 Fine art in the internet could be a marriage in heaven or it can be a marriage in hell And I'll show you the risks and also the potentials and some works that we have done at my lab So I show you three art pieces here. One is very old. It's about four thousand years old It's a cuneiform tablet in Sumerian language. The center one is as you all this printed book in Europe it's a Gutenberg Bible and On the right side you see art that is produced based on Google Street view So these are very different Objects, but it's just to show that the interaction of art and technology has led to a co-evolution Over the history of mankind. So let's look at the technology behind these artifacts The first one you need a stylus to create the tablet the center one you need a printing press to print a book and probably some post-processing and On the right side you see a Google Street view car. Okay, so very different technology is leading to very different pieces of art Now if you go to the internet you think this is a marvelous channel to Socialize and distribute artworks, but if you really look closely it is completely unclear what you get so here is an experiment done by data visualization scientists at Google Vegas and Wattenberg and they created this mosaic based on a lady with hermine and Putting it together. They call this a beautiful tapestry of half-truths because you don't quite know What is the original of lady was with hermine? but beyond color distortions and other artifacts if you zoom in to Digital representation of this painting you get these effects that you all know if you get too close you get horrible jagged edges So pixels which is the basis of digitization Pixels from far away are your friends from close by are your enemy We call this the tyranny of the pixel and it is one of the limitation of putting artwork online But something else beyond color distortion and jagged edges is lost and that's a materiality of the artwork on The left side you see a very famous papyrus will come back to this one. It's housed in the Bodmer foundation collection It's called papyrus 66 and from a picture like the one you see on Wikipedia It is very hard to know what this manuscript actually is in the center. You see a stained glass window It's actually from Lausanne Cathedral and certainly a photograph of a stained glass is really not the real thing On the right side you see a picture that you have seen many times a kiss by Klim Unless you have seen the real thing you will not gather that this is actually golden leaves over Overlaid on the painting. So there are technological fixes for this and as I jokingly mentioned I have to be careful because representatives of these various companies might be in the room But if you look around none of them actually where the Their devices unless I'm mistaken. So on the left you see a Google glass famous in famous in the center You see virtual reality system and tactile gloves and on the right side the famous Oculus rift so what I'm trying to say is that current technology is either very limited in showing artwork online or It leads to devices which are relatively hard to socialize But beyond this I think to give materiality to an artwork has Many components not all of which we will be able to actually solve First we should be able to go to arbitrary high resolution to really see the details of the artwork like on the left side You have to be able to actually gather the gaze of the lady in the painting Then you need to show the structure of the painting which is shown in the middle This is part of the technique of painters. It's a very important Component to actually make you feel what the artwork is about Finally is something we call Physicality the sheer size of the painting is very hard to get across on a virtual system like the internet So at our lab we set out to try to realize what we call an electronic facsimile The idea would be to have an electronic version that is as close as possible to the real thing Now, let me be honest. This is not completely possible with today's technology But we can do much better what as and what current standards actually do so on the left side You see an acquisition system, which is a relatively sophisticated multiple enumeration system because you have to eliminate a painting from very Different angles as well as from different points of view to really render a painting in a powerful way In the center you have what is the core business of my lab. I was told not to use equations That's a web. So there is only one up there. It's a real illumination equation It's essentially applied Mathematic algorithms or signal processing to try to extract The real meaning of the data that we are acquiring because on the left You get very large amounts of data that you have to process in a clever way Then on the right side you have an intuitive interactive real-time rendering system The idea that for example on a surface tablet You could actually have an effect as if you were holding something close to a facsimile of the artwork Now you might wonder why this has not happened and the truth is that on the left you see a 19th century camera Which did a very good job and in the middle you see a digital camera, which is very close actually Unlike what you might feel it is very close to the analog camera because simply you have replaced the film the chemical film by an Electronic detector, but other than that you're acquiring exactly the same type of imagery on the right side You have the real thing. It's a so-called light field cameras This particular one is by light draw which does a much more sophisticated Acquisition which allows you also to do post-processing so-called computational imaging to extract much more information from a photograph So with this new type of approaches we went around our home place Which is in Lausanne and we started a project called e-cathedral trying to render the Lausanne Cathedral a beautiful cathedral from the 12th century and To give for example the impression of the acoustics, which is very complex So on the left side you see an acquisition system, which was done with colleagues at TU Aachen Which tries to acquire all the complexity of the acoustics of the cathedral then we set out to actually acquire the rose window gigantic 13th century stained glass I have a short movie about it to try to show you how you could render stained glass if acquired correctly First there is it's one of the most complex rose windows that is known. It's built around Something that leads to a Imago Mundo a view of the world as seen by the builders of the cathedral at that time Then we did virtual Reillumination this is just to show you the effect so you can have the role of the Lausanne Cathedral Reilluminated you can zoom into the details. It's a very scary imagery actually very Pagan in style and This is allows you to really feel the richness of the stained glass of the Lausanne Cathedral the next step was we Interacted with Bodmer foundation in Geneva, which houses some of an incredible collection of rare manuscripts it's actually a UNESCO historical literary site and Together with the Bodmer foundation and a number of collaborations. We did acquisition of these rare manuscripts Which I will show in a minute. This was done With a startup from the lab, which is led by Lloyd Babuaz the first fellow here on the list of Founders of the company which includes art historians. So it's not just a bunch of geeks It's really trying to understand what is the right way to interact with artwork and rare manuscripts So as to show them online. I have a short movie about three art pieces from the Bodmer collection The first one is the Sumerian tablet So you can zoom in you can render the three dimensional Surface it's exaggerated here to really show you how it is done You can relight it from arbitrary directions and this of course gives you a much better feeling of what this Sumerian tablet is What it is really is essentially an Excel table because that's what people were doing 4,000 years ago already it's keeping, you know track of Accounting the second one is a phion mummy portrait. That's a particular technique that was used in the second century It's Vax painted on wood and put on mummies. It's a very particular technique and again If you get close by you relight it you get a much better materiality of this artwork Last but not least We get to the famous Papyrus 66 it was found in 1952. It's believed to be the oldest remaining copy of Text from the New Testament. It's a gospel of John. It's a very rare. It's probably the last time It was taken out to be actually acquired by this new technology Then it goes back into a vault it It's not shown in public not even at the museum was a Bodmer Foundation It's a very touching experience actually to go and and be able to acquire such a rare art piece Now let's see why we really would like to do this. Why do we want to? Develop new technologies to bring art on to an interactive platform one reason is certainly what Sarah already mentioned Museums in the world have large parts of their collections actually a large majority of the collection in their vaults in the basements and very few is actually shown and If appropriate technology is being developed and standardized we believe that we can motivate museums to actually show their artworks Rather than leaving them in their vaults the other reason of course is one of socializing artworks We believe that putting art on the internet will allow to share What is most precious to civilizations and will be helpful in the understanding between different cultures? Preservation has also been mentioned by Sarah. I take another example You probably heard about the stolen Picasso's and money from the Netherlands Which then were burnt in Romania by the mother of one of the thieves to try to protect him and It turns out they were actually no good pictures of these Picasso's and Monès So they are gone forever So it is also a good idea to have digital extremely high quality digital copies of singular artworks like these ones The second example on the right is about scholarship You probably know about the Dead Sea Scrolls and other rare manuscripts which are Often hidden and not available for serious scholarship worldwide Putting the material online would actually allow to do this work much more efficiently But the true Potential we see of developing art online is to create something that would be the equivalent of what you all know the iTunes for music or Spotify or the Netflix for video And this is if we had a very very good standard for representing artwork on the internet it would create a real digital channel to share artwork and this would allow Museums actually to develop a digital version of their collections It would allow collectors to share their treasures It would ultimately lead to what I call a Wikipedia for artworks And I sort of come back to a quote by William Blake who said it's a foundation of empire is science and art Remove it or degrade it and the empire is no more I really believe that what makes civilization is a connection between art which is emotion and science Which is knowledge and this is really what will be left in a few thousand years We looked at manuscripts and art pieces from several thousand years ago Let's think about what will be left of the 21st century in two thousand years Thank you very much for your attention