 Thank you. Can everybody hear me? Yes, that's good. All right. Well, I come to you today with black rimmed eyeglasses with short and short wavy silver hair I join you from Chicago the traditional homeland and the people of the Council of Three Fires the Ojibwe Potawatomi Dawa as well as the monomony my Miami and Ho Chiang nations Located at the intersection several great waterways the land was naturally a site of trade travel Gathering and healing for more than a dozen other native tribes and it is still home to over 100,000 tribal members in the state of Illinois So it's my pleasure to be here And I want to start by saying we started off in a very good way this week with a generous welcome from the mighty team of organizers for this conference So as one of many thank yous and also Congratulations, Alex, Emily, Martina and Sarah My hats off to you. Thank you tech focus for For it's a series spanning years So I would be remiss if I didn't shout out make a shout out to Christina froner to a god to yard chick To mona Jimenez to Joanna Phillips, and I am sure there are many more EMG stewards to thank over the last years You've made a nexus A platform for open discussion and debate It's productive in one way for keeping up with the rapid fire technological advances in the sector But it's productive in another Because of the way that it has has made a trusted space to think to rethink and to imagine just what conservation is and what it can be As one of the tech archaeology hosts back in the day I tip my hat to an even earlier pioneering cohort To this very day lessons learned in that gathering sit right here on my shoulder and they remind all of us the change that has happened Artist gary hill evoked death rituals for artworks his sanctioned practice A provocation that i'm pretty sure hasn't actualized But one that really faced the limitations of our control in preservation The artist era burn bomb implored us when I when i'm running a marathon Meaning her art installations don't interrupt me in the 25th mile to ask me about what i'm going to do next time Advice like that led us to lift up the oral record As a bonafide research method and to meet people and artists on their terms where they are instead of dictating those terms from the institution The artist james colman made it very clear that the life of his slide-based works is reliant on the medium For james and for us It has meant fortifying the pillars of our professional our traditional practices by sustaining a bygone commercial medium Now i'm going to um confess that I resisted writing remarks in advance of this week And it was simply because I wanted to listen first and then reflect What a rousing few days we have been treated to big challenges And and exciting thinkers and I'd love to share ever so briefly takeaways from each of our speakers To recap but also to acknowledge and honor their work Day one was all about technological table seven The school of seeing officially became the school of seeing and touching I wonder how many other senses will be incorporated into our best work in coming years cyber headache innovators Look to the natural world around us for inspiration Aged wisdom and evolutionary smarts have us looking anew at the exquisite interconnectedness and balance we must keep with the natural world Has conservation adapted its fundamental foundations to respond to this moment Lisa Demetrius and Daniel Ostrov kicked off the conference by opening a window by letting fresh air into the room By taking us into the minds and practice of charles and ray eames into a world of the iterative Where failure was recast as misconception How is on art conservation productively iterated in this response? James weaver brought us to a world of ammonites mother of pearl sharks for design inspiration He was asked to reflect on the nature of collaboration and called out a mistake That being to work too closely within your discipline It ends up in his estimation all too often in a competition Working among people with vastly different backgrounds leads to new ways of solving problems It made me think of caroline jones and our historian at mit I I like I like caroline's work very very much and I recommend to you a 38 minute audio reflection entitled a common sense I'm gonna hit I think I want to hit this into the chat. Hold on Is it there? I think it is and It's a completely enjoyable listen in which she wonders how we will participate in the cultural evolution of the species Our virtual tech focus space has been replete with high tech chops Mark heller's true superpower has always been speaking clearly and plainly across expert disciplines And I think that in his explanation of gcode. We might have seen him communicating between expert machines Moreover in daniel lutolf who took us through intricacies of 3d printing workflows and post-production processing I believe we met mark swiss cousin Nick lee Brought production of filament extrusion or vet resin printing or powder bed infusion to my awareness as usable names He also demonstrated the ways that the built object is not one in the same with the designed object Moreover, he showed us how innovations and software and hardware jockey for position They chase and then they supersede each other to define what is possible Charlotte eng outlined the range of materials deployed in 3d printing providing vivid examples of palimera composite and inorganic materials in use today Day two was about keeping The pivot demonstrated the resourcefulness agility creativity and hard work of you You who maneuver within the existing scaffolds of learning we call museums libraries and archives Two questions at what point do we adjust the scaffolds? And if we do what is conservation's role in that work? Pella antinelli treated us to a flyover of her digital forays, and I still find it hard to imagine That moma's first website was built for three hundred and fifteen dollars She talked about change in her curatorial life a curatorial life happening now in all dimensions That is an invitation an invitation to see artists and artworks in all dimensions See our public with greater dimensionality And I wonder how this conference will bring greater dimensionality to come to conservation Her word trouble albeit in good trouble reminded me of Charles and Ray Eames supplanting the word failure with misconception. I wonder what word we can choose to supplant trouble In her inimitable way Emily Hamilton put her finger on the nub of a problem The ethics of refabrication asks us to think about what collections do Perhaps what we allow them to do To inspire creative ingenuity in our field we need only to look at those who design in this field we've been discussing this week Maybe art museums need to start collecting the science behind these 3d prints Sriga Quadrovi Quintana brought us into the world of copyright law in the u.s. And as I listened to Sreba I was remembering Jessica Walther's question to Paolo and Tenelli is anything uncollectible Interestingly Paolo in Paolo's opinion it was the proprietary restrictions that that makes something uncollectible Then we heard from Virginia San Fratell. Okay, I'm not going to lie immediately following Virginia's presentation I went to forest and purchased those incredible 3d creations for friends and families this holiday season Rethinking building from the bottom up whether salt Bugs spices or discarded rubber tires rethinking building using the materials around us Those are rich outcomes of experimentation and play Sarah Barak and Jessica Walther then treated us to the mechanisms of the museum devoted to these processes of design Working with Virginia to surrender to the discomfort of works like furry curry Sarah talked about bringing order to what seems chaos seemed chaotic. There's a word chaotic That has been around since 2017 To describe an organization that harmoniously combines elements of both chaos and order without letting either one dominate I Wonder if that new space Sarah and Jessica described as supplemental acquisitions has opened the door to experimentation and play In their discussion of cost of living Aleda by Josh Klein Margo Delado and Savannah Campbell asked how perhaps if Museums are willing participants in the process of change The uncertainty that goes along with that question lies at the root of this whole conference Now if day one was about table setting I'm going to call out day three as being about the meal We sampled every course and now we lean back in our chairs to talk Shirley'd say in Negotiated differences aims to let differences face off in pursuit of negotiation the old and the new The now and the unknown future the unique and the reproducible the functional and the non functional The handmade and the ready made She reminds us of one of art's great gifts and that is to see the world anew If we think about it attending to those works Can reflexively inspire and guide us to see our work anew Thank you to Olivia Chow Alessandra garden garascio and aga the alaka For dialing in from the middle of the night in Hong Kong just as m plus prepares to open It punctuates the perpetual process of cultural stewardship. It's always going on somewhere Struck by the parentheses that existed in their title The grammatical tool that that a parentheses is for inserting an afterthought in what would be a complete idea without it The impossible futures of Shirley'd say's work Impossible in parentheses. It reminded me of a couple of other titles A panel discussion that I participated in in Madrid many many years ago and titled collecting the previously Uncollectible Your our entanglements The why in parentheses is an essay written by Madeline Grinch-Stain about all of her Alliason's artistic practice The conditionality of language points to the ever-present messiness of human knowledge that flows From the artist to the artwork to the gallery to the museum to our publics and then all the way back again How does our work identify with this game of telephone? And also with the debates of our time Tobias Klein Intrigued me by the possibilities of supplanting the word error with lucky accident The idea is not known to us in human history But thank you Tobias for not only articulating a lovely new term to me. That is digital craftsmanship But also demonstrating it in your work Caroline Kuhn Matt Colisho's Matt Colisho's Zotro garden of unearthly delights was such an apt visual for your talk The immense value of the analytical research Units like UCL's Institute for Sustainable Heritage with resources that produce produce data about the vast Range of plastic formulations and 3d printing these units probe and answer questions encountered across the world the globe How will this unit's work be coordinated internationally? What questions will guide these efforts? sincere thanks to peter alexa for dropping in throughout the conference to share Oh, you're always thoughtful working processes when peter joined megan randall to discuss toba our box Alter engines specifically reprinting 40 mesh the hiccups they encounter could seem daunting Tuba our box alter engine illustrates the ongoing need for the skill sets we currently hold With the introduction of new rhythms of work and labor in the machine of the museum The reminder here Conservation the work that we do is part of something much larger Sarah scotora took us into the challenges of wearable 3d prints And for me it recalled nix nix lee's talk and the divide between an object's design and its construction It also reminded me of an entire field of study in architecture experimental design Ex fantastical structures of architects like lebius woods All of that fascinating and thank you, sarah for bringing us into this realm of fashion The opening paragraph of something i wrote in 2016 called in the wings goes like this Art sparks ideas and emotions that are one with everyday encounters in life It amuses confounds angers seduces bores excites frustrates and delights There are countless roles and practices for those faithful to the enterprise of art making stewardship scholarship and interpretation An ever-expanding array of materials and new methods of production prompt corollary streams of discourse and exchange All unfolding at a dizzying pace Meanwhile cultural institutions move slowly And while it is unlikely that anyone will topple over from the force of the new We are obliged to engage with these strong currents and to sway with the push and pull of perpetual transition We balance what lies ahead with what has come before Equilibrium exists in between Now I can't help but read this five years later and ask myself Which parts remain to true? And what reads already outdated? We face wicked problems A wicked problem is a term popularized in 1992 by professor Richard Buchanan It refers to the extremely thorny social and cultural problem that is hard precisely because Of the number of people who are involved Because one wicked problem is entangled with others Because of incomplete information and because addressing these problems is costly sound familiar Climate change poverty education are all described as wicked For heritage workers to be at the table as solutionaries Our approach must take the point of view that this is an era in which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment What challenges do we face in adopting this new perspective in our field? I won't answer this question today But I will say that we have been in the company this week of remarkable inspiration So how will we respond? Caroline Jones wonders too, how will we participate in the cultural evolution of the species? As humans we take into account the apparatus of our bodies Our small primate brains that limit our memory to our lifespan And every day we're up against an inherited predisposition to individualism Caroline looks to shifts in science and technology. Indeed, the likes of people who have joined us here this week Who are engaged in the study of vast natural life forms from which we we will and we can learn Jones played a rhetorical game with two artists working in biology in which he asked them to imagine their embodied superpower One of the tentacles of an octopus One one of the tentacles of an octopus Another one of the echolocation or the sonar sensors of a bath For caroline. She said this I want the temporal sensibility of the sequoia I want to know what it would be like to have all of your offspring be clones To potentially live a thousand or more years. What would that be like? What kind of consciousness would you have of the planet as something you were a part of? Amidst gobsmacking complexity our field exists to help people make meaning in their lives As you go about your extraordinary work In conservation attending to the details of 3d printed objects The people who made them and the stories behind their work remember this trouble And remember the iterative Collaborations of our mindset that will connect our heritage work even more to the big questions of humanity this cohort Can be the one to model adapted conservation approaches because the work 3d prints themselves require it This cohort has the potential to bring far-reaching impact to the field that we hold very very dear. Thank you very much