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Every piece of art you've ever wanted to see -- up close and searchable

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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
    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 museums,
    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 our current platform,
    where you can explore
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    thousands of museums
    and objects at your fingertips,
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    in extremely high-definition detail.
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    The diversity of 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, this month,
    we 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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    centered around craftsmanship,
    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, thanks to this exhibition,
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    that has really taught me
    about the craftsmanship
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    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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    One of our recent ideas was with
    The Guggenheim Museum in New York,
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    where you can get a taste
    of what it might feel like
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    to actually be there.
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    You can 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 accessibility
    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 into 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
    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 onstage
    by my good friend and artist in residence
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    at our office in Paris, Cyril Diagne,
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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 Cyril 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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    This object you see
    behind me -- oh, just clarification:
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    Always, seeing the real thing is better.
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    In case people think
    I'm trying to replicate the real thing.
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    So, moving on.
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    This object you see behind me
    is the Venus of Berekhat Ram.
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    It's one of the oldest
    objects in the world,
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    found in the Golan Heights
    around 233,000 years ago,
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    and currently residing
    at 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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    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
    at the Cultural Institute --
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    over six 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 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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    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 yourself.
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    (Applause)
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    But if you don't mind
    and 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 cool stuff.
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    So, just very quickly:
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    you can move on from here
    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 at museums,
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    who, by the way, I've fallen in love with,
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    because they dedicate their whole life
    to try to tell these stories.
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    One of the curators told me,
    "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 six million objects
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    are displayed in a way for us
    to look at the connections between them?"
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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 Matrix experience.
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    (Laughter)
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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 resolves,
    and as Cyril 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 Orsay in Paris
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    and one at the Art Institute of Chicago,
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    which, actually, currently
    is 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" very quickly,
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    so you can experience 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, Cyril, 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 Cyril
    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,
    it was quite a challenge
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    because when I decided 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 it took around four 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 was,
    I realized one day that she loves gold.
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    So I started showing her all objects
    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 -- every time
    I meet her, she asks me,
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    "Any more gold, any more silver
    in your project? 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, it's complicated.
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    So -- Cyril, can we load
    up our art trip, what do we call it?
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    We don't have a good name for this.
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    But essentially, we have
    around 1,000 amazing institutions,
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    68 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've got around 500 amazing
    Rembrandt object artworks
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    from 46 institutions and 17 countries.
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    Let's say that on your next vacation,
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    you 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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    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,
    which is machine learning.
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    So what we thought is,
    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 purely on visual recognition
    of this entire collection.
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    What we ended up with
    is this very interesting map,
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    these clusters that have
    no reference point information,
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    but has just used visuals
    to cluster things together.
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    Each cluster is an art to us
    by itself of discovery.
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    But one of the clusters we want
    to show you very quickly
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    is this amazing cluster of portraits
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    that we found from museums
    around the world.
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    If you could zoom in
    a little bit more, Cyril.
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    Just to show you, you can
    just travel through portraits.
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    And essentially, you can do nature,
    you can do horses
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    and clusters galore.
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    When we saw all these portraits,
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    we were like, "Hey, can we do
    something fun for kids,
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    or can we do something playful
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    to get people interested in portraits?"
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    Because I haven't really seen
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    young kids really excited
    to go to a portrait gallery.
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    I wanted to try to figure something out.
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    So we created something
    called the portrait matcher.
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    It's quite self-explnatory,
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    so I'm just going to let Cyril
    show his beautiful face.
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    And essentially what's happening is,
    with the movement of his head,
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    we are matching different portraits
    around the world from museums.
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    (Applause)
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    And I don't know about you,
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    but I've shown it to my nephew and sister,
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    and the reaction is just phenomenal.
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    All they ask me is,
    "When can we go see this?"
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    And by the way, if we're nice,
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    maybe, Cyril, you can smile
    and find a happy one?
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    Oh, perfect.
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    By the way, this is not rehearsed.
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    Congrats, Cyril. Great stuff. Oh wow.
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    OK, let's move on; otherwise,
    this will just take the whole time.
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    (Applause)
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    So, art and culture
    can be fun also, right?
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    For our last quick experiment --
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    we call all of these "experiments" --
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    our last quick experiment
    comes back to machine learning.
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    We show you clusters, visual clusters,
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    but what if we could ask the machine
    to also name these clusters?
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    What if it could automatically tag
    them, using no actual metadata?
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    So what we have is this kind of explorer,
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    where we have managed to match,
    I think, around 4,000 labels.
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    And we haven't really
    done anything special here,
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    just fed the collection.
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    And we found interesting categories.
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    We can start with horses,
    a very straightforward category.
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    You would expect to see
    that the machine has put
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    images of horses, right?
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    And it has, but you also notice,
    right over there,
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    that it has a very abstract image
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    that it has still managed to recognize
    and cluster as horses.
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    We also have an amazing head
    in terms of a horse.
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    And each one has the tags
    as to why it got categorized in this.
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    So let's move to another one
    which I found very funny and interesting,
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    because I don't understand
    how this category came up.
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    It's called "Lady in Waiting."
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    If, Cyril, you do it very quickly,
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    you will see that we have
    these amazing images
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    of ladies, I guess, in waiting or posing.
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    I don't really understand it.
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    But I've been trying to ask
    my museum contacts,
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    you know, "What is this?
    What's going on here?"
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    And it's fascinating.
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    Coming back to gold very quickly,
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    I wanted to search for gold
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    and see how the machine
    tagged all the gold.
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    But, actually, it doesn't tag it as gold.
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    We are living in popular times.
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    It tags it as "bling-bling."
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    (Laughter)
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    I'm being hard on Cyril,
    because I'm moving too fast.
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    Essentially, here you have
    all the bling-bling
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    of the world's museums organized for you.
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    And finally, to end this talk
    and these experiments,
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    what I hope you feel after this talk
    is happiness and emotion.
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    And what would we see
    when we see happiness?
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    If we actually look at all the objects
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    that have been tagged under "happiness,"
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    you would expect happiness, I guess.
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    But there was one that came up
    that was very fascinating and interesting,
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    which was this artwork
    by Douglas Coupland,
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    our friend and artist
    in residence as well,
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    called, "I Miss My Pre-Internet Brain."
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    I don't know why the machine feels like
    it misses its pre-Internet brain
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    and it's been tagged here,
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    but it's a very interesting thought.
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    I sometimes do miss my pre-Internet brain,
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    but not when it comes to exploring
    arts and culture online.
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    So take out your phones,
    take out your computers,
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    go visit museums.
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    And just a quick call-out
    to all the amazing archivists,
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    historians, curators,
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    who are sitting in museums,
    preserving all this culture.
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    And the least we can do is get
    our daily dose of art and culture
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    for ourselves and our kids.
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    Thank you.
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    (Applause)
Title:
Every piece of art you've ever wanted to see -- up close and searchable
Speaker:
Amit Sood
Description:

What does a cultural Big Bang look like? For Amit Sood, director of Google's Cultural Institute and Art Project, it's an online platform where anyone can explore the world's greatest collections of art and artifacts in vivid, lifelike detail. Join Sood and Google artist in residence Cyril Diagne in a mind-bending demo of experiments from the Cultural Institute and glimpse the exciting future of accessibility to arts and culture.

more » « less
Video Language:
English
Team:
closed TED
Project:
TEDTalks
Duration:
15:00

English subtitles

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