive collection of artifacts In the early modern period the kunzkama was a place of discovery and learning through the direct experience of objects that represented various worldly phenomena This was a place reserved for those privileged enough to gain access to it Today digital cabinets of curiosity are reserved for the tech enabled and allow for new means of discovery Which favor sight over touch? As viewers we can enjoy the visual panopoli of entire of an entire collection in a single viewing Yet this form of engagement is not without consequence and brings us to the third and fourth Anticipations of the future archive The default position of machine learned images is their treatment as equal parts Of the totality they represent Unless explicitly weighted by a programmer to be interpreted differently Individual record digital records undergo something of a democratizing effect Simultaneously, there's a dramatic reformulation of scale that catalyzes our expectation that every digital artifact Be seen as the same size without regard to the physical parameters of the object itself This particular image group of late Byzantine icons drive from my own Research photos and scans and while they appear here all roughly the same size Not only are their digital formats different the actual objects They represent vary from the size of one's fist to the dimensions of your average old master's portrait Not only does size matter in our interpretation of an artifact It is dangerous to assume that all digital records have equal values as this could lend to the creation of a narrative About the machine learned image which may be divorced from the historical truth of the object it represents It is therefore essential that these constructions of visual engagements with archives and collections are built hand in hand with scholars from the humanities At the Frick collection and art reference library one collaboration project We are pursuing with researchers in computer science and and engineering at stanford and cornell Includes using transfer learning to automatically label the 1.2 million images in the museum's photo archive Essentially, this means applying pre-trained image classification algorithms to examine the visual content of the collection Thus creating a rudimentary Iconographic index of the photographs with better efficiency than only relying on the dataset From the collection as a source from which the computer makes an analysis of the images This project and a number of other recently built visual search tools Will greatly aid archivists from having to label digital images by hand and support the creation of a strong Foundational data from which to build even more useful machine learning based analyses of visual data The formation of ferros the international consortium of european and north american art historical photo archives Which has a research commitment to make their collections digitally available And amenable to the latest digital tools for curation is a promising sign of the direction that cultural institutions are moving A basic image recognition tool specifically designed for italian renaissance art has already been developed by john racing for the consortium In the same vein the metropolitan museum of art has recently created collaborations with Microsoft mit and wikimedia through the results of a recent hackathon to increase viewer engagement with the collection Given that the future museum will likely become more dependent on its reported number of viewers Clicking on its digital collection than its number of visitors to its physical collections The emerging curatorial potential of digital holdings will no longer be sidelined Like the initiative to correctly label images in photo archives The med is collaborating with wikimedia on a project that uses machine learning to automatically tag features in a work of art Once these labels are generated for a given artwork They are then made publicly available to allow for the verification of that label with human supervision Here is my contribution verifying that a mountain appears in the painting of labgo maggiore Only inaugurated on january 31st This project has great future potential to enhance the quality of online visual searches of art And is creating a future training data set more suitable to the image recognition requirements of digital images of art Than the generic go-to data sets that are usually employed These examples demonstrate the fifth anticipation of the future archive Which is that foundations are being built with machine learned images to allow for new forms of discovery That privilege visual engagement and foster visual curiosity In the next examples that I will provide I'd like to highlight another AI technique that is transforming our conception of the archive This is the use of gans or generative adversarial networks Which are essentially two deep neural network architectures composed of a generator And a discriminator to selectively create new content once having been trained on a given data set An mit based project called gen studio led by sarah schwetman Utilizes the Mets digital images to map the relationships of visually similar objects With the use of gans an image representing the visual relationship between the mapped objects at a given point is produced In this example, I chose the category goblet and picked a point in the upper register of the map On the left side, you see the image of a gan produced goblet that the computer has created To represent its formulation of similarity to the other goblets in its proximity To be clear the goblet on the left does not physically exist But is what the computer visually comes up with as a goblet in its relative comparison to the other real goblets Outside of the interesting questions that this project raises about formalism What I find most remarkable about the use of gans in the art and cultural heritage sectors Is that digital collections of objects that do not actually physically exist Nor were created by human hands can be produced nearly ad infinitum In the case of the goblets, this could be useful in creating a training set of images to enable an algorithm to better identify unlabeled digital images of goblets Indeed one of the biggest barriers to using ai techniques on digital image collections of art Is that the data sets are too small Employing gans to produce more training examples of visually similar objects could allow for the creation of increasingly effective machine-learned images What the consequences of this will be on the hermeneutics of the collection, however remain unknown At this point in time, we can simply make the six observation that attention to the formal qualities of art is resurgent And that the processes inherent in vision tech applications are influencing this movement While these modes of interaction with visual data are still largely experimental They have great potential to disrupt our notion of traditional image collections Especially when the computer generated image is not easily discernible from the digital image of the actual physical thing represented A research group at Berkeley recently addressed ways to enhance the performance of generative models In one trial, they trained their algorithm on a data set containing the headshots of celebrities and were able to produce these results While a close examination of these images does indeed reveal that they are not real photographs of actual people It is alarming how convincing these machine generated celebrities actually are Although not intended to be viewed as an art collection They are just figure 10 in a computer science paper These results are outstanding It follows that our seventh anticipation of the future archive concerns the ethical questions raised by our ability to make a new face A new record a new object a new artwork a new archive or a new collection Which are only indirectly related to that which exists in the physical world of things What will constitute the authenticity of a given record is therefore a subject that I expect will come to define This age both philosophically and legally Already much distrust is brewing in this domain Nonetheless, both the potential creative and security related uses of machine generated material are transforming our notion of the archive In a 2016 NIPS paper first authored by Carl Vondrick, who is now here at Columbia The ability to produce machine generated videos based on the predictive outcomes of scenes was demonstrated In this generation of beach scenes the machine anticipates the movement of the beach walkers and the crashing surf of the waves And in this slide, you see the predicted movement of trains I see these outputs as art in and of itself But in this type of research that will be used to verify that the videos in our historic archives are authentic That the news you are watching has not been tampered with and that our videos have no gaps In maudakiev derrida saw the managers of the archive as bearing the responsibility for not only the physical security of the collection But quote holding the hermeneutic right and competence of them The archivists are thus the ones who have the power to interpret the archive And their contents have the power to speak the law end quote In the age of ai we must ask What what rights are we willing to give the machine to interpret our digital records? Once we outsource the act of interpretation We also concede part of our custodial powers over the ideas the archive was intended to represent This in turn affects the discursive history of the archive which becomes a part of a new system of knowledge production I am not at all suggesting that we cease developing computer vision technology for reasons of trepidation No The issue is that the notion of a strict binary between what constitutes human and machine based analysis Is in fact becoming increasingly gray and with this come sociopolitical consequences For this reason my final anticipation of the future archive is something of a warning of the misleading anthropomorphizing descriptions we give to the machine We are quick to describe deep learning processes as dreams hallucinations and even memories But by doing so we imply that the machine has a psyche Which is fueled by unconscious desires It is now more imperative than ever that we disambiguate our terms and clearly explain what our algorithms purport to perform In conclusion, I am privileged to be allowed to share a video of an installation by Mario Klingemann that goes to auction in london next month for southerby's contemporary art sale On two screens gan produced images trained on a select data set of portraits from the 17th to 19th centuries Are projected according to their gender Rather than emphasizing the production of a singular image the data encrypted algorithms Ceaselessly generate new faces Never allowing the viewer possession of any one portrait Indeed what you see projected in this video has an almost impossible mathematical probability of being generated again This portrait machine of perpetual creation Contained in but one artwork yet also uncontainable in its act of constant disappearance Masterfully demonstrates the aesthetic frontier of the machine learned and generated image The archive fever is blistering and even elusive in our age of AI But the blinded stuntman landed flawlessly Our final speaker is Carlos Bayaud Carlos is a director at the factum foundation and is our is is a professor here and Carlos's arrival at columbia together with his colleague adam lo was really transformative for for the program because they brought an expertise in digital scanning and replication that helped us to really advance that area within within the program And they've continued to to replay data with and to help our students understand Just how difficult it is just how difficult it is to do what you know, we see And appear so to be so simple. So if anything they Carlos has really been able to unpack the complexity of it all I think we're so used to in these days of sort of youtube how to Videos where we just sit there and watch experts doing expert things and everything seems so easy Um, it's so refreshing to actually do the work something that Carlos was pointing to and and Carlos Ben A'im But Carlos Bayaud has really taken the students through the the the process And he has done this also by by pushing. He's the technology within factum foundation So he's been spearheading both new Scanners new ways of scanning heritage new ways of replicating heritage with some really extraordinary projects like The replica of tutankhamun's tomb and the replica of seti the first Tomb these are some really extraordinary Projects that have begun to really bring that these these technologies to a to a broader public And so here he's been really investigating that the the the nano or the submillimetric not nano, but submillimetric Capacity of of these technologies with our students and some of whom have then gone on to create their own companies like Andre and Haley a shout out to them back there and in the back So it's the beginning of a of an incredible transformation that We're going back to the first slide of the day of the preservation technology lab that Carlos has been a big part of So please join me in welcoming Carlos Bayaud Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for the introduction Thank you all the team organizing the pitch colloquium and I also like to say thank you norman for his keynote speech yesterday very inspiring um, I would like to talk about what can we learn out of the surface of things in the context of preservation and especially why is it important to develop new tools and new Methodologies for capturing surface of things. So what we do in fact in foundation is Developing new technologies digital technologies for visualizing and measuring The cultural heritage so one of our probably most famous project is What Jorge was mentioning facsimile of Tutankhamun There was this one of the headlines of the news covering the installation of the facsimile Near the original tomb in the valley of the kings. So this was a very important It was a very famous project, but we are now embarked into something much bigger Something probably more even more important than this is the tomb of seti the first For the last years. We have been recording every Square meter of the reliefs of the walls in this pharaonic tomb and We have been trying to apply different technologies in combination with color recording Photogrammetry, of course laser scanning in order to try to capture The current conservation state of the monument because the thing with this site is that for many decades It has been closed to the public for preservation so The idea is can we at once document The current state of this site and also eventually produce a facsimile that can bring again people to see this fantastic space We have been using different technologies as I say It's been working progress for the last months for the last years Because the goal is not only to capture The shape or let's say the architectural space of the different rooms But also focusing on the very detail of the walls of this Amazing relief on the walls that it's also possible to be captured with When you are working with high resolution Capturing technology. We are of course talking about non-contact recording. We are not Using invasive technology. So what we are doing is Recording the shape of the walls, but also the minute details That makes this particular area of the wall unique The scratches on the walls the different damages that have happened to the wall over the years So all this is thanks to high resolution recording So one very brief note about high resolution because Resolution can mean different things depending on the application you are looking for. This is the same object reproduced After being recorded with two different systems when we are talking about long-range scanning It is perfect for analyzing the facade of a building or a landscape but when we are Aiming to produce a facsimile a digital Replica that will have a physical component. We really need to be able to capture what is unique For example in this particular brick wall, not just a standard brick But what is unique about this one in particular? So that's why when we talk about high resolution, we are talking about 100 microns resolution. We are aiming about a higher amount of points of information Then can give us a closest closer correspondence to reality And this is not a very scientific concept how close to reality And I would say we are still looking about Looking to respond this question, but it's about Recording things in a way that we can keep learning more about it When we look at the reproduction. This is the reproduction of Room of seti the first we managed to Complete a series of rooms and then create a temporary installation In the antique museum in Basel in Switzerland Reproducing some of the main chambers like the hall of beauties or the main funerary chamber So this is the combination of all the different recording technologies Panoramic color photography laser scanning also combined with traditional craft skills This is always this combination if in our workshop between digital technologies and traditional crafts This facsimile this Real size replica was for a few months in Basel But the intention is that it will be installed in the valley of the kings near the original eventually. I hope sooner than later And this will be our answer to this idea of sustainable tourism. We believe that through facsimiles It will be possible to effectively It is actually possible to separate the act of preserving a monument from the act of Visiting the monument and then can be at different in places like this so I work like this It's challenging because it's a huge project But then the real challenge for us is what happens when we want to record the three dimensions of paintings So these are the most complex most difficult objects for us so As you can see when you are looking when you are capable of seeing the surface of a painting is because it's not properly lit So the illumination is not correct But at the same time you need this combination of color and relief to understand the character and the uniqueness of a work of art This is why we developed our own tools the lucida 3d scanner For example, it's a laser scanner specifically developed for capturing the surface of paintings and other low relief objects And this is what we've been doing So when we are for example recording a painting by rubens a panel painting like this one in the museo del prado We are capturing the color with a different system. Let's say with panoramic color photography But then we want the 3d scanner To to ignore the color and we want the 3d scanner to focus on capturing the relief of the object Okay, so we are suddenly In front of something that is not just a flat image. So suddenly a painting is not Bidimensional image. It's something that it's more close to a landscape to a topography It reveals its true character as an object It's like if we were removing The layer of color out of a painting the destruction of the color virtually of course And then we can zoom in because we are talking about Very fine detail resolution and we can understand things like the thickness of the brush strokes We can read and measure the cracks on the wood in this case. It's a panel painting There are so many things especially if you are a conservator Or an expert not exactly like me in this case you can Try to look for certain elements on the painting that can give you a lot of information about the trajectory about the biography of this particular object So we have been recording over 180 paintings Um since we created this particular scanner And for example for panel paintings It is essential to record something before and after restoration as a way of monitoring how the object has been changing Uh with a process of cleaning or consolidating the panel Or simply just for monitoring change over time in works of art This is possible. Thanks to this type of 3d scanning when we are talking about canvases Of course, we have been recording Paintings there are abstract paintings in which there is already A consciousness about the texture So sometimes the texture is very evident the three-dimension Quality of the painting is more evident But in other cases like in the black square by malevic The texture is much more subtle We are talking about Appreciating and I learned to appreciate over time these very subtle qualities of Supposedly flat objects like this type of paintings This information where I'm showing on screens is basically renders. It's simulation of the relief We are this is not just like a raking light Photography we are actually capturing a 3d model that then we can reproduce But essentially this type of information is something you can combine with other layers of data Which they have been doing in museums for a long time like X-ray analysis infrared Ultraviolet, etc You can combine all these layers together with this one with the relief which is not like Seeing through the painting is effectively the opposite. It's like a top layer that can add another Set of new information for those in charge of taking care of the object or just for the public We have been of course using this system for recording wall paintings frescoes And in these cases the topography what they call the The low frequency relief is more evident it's something that When we are talking about reproducing this type of objects It's in a way easier because there is already a high topography That we can reproduce for example when we are recording a medieval map Like in this case that already has a lot of wrinkles and bumps So when we want to reproduce objects like this we normally use CNC milling machines like Susstructive technology for fabricating something like this and then maybe reproducing it as a plaster reproduction So it can be converted into a tactile object something that used to be very fragile thing It can be something people can touch But then What happens when we are interested in objects that are much more Flat like for example drawings or a cartoon in which the Low frequency relief is very shallow very flat, but we are interested in very Detailed Characteristics on the surface like punching marks or small foldings So It is essential to use just a different type of technology. We are we have been working In a very innovative process with othe a canon company that they have developed this type of Effectively like 3d printing with layers of ink. Okay, it's like stacking layers of ink and for the first time It is giving us Even more resolution in the reproduction side that we can actually record So with milling with routing. It's kind of the opposite We always have more information on screen or in our digital files that we could reproduce but with this type of I would say revolutionary 3d printing Technology which is possible to combine relief and color at the same time We are actually A bit behind of what is possible to reproduce. So then we will have to keep updating our recording methodologies Then how you apply the color right that's for another lecture not for today But of course there's it would require another Field of expertise how you combine the layer of color with the layer of relief At the end we are in an architecture school and I am myself an architect So we have been always wondering how to apply this type of Super highly detailed recordings to the world of architecture or more specifically to the Preservation of architecture. So this is what we have been Working thanks to this collaboration between the factum foundation and the historic preservation program here in columbia and we have been Trying to answer the question of how to apply Close range recording to architecture or I would say even better to how to try to ask the correct questions And in the last years with this studio I will show you some examples of how we have been trying to address this issue The collaboration of the factum foundation with the program consists basically on providing access to Projects and sites and buildings in which the surface is essential to understand their complex history And we are also helping with Providing expertise and equipment in order to record them. So for example in the case of the church of sambaudelio in spain It's a monument that actually exists in fragments because the wall paintings were removed Near 100 years ago and they are now scattered in different museums throughout the world So we were trying to apply these different recording technologies photogrammetry laser scanning To document the structure of the building in spain and also the paintings in the museums For example in this case here in new york in the cloisters museum the metropolitan museum As a way to try to bring back together these two elements the structure of the building that now Looks like completely Empty in spain with the actual information that is contained in the wall paintings So we have to do that. Of course not physically It is not possible to reintegrate those frescoes back in the church But it is possible to try once you have the information in high resolution You can try different digital methodologies to try to Provide a more complete experience when understanding and when reading this monument This project for example has been continued by haley ramos and andre hauregi By trying to propose an approach based on mixed reality specifically with augmented reality to facilitate To those visiting the church the experience of seeing The paintings that were recorded in museums As a way to provide a more authentic experience so in a way originality and authenticity It's also a complex relationship and their project is Exactly trying to give an answer to this We work a lot in italy especially in venice And it's obviously as frederick explained there's so much you can read out of the Architectural history in venice we were recording the trophy wall in san marx square also in in As part of this preservation technology studio And this is not with the aim of making facsimiles in this case It's more as a documentation project in order to understand the large scale of architecture Through analyzing through try to reading and visualize the close Scale of details of the material we are talking here about stones from different origins different types of marble And we will be working more and more in venice as Also was mentioned before this new initiative called archive analysis and recording of cultural heritage in venice In collaboration with fundazione cini and digital humanities lab We will be trying to close the circle. So in a way we are Putting technology for recording things and then with the digital humanities lab It will be about interpreting this data and extracting knowledge out of that One last example I want to share with you is what we have been doing just a few months ago in Seville in spain in casa de pilatos. So this is a very special building. It's a renaissance palace that contains a very unique a collection of 16th century tiles and They are in generally in general more or less well preserved, but The tiles are suffering the effects of the just the time passing in the structural stability of the building so the Different cracks that can be discovered in the tiles and the way some of them have to be replaced So it's a silent but Progressive decay of this specific part of this building So we were recording In a very intensive week with the students just last semester In an extraordinary teamwork that we were able to capture Almost a third of the more than 120 different designs of tile Examples that were across the building The idea of a project like this is as with other examples What can you learn about the building as a whole by analyzing Specifically in the sub millimeter scale And then how can you bridge this gap between the large scale of architecture and the small scale of analyzing art elements like these ones so This is basically Attempts of trying to close this gap between scale and I I'm sure that thanks to conversation with all of you With the faculty here with students. We are trying to Envision new uses for this type of technology that we cannot even see right now So at the end beyond of replicas beyond the use of making facsimiles The importance is how to transmit this information to the future generations How you can use as much as possible the available technology for recording the current state of things before they change before they decay even more And of course just to remark that the technology Is there so we have seen it today with all the presentations And the technology is there to be used I wish we had Not not the whole evening, but the like another year so for us to to discuss this in the spirit of them Of the day and the notion of experimentation. I am going to Try to experiment with the format of the panel So I am not going to necessarily ask you a question about your own About your own talk, but I'm going to try to pull things from each of your talks and ask Other people like each of you to reflect on each other's talk And so I thought that I would begin with With uh taking an idea from our nose talk And ask uh ian about it And that is the notion of the avatar When I was looking at our nose presentation. I kept thinking of the movie avatar And so I I I pose I I I I I put the word avatar before you and ask you that That's my prompts and think about so minimalist minimalist prompts. Um Well, I mean, I guess the thing I think of Based on the the minimalist prompt you've given me is that it's It's often as interesting to be somewhere else than to be someone else And maybe it's even more interesting. Um, or differently put when you are, um, a place In reality or in virtuality in a in another environment Then you get to fill in all of these blanks about about what has taken place there or what might and and some of those can be Uh, you know constrained by an understanding of history or a framing of a of an experience um So, you know the this need that we that we feel and this is a fictional Exam, it turns out that that was not a real story avatar. I hope I'm not breaking any Right. No spoiler alerts. I think I've seen the No, but you know, it's it's hollywood. And so the you know the desire is to get you inside of another character's Experience and then that's literalized, you know in this very Kind of cloying the deliberate way in the in the figures. This is like this is an incredibly popular movie, right? Huge amounts of money people are making more of them because people really liked Avatar so that's the there's that temptation about you know wanting to occupy another body, but in fact I feel like in my hearts that it's more interesting to occupy another space because then it's Then it's your body in in that in that environment, right? Anyway, that's that's that's my my thought based on your minimalist prompt Well, we'll do a couple minimalist prompts and then we can have a larger conversation Um, Emily, uh, I'm gonna go super minimalist because now you now you push me into the minimalist Emily empathy I feel yeah Okay, um A subject that also came out of your talk And and also carlos is I think yeah, there's a lot of I would say that um One of the points I was trying to make in in my presentation. Sorry to dodge this little bit in fact of what I'm working on But is this idea of how Collections are being reformulated and the attention away from The singular masterpiece to the idea of the whole the totality the repository at large And I think that that in a sense desanitizes our understanding of art And um, I think I think it's concerning. I think more attention needs to be brought to The nostalgic element that we have with the act of viewership with aesthetic perception In and of itself, um a company. I was recently reviewing actually has an investment model by Purchasing works of art putting them in storage and then having multiple people own a piece of it through the blockchain Um This to me is very sad Um, we shouldn't have an aim of art only as investment to be simply Locked away. I think uh at the end of the day, there's something deeply Emotional deeply engaging with a work of art which acts as a sort of gateway in terms of our Emotional response to something a connection to a memory Uh to something and and it's through that then that we can form that relationship So I think right now, um, it's fascinating that neuroscience in particular is really rediscovering all areas of perception and uh, certainly more work on things like mirror neurons could be helpful in Figuring out what's actually going on in the the act of empathy, which is is very complicated And so if we can use uh technology as a way to sort of explore this frontier a little bit more I think that would be great, but I think uh, I think cognitive scientists should be involved too Are no I couldn't get minimalist enough. So I think I'm going to have to use a couple a couple words. Um I think from, uh, carlos's talk separating preservation from Visitation or experience direct experience Yeah, I think that's a really interesting one that kind of stuck me when you when you said it because um, I find that What we see as as A connection or understanding A piece of art or locations So if you would let's just say we're going to to a temple or tomb And the real one and you make an association with that place because it is real And it is there and it has a history as in the history of it is actually there the history of the replica Is just you creating it. That's his history, right? That's what the history of it is. It's it was built in a it was built in a In a studio. That's the history and its history ends there as in its actual physical history So then it kind of how you feel about that when you go to different ones and I think maybe maybe some maybe there there needs to be a way to to Still still make people feel that they're connected to that piece Even though they're walking into it and the history is just is not there not saying the replica not good enough It's more just it will never be because it's still a replica, right? It's not possible for it to ever be when it is I'm sure that's the bane of your life You're re-creating things it can never be the real one Even as much as we try to replicate things and I do that day in and out I create digital versions of everything But I never I never feel that I will ever get to a point where I recreate something As they'll always be two sides to it always be two parts and we'll never merge them. Why I don't feel that Since we're going experimental, can I just add one thing to that? So By contrast, I would actually maybe almost even argue against that and the critical theorists Had some ideas about the notion of the ontological possibilities of the replica and a really interesting essay by Theodore adorno On the culture industry actually talked about the replication of music jazz in particular as Both being terrifying in that it lost its meaning But on the other hand that certain replications of things could take on an enhanced meaning That would actually surpass the original thing And so there's something about why is it that in fashion certain things come back in style? We don't need to get a pair of bell bottoms actually from the 70s We want a pair that has been produced now because the design is getting it a little bit better That somehow we're replicating that moment the nostalgia for what that thing represents better than what it represented In its original creation And so I think that you have a point But on the other hand there are other possibilities for the the life of the digital replica Yeah, I definitely agree with that too Carlos Play Well, that's what we do every day actually That's our work We play with our minds we play with our imagination we play with you know, that's how How we create is through play I think that you know, I saw a statistic that was so interesting Which was that when they did the IQ of not the IQ but Some kind of indication of the genius quality At three years old you had the maximum Possibilities of creativity And then it goes downhill from there And there is sex until 18 So whatever we can We create a little bit of that Immediacy and spontaneity is what we try to do every day Since you've introduced a new Variable into the into the experiment. Does anybody want to Jump in I like to say that by seeing your presentation Carlos's presentation. It's If I had to propose some similarities to what we do is This obsession in the good sense of the word that trying to Once you have this vision or this intuition then it's about Looking for all the different ways of possible To try to replicate that feeling for example when you were mentioning that by Trying to remember how to compose chemically A specific memory you had from childhood So all this curiosity to try to dig down into what Are the components of all that that it's composing this memory And then trying to replicate that in the form of a perfume. I found this I like to think it has something to do with what we do as well, so Can I can I ask you