 Okay, welcome everyone. I'm Matilda McQuaid and I'm acting curatorial director here at Cooper Hewitt and I'm here to welcome you all to behind the design series, which is a lunchtime discussion where you can hear from our conservators and guests which we have today and curators about our collection and exhibitions. I wanted to just briefly kind of say that we our next program is going to be in July, so hopefully you can all tune in then. We are going to be focusing on emojis and celebrating World Emoji Day and we are going to have a guest panelist there too as well as access to a documentary film about emojis. So please register when the link is available. So I want to just thank Phoebe for helping to make this all possible, the behind the design, and also to Emily who's going to be working her magic and directing people from the chat to the Q&A. If you have questions please put them in the Q&A which is at the bottom of your Zoom panel and I will be moderating those questions. So today it's exciting. We're going to hear from Andrea Lips who's the associate curator of contemporary design here at Cooper Hewitt and then objects conservator Jess Walthew and then a guest Eric Rogenback who is the founder and creative director of Stamen Design who created what you see behind Andrea Lips and her background watercolor map tiles which is a web-based open source mapping tool that displays open street maps data with the beautiful texture of watercolor paint not the kind of hard print that we were so used to on our Google Maps and Apple Maps. So and I'm proud to say it's the first website acquired by Cooper Hewitt and maybe the Smithsonian and so we're going to hear more about what goes into digital collecting and which includes this website. So welcome Andrea, Eric and Jess. I'll kick it off to you now. Cool, thanks Matilda. I am going to share my screen with you. Alright, everyone can see that? Cool. So Matilda, thank you again for the introduction. Thanks to everyone for being here today. Whether you are joining us while you're having lunch, if you're drinking coffee, maybe you're having some wine depending upon where you are in the world. I am absolutely tickled to be here with Eric and with Jess. The two of them have both been my co-conspirators and partners in crime on this journey to acquire watercolor map tiles. So we are incredibly excited to share the story behind this exciting new acquisition with you. As Matilda mentioned this is a web-based open source mapping tool that Eric designed with his team at Stamen back in 2012 and this is the first website that Cooper Hewitt has acquired but notably it's the first live website that has been acquired by Smithsonian as well as actually any museum within our sector. And in order to make a live website collectible, what we had to do was gather and archive the code and the assets. We had to bound the work and we then worked closely with Eric and his team and Smithsonian's own IT office to copy the live site to a Smithsonian version where it is hosted and will be maintained. And so this is what you are actually seeing here is a screen recording of Smithsonian's version of the site and this is going to be made publicly available imminently. So I'm going to tell you a little bit more about this but in order to contextualize how we got here, I need to tell you about where we started. So collecting digital design for Cooper Hewitt is nascent. I mean it really is nascent for the museum sector at large but it's something that many of us are pursuing with great vigor and at Cooper Hewitt we've only been doing it for 10 short years. It was actually in 2011 that we acquired our very first digital work which is this digital typeface, the Clearview Highway. The intention behind this work was to allow for greater legibility at increased distances of highway signage and we brought it in as a digital font on a CD as one does in 2011. And we realized that we didn't have curators or conservators who really were overseeing this work and so a couple short years later in 2013 we actually had members from our digital and emerging media team who brought in Planetary which was the first iPad app that was collected at the Smithsonian. So Planetary took your music from your iTunes library and visualized that as stars, planets and moons. And so this is the first time that we had collected source code that we made publicly accessible via GitHub repository. We brought in a printout of that source code which you see here on a shelf in our storage facility as well as a bunch of archival documentation. But what we didn't do was maintain this in any sort of interactive or performative way. So what we found for short years later when we did a conservation assessment was that it had already broken that the source code had deprecated and was incompatible with the contemporary operating system because obviously what ends up happening is with the constant developments in hardware and firmware and web protocols, all of that means that software itself must also be in a continual state of evolution and we anticipated that it would take months of a developer's time to upgrade the app to a functional state. So this was important for us though to, you know, of course, really understand that we needed to begin wrestling with this new medium within the museum's collection and the importance of bringing it into the realm of curators and conservators who are trained to collect and care forward. We just didn't know how to do this. I mean, we're all kind of making it up along the way. So we formed a digital acquisitions working group at the museum, very much sits at the nexus of all of our kind of individual levels of expertise and practice. So we have curatorial representation, conservation, at the time we had some representation from our digital media and AV team, which really helped us explore the embeddedness of any of these works and how we would bring them into the galleries. So at the outset, this is in like 2016, you know, we started kind of building our own expertise, attending conferences, talking to colleagues doing a lot of knowledge sharing, and a lot of reading to really begin to think about what it means to collect digital work. And we found the work of Fernando Dominguez Rubio in particular to be quite helpful to us. And this particular piece that he had published with Glenn Wharton, we found to be very salient. So for them in advancing their model about how digital fragility itself impacts the museum practice, they identified four ways in which digital digital works push against standard museum norms. And one is that digital works are circulating rather than stable, stable objects, they must be in perpetual motion in order to be kept alive. And of course, I mean, that is like the antithesis of what traditional museum practices want. Digital works are multiplying rather than singular. So these are endlessly proliferating works. Digital works, are we generated or constantly remade, again, as opposed to being authentic objects, and they are distributed, rather than being discrete objects. So they are scattered across different property regimes, spatial and temporal regimes, a perfect example is actually planetary itself. You know, because of course, you have the intellectual property existing with the design studio who had created it. It's built for Apple's operating system. It uses iTunes music, you know, so that of course is spread across this distributed property regime. But at the same time, what are we collecting? So with with these particular types of works, you know, we're collecting with source codes, whether that comes in the form of a GitHub repository, whether we get these nested file structures from designers, all of which end up in our digital asset management system. You know, we really also need to think about like, you know, is that the work? I mean, certainly, this is the medium of the work itself, but it's only when it's assembled and performed as it become the work. So in order to show the work to the public, and in order for us to actually preserve the work and to ensure its functionality, we need to translate the source code into the piece that it is. And so this is where things like interactive visualizations and websites like Eric's work become very unruly and nebulous for us in museum practice. So we started trying our hand at this. This is a work called On the Origin of Species by Ben Frye. And here you see him visualizing the different changes in and excisions and additions to Darwin's six editions of his very seminal text. And shortly after we acquired this, we put it on view in a collection space exhibition. We displayed it on a monitor with a touchpad from the period. We thought this was really great because people were interacting with it and you know, could see it and and play around with it. But once the exhibition closed, the work reverted to code that is otherwise inaccessible until we re-embed it in an environment whether that environment is a web based environment, whether it is on again, another type of monitor display kiosk in the galleries. You know, basically, we actually do not know if this work still functions until we are able to access it. Same thing with visualizing the Cosmic Web. This is another interactive visualization by Kim Albrecht and the Barabasi lab in which they are visualizing the three different network models for the connections of stars and galaxies within the universe. And so with this, before we brought this work into the collection, we had actually displayed it as a video in our last design triennial. And so we maintained the video, we have that as documentation of the site. But of course, what we collected itself was the source code. That's what is in our digital storage systems. And we are very eager to, you know, take it out of this latent state sooner rather than later to have a performative active experience of it, to ensure that we are able to maintain it and to ensure that there is not irrecoverable loss. So all of this, then, has really helped us internally at the museum to realize that while we collect and preserve the source code, and of course, the archival documentation around these works, it really is in the performance of that work that enables us to maintain it. And so we are now always looking at how we can get to that sweet spot to that nexus between these three things. And we're always trying to acquire and preserve works in that space. So a goal is, is not only to preserve the work in its dormant state as the source code, but to preserve it in a way that makes the work accessible in its performative state. Again, thinking back to Rubio and Wharton, you know, digital works exist as circulating, they must be in perpetual motion in order to be kept alive. And so all of that lands us here to watercolor map tiles. And so this is a work that we have spent a couple years untangling in order to acquire and preserve it in a state of perpetual motion with the goal of ensuring future stewardship. And within this process, we found ourselves on the edge of precedent experimenting with a new acquisition and preservation model for the museum sector by not just acquiring an archiving source code and assets, but by treating that source code is living and privileging the active performative state of it in order to keep it alive. So what we collected with this again, we collected the source code, we have made it publicly accessible via GitHub repository, and we actually brought in over 56 million map tiles, which are the individual 256 by 256 pixel JPEG files. So Eric, that I think is has won the record for Smithsonian of the largest group of files, or anything that we have ever collected. And of course, we have lots and lots of archival documentation. And we made this, again, accessible. So you know, we worked very closely with Eric, and his team and with developers at Smithsonian to copy all of the assets onto our servers and to host it on our on our domain again, which is going to be publicly available shortly. And what you are watching here is again, it's another screen recording of a site behind Smithsonian's firewall. And so what you can see is that, you know, the work itself, it's it's zoomable. It's searchable. It is actually downloadable. All of this is built on open street map data, which itself is a collaborative project to create a free oops, sorry, editable map of the world. And, you know, for us, all of this was important because for one, we really saw watercolor map tiles as flattening a user's ability to access and integrate the map in a web project. And so I mean, you know, Eric, you guys over at statement, I mean, you made this as like as bone simple as possible, you took something that was highly difficult, and that needed a lot of resources, you basically like gave it to people for free. I mean, users don't need to sign up, there's no API, you just copy and paste the embed code to put it onto a website. And you would like you have a map, you can screenshot it, you can, you can put it on scarves, you can make posters with it. I mean, it's it's, it's really, really cool. You know, but, but more than that, I also remember seeing this work even before Eric, you and I had started talking about it. You know, I mean, it very much I felt like expanded the visual vocabulary of digital interactive maps. I mean, it played with conventions and assumptions about what was possible with digital art by rendering this very hand wrought and tactile quality to an interactive digital work in many ways, almost reminding us and emphasizing that that these things are still made by people, even if they're generated, you know, by elaborative inch processing algorithms, they're still made by people at underneath all of it. And at the same time, and I would, you know, be curious later on Eric to hear your thoughts about this. I mean, I would also venture to say that maybe it expanded some of the conversations around a digital maps purpose, because, you know, this is arriving at a time in 2012, when the two mapping environments and the aesthetics of those mapping environments open street map and, and Google maps were largely utilitarian. And I felt like with watercolor map tiles that it demonstrated that a digital map could be more than about just getting a user from point A to point B that it could be in paging, it could be beautiful, it could elevate the human need to know where, which I think is really lovely. So we are excited about making all of this publicly available and accessible to everyone. And I do just have to mention this is not something that we arrived at easily, of course, at the outset of our process, we had conceptualized and examined a range of different acquisition and preservation models. And we presented these actually to Eric. And so we talked about early on, we talked about possibly a model of keeping this in the wild, if you will, with, in which the watercolor map tiles would remain under Stamen's ownership and maintenance with a natural lifespan, meaning that the site would work until it didn't. And so I remember very much talking with you, Eric, about that initially. We, you know, propose a possible transfer model in which the live site would be migrated from Stamen to Smithsonian properties. We conceptualized a captive breeding and gardening model in which the live site would be versioned and duplicated and then maintained by Smithsonian, so that you actually then have a site that remains in the wild as well as in captivity simultaneously. We looked at a seed bank model in which a preservation environment is archived for reimplementation at a later date. And then of course, a traditional archive, this is much more of like the space that we understood and felt comfortable in but knew that we needed to push further. So the traditional archive, of course, is one in which you keep the assets and you archive those without necessarily collecting the materials needed to resuscitate the work at a later date. And so in these conversations that Eric and I had probably like two years ago, we ultimately opted for the captive breeding and gardening model again, you know, really for us thinking about like how we could kind of, you know, get it into that sweet spot. And for us, we really felt like this model ensured the instantiation of the work by Smithsonian was even possible rather than abandoning it to an unknown future. We felt like it would create a preservation model in which Smithsonian could maintain a live version of the site over time. And of course, we very much wanted to maintain ethos of the project to maintain the free access and the public usability of the site that was such a central part of it when it was initially designed. You know, and so we very much were thinking about how the site can come to Smithsonian, not to die, but to live. And at the same time, you know, although there are going to be multiples of the site for the foreseeable future, you know, at some point, the natural lifespan of the site in the wild, you know, the site that's hosted by statement will end and Smithsonian's will continue on. And so this could lead to some very interesting future research and scholarship. So I'm going to stop talking for a moment. Jess is going to pick up the thread and tell you a little bit more. And then we're going to just have a conversation with Eric and and hopefully with all of you. I mean, definitely pepper us with some questions that until the books will facilitate for us. So Jess, over to you. Thanks. So understanding how to preserve this work required us to really delve deeper and understand its hidden infrastructure. So when a user comes to this page, as Andrea mentioned, you have this beautifully simple interface and all of the hard work has been hidden from you. And that includes all of the underlying infrastructure of digital assets being moved through space, how the data flows, how all of that works. So the function of the site requires managing large amounts of data through complex network of servers and services. And when statement initially presented us with a site map diagram, it was totally incomprehensible to us as non programmers. So making sense of all of this was a really collaborative effort. And we want to give our thanks again to the teams that could recue it at Stamen and at Smithsonian's OCIO, who are the web developers who helped to make the live site a reality. So as Andrew is mentioning, we were really interested in the performative qualities of this website and being able to have the live version function as an exhibition copy. Can you move forward, please, Andrea? So the the preservation plan, you know, those options that Andrea showed, they weren't mutually exclusive. We have both an archive and a live part of this sort of elaborate strategy. And Stamen had already hosted the original code for making those watercolor tiles and the original designers that had worked with Eric had written wonderful blog posts describing their process. So we knew that those were going to be critical parts of our documentation to put into the archive. And the original code and then this modified code that has been branched off have both been put into the archive. And there's also these map tiles, which are critical to both the archive and the live site. So we actually have those in duplicate all 56 million of those tiles have been put one copy into our digital asset management system, which is like locked down storage to preserve them forever unchanging. And of course, the other copy is in the production environment. So allowing people to actually access and use them. And in archival practice, it's usually not a good idea to have the same copy of things being accessed, because then you can't ensure their fixity over time. So there's really there is a tension within preservation strategy about considering these assets as the work and figuring out how we're going to preserve them and yet maintain access. That's why those sort of like overlapping bend diagram areas of preservation and access in the case of digital works, even though we think of them as being very entwined, they're also there's areas of difference between them. So I wanted to talk a little bit more about how the the sort of underlying dynamics are really non trivial. What we found was managing the transfer of the tiles from cloud server storage locations from place to place actually takes actually weeks. And so it in order to have secure transfer of digital assets from the cloud, you really have this this process that's actually taking a lot of time and needs to be managed and needs to be overseen by people who really understand it. So that's sort of a real I think a real shift from the way that we think of this instant ethereal cloud and things living in the internet is living in some kind of mythical space that doesn't exist and doesn't have any costs or infrastructures behind it. And so I want to move back sort of away from the you know the nitty gritty of this the sort of strategy we would develop to think a little bit more about the philosophy and this is something we've talked about with Eric a lot. So if you can move on to the next slide, Andrea, we we've learned through learning from our colleagues in time based media that for digital works this mantra permanence through change, which at first at first seems like an oxymoron. It's really restructured the conventions of the conservation field to adapt to the 21st century. So conservation of traditional objects in a museum lab like I'm sitting in right now. We usually think of that as backward looking. We think of it as focused on minimizing or preventing changes and focused on maintaining a work in as close a possible state to its creation. So it's original state. This is an approach that's focused on authenticity, but this doesn't really work for for digital works. So conservators of contemporary media have refocused attention on maintaining the identity of the work. So identity as opposed to authenticity, despite substantial changes necessary in order to maintain them as interactive, displayable, performed, functional. So Andrea has invoked this term performative. We rely really heavily on the literature of time based media and performance art in thinking about what we are doing to these works when we collect them into museums. As my friend, time based media conservator Dr. Brian Castriata has termed it the works of all over time and go go through processes of recentering. He argues that the core or essence of the works is defined through their iterative performance. And it's a construction based in the logic of museums and collections. So thinking about a works identity over time rather than its authenticity permits and requires us to understand it as evolving and changing. This asks us to really reconsider how we might embrace the works ability to live on in multiple places at once as versions, duplicates, copies, branches, forks, and all of these with shifting centers. While we've managed a variety of translations and changes from the original project to create the duplicated copy under our control. Some of those are visible. And some of them are really invisible to users. Again, this hidden infrastructure underlying all of the the elegant design work that Eric and his team have put into it. So one way of making literal this recentering of the duplicate at Cooper Hewitt is to have the project open centered now on Cooper Hewitt rather than in San Francisco. So when you go to the live website on Cooper Hewitt's version, you're going to be looking at an area that looks like this, which is New York City. And if you zoom in, you'll see that you're actually centered over us in Cooper Hewitt in New York. So what's really interesting to us as museum professionals is the fact that our version will have all of these changes that we can't anticipate right now. We're going to maintain our version to the best of our ability updating it to keep it current. We can't expect statements version to necessarily remain static either, but we won't be involved in their decision making and they won't be involved in ours necessarily. The products are going to diverge like two branches of a tree. And so it's going to become even more important for us to have been very clear and transparent about what we did and why. So this approach is still a little bit of an experiment. It may not be the perfect solution to all the challenges that we posed about how digital works really don't fit neatly into the box of museum collections, but we hope that it's opening up a really interesting conversation and one that gets at the heart of what these digital projects are now and what they'll be to people in the future. So I think I would just close by saying the processes of acquisition and conservation opened up these works to a level of scrutiny that asks those of us involved the designers curators, conservators, registrars and all our other collaborators within and outside the museum to really take part in collaboratively defining the work. So I'm going to bring me and Eric at this point into the conversation and ask, you know, first, like how crazy did we seem proposing this elaborate strategy to you? And can you speak a little bit about going through this process with us, which was really a long process. It wasn't like buying a single object. You negotiated all of these questions with us. And we again, will thank you so much for your generosity and going on this journey with us. Amazing. It has been a long conversation. It took some time, it took some doing. I guess what I maybe I'd start by saying that the thing that was very easy about all this is that the project was in intended and always has been pointed at, you know, the broadest possible audience. And so the idea that you might make some changes to it or show it in a different way than we were showing it was never really something to be worried about. Or, you know, we didn't we the whole point of this work is that is that anybody can do anything they they want with it. And many people have people have made products out of it. It's on lots of different websites. So it wasn't really an issue for us that it would be shown in some way or or that it would be we were sort of the opposite of precious about how it was displayed sort of by by design, like, okay, you want to point it at Cooper Hewitt? That's, you know, we didn't, we're not we're not trying to curate that part of the experience. The other thing I'd say is, is, you know, working with museums is kind of inherently it's wonderful to see the Smithsonian come around into this place of being cognizant of the differences between, you know, what this acquisition means and acquiring a chair or a printout. The work is very much of a moment, which is to say it was it was rendered off of OpenStreetMap and some other tools that we had built around it. And then and then we stopped, right? So it's the sort of it's another sort of thing that speaks to the malleable nature of this is that, you know, we could fire up the software and generate some new tiles, or we could regress to old versions of OpenStreetMap. There's so much fluidity in the whole process that that it doesn't really make a lot of sense for us to think about this as a kind of as the iconic version of it. It's just kind of where we stopped. And I think that's that's also reflected in some of the edges of the work like without getting too technical, the each one of these tiles gets rendered when someone requests them. Otherwise, you'd have to sort of render the whole world in advance. And that doesn't make a lot of sense, because it's just too big. So at a certain point, you see tiles that are broken and you see places where while the software was up and running, people just never, never looked what you're looking now. And that's something I'm quite fond of in terms of this conversation. And the acquisition is that it's, it's a way to think about a digital work that is, you know, growing and transforming and changing. But it's sort of it has its edges, it has a natural place where it where it stops. And so the acquisition becomes about that as well. Yeah, we were super intrigued to learn about that, that and to go in and to actually like search for some of these edges. Certainly found some, I think we found some in like in Cuba and in Chasa, and some other places, you know, that that really that the work's own use is baked into it. Yeah, it's so fascinating. I'm going to stop sharing my screen so that we can actually have like a conversation and I can see you guys. You know, one of the other things too, Eric that, you know, we've been talking about quite a bit is, you know, this idea around these these biological metaphors that we've been using, and how we frame our thinking around collecting and preserving this work, you know, I mean, thinking about this natural lifespan and, you know, we're kind of actively breeding it and, you know, requires this gardening approach. You know, do you find biological language appropriate for digital works for one outside of, you know, even museum processes? Is that something that you had ever considered? Yeah, well, I mean, the company's called Stamen, right? The whole thing is a is a biological metaphor. Not always the easiest to talk about. But yeah, I mean, this is this is the most intriguing part of this conversation to me, you know, from from the outside is this idea that that you would, I think we've talked about you using instead of using traditional conservatorship models for this, you've you've asked the National Botanical Garden for their or the or the National Zoo. And so this idea that you would that watercolor is being treated like you would acquire a magnolia tree or a tiger is, you know, a dream come true. And I do think it makes sense to I do think it makes sense to think of digital conversations as having a biological component, I think, especially in terms of this idea of a garden that that these things require tending, they are they require care, they're not they're not monuments. And so this idea that like I think the fun part about the biological metaphors is that we are familiar with them, right? I mean, we can have a botanical garden trees die, tigers die. They have children, you know, there's a there's a whole way of thinking about acquisitions and care that I think using biological metaphors for can really help the conversation. I think it's really great to be able to have this conversation also to to come back to this jumping off point that, you know, seeing the fragility of planetary something that had been acquired with explicitly this idea of code is living. That was sort of the precedent setter about how an app could be a living object. And I want to credit Seb and Aaron, who are working in our digital and emerging department, I believe Aaron is also a stamen alum. But I'm just going to drop in the chat there one post that they wrote about that work. But I think one of the things that that caretaking gets at is a little bit of fragility and this sort of like balance between thinking of things as needing a lot of investment and fragility versus like having a life of their own. And I was very intrigued by the way I think at initial discussions, you would talk about how this idea, which is very creative and outside the box came to all your opportunity leave with your the birth of your son. And and now we're looking, you know, pretty far down the line, like nine years later, you must have a third grader now. So I'm just wondering if you know, I also became a parent during the pandemic and it's been really interesting to think about this idea of fragility and control and letting something live its own life. I think that's been transformative to my own thinking as a conservator is thinking about how things that you create kind of have a life of their own. So maybe you could just could you just talk a little bit about that, how it might relate. Sure. The project had its start out of idleness and boredom. I we had we had had our son and I was taking some paternity leave and so I had some time on my hands. But also I was getting bored with just one more map style where you adjust the line weights and you make the fonts a little bigger and you know, everything seemed very clinical at a certain point, like I mean, you could put in patterns and things, but there wasn't anything out there that that expressed. I think that I wanted to try to get to something that would express the nature of the place more than just a sort of simple application of line weights and fonts and colors. So I wanted to blur the lines, so to speak, and to get to a place where different places look different from one another. It wasn't just the same kind of, you know, the thing with all these mapping technologies is that the way it seems is that it's sort of the hand of God just kind of stamping out these kind of, you know, identical, super crisp, super clean, you know, there's this sort of sense of them that there's this one to one relationship between the map and the territory. And of course, we know that that's not the case that mapping is an expression of aesthetics and the expression of power, that there's a there's a there's a politics to what goes on and what goes off the map. And so really the idea was to to get at a conversation that was about how these things get made, why they get made, who makes them those kinds of things and making that evident in the in the in the map making. And again, from the beginning, you know, it is it is sort of like having a child, you know, you kind of. You you do your best and you try to make it as good as it can be. And then people do what they what they will. And so I mean, my my trouble with this project was that for the first six months, it was hard for me to get any work done, because I would just constantly come into work and scroll around and look at, you know, the Forbidden City and look at Epcot and look at, you know, just look at look at Amsterdam, look at Beijing, and there's sort of this pride. There's a there's a there's a pride in it in the sense that, you know, oh, look, look what the algorithms did. Look how they treated that. Look at how those freeways mash up together. There's this kind of there's a playful playful aspect to it that hopefully comes across. Discovery aspect, but you know, but at the same time, too, so like that's the initial six months. I mean, did you have any idea nine years ago that, you know, you would be here with it and having conversations around the preservation of this work? I mean, this is the one thing, you know, it's like digital work is so it's it's inherently made to obsolesce, you know, it's built upon all sorts of other, you know, ecosystems completely outside of its control. There is a level of complexity that is extracted away from us so often. And, you know, and so this idea of almost kind of like wrangling something back, you know, to be able to preserve it, you know, what is that? What is that, you know, done for your own process even, you know, and thinking about your work? You know, I think you made mention of it in the talk earlier, the most stable medium that I know about on the internet is Vimeo. Like everything, everything dies. Flash died. I can't tell you how much work I can't show anymore because because it because it was in flash and you can't you just can't even pull it up anymore. So I guess what it's done is just part of it is that this idea that this work might actually last. I mean, I think I think being involved in digital work for the last 20 years, it's been such a flurry. And so many things have come and gone that this idea that that we might try to preserve any of it in a form that's not, you know, the internet way back machine is a is a is a wild thing to think about. But I also feel like the best way to approach this work is to not not hold on to too tightly and to kind of make something that can be viewed in as many ways as possible so that you're not stuck to one slice of it. And that's been kind of a core of all of our of all of our projects. It's like don't don't hold on too tightly like let let these things go pollinate them. I wanted to just kind of jump in because there's been some questions in the in the Q&A and I just wanted to make sure that maybe other people might have the same question. There's one that's unanswered from Yoni Nakmani and a slide. I saw that the Cooper Hewitt forked statements open source code base. How does the Cooper Hewitt think about stewarding a GitHub repository? I'm thinking about providing instructions to run the code responding to new uses pull requests and engaging with developers who fork the repository to rip off the watercolor style. I would love to recreate other artistic styles building on top of this work. Eric, you want to answer that one? Sure. Yeah, go go go please. I mean that would be that would be amazing. We'd love to see that. You know, again the anyway, there's so many conversations to have around free and and and support and develop acquisition and and or development and who has that kind of things. But but certainly from our perspective, I mean, so many people have made so many different things with this that I'd love to see it. I'd love to see it bloom further. And the other thing is that I wouldn't be able to stop you if I wanted to. So I think this this gets at one of the the really interesting questions that's been that we've been working on as we learn how to become stewards for digital works as the museum grows into this capability. And one of the things gets sort of a little bit at the question. Andrew had just asked Eric, which is, you know, how are you preserving your projects? So some of them are based on outdated technologies, but many designers today use version control collaboration software. A lot of people use GitHub. GitHub is a really great hub for all of this repository management. And yet there's a level of interpretation that people coming to it still need to to be guided a little bit. Like what are all the parts? And so I think the museum sees that GitHub is only one thread in this sort of like much larger approach of preserving the works and that, you know, the work, the assets that we hold separately from the repository, the assets that are, you know, freely accessible for people in the excess copy of the site. Like these are all just like little extra parts of it. It's like it's been exploded out into a million different different little sub parts that all contribute back to creating the whole. So a really, you know, an important question is right, who's going to manage the repository going forward? Will it be maintained? Will people be contributing to it? So at the moment we are waiting for our wonderful colleagues who have been modifying the live site to finalize their changes and fork over their version of the live site so that it'll be totally transparent what was changed from Stamen's live version of the site, which is up right now, to create our site. So there's a way in which the relationships are baked into the way that the software manages repositories. But that's not really like the interpretive level. And that's not really the museum discourse. And that's not really this like larger philosophical questions that we're getting to. So there's, I would say there's like different registers that the GitHub repository is one home, but we hope that Cooper Hewitt is going to create, you know, by re-displaying the work and displaying it in our galleries when the museum reopens and being able to, you know, give it a longer life. I think we're hoping that we're going to be providing maybe even a richer understanding of the work, a place where people can go to learn more to find video recordings with Eric describing his work, probably this recording will also be linked, you know, becoming a place where everything can sort of coalesce around this museum object in this sort of like eternal future that museums are promising, which of course, I think digital works really push us, they challenge us a little bit on this promise of the eternal future. And certainly most digital designers are not necessarily worried about future-proofing their work because they put themselves out of business and they did that. So there's also a business incentive for designers to constantly be chasing new, more interesting technologies that keep them feeling like they're working in things that are creative and pushing, you know, pushing forward their work. Eric, can you talk a little bit about the code underlying some of these transformations? So there's like the structure of mapping using map tiles, which has largely stayed the same, but then there are sort of the algorithmic transformations that you guys put together to go from a base map to this beautiful watercolor tile. Can you talk a little bit about now with like a historic perspective or were those novel types of implementing code or were you working with, would you use the same tools today, same tools and techniques? Yeah, when we, there was a legitimate question when we first put the project out of, you know, do you have an army of people in a room hand drawing these things based on server requests? You know, the whole, the whole thing was very, very custom, all credit to Zach Watson, our friend who's, whose memory this is a gift in the name of, and Geraldine Sarmiento, Nate Kelso, Mike Murgursky for working with me closely on a on a process that was very intentionally designed to be this kind of blend of the the hand and what the machine was doing. I can remember having conversations in the early days with, with, with the team where they were striving mightily to avoid any kind of overlap between the roads and the, and the parks. And I very gently encourage them to, to make it overlap. Like the whole point of it was that we were going to try and do some things here that were going to press the boundaries of, of what we normally think of as, as legibility for these maps. The code is very I don't want to say labor intensive, but it makes the machines when, when you do it and the developers get nervous when their machines are humming. So that was part of the conversation also was to come up with something that was practical enough to actually get into the world and render 50 million tiles or 60 or whatever it is. But also, but also stitch together and feel, feel coherent. Great. I think we have time for any other last questions. We have time for one more. Here's one. Can you speak to the different areas that you document for this and other digital work? Is there any effort to make this work discoverable on the web? I'm imagining this is for the museum side. We speak to the different areas that you document for this and other digital works during efforts to make it discoverable on the web. Well, so once this particular project is available and publicly accessible, we certainly are going to be linking to it from our own website. We are putting out a press release on it. You know, I don't know what other, you know, built in SEO or anything will happen. I don't know what's going to happen if you search for watercolor, you know, stamen watercolor matte tiles. You may get stamen and you may also get ours. And so one of the things that that we also did with this was on our version of the site when you actually first access that we did put pop up window explaining where you were that you were on Smithsonian's version of the site and we very intentionally wanted to do that so that there was a clear delineation and no confusion if you were if you were looking for statements and you really wanted that one versus ours or whatnot. So we are you know, we'll we'll, you know, put it out on social media and whatnot. So we do want to, you know, try to make it as as publicly accessible and to push it out there as much as we as we possibly can. And the other thing I will say about other types of digital work. So obviously what we're talking about here are specifically interactive based works. We do also acquire file based works, which are much more straightforward for us. They don't the file types are a bit more stable and they don't tend to deprecate quite as quickly. So we call those our long hanging fruit because we understand what to do with them. Whereas projects like this, you know, take like, you know, much more research and intensive investigation. And so we, you know, continue to just explore and experiment and and push the boundaries a bit with it. So great. Well, thank you, Jess, Eric and Andrea and thank you all for joining us today and stay tuned for the next behind the design which Andrea will also be leading. So you can get more you know, more digital kind of collection information in July too. So really appreciate it. This is great conversation. Thank you all. So much, Eric. Thanks. Bye. Thanks, Jessica. Thanks, Miss Rosa. Thanks.