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The world is filled with 
incredible objects

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and rich cultural heritage.

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And when we get access to them,

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we are blown away, we fall in love.

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But most of the time,

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the world's population is living
without real access to arts and culture.

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What might the connections be

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when we start exploring our heritage,

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the beautiful locations
and the art in this world.

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Before we get started 
in this presentation,

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I just want to take care
of a few housekeeping points.

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First, I am no expert in art or culture.

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I fell into this by mistake,
but I'm loving it.

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Secondly, all of what I'm going
to show you

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belongs to the amazing museum's
archives and foundations

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that we partner with.

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None of this belongs to Google.

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And finally, what you see
behind me

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is available right now
on your mobile phones,

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on your laptops.

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This is a current platform 
where you can explore

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thousands of museums
and objects at your finger tips

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in extremely high definition detail.

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The diversity fo the content is what's
amazing.

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If we just had European paintings,

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if we just had modern art,

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I think it gets a bit boring.

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For example, we, this month, 
launched the Black History channel

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with 82 curated exhibitions,

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which talk about arts and culture
in that community.

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We also have some amazing objects
from Japan

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around craftsmanship in Japan
called "Made in Japan".

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And one of my favorite exhibitions,


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which actually is the idea 
of my talk,

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is I didn't expect to become
a fan of Japanese dolls.

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But, I am.

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And thanks to this exhibition
that has really taught me

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what is the craftsmanship 
behind the soul of a Japanese doll.

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Trust me, it's very exciting.

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Take my word for it.

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So, moving on swiftly,

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one quick thing I wanted to showcase
in this platform,

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which you can share with 
your kids and your friends right now,

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is you can travel to all these
amazing institutions virtually as well.

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So one of our recent ideas was with
The Guggenheim Museum in New York

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where you can actually get a taste
of what it might feel like

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to actually be there.

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You can actually go to the ground floor


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and obviously, most of you, I assume,
have been there.

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And you can see the architectural
masterpiece that it is.

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But imagine this accesibility
for a kid in Bombay

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who's studying architecture,

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who hasn't had a chance
to go to The Guggenheim as yet.

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You can obviously look at objects
in the Guggenheim Museum,

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you can obviously get in to them
and so on and so forth.

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There's a lot of information here.

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But this is not the purpose
of my talk today.

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This exists right now.

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What we now have are 
the building blocks

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to a very exciting future


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when it comes to arts and culture

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and accessibility to arts and culture.

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So I am joined today on stage
by my good friend and artist in residence

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at our office in Paris, ?

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who is the professor of interactive design

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at Ecal University in 
Lausanne, Switzerland.

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What ? and our team of engineers
have been doing


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is trying to find these connections
and visualize a few of these.

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So I'm going to go quite quick now.

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Just clarification:

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Always, seeing the real thing
is better.

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In case people try to think 
I'm replicating the real thing.

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So moving on,

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this object you see behind me

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is the Venus of Berekhat Ram.

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It's one of the oldest objects
in the world,

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around 233,000 years ago

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found in the Golan Heights

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and currently residing in 
the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

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It is also one of the oldest objects
on our platform.

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So let's zoom.

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We start from this one object.

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And what if we zoomed out


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and actually tried to experience
our own cultural big bang.

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What might that look like?

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This is what we deal with
on a daily basis

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at The Cultural Institute.

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Over 6 million cultural artifacts
curated and given to us by institutions

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to actually make these connections.

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You can travel through time,

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you can understand more 
about our society through these.

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You can obviously look at it
from the perspective of our planet

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and try to see how it might look
without borders

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if we just organized art and culture.

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We can also, then, plot it by time,

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which obviously, for the data geek
in me is very fascinating.

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And you can spend hours looking
at every decade

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and the contributions
in that decade and in those years

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for art history and cultures.

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We would love to spend hours
showing you each and every decade,

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but we don't have the time right now.

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So you can go on your phone
and actually do it yourseld.

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(Applause)

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But if you don't mind,

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and you can hold your applause
'till later,

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I don't want to run out of time

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because I want to show you
a lot of really cool stuff.

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(Laughter)

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So just very quickly,

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you can move on from here

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to another very interesting idea.

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Beyond the pretty picture,

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beyond the nice visualization,

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what is the purpose, how is this useful?

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This next idea comes from 
discussions with curators

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that we've been having with museums,

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who, by the way, I've fallen in love with

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because they get their whole life
to actually try to tell these stories.

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And one of the curators told me,

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"Amit, what would it be like

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if you could create 
a virtual curator's table

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where all these 6 million objects


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are displayed in a way for us
to look at the connections between them.

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And let's start --

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you can spend a lot of time,
trust me, looking at different objects

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and understanding where they come from,

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it's a crazy matric experience.

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Just moving on,

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let's take the world-famous 
Vincent Van Gogh

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who is very well represented
on this platform.

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Thanks to the diversity
of the institutions we have,

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we have over 211 high-definition,
amazing artworks by this artist

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now organized in one 
beautiful view.

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And as it ? 


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and as the seril goes deeper

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you can see all the self-portraits,

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you can see still life.

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But I just wanted to highlight
one very quick example

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which is very timely:

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The Bedroom.

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This is an artwork where
three copies exist.

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One at the Van Gogh Museum
in Amsterdam,

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one at the d'Orsay in Paris,

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and one at the Art Institute
in Chicago,

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which actually is currently hosting
a reunion

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of all three artworks physically,

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I think only for the second time ever.

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But, it is united digitally and virtually
for anybody to look at

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in a very different way,

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and you won't get pushed
in the line in the crowd.

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So let's take you and let's travel
through the bedroom

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very quickly so you can
experience

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what we are doing for
every single object.

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We want the image to speak
as much as it can

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on a digital platform.

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And all you need is
an internet connection and a computer


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(Applause)

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And Seril, if you can go deeper, quickly.

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I'm sorry, this is all live,

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so you have to give Seril
a little bit of --

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and this is available for every object:

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modern art, contemporary art,
renaissance -- you name it,

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even sculpture.

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Sometimes, you don't know
what can attract you

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to an artwork or to a museum
or to a cultural discovery.


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So for me personally,

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it was quite a challenge

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because when I to make this 
my full-time job at Google,

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my mother was not very supportive.

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I love my mother,

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but she thought I was wasting my life
with this museum stuff.

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And for her, a museum is what
you do when you go on vacation

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and you tick-mark and it's over, right?

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And so, it took about 4 and a half years

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for me to convince my lovely
Indian mother

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that actually, this is worthwhile.

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And the way I did it

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was I realized one day that she
loves gold,

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and so I started showing her objects

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that have the material gold in them

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and the first thing my mom 
asks me is,

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"How can we buy these?"

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(Laughter)

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And obviously, my salary is not that high

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so I was like, "We can't actually 
do that, mom.

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But you can explore them virtually."

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And so now my mom --

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every time I meet she's like,
"Any more gold,

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any more silver in your project?

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Can you show me?"

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And that's the idea I'm trying
to illustrate.

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It does not matter how you get in,

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as long as you get in.

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Once you get in, you're hooked.

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Moving on from here very quickly,

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there is kind of a playful idea,
actually,

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to illustrate the point of access,

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and I'm going to go quite quickly
on this one.

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We all know that seeing the artwork
in-person is amazing.

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But we also know that most of us
can't do it,

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and the ones that can afford to do it,

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it's complicated.

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So Seril, can we just load up
our art trip,

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what do we call it?

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We don't have a good name for this.

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But essentially, let's. --

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so we have around 1,000
amazing institutions, 60 countries.

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But let's start with Rembrandt,

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we might have time for only
one example.

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But thanks to the diversity,

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we have around 500 amazing
Rembrandt object artworks

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from 46 institutions
and 17 countries.

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And let's say you on your next vacation

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want to go see every single one of them.

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That is your itinerary,

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you will probably travel
53,000 kilometers,

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visit around, I think, 
46 institutions,

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and just FYI, you might release
10 tons of CO2 emissions.

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(Laughter)

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But remember, it's art,

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so you can justify it, perhaps,
in some way.

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Moving on swiftly from here

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is something a little bit more
technical and more interesting.

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So all that we've shown you so far
uses metadata to make the connections.

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But obviously we have something
cool nowadays

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that everyone likes to talk about
called machine-learning.


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And so what we thought is,

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"Let's strip out all the metadata,

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let's look at what machine-learning
can do

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based on visual recognition of
this entire collection."

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And what we ended up with
is this very interesting map,

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these clusters