December 1, 2014
London
Amit Sood in conversation with Sook-Kyung Lee, Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho
Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho, Sook-Kyung Lee: We would like to begin our conversation with a discussion of your project at the Google Cultural Institute and the online digital archive you launched in 2011. Can you tell us more about this project, such as the motivation and the vision behind it, and what you want to achieve with this? How can we perhaps relate it to existing ideas of the virtual museum? ﷽﷽﷽﷽﷽﷽﷽﷽g to do with the zoom,ctione,
Amit Sood: When we at Google started this project, I didn’t have a concrete vision, to be honest with you. And the project itself has morphed into something that was not what we had anticipated during the initial phase. The initial idea was very simple, which was to create better access to, and experience of, information on art. This still remains at the core of the project. One of the initial questions we raised was: how do you make museums and the art in those museums more accessible? Then the project changed quite a lot when we started asking why we had restricted the scope only to art. Why not history, why not archives? Why not world wonders like Jeju Island? That’s really how the Cultural Institute has started forming because we were trying to figure out how we define culture. Can you even define culture? We realize we can’t, because culture means different things to different people. So we said we would focus on the following three areas: art, history, and the wonders of the world.
Once the three categories were defined, we started debating about what we should do in these areas. One option was starting a database of everything. A second was to create a kind of a social network about it. A third was for a very academic and research-driven project. Eventually we decided that we would not do any of these, because the thing that was missing from the Internet seemed to be more about how to make this type of information magical again.
The premise was that it’s easy for us to go and get 2 million pictures from some database with meta-data and put it online. But this would be rather pointless since my intention was to excite people who are not excited about art. In the end, I wanted to allow people to “travel” inside an artwork. Although the idea of navigating around hi-res images is quite an ordinary function we find on websites now, the idea was very new in 2011. Even back then, there were people who were concerned—the curators, directors, and other art professionals. Yet the best part was to see how 10-year-old children would interact when left with an image of a painting. They would zoom in and freely play around with the details of the painting. You could see that their engagement was ten times more than when they physically visit the museum. The reason was because they were given control over their own experience, which I think is a very important factor that had been removed from art experience. Who really is in control? Is it the museum guide, the curator, or is it my mother who’s taking me to this museum? With the image provided in front of you, however, you were in control of the navigation.
So the idea was, first to define the categories, establish some guiding principles, and make it a magical experience by making it accessible to everyone around the world. It was also important to have the project be a non-American and non-European one, because we feel that most of the art world is quite biased towards Western names from the Renaissance to the Impressionist periods. For instance, no average European was able to tell me who Van Gogh’s contemporaries in Japan or China were. We felt that if we do this project, we have to do it right. Every country’s cultural identity or content had to be presented, which is why, rather than focusing on one thousand French museums, we decided to give equal focus on museums from other nations, such as India, Korea, and China.
As for the vision of the project, we want to create a richer, more meaningful experience with cultural content that is accessible to everybody, which is critical for human nature in general. Then comes the question—why is the archiving logic important? First, we had to acknowledge that people have been archiving for many years. Even before Google came along, museums, governments, and artists have always been archiving our cultural history but they did not keep up with the digital age. In other words, the digital disruption or transformation has happened really fast. It’s not like printing. Printing took years to progress but the speed of digital innovation is ten times or even a hundred times quicker, depending on whom you talk to.
Secondly, we have to look at the way Google and the other database agencies are archiving online. The common goal perhaps is to introduce the idea of access to data again. Archiving art creates a permanent record of something that could have been conceptually temporary, which is maybe scary, maybe not so good—the decision depends on each artist. But I think it’s a good thing, because you learn from your past and history. For me archiving and cataloguing, and remembering the current for future generations is critical. And the Internet is the most efficient tool to do that, while also meeting other criteria like accessibility and having fun.
Moon & Jeon, Lee: That’s really interesting. So you are addressing the importance of archiving as the key role?
Sood: If you look at the project in its current incarnation, it is more about having this beautiful experience of visiting a website and navigating through the images as if you’re walking through the museums. So yes, archiving is critical, but not archiving for the sake of archiving. I don’t want to have a website with 100 million pages where no one can make sense of anything.
Moon & Jeon, Lee: So it’s just these tides of information, but you’re exploring the way to distribute this information?
Sood: Exactly, it’s like telling a story. The way and how people will consume it. Let’s take a simple example of an exhibition that I just launched last week in Italy. I was at the Teatro della Pergola in Florence, the oldest theatre in Italy. We could have done a simple archival project, where we would go in, collect the information available, and put it on the website. But instead of that, we worked with a curator, director, and artists to create an exhibition about the archives and tell their story of why the theatre is so important—for example, it was the first theatre in Italy to have a different architectural style with individual seating boxes. So the focus was to bring out the hidden stories from these archives and present them in some form of a narrative, because otherwise, it’s just academic. I want to move beyond art and culture being the area for academics or researchers.
Moon & Jeon, Lee: You touched upon the experience of the user/viewer, the person who is experiencing the artwork, cultural artifact, or cultural history. How do you think a viewer can have a newer or different relationship to the work of art? We are thinking of André Malraux’s idea of the “museum without walls (le musée imaginaire),”which dealt with the proliferation of photographic reproduction in the early 20th century and how it made the works of art more accessible. Malraux also pointed out how the museum setting could impose on the viewer a new relationship to the work of art. If photography had released the art object from its objecthood, the net has released photography from its paper support, exhibition halls, and lecture rooms. How would you describe Google Cultural Institute’s vision vis-à-vis Malraux’s idea? How will future audiences experience art?
Sood: It’s a tough question because it’s also quite debatable. I think it depends on the viewer’s choice, and the faster we realize that the better, because there will always be two ways of enjoying art for the viewers. One is a kind of top-down approach, where you are being told and guided, and you don’t have to think. Someone is doing the thinking for you and you just have to go along on the journey. That is the classic system. In the age of the Internet, however, everyone wants to have a voice. Everyone is their own little curator curating their lives, picking their favorites, and managing their things. So the need for interaction is going to increase if you want a sustainable engagement. That is critical. If you want a quick, one-second engagement, that’s fine, you don’t have to interact.
So I think André Malraux’s concepts are still valid. The problem is that the concept of a building and space is changing. The idea that you have this building, and this building is the place to get the viewers into an experience, is no longer valid. Space is going to be limitless. You are going to be able to do much more. So start thinking about what happens when you break down all the walls. Will you recreate that experience? Our role is not to recreate that experience, because the curators, museums, and artists will do that. I want to be providing the tools for that to happen. So I look at myself and our team as the people who can enable that transformation. But what should that experience be? We are not experts on it, because we are technologists.
Moon & Jeon, Lee: Can you elaborate a little bit further about the relationship between the physical museum space and what you are doing?
Sood: Yes, one of the questions we used to get a lot when we started the project was “Will people stop going to museums?” People shared their concern that we were killing the art. And I said “I don't know if I’m killing anything, all I’m trying to do is to sit peacefully and explore The Starry Night.” To be honest, I think people get too worried about things that are not really in their control. It’s not even something to worry about, because since the launch of the project, museum attendance is at a record high. Galleries and museums are having blockbuster shows. Millions and millions of people are going to museums. At the same time, digital and online visitor rates are climbing extremely high. So it’s a contradiction. Why are people who have online access to the same painting at the Tate still going to the Tate? Because it’s obvious that the in-person experience is still extremely valuable. So the key question for the future is, “Will we be able to truly replicate the in-museum experience?”
The strictly personal answer to that question is: I don’t want to. Because I feel that—unlike with music, which essentially is what you consume alone and concerts are the social way of enjoying it—with art, if it has been created for physical consumption, then that should be the primary entry point. It can have online, digital, and A.I. components, but this question is for the artists, and not for Google, and the curators. What is the artist’s motivation? Does the artist want his or her piece to be consumed in a digital form, in a physical form, or in some other form yet unknown? That is the question. For those artists who are dead and we don’t know what they want, we have to be sure we make the right decisions together with the curators who have studied them and the museums who hold their works. I prefer seeing art in person, but not everyone has that option.
Moon & Jeon, Lee: So would you say the Google Cultural Institute is more like a supplement or equally important? Or just a different type of experience?
Sood: For me it’s neither. It’s a bunch of ideas. For me it’s an idea of how to break down access to cultural content. And then the Cultural Institute builds platforms and tools for that to happen. For me, that’s the key massage here.
Moon & Jeon, Lee: How about the issues of authenticity and provenance? Can you talk more about these issues at stake in relation to your project?
Sood: While we do all this cool stuff, there has to be a provenance and authenticity. The biggest advantage of the digital and the Internet is that everyone can say anything. So there is even greater need for credibility, in my opinion. Because I can have 1 million people posting something, so who decides what is an amazing piece of art in the future? Does the wisdom of the crowd decide on the social network? Do you decide as a curator? Does Hans Ulrich Obrist decide as one of the leading curators of his generation? Who decides? I think we will need credible voices more and more, because it will balance the equation. Right now, I can post something amazing on YouTube or Facebook and get a million or 2 million hits, and hey, bingo, it’s a piece of art. Then a museum could take it on, stamp credibility, and ship it to the next stage. So I think the whole model is going to be pretty interesting. I don’t have the answers here. I’m suggesting what I think is a very interesting thing. If I think we can bring these two worlds together, the world of credibility and authenticity and the world of scale--of wisdoms of the crowds, of hundreds and millions of people having an opinion together in a very interesting manner, we can have some pretty amazing things.
Moon & Jeon, Lee: So you would say that the expansion of digital archive and digitization in general would inform the evolution of the arts?
Sood: I think it’s already changing, and I’m not playing a great role in it. I don’t take any credit because I think the young people who are embracing digital technologies and creating amazing 3D art pieces are at the forefront of it. It’s just that we are not tracking it very well. We as a community, I don’t think we track this very well, because people who are doing it are probably not your conventional artists. That’s the thing. The intersection of computer science and art will be very big in the next 20 to 30 years. Someone brought it up and made this idea very clear. Fifty to 600 or even 100 years ago, artists were also engineers, scientists, and authors. Edison was an artist. Gustave Eiffel was an artist. But both were also mechanical engineers. The interdisciplinary approach is critical. That is what has happened in the last 50 or 60 years. Art became very dimensional. You’re not an artist if you’re not doing this. Now we are coming full circle and we will be going back to this kind of place where innovation, design, engineering, and artistic insight will come together and those artists will emerge. And that’s going to be a very important thing.
Moon & Jeon, Lee: Finally on to more practical questions, can you tell us about the challenges of digitization? How do you intend to digitize installations and other non-conforming forms of contemporary art?
Sood: It’s easy to digitize 2D and 3D objects. It’s very difficult to digitize an experience. Maybe there is no way you can. We will need new technologies to come. There will be advances in technologies and I think it will happen. But for example, I cannot digitize a performance of La Scala. What do I do? Put it on a video? It could make a nice video but it’s not the same thing. So the biggest challenge at the moment is performing arts. Performing arts is one of the few last bastions of art and culture that has truly not figured out the right combination digitally. I don’t know the answer. If I knew, I would work on it immediately. Maybe someone else will come and figure it out. We don't have to figure out everything. That’s one thing I tell everyone in my team. You’re not going to solve all of mankind’s problems. Let’s try to do one of the things well and that’s good.
I do want to go back to the viewer/user artwork relationship, because I think it’s really important. I think that the in-person experience of viewing certain types of art is better than the digital. Secondly, viewers will want more engagement, and they will want a way to express their opinion more. Taking selfies in museums is a way of expressing those opinions—probably not the best way but people are doing it. Perhaps because they don’t know what else to do to make this piece part of their life. Thirdly, how can you stop somebody online from running from one website to another and instead provide that peaceful 10-minute moment you can have in a museum? Sometimes, you’re in an art space, a gallery, or a museum, and you see something and feel like you just want to stand there. It’s like a deep massage, an acupuncture-like release. Unfortunately, it’s even more difficult to have that kind of experience online, because it’s an environment prone to distraction. You constantly receive a ping or an email from someone and the peace gets interrupted. So I want that space online, which can give me a little bit of tranquility. The zoom and walking through the museum function have to do with this idea of making people spend more time on fewer things. Not less time on more things. But that’s not the Cultural Institute, that’s just me personally.
A Conversation with Amit Sood
December 1, 2014
London
Amit Sood in conversation with Sook-Kyung Lee, Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho
Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho, Sook-Kyung Lee: We would like to begin our conversation with a discussion of your project at the Google Cultural Institute and the online digital archive you launched in 2011. Can you tell us more about this project, such as the motivation and the vision behind it, and what you want to achieve with this? How can we perhaps relate it to existing ideas of the virtual museum? ﷽﷽﷽﷽﷽﷽﷽﷽g to do with the zoom,ctione,
Amit Sood: When we at Google started this project, I didn’t have a concrete vision, to be honest with you. And the project itself has morphed into something that was not what we had anticipated during the initial phase. The initial idea was very simple, which was to create better access to, and experience of, information on art. This still remains at the core of the project. One of the initial questions we raised was: how do you make museums and the art in those museums more accessible? Then the project changed quite a lot when we started asking why we had restricted the scope only to art. Why not history, why not archives? Why not world wonders like Jeju Island? That’s really how the Cultural Institute has started forming because we were trying to figure out how we define culture. Can you even define culture? We realize we can’t, because culture means different things to different people. So we said we would focus on the following three areas: art, history, and the wonders of the world.
Once the three categories were defined, we started debating about what we should do in these areas. One option was starting a database of everything. A second was to create a kind of a social network about it. A third was for a very academic and research-driven project. Eventually we decided that we would not do any of these, because the thing that was missing from the Internet seemed to be more about how to make this type of information magical again.
The premise was that it’s easy for us to go and get 2 million pictures from some database with meta-data and put it online. But this would be rather pointless since my intention was to excite people who are not excited about art. In the end, I wanted to allow people to “travel” inside an artwork. Although the idea of navigating around hi-res images is quite an ordinary function we find on websites now, the idea was very new in 2011. Even back then, there were people who were concerned—the curators, directors, and other art professionals. Yet the best part was to see how 10-year-old children would interact when left with an image of a painting. They would zoom in and freely play around with the details of the painting. You could see that their engagement was ten times more than when they physically visit the museum. The reason was because they were given control over their own experience, which I think is a very important factor that had been removed from art experience. Who really is in control? Is it the museum guide, the curator, or is it my mother who’s taking me to this museum? With the image provided in front of you, however, you were in control of the navigation.
So the idea was, first to define the categories, establish some guiding principles, and make it a magical experience by making it accessible to everyone around the world. It was also important to have the project be a non-American and non-European one, because we feel that most of the art world is quite biased towards Western names from the Renaissance to the Impressionist periods. For instance, no average European was able to tell me who Van Gogh’s contemporaries in Japan or China were. We felt that if we do this project, we have to do it right. Every country’s cultural identity or content had to be presented, which is why, rather than focusing on one thousand French museums, we decided to give equal focus on museums from other nations, such as India, Korea, and China.
As for the vision of the project, we want to create a richer, more meaningful experience with cultural content that is accessible to everybody, which is critical for human nature in general. Then comes the question—why is the archiving logic important? First, we had to acknowledge that people have been archiving for many years. Even before Google came along, museums, governments, and artists have always been archiving our cultural history but they did not keep up with the digital age. In other words, the digital disruption or transformation has happened really fast. It’s not like printing. Printing took years to progress but the speed of digital innovation is ten times or even a hundred times quicker, depending on whom you talk to.
Secondly, we have to look at the way Google and the other database agencies are archiving online. The common goal perhaps is to introduce the idea of access to data again. Archiving art creates a permanent record of something that could have been conceptually temporary, which is maybe scary, maybe not so good—the decision depends on each artist. But I think it’s a good thing, because you learn from your past and history. For me archiving and cataloguing, and remembering the current for future generations is critical. And the Internet is the most efficient tool to do that, while also meeting other criteria like accessibility and having fun.
Moon & Jeon, Lee: That’s really interesting. So you are addressing the importance of archiving as the key role?
Sood: If you look at the project in its current incarnation, it is more about having this beautiful experience of visiting a website and navigating through the images as if you’re walking through the museums. So yes, archiving is critical, but not archiving for the sake of archiving. I don’t want to have a website with 100 million pages where no one can make sense of anything.
Moon & Jeon, Lee: So it’s just these tides of information, but you’re exploring the way to distribute this information?
Sood: Exactly, it’s like telling a story. The way and how people will consume it. Let’s take a simple example of an exhibition that I just launched last week in Italy. I was at the Teatro della Pergola in Florence, the oldest theatre in Italy. We could have done a simple archival project, where we would go in, collect the information available, and put it on the website. But instead of that, we worked with a curator, director, and artists to create an exhibition about the archives and tell their story of why the theatre is so important—for example, it was the first theatre in Italy to have a different architectural style with individual seating boxes. So the focus was to bring out the hidden stories from these archives and present them in some form of a narrative, because otherwise, it’s just academic. I want to move beyond art and culture being the area for academics or researchers.
Moon & Jeon, Lee: You touched upon the experience of the user/viewer, the person who is experiencing the artwork, cultural artifact, or cultural history. How do you think a viewer can have a newer or different relationship to the work of art? We are thinking of André Malraux’s idea of the “museum without walls (le musée imaginaire),”which dealt with the proliferation of photographic reproduction in the early 20th century and how it made the works of art more accessible. Malraux also pointed out how the museum setting could impose on the viewer a new relationship to the work of art. If photography had released the art object from its objecthood, the net has released photography from its paper support, exhibition halls, and lecture rooms. How would you describe Google Cultural Institute’s vision vis-à-vis Malraux’s idea? How will future audiences experience art?
Sood: It’s a tough question because it’s also quite debatable. I think it depends on the viewer’s choice, and the faster we realize that the better, because there will always be two ways of enjoying art for the viewers. One is a kind of top-down approach, where you are being told and guided, and you don’t have to think. Someone is doing the thinking for you and you just have to go along on the journey. That is the classic system. In the age of the Internet, however, everyone wants to have a voice. Everyone is their own little curator curating their lives, picking their favorites, and managing their things. So the need for interaction is going to increase if you want a sustainable engagement. That is critical. If you want a quick, one-second engagement, that’s fine, you don’t have to interact.
So I think André Malraux’s concepts are still valid. The problem is that the concept of a building and space is changing. The idea that you have this building, and this building is the place to get the viewers into an experience, is no longer valid. Space is going to be limitless. You are going to be able to do much more. So start thinking about what happens when you break down all the walls. Will you recreate that experience? Our role is not to recreate that experience, because the curators, museums, and artists will do that. I want to be providing the tools for that to happen. So I look at myself and our team as the people who can enable that transformation. But what should that experience be? We are not experts on it, because we are technologists.
Moon & Jeon, Lee: Can you elaborate a little bit further about the relationship between the physical museum space and what you are doing?
Sood: Yes, one of the questions we used to get a lot when we started the project was “Will people stop going to museums?” People shared their concern that we were killing the art. And I said “I don't know if I’m killing anything, all I’m trying to do is to sit peacefully and explore The Starry Night.” To be honest, I think people get too worried about things that are not really in their control. It’s not even something to worry about, because since the launch of the project, museum attendance is at a record high. Galleries and museums are having blockbuster shows. Millions and millions of people are going to museums. At the same time, digital and online visitor rates are climbing extremely high. So it’s a contradiction. Why are people who have online access to the same painting at the Tate still going to the Tate? Because it’s obvious that the in-person experience is still extremely valuable. So the key question for the future is, “Will we be able to truly replicate the in-museum experience?”
The strictly personal answer to that question is: I don’t want to. Because I feel that—unlike with music, which essentially is what you consume alone and concerts are the social way of enjoying it—with art, if it has been created for physical consumption, then that should be the primary entry point. It can have online, digital, and A.I. components, but this question is for the artists, and not for Google, and the curators. What is the artist’s motivation? Does the artist want his or her piece to be consumed in a digital form, in a physical form, or in some other form yet unknown? That is the question. For those artists who are dead and we don’t know what they want, we have to be sure we make the right decisions together with the curators who have studied them and the museums who hold their works. I prefer seeing art in person, but not everyone has that option.
Moon & Jeon, Lee: So would you say the Google Cultural Institute is more like a supplement or equally important? Or just a different type of experience?
Sood: For me it’s neither. It’s a bunch of ideas. For me it’s an idea of how to break down access to cultural content. And then the Cultural Institute builds platforms and tools for that to happen. For me, that’s the key massage here.
Moon & Jeon, Lee: How about the issues of authenticity and provenance? Can you talk more about these issues at stake in relation to your project?
Sood: While we do all this cool stuff, there has to be a provenance and authenticity. The biggest advantage of the digital and the Internet is that everyone can say anything. So there is even greater need for credibility, in my opinion. Because I can have 1 million people posting something, so who decides what is an amazing piece of art in the future? Does the wisdom of the crowd decide on the social network? Do you decide as a curator? Does Hans Ulrich Obrist decide as one of the leading curators of his generation? Who decides? I think we will need credible voices more and more, because it will balance the equation. Right now, I can post something amazing on YouTube or Facebook and get a million or 2 million hits, and hey, bingo, it’s a piece of art. Then a museum could take it on, stamp credibility, and ship it to the next stage. So I think the whole model is going to be pretty interesting. I don’t have the answers here. I’m suggesting what I think is a very interesting thing. If I think we can bring these two worlds together, the world of credibility and authenticity and the world of scale--of wisdoms of the crowds, of hundreds and millions of people having an opinion together in a very interesting manner, we can have some pretty amazing things.
Moon & Jeon, Lee: So you would say that the expansion of digital archive and digitization in general would inform the evolution of the arts?
Sood: I think it’s already changing, and I’m not playing a great role in it. I don’t take any credit because I think the young people who are embracing digital technologies and creating amazing 3D art pieces are at the forefront of it. It’s just that we are not tracking it very well. We as a community, I don’t think we track this very well, because people who are doing it are probably not your conventional artists. That’s the thing. The intersection of computer science and art will be very big in the next 20 to 30 years. Someone brought it up and made this idea very clear. Fifty to 600 or even 100 years ago, artists were also engineers, scientists, and authors. Edison was an artist. Gustave Eiffel was an artist. But both were also mechanical engineers. The interdisciplinary approach is critical. That is what has happened in the last 50 or 60 years. Art became very dimensional. You’re not an artist if you’re not doing this. Now we are coming full circle and we will be going back to this kind of place where innovation, design, engineering, and artistic insight will come together and those artists will emerge. And that’s going to be a very important thing.
Moon & Jeon, Lee: Finally on to more practical questions, can you tell us about the challenges of digitization? How do you intend to digitize installations and other non-conforming forms of contemporary art?
Sood: It’s easy to digitize 2D and 3D objects. It’s very difficult to digitize an experience. Maybe there is no way you can. We will need new technologies to come. There will be advances in technologies and I think it will happen. But for example, I cannot digitize a performance of La Scala. What do I do? Put it on a video? It could make a nice video but it’s not the same thing. So the biggest challenge at the moment is performing arts. Performing arts is one of the few last bastions of art and culture that has truly not figured out the right combination digitally. I don’t know the answer. If I knew, I would work on it immediately. Maybe someone else will come and figure it out. We don't have to figure out everything. That’s one thing I tell everyone in my team. You’re not going to solve all of mankind’s problems. Let’s try to do one of the things well and that’s good.
I do want to go back to the viewer/user artwork relationship, because I think it’s really important. I think that the in-person experience of viewing certain types of art is better than the digital. Secondly, viewers will want more engagement, and they will want a way to express their opinion more. Taking selfies in museums is a way of expressing those opinions—probably not the best way but people are doing it. Perhaps because they don’t know what else to do to make this piece part of their life. Thirdly, how can you stop somebody online from running from one website to another and instead provide that peaceful 10-minute moment you can have in a museum? Sometimes, you’re in an art space, a gallery, or a museum, and you see something and feel like you just want to stand there. It’s like a deep massage, an acupuncture-like release. Unfortunately, it’s even more difficult to have that kind of experience online, because it’s an environment prone to distraction. You constantly receive a ping or an email from someone and the peace gets interrupted. So I want that space online, which can give me a little bit of tranquility. The zoom and walking through the museum function have to do with this idea of making people spend more time on fewer things. Not less time on more things. But that’s not the Cultural Institute, that’s just me personally.