William R. Lobkowicz, Sara Polak / Fireside chat / DCxPrague

Transcript

ladies and gentle oh I always start as like an MMA um uh moderator I'm really sorry about that um welcome to today's fireside chat which we've been preparing for weeks um and we're about to um share with you um a kind of what we both geek out about which is culture and history and archaeology but also show how that can be uh tied into the Wonder wondrous world of blockchain um and uh the various kind of connections between like high-tech and uh these seemingly old school uh subjects that we can kind of better understand not only what history actually means to us but understand history to help crack open the future um and the The Human Condition so it'll be some improv it'll be light banter highly

humorous um and just generally impromptu conversation I would love to it's an absolute honor to introduce a dear friend and a wonderful expert in this field William Rudolph Lovitz hello hello welcome to your own house thank you so uh we actually had a uh an event happen uh this morning which kind of signifies the connection of the modern and the old so to speak uh would you mind telling us what that was yes uh well firstly I thought I might introduce Sarah a little bit as well in some way she perform since this is sort of a more of a Fireside shop but we've been working together uh since 2021 mostly geeking out about history a lot of the

time too uh but as a cultural Anthropologist as well and uh someone who has a very wonderful uh understanding of history and its importance but also someone who has a great understanding of how technology can help deepen our understanding of that um we've been working very closely in collaboration with our own collections uh which some of you have had the opportunity to see upstairs but also with different historic properties where we can look for ways to uh to find uh how to bring them to life um and how to keep them relevant in the 2st Century um when we I have my various ancestors who are here uh looking down upon me these are my we've got my 10 times

great-grandfather who's the man who looks like a poodle um then the eight times great-grandfather on the left side over here and I think it's interesting um being in the w w witness of their gaze right now uh thinking about where we are today speaking about blockchain and Technology here I don't think this would totally surprise them I think their concept of what the world looks like uh today would be the surprising thing because um as much as we talk about uh how how revolutionary this technology is how uh we're making great strides and boundaries we don't know whether this is really respectful to our history or our culture I I think it's

it's wrong to think in this way because all of those different my different ancestors and all of these different people through history we really striving to find new ways of creating new societies that we can live in um new ways where we can make contributions as well um and so some people came up to me today and said you know thank you for letting us be here and I said thank you for coming um because we for if we can continue putting paintings up on the wall and saying this is good art and you should appreciate it but if it doesn't have any relevance in our society today and we're not able to find new ways to connect with it understand it and use different tools to do so uh it won't last uh the test of time and what what

has already been a 700 year history um so Sarah in her work as well uh I wanted to also say as a research fellow at Oxford as well is working uh with the Czech Technical University um and runs a research group called chaos uh they don't cause chaos all the time but they're looking sometimes but they look at different ways to do that but one reason reason why we' become such close friends is that um she has this she's uh not only fascinated with the history but she's also uh been so critical in popularizing this history and helping people understand it and look for new ways for us to work with it today so today when we uh what was happening literally in the concert room right before you started your programming here

today uh we had signed a memorandum of understanding between our cultural institution and uh the Czech Technical University here which was a great stried for us um it doesn't seem like it's only the second official uh memorandum we've signed with a Czech University and it's with a technical one the one we signed with before was with the historical faculty and that might be surprising we there are other institutions and cultural institutions that we can work with here but I think uh this the Technical University will allow us to take great St strides and share things with more people as well absolutely thank you William I'm I'm blushing and very honored that we could um do do this thing um together and that we're we're

also helping the culture come to life because I actually remember one of the first times that that we met was here um during NF castle and I would love if you could tell us a little bit more about that because it was a just over a year ago that the last NF Castle finished and roughly about this time I was still recovering from the incredibly intense uh hangover um that that I had um but it was also thanks to William but also thanks to Yosef and Pa that I uh slowly but surely kind of dragged myself into uh the blockchain world and one of the things I was fascinated by is that um it's actually not that different from the like principles of evolution and social structure and peer-to-peer exchange that have been happening for I dare say millions of years like from exchanging shells in like the C dupon

which is an archaeological site which shows one of the first kind of examples of um of trade of the archaeological evidences of trade uh we actually haven't technically or principally moved on all that much we've just digitalized the process and blockchain has just completely fascinated me and I might say maybe something slightly controversial but I'm actually really happy for the crash that happened not because of necessarily the contents of your wallet which I realize was um dramatic but because it's forced people to look at other use cases and the use cases of using blockchain in uh places like archaeology culture history um so I'm wondering will because you understand this infinitely more than IDE do and you've pioneered this in in the Czech Republic and also you talk about it um uh on a global scene uh how you have

used um the phenomenon of nfts Beyond just a picture of a monkey how you've utilized that in helping your collections come to life but also um kind of help history be cemented and understood in a whole different way I'd say with our approach to blockchain we try to create historical precedence for everything that we're seeing um you were mentioning the exchanging of shells the idea of a public Ledger dates back to the time of Mesopotamia where we had proof of people's ownership of different properties that existed um and those of you who joined me on the tour today I gave a little bit of context Behind These collections which have been lost twice and regained twice uh first under Nazi occupation and then under communist occupation where our ability to actually

restitute these pieces was contingent upon receipts that paper receipts that were given to us by two totalitarian regimes um which literally had H Hitler at the end of that receipt and that was used to reclaim this property in restitution um in the 1990s which was led by my father you have to imagine the we're dealing with 20,000 movable objects uh spread across a 100 different locations during restitution the complexities around just reclaiming that Heritage but then on top of that having to prove that we were the owners of it resulted in us first restituting those receipts and then using that to prove um and so in the context of our own history of our family we've lived through

different Wars conflicts that have happened throughout the course of history this building has been witnessed to uh the spark uh to the 30 Years War which was the uh defenestration of Prague that happened two palaces away from us here and being able to have evidence of uh different historical events that happen throughout the course of history uh ownership structures that have existed as well is something that is desperately needed um and is incredibly important I think um whether it be for us as individuals but I I I come from an arts background um and I spent a short time period working as a researcher at SES in the old Master paintings Department one of the biggest issues we have is around provenance

history behind different paintings where uh we have to actually prove that the actual lineage of these pieces is authent authentic and real um and art historians are notorious um for making up some of these histories as well and so it all has to be proven um the wonderful thing about code is it can it depending on whether you can work your way around it if you if you set things up properly we won't be able to manipulate those things um so in our own Pursuits of that we try to create those historic parallels and now I'll get to this NF Castle concept which you had originally asked me about when we start first started exploring it that was the reason we started uh exploring blockchain were for those reasons and

then we realized we really didn't know much um we needed to learn more I started traveling with a group of friends uh to California uh London France uh and learning more about this technology and then we decided to host a conference here in Prague called non-fungible Castle which uh was uh an opportunity for us to connect both the blockchain and the cultural space where we invited people from two completely different fields to have a conversation um and sort of form a narrative about how these two different groups could work together um and create lasting change um and the unique ability of this Palace and these buildings in our family I think is to act as mediators between

these different groups so that we can create that understanding so we had uh crypto degens on stage with uh with like the head of the Salvador Del foundation for instance which was absurd uh but it was really fun because they got on a heated debate um and I think it was important for them to raise their concerns so the the um head of the do Foundation was a complete non-believer in this technology actually um and he we knew that putting him on stage too we knew that he would actually criticize it but it allowed him to actually poke um holes into different arguments and then vice versa for people to learn from one another um so when we think about uh so that that conference was great in doing

that and one um thing we also pioneered during that conference was this concept of proof of patronage um where we used historical precedence once again upstairs in the the collections where we have a receipt from Beethoven acknowledging his receipt of 175 golden uh for the litz's patronage of his music so you have the original working parts of the third fourth and fifth Symphony upstairs which you can see but that receipt um we used as a way of creating a concept called proof of patronage where we took a painting that was in need of restoration there would be a hole or a scratch in the canvas we would uh take a a digital reproduction of that piece and sell it as an nft at the cost

of the restoration of the piece meaning that when you purchase the nft you're paying for the restoration of the piece and 6 to n months later we then send them a second nft as an airdrop where they see uh the restored piece in its final form and this way we're taking people on the Journey of philanthropy where they can better understand what goes into putting these pieces together um we treat them exactly as we' treat any other donor um and we uh and it's like adopting an animal at a zoo in many ways too but it it these animals are different paintings and many of the paint this lady you see over here is the result of a restoration actually uh there's another lady over there in that room that's a result there are 65

different paintings that we manag to restore and this uh including this room we're we were actually really lucky we're in this room because there's a lot of things I can point to this is the Chinese badir which was uh is painted with these beautiful frescos that baked that date back to the 20th century um we created a 3D nft actually uh working with known origin where it actually allows you to import the nft into um certain uh digital metaverses where you can walk into the space see exactly what it looked like before and what it looked like after and you're capturing a moment in history in that transformation which is interesting so that um that that's been our most successful Endeavor I'd say in this space um but we're

continuing to explore as we keep moving forward but the conversation is so key between the different groups to do it yeah yeah AB absolutely and it's a beautiful example of how like a spark God that sounds like a um some kind of communist quote but like how a spark can cause a fire you know and with um with uh Williams and the and the family's work um it's it's inspired a lot of people around the Czech Republic to and not just in the Czech Republic to get the ball rolling with really using blockchain in the cultural sphere including myself because I was first of all I had no idea what you were talking about then I was like okay I really need to educate myself so I can hold my own in a conversation and I became absolutely fascinated by this and not only do we hope to pursue this at uh at

Oxford um with Dr Katherine Eckles who is very much exploring how to digitalize cultural cultural heritage in a scalable way uh but purely for me uh as an archaeologist um it's blockchain actually becomes very very interesting in how you record history there's this um kind of age-old kind of qu philosophical question that you ask archaeologists when do you stop being a grave robber and you start being an archaeologist and part of that actually is just the period of time that passes between the active live history in like between the thousands of years of what you're exploring um but at the same time we of often see history as something long in the past without realizing that we're actually living it we're living through an Israeli Palestine conflict we're living through a war right now we're living through an economic crisis

we live through a pandemic like in a thousand years time there'll be kids poor bastards you know reading this in the history books trying to get all the dates lined up and thinking oh my God what is the interpretation of these events and it's very much our responsibility to have those uh that interpretation in as diverse way as possible but also in a way that cannot be changed because I mean I'm a huge fan of memes I don't know how about you guys but memes are great and there's this great meme that basically says Ah isn't it cool that like only the good guys ever won Wars in history um and it's very much the case that if you do win a war or if you do have the economic or kind of military um superiority you get to write that interpretation of history and even key

events I mean I was in in bed at 2 am which shows you how slightly unhinged I am reading about Hannibal's Crossing up the Alps and I was re sorry I was reading some of the interpretations and actually even one of the most prolific aspects of the Punic Wars we don't understand we don't know how many elephants survived you know some say 12 some say one out of the 37 it all depends on like the Roman interpretation of like the like B basically the sources of the time um but that's just Hannibal's crossing of the Alps imagine like how many different interpretations of History archaeology are being done and how that's being used to justify the present the ruling of the nation states uh foreign policy domestic policy all of

that is often based on historiography that's often highly skewed so one of my huge hopes is using blockchain to make history as objective as possible the interpretation as kind of cemented as possible but also in archaeology to um prevent people um for example from stealing our stuff and stealing our our ideas to give you concrete example I just uh returned from a um expedition in Guatemala where we're looking for a lost Maya City unfortunately there's an embargo on the information so I can't tell you nothing but um in January there might be something who knows but um uh nonetheless like one of the things that happened to us from a previous Expedition uh there is that a a kind of competing archaeological team we don't

know who it was the Americans um stole one of the stil that that we left there so we basically dug it carefully like underneath some Earth we left it there like hoping to return to it the next season and voila it was gone um and then the people who who were working said yeah they basically just have a helicopter they lifted it out of here we're like yep the Czech Expedition doesn't have money for a helicopter but you know that's fine um but it's not just about the physical object anymore for example what they then do is they take it to a museum and they chronologically alter the interpretation of that Steeler to make sure that we cannot Trace that interpretation to that particular Steeler and that they're basically like in the clear because there's no context for that find and like all that like basically we have is

some like very grainy photographs from like a Motorola uh phone um and maybe like some notes in the field book um so using blockchain as a proof of find or a proof of Discovery but also proof of interpretation because often you chat by the campfire and you say oh this Steeler might have a um snail with a penis playing basketball which you might laugh at that's a genuine Maya uh iconography that has been disced CED so it I mean archaeologists whenever we don't know we just say it's a fertility ritual right but um this is a snail with a penis playing a b ball cord game is an actual thing that um we have seen uh many times um worryingly and scarily enough I mean the Maya were not as um ethereal as we think they were um but for example you

say that interpretation where do you write it down how do you record it you're just chatting amongst friends and then someone can like basically leak that out and publish that before you and then all the but it's not just about the prestige it's all about the grant money and the H index and the citations that then go to that person which means that you won't be able to get money for your research just because like you were like too loose with your interpretation of a snail with a penis um so using blockchain for uh archaeology as ludicrous as it might sound um is something that will really help uh history I think form and shape itself and it's the best gift that we can give to the Future Generations as well sorry I got all te eyed about a snail with a penis and that's the last time I use

that phrase today sorry um uh will I'll I wanted to I wanted to I I won't Circle back to the the the the graphic nature of that what you just said uh but um the the thing I wanted to acknowledge there which was quite interesting is uh capturing historic moments actually when you as a archaeologist visits the visit the site and trying to make sure that we have some evidence of you being there seeing the site um this is something that we were also we also quite interested in exploring um proving people's um participation in historic events um there was one issue we had in this country for instance for a while where

uh people uh pretended or said they were uh actually participating in the Velvet Revolution for instance that happened in this country in 1989 um and we see these different poops on different Twitter spaces that were on and everything and some of us may poo poo it in that moment and say oh it's just another poop I don't know if I need this but it's actually very interesting from a a historical perspective to show where people have traveled over time what they've experienced and proving that uh you've participated in an important historical moment um and when I see these are politicians that we're working with today who um claim to have been uh there in that moment when really they were supporting some of the regimes

that were actually in place that were preventing these freedoms and and and and the creation of our democracy um it's it's very very difficult to prove and this is another thing we tested at our conference it's um really we used it as a wonderful uh breeding ground for testing different things and seeing what actually worked um we many people are testing nft tickets um in different forms for events and uh what's taking place we had a lot of trouble doing this because uh we had a lot of attendees of our conference who were not crypto natives uh and we uh were worried that if if we were going to do this um people wouldn't be willing to set up a wallet

purchase crypto purchase the actual ticket and so uh we worked with another uh company which is check based here called strv uh which was able able to create email bound wallets um where people could actually pay in Fiat for tickets to then eventually get the the nft tickets themselves which they can later claim on their wallets if they'd like to or not but we stayed true to the concept of actually uh using nfts that prove your attendance in a certain event and the nft itself uh transformed over time based off of what portions of the event you scanned in for actually um this was an incredible Nightmare and very difficult to put together um and drove our team absolutely insane from an

organizational perspective um so I I felt and it's also very difficult from my perspective because I'm trying to uh explain to our internal team here the importance of of us trying to prove this this is a historical moment where we're testing out this technology uh but it's still people don't understand the the feat uh of what we are actually able to achieve on the back end which can be quite uh disconcerting sometimes um but it and that's again why I'm so excited you're all here because uh helping people better understand what what how we're able to change our Societies or speaking speaking uh about it in terms

that people can understand for instance the way we did this was through a um a ticking app where it generated a QR code that changed over time and the QR code represented multiple wallets that you could associate with that uh with that QR code so you scan the QR code it checked your different wallets you could connect to different uh chain chain-based wallets and would determine whether you had the nft needed to actually access the space um and what I would try to explain to people is imagine your Apple wallet and all those different uh cards that you have or tickets and everything imagine if all of that is represented by one QR code could be your University degree it could be the uh access to your home um and this

is what what I'd say has been the biggest struggle for us generally is trying to figure out how do we explain this in a way that's understandable and comprehensive uh for people to get until eventually it'll become commonplace um and so that's where I think I'm grateful to people like Sarah too it's it's the historical context that explains this isn't anything different we shouldn't be afraid um and that we should if something doesn't work for you or if there's something that intimidates you how can we adjust the the product or what we create to uh to uh fit what what your needs may be thank you um by the way ladies and gentlemen we have a few minutes left I also want to give you the opportunity to ask some questions but I've got um a final I say one question

it's like one question but there's three hidden within that know the way that I that I talk um uh but just a quick precursor to that I I want to ask about like the fetish of the physical object um because we're still like I think in our minds not quite able to divorce that a certain way and just to give a concrete example with this uh Guatemala shtick um one of the things that we're not allowed to do unless like it goes through a really long round of the Guatemalan bureaucracy is publish whatever photos of whatever finds and whatever buildings we might find um and given that Guatemala has been a dictatorship for the last 40 plus years they had a civil war on they actually had elections while we were in the jungle so we had an escape through through Mexico it was it was a lot of

fun um I didn't tell that to my mom and Granny um but um um one of the things that we can't do is for example we have to wait for a really long time to show any evidence of the fines themselves uh one quick bypass that we found is actually virtualizing and digitalizing some of those objects using photogrametry and 3D scanning and recreating them the way that they might have looked you know 3,000 years ago were actually able to show them without showing the actual photo because uh Guatemalan bureaucracy doesn't like account for 3D scanning it doesn't account for augmented and virtual reality which is quite interesting and we're kind of like playing around with that at the moment um uh but I want to kind of uh Circle back to uh both a fascinating guess that you had at last um NF Castle Loy art but also how you

view you know the future of your own Collections and the the future of your own physical objects that are everywhere around us because of course we can have you know 3D scans but there's still emot we are humans and it's your family stuff that you've been collecting for the last 700 years so how do you kind of bridge the realm between the physical and the virtual in your head and also like in the lovet family strategy I mean I think this is an issue for museums around the world is when we talk about digitization and finding ways to make these pieces more available to people I think that's an incredibly Noble and important Pursuit um however we we can't forget that these objects still need care and help and preservation um and so so uh digitizing

can help people understand these things bring them closer to people uh so that you're not creating physical or financial barriers for people to understand the art uh which is fantastic but the Practical uh and thing that we will have to deal with in the end of the day is that these pieces still need to be taken care of um and this is where licensing becomes an incredibly complicated uh field as well um there's nothing preventing any of you from taking your iPhone or or your Android and taking a photo that will be of a high enough resolution of these different paintings to post it in your rooms um and do whatever you like but uh one thing that helps fund these

collections are licensing uh things that we do around products or things that we do there's te technically the nothing stopping someone from taking a photo of this lady and creating a p pillow um which creates problems we still need to find ways to support these Collections and make them accessible um so the way we think about technology as well is we want to enhance our understanding of the pieces but not take away the physical experience that you can have with them um and you mentioned Ludy art which is a interesting example um the the people who put together this organization um are of Nigerian origin but live in the UK um and there have been huge issues around the British Museum and uh some of the pieces a lot of the pieces in that great

majority of the pieces in that museum that have been uh taken over the course of Britain's Colonial history um and the benine Browns is in particular have been something that have captured the attention of uh many different people around the world because this is the National Heritage of um the kingdom of benine which represent what is today modern day Nigeria primarily uh that has um that has these pieces that are critical to that uh cultural heritage which were systematically taken and looted from uh the king uh Palace and the concept that uh this uh group came up with is that they were stealing back their Heritage and so they went into the uh British museum they uh

scanned uh these pieces using photogrametry and they claim back uh the piece without necessarily stealing it technically there are all sorts of issues around that from a licensing perspective from the perspective of the museum um but there they weren't really going to get into an argument about this whatsoever because it's it was uh problematic from a PR perspective to say the least uh regardless it was actually a really great initiative because they worked with different um artists uh Nigerian artists to create different interpretations of that benine bronze um and they shared the data with them uh open source so that they could actually create their own um nfts based off of the project uh which supported Nigerian

artists uh in that area but um and also uh and also uh raised a little bit of um uh uh understanding or knowhow about this uh crisis so um it was very interesting and generally the way museums are going about the nft space or blockchain I think it's uh they're still really exploring this I was invited to a talk uh that was organized by the ministry of culture of France um and we were one of three international institutions that were invited for this talk one was the the uh uiti Museum um which was represented by the Italian museums who sold a version of their Michelangelo's rotund as a one of one

that was sold I think at 300,000 but 50% of the profits went to um went to uh a partner company they worked with and another uh 775,000 went to legal fees so probably the the most wellknown one of the most well-known pieces in the ofit uh so generating a profit of €75,000 uh which eventually led to the Italian government uh banning all digital sales of works of art within all national institutions um and they were basically saying that the the issues that they were having around this the other institution was the Belair which uh created kind of a 10,000 collectible project which um they sold different

tiles of the uh the Kiss by Gustaf Clint um where about 75% of the tiles were just pieces of gold uh which led to the market actually not being so successful and they spoke a little bit about that but it was another interpretation of creating a community around it and then there was us and then there are 12 other institutions in France which were also looking at their own projects but it's funny how the the perspective has changed now where it's not necessarily about and this is where we're heading too it shouldn't be about generating necessarily huge amounts of profit for the museum uh there are still Revenue sources that are needed obviously so um it is welcome but I think the way people are looking right

now in the museum space are how do we create communities around our museums so that we will encourage younger audiences to continue visiting to give you perspective with our own institution uh we raise money every year to support these Collections and everything we do um the entire collection staff and curators who work here are all from privately raised funds that support their salaries and their activities um our Restorations are done based off of how much money we're able to raise is to support the collections and we do this without primarily without Public Funding or very limited and uh the age bracket for most of our donors are between 60 and 80 years old now from my perspective as a Next Generation and someone uh who is trying to think about how are we able

to preserve these things for the future um it it's become abundantly clear that we really need to look at finding new ways to generate interest in these collections where it becomes relatable to other people people where we're not sitting in an echo chamber of our curators thoughts as we're going through but finding ways to make this culture as relevant as possible for people so that they want to find ways to preserve it protect it and share it with others which is the mission of these collections sorry that was a really long answer as well but extremely interesting um um I I I think the the wonderful thing is you've created such a welcome uh open sandbox here um and absolutely everything's our popularization we struggle with this in Academia that we are in our Ivory Towers kind of talking

uh very kind of obscurely about things that only interest us and it's both a role of cultural institutions and academics to make sure that we can talk to the average person and I think at least like in my head something that sticks out last year at NF Castle um at Nella hoses where you had um people basically collecting nfts as they completed certain activities and there were kids running around collecting nfts without even realizing it that's exactly the kind of use case how you can bring um something that was a kind of fetishized thing for people to speculate on and by Lamborghinis from to actually being a pro uh kind of people um tool and a pro people technology that can also give another dimension to culture which is so so important so thank you so much for pushing that forward and having

The Bravery I know it's often not easy and with um CTU in oxwood I'll do everything that we can to support those Endeavors whether it's virtualizing um uh physical buildings or objects and trying to make that dream of Tomorrow a reality right um anyone has yes the the the cyber Punk steampunk gentleman um I love your mask please thank you um how do you see the concept of the imitable authenticity in the era of AI generated content you oh thank that that's actually a very good um very good question we we discussed this again last year's uh NF castle with um sfia robot from Hansen robotics where we discussed

when something is generated by by AI obviously can track that somehow in the database and at least like register that moment of generation as a unique moment um obviously sometimes with the structure of neural networks and by the way I'm no expert at this I merely pretend but um from the little that I do know um uh it's very difficult to trace which concrete training data that image picked to generate like what you're what you're seeing at the end or whether that's you know uh word word generated like a poem or a song or whatever that might be so I think that we need to be able to pinpoint in the database the Genesis of that moment um and to basically be able ble to kind of associate that with a concrete kind of generating program because there's a big difference again with licensing open AI

at the end of the day is a private company if you have an open-source gener generative algorithm you know I've seen people this really kind of made me angry when for example darly in mid Journey first came around there were these kind of speculative um uh I call them like like the 90s businessmen of like you know in the Czech Republic where you kind of like speculate with other people's work and other people's intellectual property um and they would generate images In Dary and then like sell them uh create their own gallery and then sell them for huge amounts of money just because they were relying on the fact that people don't understand what generative AI actually is so they generate them for free and then sell them for like you know 50,000 check crowns of Pop which I actually find disgraceful especially given that the

generative AI mechanisms were partially uh invented by tamas mikov who's a Czech scientist who doesn't get really any credit for them these days because he created them as open- Source um mechanisms that people can use so that it gets start being popular and basically so that the science can progress so he forwent about 40 patterns to make sure that um algorithms like word Tove which contributed to the uh augmentation of Google Translate for example can be used by the general public so where do you trace the scientific discovery that goes back you know 10 years to someone who's highly speculative then using the fruits of that labor to generate profit for themselves it's a it's a massive mindfield but it goes back to the point at least for me personally I was mentioning about history it's not just

history with you know Wars and inter ation of uh kind of Museum Heritage but it's also history just purely human actions like um scientific discovery proof of thought proof of Discovery um and I think that blockchain can be really helpful in that also in the AI space Sorry monologue sorry I think I have less to add in this uh space as well I'm less of an uh expert for sure um what I will say in our in our case I think our use of artificial intelligence is um there are a lot of really interesting use cases we spoke at the Czech with the Czech Technical University today about some things they could look at um one thing that's quite interesting actually is

that our uh painting by Peter brogel the Elder is a painting that is a series of six paintings and one of them is lost and one thing that would be very interesting if you can replicate the hand of the master as much as possible is to determine what that six painting could look like um another area that's interesting is looking at um how can we eliminate a lot of manual labor that is uh done by our curators to catalog our collections to um we have uh four kilometers of library and archival material and just cataloging that material should take somewhere between 7 to 10 years with current practices at the moment what we're talking again with the university

about is whether we can create um whether we can train models to actually read and analyze um historic German um kft is a a very specific type of writing to actually um uh analyze and digitize and transcribe many of the pieces that are here and create a brand new catalog based off of that or even ask it to generate a new um uh cataloging system based off of the different material that exists um so it's about eliminating human labor and learning to work with it um and we have a a BET right now between one of our curators and uh one of the people from the check Technical University uh the winner gets a creative

champagne uh whoever is able to uh trans transcribe and uh uh recatalog uh just the catalog that was written in 1923 that we're still working with to this date uh gets a creative champagne so we're going to see who wins the curator or AI uh but it's a fun test we have a lot of fun any more questions yeah one more question so we we mentioned Ai and effectively AI has can create a lot of things Without Limits and that's a bit hard uh for art because uh there can be too much another current uh is generative art and I wonder what are your opinions on that um

I'll start because I at our conference we organized we actually had a lot of uh generative art pieces on display um and I think it's very interesting because we had a large debate about this um people from the artistic Community uh there are a lot of people who actually hate generative art um with a passion um and I had a conversation with a director of a museum institution here about one generative R piece that we had put on display um where we tested this we asked um uh a uh group of artists uh known as um uh oh my goodness obvious uh based in uh Paris actually um um who are an

artist Collective that creat generative art pieces and we gave them access to 150 images of maps that we have in our archive which aren't on public display and they're incredibly difficult to display because there are these massive books of maps and you would have to turn a page to see each one uh physically so and they're just sitting in a library so we gave them scans of those pieces they inputed those inputs into their algorithm to create a brand new uh animated piece that was trained on their algorithm to put that together the amount of work that went into that there is actually quite a bit of work that goes into that coding and there's Artistry in the code itself in order to create a piece I see for for me personally I see code as a form of uh if

it if it's creating some sort of output I see it as a tool to create something uh to to create a work of art um that creates some difficulties around the area of AI I think but when I'm thinking about generative art which is done with a purpose to create something as well that is of an artistic nature I see code similar to a paintbrush uh and those advant advances of Technology um where I have trouble is um is when uh when that artistic qual the making the separation between artistic quality and an artistic idea that came about and just sort of putting something together for financial gain um and this is something that you see uh very often in

the um nft Market uh and one thing that really I did not like about the space uh because you had these 10,000 collectible projects that were put together uh which were primarily being uh created by generative art um but like generative uh pieces that were being generated by a machine which have artistic qualities but were not art for Arts sake they were done for IM composition image composition exactly um and that I wouldn't call that a work of art I would call it a an instrument for there there's not an artistic act that goes into it as much thank you um yeah just very briefly on that I think I love historical

Parallels for that reason because a very similar debate was going when it was the rise of the Impressionists because basically um like okay I love fand dijke for example I love like the old like Dutch Masters but at the same time like there was a with with manufacturing and the Industrial Revolution you had the Manu facturing of paint brushes suddenly you didn't have to have a workshop of 20 poor underpaid bastards preparing your paints and your canvas and everything and essentially like the old school like generation got quite angry about the fact that suddenly you have you know Monet and mané kind of sitting by the sen and they can whip out you know three paintings in a day and that that is disgraceful we had to labor with blood and sweat and tears for you three months to like create one cuff on a collar so I think that we're going

through a very similar thing now um and it's important also to create these historical parallel so that people realize exactly as William said that there's a lot of art that goes into the code into making sure that the thing even runs to um help with the post interpretation for the postprocessing so um yeah it's definitely not a conversation that we have for the first time and I think I think it's a thing with AI in general with Humanity that we love hard work because it's what gives us justification because that's the way our society's currently structured um and that's one of the things that I'm interested to look into in our research group I I have no answers just like f at by very similar things yes hi U so obviously you guys are like history experts right but I want to

connect back to what you mentioned s in terms of like thinking in you know 5,000 years you know the the the children of that time kind of like looking back and thinking also okay what are your thoughts on the technology not LLY for the historical pieces that we have one of the most amazing collection I've seen in my life here but for the artist of now now and of the future and the tools that they can uh uh use with this technology for themselves now and for the future Generations just ve very quickly from me I think what we will have to deal with is a um restructuring of the hierarchy of culture I used to work in museums very briefly when I was working for an

AI company we used to predict visitation based on various internal external factors so for example we figured out why people are not coming to the National Gallery anymore and it wasn't because of brexit it was because um uh it was very expensive to um stay in the center of London so people would just stay on the outskirts of London and even though that the National Gallery was for free the trains are so expensive that it wasn't worth for them to come into the center so it was a different way in which people started interacting with culture and interacting with the city as well um and I think there is unfortunately in some circles or at least like I saw this in the kind of old British institutions that I'm most closely associated with um a huge kind of snobber in elitism and kind of like a

knowledge barrier that doesn't really allow people even though it's free and even though you want to Dem democratize it people feel awkward because they they don't know as much you know they don't don't know the like connections and they they feel scared to even enter the space so like where I studied archaeology it's the same type of people studying archaeology over and over and over again so I think that what we're going to be seeing is a diversification and a democratization of who is involved in high art and high culture and that's going to massively change the Dynamics of society because the two are so closely intertwined how I don't know but I just hope to get as many people involved in it as possible because it's the most beautiful thing I agree we're at a interesting Crossroads here

I'm I'm quite uh concerned with how much uh people really appreciate our cultural heritage and how the importance that people draw upon it and I hope uh looking back that people will remember um our history and and where we come from I find culture to be the source of what makes us who we are today um and history uh it creates the national identities from the countries we come from from who we are as individuals it's history art and culture that gets us to where we are today and it's the first thing however that's cut in any national budget whenever there's a crisis uh it's the first thing that we um scoff on when

when uh politicians think about oh what should we really be spending our money on as well it's but when we think about our personal identity and trying to protect something like that I think it's the most important uh thing we can do because it protects who we are as individuals so I hope in the future uh when people look back on this time uh people will think that there there is a uh a group of people that feels a sense of responsibility to protect that as well even if especially in the Arts industry it's it's one of the mo most underpaid Industries for people who work in it but the reason people do I think is because they're passionate about protecting a legacy and a Heritage that we all Source our identity from uh very

often as well amazing thanks a lot thanks a lot again Sarah and uh VM if you two start a podcast I'll subscribe to that if you talk about our history uh well uh thank you again uh one round of applause for these two amazing so this was it um that was that was the that was the whole programming that we have or even didn't really prepare uh for uh for the event um we will still be able to co-work here until I I think like 6 PM uh there might still be some like tea and coffee to to drink

and tomorrow uh if you still you know stick in town for a couple more days uh join us here as well uh there won't be be like schedule talks uh but uh I hope we'll get to talk to each other just like sit in this gorgeous uh G gorgeous place um in the Imperial Hall and and just work and talk about tech and now even art and history so thanks again all to you uh yeah if if you want go for it thanks so for coming and um there's the event on 28th so if you are sticking here around for a couple of days later on and on 28th uh Tuesday evening there's a beer FY that opens meet up so you're you're really welcome to come

there yeah awesome if there is like anything else you wanted to share like some people were asking me about an after party I didn't really plan anything but there is a group of like 250 people I'm sure you will find uh your peers there so please just do you uh and yeah again like I'm I'm bad at like these endings like this is it well I will just shut up now