foreign
[Music]
so Seb is the director and CEO of Acme
and
my notes have disappeared
sorry sir
uh he was appointed to the role in
August 2022 and was previously a part of
the team that transformed Acme into a
multi-award-winning multi-platform
museum he's currently the national
president of the Australian museums and
galleries Association
prior to Acme he led the digital renewal
and transformation of the Cooper Hewitt
smithonian design Museum in New York and
the PowerHouse Museum's pioneering work
in Open Access Mass collaboration and
digital experience during the early also
during the 2000s
his workers won awards internationally
in the museum media and design spaces
he also leaves leads of parallel life in
digital art writing and music
so please give it up for stepchan
[Applause]
digitization was all about taking
high-res photos of things hi res then
being like lower than the resolution of
this screen
now we talk about doing 3D scans
so digitization creates the demand for
opener collections or created the the
drive foot open collections of course
mean that new forms of interpretation
like what things mean become possible so
I've done a lot of work throughout the
last decades in searching inside things
so both within text text mining in the
early 2000s computer vision stuff too so
just describing what is in stuff and now
also of course language translation and
of course that also means language
modernization so the way people describe
collections of often goes back decades
and the terms we use to describe things
change obviously now the basic principle
in all of this is public domain a should
exist and does it does it does it does
exist now it's you know public domain
I'm not sure if Rebecca geblin's spoken
here yet she's on tomorrow I think she's
awesome public domain is not a universal
thing in all but
jurisdictions and of course not every
not everything a museum has is out of
copyright so those games I was showing
those films I was showing those are the
end of copyright still
um open curation different to open
collections means curators the people
who curate exhibitions show their
working right we all we all know what
show you're working means but in the
museum what I'll show you working is not
an obvious thing Humanities doesn't
necessarily show it's working in the
same way the Sciences do this is super
super important for of course Public
public trust and expertise has been
degraded by several decades of Neo kind
of upper liberalism and also you know
far right activism too has diminished
public trust so expertise matters a lot
but of course transparency matters to
allow the non-expert public to actually
want to trust us okay and of course
that's difficult it's hard hard work and
it requires inter
um interpreters so the things that
curators write the things that I write
up write about stuff the things that you
write about code are not understandable
by most people so translators matter and
raw information of course as we know has
been weaponized by the right and by
um
authoritarian governments raw
information flooding the world with more
information creates noise which hides
truth right so we have to be careful
with open to curation that we're not
just flooding the world with more noise
open a collection similarly open open
source of course in the museum world we
make stuff we write write things with
code museums now are full of great
interactive experiences well great maybe
not always but good interactive
experiences we Outsource a lot of that
soft software development or work with
people like some of you
and the client like always wants
stability they want things to last they
don't want maintenance costs right so
you put a thing in a gallery and I I
remember when I started at the
Smithsonian they were talking about
doing a new permanent exhibition in one
of them any museums they were like this
has to last for 30 years
and every designer and software
developer who came into those briefs was
like what
and what they actually meant was 30
years with no revisions nothing it would
run on the box for 30 years which means
it's not plug plugged into the net
Network right because huge security
risks
so the shift in the last decade has been
of course from things like processing
and open kind of Frameworks of course to
now the dominance of unity we also rely
on open kind of code kind of libraries
but I'll talk talk a little bit about
that so after all of that you're like
why open why do I care as this direct
director and CEO now now about this of
course because I come from soft software
and design world of course I care about
it and it's also of course you probably
realize it's a political thing for for
me too because everything is political
why open still preserving is much easier
when it is open
um we know able use through through this
and sometimes museums and libraries are
not also the best person who can
determine who might use a thing or how
they might use it public value of course
is very important and it's vital for
museums and Galleries and libraries like
like like like mine which run on tax
taxpayers money so it's a better use of
public funds and of course this this
fund's an ecosystem and of you know it's
a less bad choice than than a closed so
I'm going to go back in time 20 years
now so this is where I worked at the
PowerHouse I worked at the powerhouse
uh till 20 2011 so I was there for about
a decade and I was making stuff right I
was making stuff that came up with this
warning when you loaded the uh the page
some of us remember that and made lots
of websites we've made lots of stuff we
were like a team that made lots of
things
um lots of fun fun things things in
Flash that's weirdly still work anyway
and around 2005 I came across the the
first needs for doing Open Access stuff
right so these were two books of many
that were in the powerhouses powerhouses
collection in their fashion to
collection
and within those books all out of out of
out of out of out of out of out of
copyright and
um students who were studying fashion
design and Tech textiles would come and
look at these and they were full of
fabric swatches so fabric Swatch is a
little bit like when you go by car
carpets and stuff you can get those
little Swatch to watch books and stuff
that's what they were called Swatch
books right so lots and lots of these
patterns from you know uh 1890s to 1910s
um of these amazing patterns and
students would come flick through these
and they would take photos of them and
then go and make patterns like those and
of course this was very difficult for
the curator to come and get these out of
the store the store room for the
students to look at the students that's
put on those little white white white
gloves to flick through them and every
time they were flicked through the pages
would deteriorate more and The Works
would would be exposed to light for more
more time which would mean their colors
would fade which would degrade the work
so in 2005 we launched a thing called
the electronic Swatch book which scanned
thousands of these and what we did in
that was made an interface that allowed
people to download these as tips
and back back then that was quite a
radical notion that you would give away
all of this stuff that was out of
copyright and it was really a bitly
about making making this usable by those
students that also saved the the museum
a lot of work we had a color search on
this
one of our developers one of my friends
who was working there made a very simple
tool
that broke each image up in into a grid
and then sampled bits of it to pull out
the primer colors of each image I'll
come back to that because we reused that
piece of Code 10 years kind of late
later we opened open sourced a lot of
how this this this this this was done
and then this led to putting the entire
Museum's collection at that time on the
web right so what was nice about that
was the sort of notion of exposing all
the the metadata so the metadata is all
this stuff like the text and also the
things were related sub subject tagging
all of that sort of stuff so this is
2005 2008 and aapi was launched for it
pretty early on we had early success in
the social media world as people started
to use and find these sort of things so
this is a comb from the Museum's
collection this is the all this
website's all gone now but you can look
at it on the internet archive of course
in the Wayback machine and we were using
a tool there from Reuters opened a
Calais that was text mining the entities
that were mentioned in each
blob of text so we could pull out the
people the places all of that sort of
stuff that now is much easier
and we had subject cataloging and we we
found one morning that someone had used
the user tagging feature to connect to a
URL now it wasn't a Spam URL of course
there was that going on as well and that
article when we clicked on that link
took us to one of the digitized
newspapers in the National libraries
collection where someone had linked that
image of the comb
to the art article from 1950 of the
museum collecting that comb right
so that was kind of
kind of and there were quite a lot of
examples of that and this is this
newspaper search of now of now of course
is part of what is called Trove and If
the Fed if the federal government
doesn't continue to fund Trove things
like this won't happen so please support
the National Life of Live library
so what's what's exciting about this was
it opened up the way the museum thought
about knowledge to the opportunities
that come from opening that up to other
people and building the interfaces to
connect people on the internet to the
stuff that is never showing in a public
museum because a very small percentage
of any collection is put on exhibition
so it made us start to think about how
we might also connect a museum to other
in other ways to the world Beyond
2009 we worked worked worked with a film
we're with a firm called mob labs in
Sydney we just released a whole bunch of
historic images of Sydney on Flickr with
the cc0 license these were out of out of
copyright images and Flickr had that
early feature around Geo a kind of
location so we started to geolocate all
of these scanned images his historic
images
the iPhone had just also launched an
early AR tools had become launched and
MOB Labs worked with one of those AR
tools called layer back back then and
allowed you to nav nav Navigate the
photo archive
whilst he was standing in front of the
building with your camera on your phone
kind of obvious nowadays back then it
was kind of mad magic kind of clunky
magic but still but you could be in
front of the qvb and then see the photo
of the qvb the 100 years prior kind of
nice but again began to show that there
was opportunities once you opened access
to things and created additional
metadata for them it created new ways of
using and browsing all of this historic
material that would have would otherwise
never be seen so 2011 I got hired by the
Smithsonian and moved to this this
Museum in New in New York this is in
Carnegie Carnegie's old mansion house so
kind of Carnegie was one of the guild
Gilded Age
industrial industrial
industrialist Barons I guess super
wealthy put most of his wealth towards
public libraries
but also did some Union to bust busting
things during his time so good and bad
things uh foreign Cooper Hewitt was in
his house
so it's part of the Smithsonian so the
Smithsonian is this very large federally
financed American museums mostly on the
Washington Mall the air and space museum
Etc you would have seen them in many
films
Cooper Hewitt New York Upper East Side
full of amazing stuff mostly hadn't had
been digitized lots of porcelain animals
lots of posters lots of products weird
things like this there's a cage for your
pet Cricket what
uh yeah kind of cool right so anyway
um there were nerds back then who
collected weird things yeah right
anyway
um the mascot for my then team I was the
director of digital and emerging media
during this rebuild of that that's
Museum the mascot for my team became
this this fabulous creature that became
a gif uh cat and kitten as if in the act
of spanking was the description animates
beautiful beautiful beautifully it's
like slightly not naughty and
provocative Cooper Hewitt was very small
so at any time a very small amount of
the collection even with this massive
Redevelopment was ever going to be put
on shot so that's a tiny amount of that
amazing collection now when the Cooper
Hewitt collection was first uh pulled
pulled together by the Hewitt sisters
some early 20th Century Century women
who were really paying Pioneers in
collecting practice then they collected
things from around the world and it and
invited people in to copy them
explicitly into copy them so it was
about obtaining things from Europe and
inspiring Americans American women
predominantly to build their craft
skills by copying the Masterworks of
Europe so this was about Open Access in
a physical form right
so that image of these women cop copying
the collection informed a lot of how we
thought about things for the following
four years so when I arrived the museum
had just begun a massive Redevelopment
pulling apart Carnegie's old building
and rebuilding it by hand in its
original form
um so when I started there were about 10
10 000 works on kind of line when I left
there about 200 100 100
000 Works online
digitizing The Collection became the
primary thing that drove much of what we
implemented later
um and remember what I said about
collections being images of stuff but
then the the descriptive stuff the
metadata about things most of those
Works before did digitization were on
the website like this
1901
now when you have a hundred thousand
prints then they're all like that how do
you know which print is which like you
literally don't
like uh and so we we put some text up on
here that would explain what was going
on so this object is resting in our
storage facility we're not sure sure who
kind of made this
because we literally didn't
um so that's a problem right and of and
and obviously photographing that work
even just photographing that work allows
someone to separate that from another
print that says print
1901 so the very first set of work was
putting all this stuff up on the web as
it happened
um so my colleagues Aaron kind of Stroup
Stroup cope and Michael Walter did a
huge amount of work on making all of
this stuff that we had available in the
most accessible form possible on the web
right so early forms of this looked had
different ways of presenting it we did
stuff like this where we were showing
the last three things that were
photographed this sort of stuff right we
started to do and this goes back we
reused that piece of code that was
written for the Swatch book and evolved
that so then we could Implement a color
a color-based search right so navigating
that collection by color was at that
point a pretty radical thing it's now
very common in museum collections
inspired by this work
so you could do things like this all the
things that are in the shade of the dark
kind of green and you could find avar's
the iPad the iPod Nano and this chair
uh you could also navigate that metadata
in new ways and say show us all the
things that the museum collected in
1987.
um show me all the people connected two
things um connect to the Wikipedia bio
of that person because if we know this
this person has this metadata about it
we can probably find the corresponding
wiki Wikipedia biography for that person
meaning that the staff don't need to
waste time writing another biography for
that person right so that was also part
of this this was a museum that had about
75 full-time staff
and a tech technology team including
myself of about four people
and that was because it was redeveloping
a huge amount of stuff but what we could
also do when we started to give these
things persistent identifiers on the
internet we could link them to other
things so we could say the Cooper Hewitt
knows about these people the PowerHouse
does too so let's connect those two
people up and let's navigate between
those two so we could do that with stuff
and you you could see the things that
the Cooper Hewitt had the same things as
Powerhouse had right and there's a whole
other talk about what that shows which
is that museums collect a lot of the
same kind of stuff and there's lots of
the same air on office kind of chair in
pretty much all designed designed Museum
Collections and on Amazon where you can
buy buy them as well anyway what if you
could connect all those things up
um so the idea there in rebuilding the
building then was when everything was
digitized which of course would would
happen during that time could you change
the way the the the the the building
worked for you as a visitor so we built
all lists on top of apis and this very
simple model this was what we used this
was done by Katie Shelley one of the
team who was a designer she built this
very simple
pyramid to explain to donors and the
staff what the hell be we're doing which
was ev Everything the museum did ran
through the web the public web and that
was super important and it created this
notion of the possibility of the the
museum as an interface itself so when
you visit the physical Museum what we
were trying to do was to create this
sense of you using the physical space
much as you would use an interface
through a screen right and it was an
access device the physical stuff but
also the digitized stuff
uh I'm gonna skip that next one but of
course we would need to change the way
people thought so you're coming into
that old house right
that looks like an old house
but it was this amazing digital
experience full of all this stuff that
you probably didn't know about how how
would would we change that perception
the moment you walked in the door and
how would you bring friction in to that
experience to slow people down so when I
was designing a lot of things around web
experiences it was about reducing
friction but of course in physical
spaces like like conferences here
friction is a good is a good thing
because it slows people down and
encourages people to speak to each other
right if you
optimize things to reduce friction you
you lose the grit of life and existence
and that matters so we made this magic
wand thing it was a bit like a transit
pass or a library card for a museum and
it had the initial form by the designers
who worked on this initially this was
the initial con concept art was give
everyone a pen when you came to the
designer the designer of Museum what if
what if you got a magic stylus that made
you a kind of designer so in 2015 when
we launched it it worked like this you
walked around the museum you had this
stylus that you took you could collect
things at one end
you could create you could dock that
with these interactive tables you could
explore the collection you could be
inspired and draw furniture and all
sorts of other stuff and you would be
you would be sent things from the
collection that related to the designs
you you were drawing
and of course you could save those and
take take those home as 3D models as
well
typical designed a designed a museum
making making people designers
um there was this uh this so the museum
also had this amazing wallpaper
collection right so wallpapers much uh
like that swatch book uh lots of these
little strips and of course the
wallpaper collection is about seeing
what a room would feel like being
surrounded by that pattern and of course
you can't really do do that with this
little strip however you can when they
are digitized and Rick Rick Rick Rick
Rick Rick Rick Graf of the um the
American uh graphic kind of design
Association I had this great quote in
this article on the Cooper who had just
before I joined you got this wallpaper
collection like what the hell really
what are you gonna do with that of
course you can do some cool cool things
when it is of course uh digitized and
you can allow people to create their own
wallpapers and learn how wallpapers are
made out of out of repeating patterns
that's kind of cool and you can see how
crazy crazy things get as people draw
lots of stuff including kids
but you can also load historic wall
wallpaper patterns you have digitized
and create how a room would feel being
surrounded by those patterns so
digitization makes these new forms of
access possible now all of these
wallpapers are pretty much out of out of
copyright too so that was kind of cool
and people spent a mountain of time here
designing wallpapers this is one of the
things that's still running at the
Cooper Hewitt now like 10 years later
people did amazing stuff right like
super amazing stuff anyway
um of course it was really social it was
lots of fun it was great and people
experienced what historical wallpapers
were like as well as learning about how
wallpapers were made
mathematically in terms of repeating
patterns and all of that
um people collected a bunch of stuff got
used heaps that won lots of awards
fine fine biggest thing the average the
average age of the visitor dropped right
so this historic museums usually full of
people
who are older who know what's in kind of
them now being exposed to people who
didn't know who could learn from from
them in different ways so the other
stuff that was going on then that I was
doing was acquiring soft software and
source source code is part of the
national design collection so the Cooper
Hewitt just just announced last week
that they've set up a a digital design
Department within the museums cubitorial
[Music]
division what I'm going to show you now
were the first things that that museum
collected that joined that collection
so um uh me and my team with Aaron Aaron
de cope he and I acquired the first app
in the smithsonian's collection and it
was this app that was done for the iPad
by a studio called Bloom in 2011. so the
first I
iPad this was an app that was made
um
so I uh iOS 5 and it was updated for iOS
6 as well this was a music player app
that visualized your collection of music
as a series of Planet everybody's right
so you had the Artist as a son the
albums as planets and the tracks as
moons and the orbits were based on the
length of the tracks right
kind of cool right simple idea
um didn't work by the time we acquired
it because iOS changed and it's fragile
and Bloom uh ran went out of business as
most startups did
um but so we acquired from Bloom the
non-working source code
and it's important that it didn't work
and we worked with Bloom and their
lawyers and the smithsonian's lawyers to
open source the source code as well
right and we released the source code on
GitHub as part of preserving the work so
this is a piece this is some something
the the museum is in quotes acquiring
and then giving out
and it's open sourced on GitHub and what
that meant was you could go through the
changes
that the developers made and the object
had versions and this showed and this
was super important this was like
acquiring a chair
with the process of making the chair and
all the sketch sketches of the chairs
that failed before it so for me
acquiring the versioned code was a
philosophical piece too about saying
future designers are going to need need
to know
the choices that were made because of
the limitations of the iPad in 2011 or
actually 20 to 2010.
so and of course you know it's a museum
right so to preserve this
github's not a not the best place to
preserve things Shakara
um if you want to preserve this for a
long long time
you print it out
on archival paper in a font
OCR font from the late and the the late
1960s so very small amounts of computing
power can decode that in the future and
it was digital of objects zero zero one
right super cool
in this archival box and you know
it was kind of yeah it was a it was
amusing at the time too anyway and
people would like what did you acquire
like what actually did you acquire and
of course as I just said the underlying
source code was about showing the
possible the possibilities for future
exhibitions and um we released all this
on the on the documentation the metadata
contained all of this discussion about
it and also the what we call the
curatorial file
so this was a means to as I was saying
to to reveal the choices designers make
designers as developers as well we don't
make choices in a vacuum we make choices
because of the context the politics and
the the context of the period and of
course this allows us to figure out the
affordances of the iPad as a medium back
back back then this is Ben cerveny also
known as neb talk talking about this
um a little later let me see if this
works
idea that planetary was visualizing a
collection of music as a finite set of
things is already nostalgic
um and the way that now people relate to
music is as a stream an infinite
oncoming stream of possibilities that
they're they're moving through and that
was actually part of our planned
Evolution for the Way planetary would
unfold was that eventually we wanted to
include a universe of Music which was
much larger than the sort of solar
systems that were created by the
individual artists in the collection
the idea of a high resolution touch
screen that was at one's disposal for
the browsing of media was still a
science fiction that was this was the
very first iPad one was a very science
fiction experience for people the idea
that there was this window into digital
media that they could pick up and you
know viscerally interact with and so we
really wanted to
um you know sort of in a Way planetary
was part of the completion of that
science fiction story I mean what is it
you're supposed to see on this you know
all the science fiction programs we've
seen previous to the introduction of the
iPad the thing you were looking at when
you you know picked up your little
tablet that had a display on it was some
sort of uh in interplanetary uh sort of
navigational
um one of the other designers Tyle
bacarden who's now at Square uh finally
got the version running
um on a virtual machine which was great
and 2020
a developer in Sydney
uh you got onto the GitHub repo and
managed to remaster it and preserve it
by making a new version of it which is
now free on the app on the app kind of
store this was only possible because we
released the code and opened I'm an open
kind of license that that that that that
that code and there was a lot of
discussion in 2018 and 19
um in the digital preservation world
that this ex this experiment in open
kind of sourcing uh software for for
preservation purposes had failed because
no one had managed to rebuild it a year
later someone did
so that's kind of cool
now it's important to realize it's not
it's not this solution for all of the
the thing but it's a nice proof that
some some sometimes trusting the
community allows these uh unexpected
things to happen
um the other thing we did uh was of
course we were rebuilding the building
so for the first time in a long time
the building had nothing in it for like
a week and this was a time when lidar
scanners were kind of big but they were
they were available and so we got a team
to come and light our scan the the
building and release it as a 3D model
and a point Cloud file that you can
still download now and again open
um open a kind of license so this is the
thing about the scanning of the building
[Music]
of the Cooper Hewitt Museum
First Step was to scan the interior of
the museum we scanned every stairwell
every room on the inside
we then moved to the outside to scan the
exterior walls we linked those together
and now today scanning the rooftop so
that we can join the roof to the
exterior to the interior to create a
single model the way we do that is we
take millions of measurements by using a
lidar scanner this casts a laser off of
a spinning mirror when it hits the
object it bounces back measures the
distance and then we can import this
data into the computer from that we look
at it as a point Cloud just millions of
dots we then create a mesh in the
computer which is sort of like a
wireframe and then we take the camera we
take hundreds of pictures we map those
pictures onto the mesh and now we have a
textured model that we can look at from
any direction and it looks just like the
real thing
there are so many cool things you can do
with a 3D model like this you can take a
virtual tour in your computer you can
examine all the historic architectural
details you can create 3D prints using a
3D printer you can use it to make a
video game and have zombies and Aliens
running through the halls of the Cooper
Hewitt an exhibition designer who's
planning a show at the Cooper Hewitt
might want to actually plan their
exhibit there's so much you can do with
a 3D model like this and it's so awesome
that it's free for download
so there's a lot of ideas about the
notion of a designer designed museum
being open in as many ways as in as many
ways as possible the new the Cooper
Hewitt redesigned logo and type
typeface which launched in 2014 as well
was open sourced too so it became a real
philosophy in them in the Museum's brand
and experience and reality
so it was this big piece around all of
these designed practices coming coming
kind of together in 2015 I moved back to
Melbourne and we did this process again
right
so what you can go up and see now in the
in um in the in the museum is some of
some of those ideas iterated further
um but I'm working with a different set
of stuff now so this is your your Museum
of screwed the culture and in terms of
the their collection that that means
move moving image archives video art
video games and very early on we
released as you would expect all of the
collection metadata as cc0 license so
this was about 2016 I think and
instantly we worked with students at our
our MIT to do some data the data data
visualizations of the representation in
the collection so we started just to
have people revealing new stories about
the things we collected so we were
collect collecting historically many
many more documentaries about male
creatives than female identifying
creatives
we had different biases in experimental
film we could see new ways we saw new
ways of look looking at the at their
collection as a whole have an API and I
think uh Simon kind of laughler from the
developers soft software development
team spoke uh last last year about that
um the API does what an API does
don't need to explain that
um and we've been integrating all these
experiments into our design work so this
this is what matters now for us so
there's sort of sense of human
accuration and I think as more AI tools
are released daily uh gpt4 came out
today I think uh these things human
curation really matters because I think
sorting through the mess of the massive
stuff
needs our own biases that are legible to
us to build trust right so very early on
we did a lot of stuff those same kind of
things the text mining uh video video
mining things that we were doing with
the PowerHouse in the early 2000s with
some of the things from the collection
so this is good Google's tool from 2017
running over some of the collection and
you can you can you can think about how
much better this would would would be
now so 2017's tools were pretty blunt
2023's tools have much much more
Precision but you can see the challenges
you're going to have in identifying
things in some some of these historic
footage and because of the grain so when
we are digitizing contemporary uh
contemporary things that's fine but when
we're digitizing his um his historic
things with scratches and glitches some
of these uh computer vision tools don't
work so well with it
um we did some experiments of course
with clip where we were generating
fictional disk descriptions so remember
back
to that um
Cooper Hewitt print where there was no
metadata so we started doing that with
things in the in the collection now to
generate descriptions based on stuff
that we have that hasn't had time for
staff to write
captioning again lots of things we've
been experimenting with there there
um where things go wrong right we
married at Clint hunt like what the hell
is that
um anyway
um of course uh transcription tools now
super supercharged this is from 2018.
um
yeah
right anyway
there is a concern in the museum world
of course that what we what what is
happening when we when we move away from
collections collection specific
knowledge to this data Centric View and
this is where you know I would usually
talk about bias in these tools trying to
get to try to get data sets language
models and these these kinds of things
but it really does does reveal within my
world lots of issues around skills
um so the other things that have changed
in my museum now everything is in
copyright so that's hard
there's no uh there's no quotation
exception within Australian law yet uh
Rebecca I'm sure we'll talk a bit about
that of course iacip or first First
Nations I IAP really matters and it's
not as simple as things are in or out of
copyright copyright and rights may may
exist and be collect collectively owed
within a community they're also Moral
Moral rights and if you haven't checked
out spawning dot AI That's a very
exciting project around artists and
creators opting out of training
on images and works
um open kind of data is now used by
machines more than it is by humans right
so we know that but we haven't thought
through what that actually means so you
also for First Nations and of course
that works out in the trade training
training models most ex most explicitly
but in lots of other things too so when
you come up and visit which I hope kind
of you do in the next couple of days
this is the kind of experience you will
now get
[Music]
so you'll get given a lens you don't get
given a pen you get given a lens right
and like at Cooper Hewitt you can
collect all of the things you can
collect all the things you you make but
different differently to Cooper Hewitt
you take the lens home
and what happens there within our Museum
of screeder culture is we connect you to
things that are not in our uh not in our
exhibitions and not in our collections
so the purpose of them of the museum
here has moved from showing you things
within the Museum's collection to
showing you things that you might be
interested in because our curators chose
to chose them beyond the Museum's
collection so that that's a slight
philosophical and semantic shift so the
idea is that the museum becomes a place
that inspires you to go further in this
there's there's there's this regard
um so I'm just gonna I think I'm gonna
end in a second let's see how many
fights I've got left so the big question
question now as a director and CEO is
What are the literacies that my staff
now need
to work with tech technology I'm in a
museum of screed culture I'm in a museum
that collects and explores visual
effects the explores film that explores
video games what are the literacies my
curators need to make make make sense of
the world that the tools people in this
this this this room are making
don't understand they don't understand
it at all they don't have the technical
literacies
to distinguish them from Magic and I
think that is a problem and I think that
that's something that needs a lot of
work between technology communities and
the humanities
skip the next slide because it's not
relevant
let's see what happens uh
yeah we know this too
and as I said at the start this is a
problem and this is one in terms of Open
Access that I've seen happen over the
last 20 years and where the PowerHouse
did early work in open access the
PowerHouse was not a not a museum many
people thought of in the global global
sense in terms of Museum Collections and
as soon as the British British museum
the Metropolitan Museum and other
museums that people know
started to release their their
collections it crowds out the smaller
collections the more Niche Collections
and that's something to be aware of too
and of course the web now like you know
so many design decisions within museums
are now based on
analytics data which is a very blunt
tool for measuring value
Brett's wins out over depth
and this is a challenge too so when we
don't have shared kind of narratives
about things
communities will create their own
sometimes they will be good things
sometimes they will be ridiculous things
as you're well aware of
so for me as now director and CEO open
is a strategy and it's a tool for
catalytic change
and what that change creates is what we
need to talk more more about as a
society so thanks heaps
[Applause]
thank you very much Seb it was great to
see what the museum space is doing with
their open Collections and really
embracing everything that we have done
within our open source Community as well
on behalf of the team I'd like to give
you this small gift to say thank you
and please give it up for a sec
[Music]
[Applause]