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

The world is filled with
incredible objects

and rich cultural heritage.

And when we get access to them,

we are blown away, we fall in love.

But most of the time,

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

What might the connections be

when we start exploring our heritage,

the beautiful locations
and the art in this world.

Before we get started
in this presentation,

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

First, I am no expert in art or culture.

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

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

belongs to the amazing museums,
archives and foundations

that we partner with.

None of this belongs to Google.

And finally, what you see
behind me

is available right now
on your mobile phones,

on your laptops.

This is our current platform
where you can explore

thousands of museums
and objects at your finger tips

in extremely high-definition detail.

The diversity of the content is what's
is what's amazing.

If we just had European paintings,

if we just had modern art,

I think it gets a bit boring.

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

with 82 curated exhibitions,

which talk about arts and culture
in that community.

We also have some amazing objects
from Japan

around craftsmanship in Japan
called "Made in Japan".

And one of my favorite exhibitions,

which actually is the idea
of my talk,

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

But, I am.

And thanks to this exhibition
that has really taught me

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

Trust me, it's very exciting.

Take my word for it.

So, moving on swiftly,

one quick thing I wanted to showcase
in this platform,

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

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

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

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

to actually be there.

You can actually go to the ground floor

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

And you can see the architectural
masterpiece that it is.

But imagine this accesibility
for a kid in Bombay

who's studying architecture,

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

You can obviously look at objects
in the Guggenheim Museum,

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

There's a lot of information here.

But this is not the purpose
of my talk today.

This exists right now.

What we now have are
the building blocks

to a very exciting future

when it comes to arts and culture

and accessibility to arts and culture.

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

at our office in Paris, ?

who is the professor of interactive design

at Ecal University in
Lausanne, Switzerland.

What ? and our team of engineers
have been doing

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

So I'm going to go quite quick now.

Just clarification:

Always, seeing the real thing
is better.

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

So moving on,

this object you see behind me

is the Venus of Berekhat Ram.

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

around 233,000 years ago

found in the Golan Heights

and currently residing in
the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

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

So let's zoom.

We start from this one object.

And what if we zoomed out

and actually tried to experience
our own cultural big bang.

What might that look like?

This is what we deal with
on a daily basis

at The Cultural Institute.

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

to actually make these connections.

You can travel through time,

you can understand more
about our society through these.

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

and try to see how it might look
without borders

if we just organized art and culture.

We can also, then, plot it by time,

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

And you can spend hours looking
at every decade

and the contributions
in that decade and in those years

for art history and cultures.

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

but we don't have the time right now.

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

(Applause)

But if you don't mind,

and you can hold your applause
'till later,

I don't want to run out of time

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

(Laughter)

So just very quickly,

you can move on from here

to another very interesting idea.

Beyond the pretty picture,

beyond the nice visualization,

what is the purpose, how is this useful?

This next idea comes from
discussions with curators

that we've been having with museums,

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

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

And one of the curators told me,

"Amit, what would it be like

if you could create
a virtual curator's table

where all these 6 million objects

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

And let's start --

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

and understanding where they come from,

it's a crazy matric experience.

Just moving on,

let's take the world-famous
Vincent Van Gogh

who is very well represented
on this platform.

Thanks to the diversity
of the institutions we have,

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

now organized in one
beautiful view.

And as it ?

and as the seril goes deeper

you can see all the self-portraits,

you can see still life.

But I just wanted to highlight
one very quick example

which is very timely:

The Bedroom.

This is an artwork where
three copies exist.

One at the Van Gogh Museum
in Amsterdam,

one at the d'Orsay in Paris,

and one at the Art Institute
in Chicago,

which actually is currently hosting
a reunion

of all three artworks physically,

I think only for the second time ever.

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

in a very different way,

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

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

very quickly so you can
experience

what we are doing for
every single object.

We want the image to speak
as much as it can

on a digital platform.

And all you need is
an internet connection and a computer

(Applause)

And Seril, if you can go deeper, quickly.

I'm sorry, this is all live,

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

and this is available for every object:

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

even sculpture.

Sometimes, you don't know
what can attract you

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

So for me personally,

it was quite a challenge

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

my mother was not very supportive.

I love my mother,

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

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

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

And so, it took about 4 and a half years

for me to convince my lovely
Indian mother

that actually, this is worthwhile.

And the way I did it

was I realized one day that she
loves gold,

and so I started showing her objects

that have the material gold in them

and the first thing my mom
asks me is,

"How can we buy these?"

(Laughter)

And obviously, my salary is not that high

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

But you can explore them virtually."

And so now my mom --

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

any more silver in your project?

Can you show me?"

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

It does not matter how you get in,

as long as you get in.

Once you get in, you're hooked.

Moving on from here very quickly,

there is kind of a playful idea,
actually,

to illustrate the point of access,

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

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

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

and the ones that can afford to do it,

it's complicated.

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

what do we call it?

We don't have a good name for this.

But essentially, let's. --

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

But let's start with Rembrandt,

we might have time for only
one example.

But thanks to the diversity,

we have around 500 amazing
Rembrandt object artworks

from 46 institutions
and 17 countries.

And let's say you on your next vacation

want to go see every single one of them.

That is your itinerary,

you will probably travel
53,000 kilometers,

visit around, I think,
46 institutions,

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

(Laughter)

But remember, it's art,

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

Moving on swiftly from here

is something a little bit more
technical and more interesting.

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

But obviously we have something
cool nowadays

that everyone likes to talk about
called machine-learning.

And so what we thought is,

"Let's strip out all the metadata,

let's look at what machine-learning
can do

based on visual recognition of
this entire collection."

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

these clusters that have
no reference point of information

but has just used visuals to
cluster things together.

Each cluster is an art?
to itself of discovery.

But one of the clusters we want
to show you very quickly

is this amazing cluster
of portraits

that we found from museums
around the world.

If you could zoom in
a little but more Seril,

just to show you, you can
just be traveling through portraits.

And essentially, you can do nature,
you can do horses,

and clusters galore.

When we say all these portraits,
we were like,

"Hey, can we do something
fun for kids,

can we just do something playful

to get people interested in portraits?"

Because I haven't really seen

young kids really excited
to go to a portrait gallery.

So I want to try to
figure something out.

So we created something
called the portrait matcher.

It's quite self-explnatory,

so i'm just going to let Seril
show his beautiful face.

And essentially what's happening

is with the movement of his head,

we are matching different portraits
around the world from museums.

(Applause)

And I don't know about you,

but I've shown it to my nephew

and the reaction is just phenominal.

All they ask me is when
can we go see this.

And by the way, if you're nice,

maybe Seril you can smile
and find a happy one.

Oh, perfect.

And by the way, this is not rehearsed.

Congrats, Seril.

Let's move on.

Otherwise, this will
take the whole time.

So, art and culture can be fun, also.

So for our last quick experiment --

we call all of these experiments --

our last quick experiment
comes bck to machine learning.

So we show you clusters,
visual clusters,

but what if we could ask
the machine

to also name these clusters?

What if it could automatically
tag them

using no actual metadata?

So what we have is this kind
of explorer

where we have managed to
match around 4,000 labels

and we haven't really
done anything special here,

just feed the collection,

and we found interesting categories.

We can start with horses,
very straightforward catgeory.

You would expect to see
that the machine

has put images of horses, right?

It has.

But you also notice right over there

that it has a very abstract image

that it has still managed to recognize
and cluster as horses.

We also have an amazing head
in terms of a horse.

And each one has the tags
as to why it got categorized.

So let's move to another one
which I found very funny and interesting,

because I don't understand how
this category came up.

It's called Lady in Waiting.

If Seril, you do it very quickly,

you will see that we have
these amazing images

of ladies, I guess, in waiting
or posing,

I don't really understand it

(Laughter)

But I've been trying to ask
my museum contacts

what is this, what's going on here,

and it's fascinating.

Coming back to gold very quickly,

I wanted to search for gold

and see how the machine
tagged all the gold,

but actually, it doesn't tag it as gold.

We are living in popular times.

It tags it as "bling bling".

(Laughter)

I'm being hard on Seril
because I'm moving too fast.

Essentially, here you have
all the bling bling

of the world's museums
organized for you.

And finally to end this talk
and these experiments,

what I hope you feel after this talk
is happiness and emotion.

And what would we see
when we see happiness?

If we actually look at
all the objects

that have been tagged under happines,

you would expect happiness,
I guess.

But there was one that
came up

that was very fascinating
and interesting

which was this artwork
by Douglas Coupland,

our friend and artist in residence
as well

called "I Miss My Pre-Internet Brain".

I don't know why the machine
feels like

it misses it's pre-Internet brain,

it's been tagged here.

But you know, it's a very
interesting part.

I sometimes do miss
my pre-Internet brain,

but now when it comes
to exploring arts and culture online.

So take out your phones,
take out your computers,

go visit museums.

And just a quick call-out
to all the amazing archivists,

historians, curators,

who are sitting in museums
preserving all this culture.

And the least we can do is get
our daily dose of art and culture

for ourselves and our kids.

Thank you.

(Applause)