The world is filled with incredible objects
and rich cultural heritage.
And when we get access to them,
we are blown away, we fall in love.
But most of the time,
the world's population is living without real access to arts and culture.
What might the connections be
when we start exploring our heritage,
the beautiful locations and the art in this world.
Before we get started in this presentation,
I just want to take care of a few housekeeping points.
First, I am no expert in art or culture.
I fell into this by mistake, but I'm loving it.
Secondly, all of what I'm going to show you
belongs to the amazing museum's archives and foundations
that we partner with.
None of this belongs to Google.
And finally, what you see behind me
is available right now on your mobile phones,
on your laptops.
This is a current platform where you can explore
thousands of museums and objects at your finger tips
in extremely high definition detail.
The diversity fo the content is what's amazing.
If we just had European paintings,
if we just had modern art,
I think it gets a bit boring.
For example, we, this month, launched the Black History channel
with 82 curated exhibitions,
which talk about arts and culture in that community.
We also have some amazing objects from Japan
around craftsmanship in Japan called "Made in Japan".
And one of my favorite exhibitions,
which actually is the idea of my talk,
is I didn't expect to become a fan of Japanese dolls.
But, I am.
And thanks to this exhibition that has really taught me
what is the craftsmanship behind the soul of a Japanese doll.
Trust me, it's very exciting.
Take my word for it.
So, moving on swiftly,
one quick thing I wanted to showcase in this platform,
which you can share with your kids and your friends right now,
is you can travel to all these amazing institutions virtually as well.
So one of our recent ideas was with The Guggenheim Museum in New York
where you can actually get a taste of what it might feel like
to actually be there.
You can actually go to the ground floor
and obviously, most of you, I assume, have been there.
And you can see the architectural masterpiece that it is.
But imagine this accesibility for a kid in Bombay
who's studying architecture,
who hasn't had a chance to go to The Guggenheim as yet.
You can obviously look at objects in the Guggenheim Museum,
you can obviously get in to them and so on and so forth.
There's a lot of information here.
But this is not the purpose of my talk today.
This exists right now.
What we now have are the building blocks
to a very exciting future
when it comes to arts and culture
and accessibility to arts and culture.
So I am joined today on stage by my good friend and artist in residence
at our office in Paris, ?
who is the professor of interactive design
at Ecal University in Lausanne, Switzerland.
What ? and our team of engineers have been doing
is trying to find these connections and visualize a few of these.
So I'm going to go quite quick now.
Just clarification:
Always, seeing the real thing is better.
In case people try to think I'm replicating the real thing.
So moving on,
this object you see behind me
is the Venus of Berekhat Ram.
It's one of the oldest objects in the world,
around 233,000 years ago
found in the Golan Heights
and currently residing in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
It is also one of the oldest objects on our platform.
So let's zoom.
We start from this one object.
And what if we zoomed out
and actually tried to experience our own cultural big bang.
What might that look like?
This is what we deal with on a daily basis
at The Cultural Institute.
Over 6 million cultural artifacts curated and given to us by institutions
to actually make these connections.
You can travel through time,
you can understand more about our society through these.
You can obviously look at it from the perspective of our planet
and try to see how it might look without borders
if we just organized art and culture.
We can also, then, plot it by time,
which obviously, for the data geek in me is very fascinating.
And you can spend hours looking at every decade
and the contributions in that decade and in those years
for art history and cultures.
We would love to spend hours showing you each and every decade,
but we don't have the time right now.
So you can go on your phone and actually do it yourseld.
(Applause)
But if you don't mind,
and you can hold your applause 'till later,
I don't want to run out of time
because I want to show you a lot of really cool stuff.
(Laughter)
So just very quickly,
you can move on from here
to another very interesting idea.
Beyond the pretty picture,
beyond the nice visualization,
what is the purpose, how is this useful?
This next idea comes from discussions with curators
that we've been having with museums,
who, by the way, I've fallen in love with
because they get their whole life to actually try to tell these stories.
And one of the curators told me,
"Amit, what would it be like
if you could create a virtual curator's table
where all these 6 million objects
are displayed in a way for us to look at the connections between them.
And let's start --
you can spend a lot of time, trust me, looking at different objects
and understanding where they come from,
it's a crazy matric experience.
Just moving on,
let's take the world-famous Vincent Van Gogh
who is very well represented on this platform.
Thanks to the diversity of the institutions we have,
we have over 211 high-definition, amazing artworks by this artist
now organized in one beautiful view.
And as it ?
and as the seril goes deeper
you can see all the self-portraits,
you can see still life.
But I just wanted to highlight one very quick example
which is very timely:
The Bedroom.
This is an artwork where three copies exist.
One at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam,
one at the d'Orsay in Paris,
and one at the Art Institute in Chicago,
which actually is currently hosting a reunion
of all three artworks physically,
I think only for the second time ever.
But, it is united digitally and virtually for anybody to look at
in a very different way,
and you won't get pushed in the line in the crowd.
So let's take you and let's travel through the bedroom
very quickly so you can experience
what we are doing for every single object.
We want the image to speak as much as it can
on a digital platform.
And all you need is an internet connection and a computer
(Applause)
And Seril, if you can go deeper, quickly.
I'm sorry, this is all live,
so you have to give Seril a little bit of --
and this is available for every object:
modern art, contemporary art, renaissance -- you name it,
even sculpture.
Sometimes, you don't know what can attract you
to an artwork or to a museum or to a cultural discovery.
So for me personally,
it was quite a challenge
because when I to make this my full-time job at Google,
my mother was not very supportive.
I love my mother,
but she thought I was wasting my life with this museum stuff.
And for her, a museum is what you do when you go on vacation
and you tick-mark and it's over, right?
And so, it took about 4 and a half years
for me to convince my lovely Indian mother
that actually, this is worthwhile.
And the way I did it
was I realized one day that she loves gold,
and so I started showing her objects
that have the material gold in them
and the first thing my mom asks me is,
"How can we buy these?"
(Laughter)
And obviously, my salary is not that high
so I was like, "We can't actually do that, mom.
But you can explore them virtually."
And so now my mom --
every time I meet she's like, "Any more gold,
any more silver in your project?
Can you show me?"
And that's the idea I'm trying to illustrate.
It does not matter how you get in,
as long as you get in.
Once you get in, you're hooked.
Moving on from here very quickly,
there is kind of a playful idea, actually,
to illustrate the point of access,
and I'm going to go quite quickly on this one.
We all know that seeing the artwork in-person is amazing.
But we also know that most of us can't do it,
and the ones that can afford to do it,
it's complicated.
So Seril, can we just load up our art trip,
what do we call it?
We don't have a good name for this.
But essentially, let's. --
so we have around 1,000 amazing institutions, 60 countries.
But let's start with Rembrandt,
we might have time for only one example.
But thanks to the diversity,
we have around 500 amazing Rembrandt object artworks
from 46 institutions and 17 countries.
And let's say you on your next vacation
want to go see every single one of them.
That is your itinerary,
you will probably travel 53,000 kilometers,
visit around, I think, 46 institutions,
and just FYI, you might release 10 tons of CO2 emissions.
(Laughter)
But remember, it's art,
so you can justify it, perhaps, in some way.
Moving on swiftly from here
is something a little bit more technical and more interesting.
So all that we've shown you so far uses metadata to make the connections.
But obviously we have something cool nowadays
that everyone likes to talk about called machine-learning.
And so what we thought is,
"Let's strip out all the metadata,
let's look at what machine-learning can do
based on visual recognition of this entire collection."
And what we ended up with is this very interesting map,
these clusters