From the Lab to Library: In Conversation with Vincent Morisset and Mia Ridge

Transcript

0:00:00 - 0:12:09
Vincent Morisset
Hello, everyone. thank you so much, to the Library for hosting this event. It's been a real, real, real pleasure to be part of the Frame Documentary, DocLab. I want to thanks. thank the the wonderful team; salute the amazing, eight participants. Amazing brain- inspiring people and wonderful projects that will grow over the next few months.It's really exciting. And, it was a pleasure to spend those two days with you bouncing ideas. And sorry for, my English. I feel sometimes a bit, limited. So my name is Vincent. I have a small studio in Montreal with my partner, Caroline Robert. It's called the AATOAA. Like, meaning ‘yours’ or, ‘your turn’.I'm interested in the place and the impact of the audience in what we create. And we are agnostic of medium, but we most of the time mix code with, traditional grammars. So this evening, I will present you some an array of older project and more recent one. My first, interactive film was created as part of a video collective called Kino that celebrated their 25 yearslast week. And, the original idea of the collective is quite simple, it's: ‘do well with nothing, do better with little, but do it now’. And in that context, I made a, interactive film called Colorblind Clyde, and we invited the audience to create their own editing with the use of red and blue celluloid. So a linear story, lo fi, mechanic, but participation of a group together.And this idea of combining those two, kind of opened a light in my mind. Around the same time, that same period, the music industry, was transforming extremely rapidly. Blogs, iPod, MTV becoming a reality TV channel. So let's have a place for music. I collaborated with the band Arcade Fire for 15 years in that period of transformation, and it allowed us to experiment with how to connect differently with the audience, and to revisit the idea of visual companion and stories, surrounding the music album.So at the beginning I was mainly creating websites. So the shell was more important than the content. But at the time, the Neon Bible album was released. We felt the need to create a mythology around the music. So using different platforms and infiltrating, pop TV like The Price Is Right; using phone lines, infomercials on local television and also web components.And, the band offered me to direct a music video and I used to code in ActionScript. And for me it became logical to bridge the vocabulary of film with the possibility of interaction allowed by the platform on which the fans would see the piece. So it was really pragmatic, they will watch it on a browser.Why not integrate some, interactivity in the piece? And this project became a bit, to my surprise, a kind of a change in the way people would perceive this kind of project. So those online films became, a way for me to open emotional windows through the interactivity. In this other video I did for the band, Just a Reflector, the viewers become projectionists of the contentthey watch by beaming the image of the video with their phone on the screen. Them. So they also get teleported in actual video at some point. And the protagonist of the project gets in your hand in the phone. So we’re flipping the two worlds during a sequence of the project.So this possibility allows us to kind of change the perspective on the story. So in this version of the same project, Just A Reflector, it's the sight and the angle of the face that impacts the video through the manipulation of time, of the actual, frames of the video. So, the idea that dance and movement could be also a way to engage and affect the edit of the film was exciting.Transcend the mouse, the keyboard, and the controllers and just use the body movement to interact with these. So for this video, I'll do, the webcam of the viewer detected the velocity of the dance movement of the viewer, and it would affect the browser, in the browser the pacing of the music video.So recreating loops and changing the speed of the choreography inside the music video. So you basically were invited to dance in front of your laptop. For, this project called Blah Blah, this project was the first, my first personal project. It's an interactive animation that explores the notion of communication through exchange with a character speaking in an invented language.It was, also originally released online, but we started to have opportunities to adapt those web projects into the physical world. So watching, for the first time, the audience interacting with our creations and adjusting the piece from an intimate personal experience to a collective and social one. So it's the same content but adapted for a different context.For my second personal, interactive film, I wanted to explore space and time and how would that affect the way we perceive the world around us. I was interested in bridging the contemporary convention of video games and the panoramic filming using geolocation, geolocation platforms and domes. So this was prior to the release of Oculus.So through the limitations of film panoramic content we designed the interactive experience. So by advancing in time in a 360 video of me working, we could give the illusion that we were progressing in space. So as a director not able to hide, since I'm shooting in 360, I became also the camera and a character in the piece.And through this walk simulator we integrated also nature documentary content. Caroline recorded thousands of little clips. So insects, birds, plants, rocks, animals. And the idea was to put the participant in a state of ultra lucidity. So looking at the surrounding differently. So the more you take your time, the more you discover details. So the vignettes and the nature of what you’re recording are changing on the path every time you do the walk.So a bit like when you, you go outside of the city, you never know what you will stumble upon. And this was it with this idea like, slow down and discover. It's quite fascinating that, project, a project was, able to reach different audiences, while looking at the stats long time ago, I could see the link posted on a, People Up (?) psychedelic blog, but also on a group of retired women doing gardening.So it was really interesting, inspiring to see that this really project that seems niche could, kind of pollinate different networks. The project was released ten years ago, but more than a million people visit, visit this project and still around 10,000 virtual walkers come every month. In Habitat, we created a miniature world. The idea was similar to Way To Go.You're invited to move around. Stop, take your time and, discover. But in this project we embraced the physicality. It was not virtual. We created with our hands the ecosystem. So around that glass box, you become giants exploring an enclosed ecosystem. And a little black house that we can see on the left is moving in, in space and time through a mechanical rail and through choreographed lights.Weather changes, days and nights pass. So the stories unravel when you look at all the little details and imagine the link between them, a bit like a Where is Waldo? And the idea was to kind of really create the numerous scenes that you could discover as you walk around. So since you can look through all the sides of the glass, you also encounter and interact with the other visitors, staged as giant into, over the small world.So this is an again, I feel of it became also part of the interactivity. Another project: Brain Stream. Brain Stream is an interactive animation, directed this time by Caroline. And in this, web project a young girl live streams her thoughts during, a brain massage. So in the story, just touching your screen or moving the cursor around sends her shots of serotonin and helps her visiting new cognitive pathway.And she kind of describe what she lives to you with this kind of, altered voice for anonymity. So it's a bit of a speculative future; a near future care service. So what if all the energy we spend on our phone and the screens every day collectively could be harvested; transformed into something useful and positive?And that could help, someone. I'll just going to show you little trailer.0:12:09 - 0:13:05
Brain Stream narration
Hi. Welcome to my brain. Thanks for coming.My whole head’s been spinning since this morning. A lot of the time, my feelings are super intense, but from the outside, you can't even tell. It's a pretty good feeling with you. Help me. Give me a big squeeze.I guess I must trust you a lot. Showing you all my little beasties like this.I get stuck in a loop like I'm going round, round in the dryer for ever. I can tell what you do helps me, even if I don't really get it.0:13:05 - 0:25:25
Vincent Morisset
So, so the the the idea of the interaction resonated with the plasticity of the brain. Yeah, this idea that through gesture we could transform the animation and have an impact on what you're watching. And the project was again released online. But we wanted to find other ways to present Brain Stream in the different context. So one thing we did was live cinema sessions where Caroline and other people online, collectively were giving the massage to Dee in front of the audience.And it was interesting to see how just that psychologically, how that notion of being live changed the way people embraced the cinematic projection. And we also created a setup for presentation in a specific location so that we were able to reach the audience that wouldn't be aware of that link. During the first week of the lockdown, we released a mobile project, called Motto.I'm going to show you. The trailer - it better explains it than me.This is the URL. No installation. It's just a website that you load on your phone. And, in Motto, like, the main character is a ghost called September who talks to you with text and video and sometimes ask you to shoot. tiny videos of things around you in real life. So this time, again, we wanted to put the people in a state of ultra low key, a bit like with no way to go but allow to rediscover your own house or your neighborhood through a different perspective, and context and having this moment of where to look for, different, things.So everything that you see in the project is a mix of personal archives from us; video that was shot by our team, but also the clips shot by other past Motto participants and the videos shot by the actual user. And sometimes we will present a clip you shot a couple minutes earlier in a different context.So the edit is dynamic and evolving and personal to each experience. And there is no final cut. It's a project that continues to be nourished by all the people that watch, play.... that interact with the Motto and kind of give some fragments of their life. So Motto ended up being structured as six episodes of 20 minutes that you can decide for a chapter to do inside or outside.So for us, it was really finding universal tasks. So the project for it was very important for us that anybody, anywhere at any time could do the project. So thinking of like, okay, a hand, the sun, a rock, a chair, like just finding these kind of common denominators as a as a kind of a the initial structure to build a story on.So the story is linear, but some content, some content are the same each time, but the patchwork, the patchwork edit, integrates the collective and the personal offering in the mix. So even if it's an intimate experience that was during lockdown, the participant, the participants, felt that they were part of something bigger.And there was something quite precious, especially at that time, to have access to fragments of different lives.This is another project called Composition. And the premise of this one was also co-creation a bit like Motto, and gave me the desire to explore, this idea of co-creation or collaboration in the physical space and imagine a piece, that would feel like there would be like some kind of mixed reality, but without the goggles.So you are invited to transform music, light and body parts by manipulating wood cubes on a table. So the composition can be seen as a musical score, an animation film, a sculpture, a miniature theater, a choreography or a collaborative ritual, or a bit of all that. So it's, playful and intuitive and, we have a bit of sound, so you can be really chaotic. Can you put the sound a bit higher?Composition will adapt to any circumstance. It was important to me that the project doesn't require musical knowledge. So it will always sound, good, but you will understand cause and effect. So through the different scenes the way the timeline progresses on the table changes and transform the composition depending on the position of the cubes.So we were imagining a version of Composition where the audience becomes the score, replacing the cubes by the presence of people, where we bridge the audience and the music. And by presence. This is another project that we did in a park where people become geological forces. We created, a monumental bench that became our interface, but also a perennial addition to the public space, creation and construction; that creation and destruction collide through the different, presences and ephemeral encounters.You can engage with the piece, or you can just sit and not look, or you can look in the other direction, but still have an impact, on the dynamics. We've been working with computer vision over the last decade. And in Vast Body our own gestures become the foundation of the experience. In front of the camerawe invited a diverse group of people to imagine and embody the widest spectrum of postures they could think of. Renowned choreographers from different backgrounds: ballet, contemporary dance, krump, Sufi whirling, West African dance, but also, amateurs. So they developed a system, to map as many variations of their upper body as possible: arms, torso, head. There was a ki nd of... mathematical and geographic geometrical aspect to it, but also an anthropological angle, because they needed to imagine what the visitors would do in front of their piece with their own movement.So even for experienced dancers, it was a huge challenge. We asked some of the performers to choreograph for two hours and try to never repeat themselves twice. So millions of still images were recorded and indexed in our database, and the images were distilled and analysed by Vast Body. And we called it a system that continuously tried to match the actual position of the participant with the closest posture in the collection.So we're recreating movements from still images. Since we're looking at the moving image and not computer graphics, the connection with the protagonist is, different. So at one point you start a bit to forget yourself and become the other different body, different energies. By wanting to see what the other person is doing, you get less and less, self-conscious about your own movement and kind of abandon yourselfin the piece. So there was this interesting psychological aspect. So in this version of the installation, a myriad of alter egos continuously try to replicate the movements of the person facing it. You are becoming all of them at the same time. And in this example, it’s the other way around. All the people, all the different people are becoming one performer.And it's interesting to see that the same collection of images takes the energy of depending on who dance with.... ??? So as we were developing the project, I had a feeling that we were at an interesting point in time where the limits of human imagination and the capacity of the artificial system were at the meeting point, an imperfect computer tracking systemAnd the premise that challenged even the best choreographer. But it was first designed as a single installation, but lately we've transformed it into a whole exhibition where mythical people can dance together. So I have one last project. It's called Being Giants. We presented it in Barcelona two weeks ago on the Design Museum.And, in these monumental murals, the facial expressions give life, to the to the painting, its sort of rights of the imagination and intuition, when challenged with constraint. And the faces of the participants are streamed live to become part of, ephemeral scenes. So the perspective??? prediction is about chance, encounter, exchange, power of context. And we stage the audience from behind??? scenes that are imagined to resonate with the the complexity of the world, where, walking together can mean a joyful parade or a solidarity protest.And just to kind of bridge with, with Mia's practice, I wanted to share some personal challenges regarding the preservation and diffusion of my... technological project over the years. Technological obsolescence, tech corporation agendas, storage malfunction, people leave jobs. So you're losing collaborators for potential fixes; money for updates; online projects deleted by someone intentionally or by accident.barriers of leaving social media platforms; the physical storage for physical installations, and the shipping costs and environmental impact. And the key discoverability, I think, is one of... our common challenges to reach broader audiences. Thank you so much for listening. And I'll pass the buck to Mia.0:25:25 - 0:45:51
Mia Ridge
Thank you so much, Vincent, for that incredible presentation. And I was really inspired by talking to Vincent earlier to think about, the role of museums and libraries and archives in creating joy in the future and what we need to think about to capture moments like that, to capture moments that will create joy in the future.And I think it kind of ties into these conversations about the future of libraries. How do libraries respond to the challenges of the digital age? So I’ll begin with some context, because I think it might come up in the panel discussion and maybe the Q&A as well. I'm literally back where I started my career in cultural heritage technology.I had, dropped out of an arts degree – sorry mum and dad – to work at a research startup. And during that job, I learnt, I taught myself HTML and JavaScript. Went back to uni to RMIT on the left hand side, to do a degree in software engineering. while working at the State Library in a part of the library called VicNet.VicNet which was an internet service provider, but also made websites. So I learned a lot through that about how to understand the difference between what people say they want and what they actually want when they're talking about digital stuff. Because it's hard for people to describe accurately what they want when it's a new field, when they're not quite sure how to get what they,even to describe what success would look like for them. So it's nice to be back, I think where I began, and I also wanted to reflect on the joy of open stacks. I work in a library that doesn't have - you can't just wonder in and pick up a book off the shelf and take it home.You get the robots to get it for you. So walking into a space that there's some predetermination of what you're going to see if there's a curated trolley or a section, or how things are ordered on the shelves. But you can choose and you're not surveilled when you're making that choice. And I think that's one of the things that libraries can do.What they can offer the world is the choice to, to look around, to be curious, to pick things up and not be followed around by that thing across the internet for the next ten years of your life. And I think it's also really important that we have these third spaces where we can break through the bubbles, otherwise created by social media and the kinds of filters that we get online.Libraries can be places where people have joy, where they make connections, where they disagree. But we need that in civil society. We need places where people can encounter others, where they can have conversations on a kind of equal footing. So I think, when I'm thinking about the challenges of libraries, I think hanging on to those things that work really well in a physical space, but also, as we've seen, these hybrid experiences where you have something that's happening online or is informed by an online, experience, or is informed by an interaction with a screen or some kind of thing... that knows what you're doing in a space.So that we need to hang on to that fact that libraries as physical venues as well as online, places have real value. And it should be obvious, but it's not always. A lot of my practice as a curator has been working with ephemeral collections. So at the moment I'm a digital curator, which, means that it's my job to get people to use the library's collections for research, education, and enjoyment.We have fantastic collections. Really big. A lot of my work either happens at either end of a scale. I'm either asking people to look at huge, massive data sets and find ways to make them make sense using computer vision methods, using text data mining methods. Or I'm asking people to look at things up close and really get to to know an individual piece by piece.And I think together they work to challenge assumptions about the past. They work to, invoke curiosity. They raise questions, they raise challenges. Hopefully, that's what libraries do. They kind of are spaces where you can have those encounters with collections. But it's also really important to know that libraries have really big collections, often relative to the number of resources available to them.So these are playbills from the British Library's collection. They were thrown away items. And this is why I love ephemeral, items. They were posted up. They told you who was appearing in the theater that night. they might have described the scenery. They might have described the plays. They'll often say, first time presented here because everybody loves novelty.They're not very amenable to optical character recognition. They can't be easily transcribed by, software. It's actually quite, it’s better now than when I first began working with these items. And also the biggest text isn't the most important text necessarily. So if you're a theater historian looking for the titles of a performance, sometimes the biggest text is actually the name of the person who sponsored the performance, the patron.So they're not amenable to, automatically grabbing structured data from the text. So I'll talk in a moment about how we dealt with that. But just as a side note, because it informs so much of the work that I do. Something about the British Library, I can't assume that everyone knows – it's the National Library of the UK.It's one of the two biggest libraries in the world; we’re in a very polite tussle with the Library of Congress about which is the biggest library. I think they are winning. But anyway. But we have really, really big collections, so about 16 million books, lots of other formats of things. Terabytes of ebooks, e-journals, billions of web pages.We add about 3 million items a year. And we really want these collections to be for everyone. That's our mission, is to make sure that you don't have to be fancy. You don't have to have a PhD, a you don't have to have an idea of what you're going to do with a collection. They're the nation's collections, and we want them, everyone to feel like they have some form of access to them.Also, importantly, as an Australian, I can say that they're the world's collections. So it's important that they're available online. You don't have to come to London or to Boston Spa, in Yorkshire to access the library's collections. We want as much as possible to be to be available online. So one of the ways that I have invited people in to access the library's collections, to share them, to experience them is through crowdsourcing, and in this case, it's the playbills again.And we ask people to, in this case, just find the date on the playbill which can appear anywhere, on the script. And you can also see the variety of typefaces that they used. Find the date and then type that in, in a structured way so that we could start to index the performances by date, which is a really useful thing for researchers, because, you can track the performance history, you can track individual performance, when you've got a bit of text, it's a bit more amenable to structured data.So this was using the Zooniverse citizen science platform, which has about 2.5 million volunteers, which is a fantastic way for us to reach people who didn't know when they got up in the morning that the library was going to be part of their lives by the time they went to bed. Because they just go into Zooniverse to find something interesting, something that they can do for the greater good, a way of passing time, and they encounter the library's collections and for other projects that we've run, the vast majority of people hadn't maybe heard of the library, definitely hadn't been to the library, didn't consider themselves to have a relationship with the library.So this kind of outreach, this active invitation to look at our collections and to tell us something about them, is really important to the kind of work that I do.So I just wanted to take a moment and think about some of the challenges for libraries of the future. And if you could all think of a recent moment of joy, of connection or meaning that happened via a screen, it could be your phone, could be your telly maybe, it could be a computer screen. and hold that in your mind.It could be a meme. It could be a photo from someone you love. It could be anything. Is there a cultural institution that you can think of that's collecting that format? Because how do we have those moments of joy with ephemeral collections in the future if we don't have any ephemeral moments of joy, if we don't have the podcasts, if we don't have the casual games, if we don't have the artistic creations, how do we tell stories about the future?How do we capture life as it is now, if we don't collect a wide range of formats? And there are lots of reasons why we don't collect a wide range of formats. This is another digital curator, Julia, who works in the contemporary British section of the British Library. She works with emerging formats, which just means this stuffthat's really hard to quantify; really hard to collect. So they're structurally complex. It's not just ebooks and ejournals and epubs, it's things that are embedded in particular social contexts. So Vincent's work with, you know, it's all in a moment, things that happened. Lockdown projects were in a particular moment. And how do we in ten years time explain that?How do we include the social graph or the social network where a meme had a particular meaning to you? How do you share a podcast that might have been about another podcast? So things have contexts that it's very hard to retain sometimes, as well as the kind of all the technical aspects of fragile hardware, fragile software. I noticed in Vincent's, screenshots he was showing an early iPod.Those iPods behaved differently than things do now. Computers operate at different speeds. I have animations that I made in the 90s that I can't play anymore because they run so quickly , they’re over in like a second. So even the hardware that we use changes the experience as well as the social context. One of the trickiest aspects for libraries is thinking about the role of copyright.And this is where everyone falls asleep, because copyright is really boring. But working out the copyright, is a really important way of creating the trust between people who create things that we want to collect and the institutions that collect them. So that they know that, if we hold something for them, it's not going to be sneakily monetised.It's not going to be slurped into generate generative AI. If it's from an Indigenous collection, it's not going to appear in an inappropriate context. Copyright is one of the methods that we have for managing that process. But copyright can also mean that institutions are scared to collect material where they don't have a process and a legislative framework for ensuring that it's okay to do that.So in the British Library, libraries around the world collect web archives. They'll write to you and they'll say, can we archive your website? It's a significant part of British culture. And everyone ignores that email because of course you do. Like, who's going to believe that the British Library is writing to you about your website? So it's really hard to negotiate this kind of stuff, but it's really important that we also need to have conversations about privacy, about the right to be forgotten.Probably some of you, when I said, you know, that moment of joy might be transient, you're like, well, good, because it was a personal moment. It meant something to me. it's not for public consumption. We need to think about that balance between how do we represent what popular culture was those voices from below. You don't only want to have the people who appear on telly, who appear in the news, not even like the social media, the TikTokkers with millions of views.You want the boring person who documents, the sound of their backyard as well. That's the moment that we might want to capture, too. But we do need to have a conversation as a society about what that means. And I think that libraries need to be in that space as well as leading conversations about how do we do ethical AI, how do we do green AI, how do we manage our carbon footprint, how do we manage our water usage while we're doing all this cool digital stuff?And finally, we need to balance the commercial interests of companies that, have no interest in setting aside some server space or some time, or some engineer, to save content. So Twitter very early on had a negotiation or a relationship with the Library of Congress; hasn't necessarily sustained that relationship. Things change fast. velocity and scale are real challenges for working in this area, but I would love to know if any library is talking to TikTok,to preserve, you know, what TikTok is doing to popular culture now. Melbourne this weekend was flooded with Taylor Swift fans. Like, where does that go? How is that moment represented? Is it just what Channel Seven news said, or is there some other form of collecting that content? Yes. Excellent. Good. Problem solved. Thank you. And I wanted to take a moment to think about the challenges that public libraries have, because it's a very different role than a research library or a kind of national legal deposit library.CILIP is the, Chartered Information Library Professionals group in the UK. And these are the some of the uncertainties that they're setting out as challenges for public libraries to talk about and to plan and to think about how they're going to deal with these issues. So public trust in technology – huge, huge issue. And I think that also ties into our sense of agency, our sense of control, our sense of, ‘can we stop things happening that we don't want to happen?’,‘can we enable things happening that we do want to happen?’. It's not only up to, the government or to technology companies. It should be up to us as well. The degree of climate disruption. I don't need to tell Australians how disruptive the climate can be and how bad climate change can be, even if it's just thinking about conservation and keeping things cool enough and dry enough and not burnt enough.The speed of economic growth, whether that increases or decreases, is a huge challenge. Political stability. Something that we worry about a lot is thinking about AI, robotics, other forms of automation. Will it replace your job or will it enhance your job? And how do you make sure that it works for your benefit and doesn't disenfranchise a generation?And also, how do we make sure that people who don't have currently have the skills to work in these fields aren't left behind? And again, that's where libraries and, educational institutions have a role to play Further pandos. Nobody wants that, but it might happen. Crypto digital things, and the amount of misinformation and I think there's a lot of attention on AI and misinformation, but we also need to look at how misinformation is spreading.Australia has reasonably good ways of thinking about electoral advertisements, public donations, whatever. It's always a challenge to make sure that these new methods don't bypass some of the controls that you might have over political spending or political ads or misinformation. If it's illegal without AI, it's still illegal with AI, despite what some people will try and tell you.But it also means that it can be harder to track, to trace, and just because things can move so quickly and, really be quite convincing. And there's the flip side where the fear of misinformation means that you've got plausible deniability for anything. Where people might start to say, well, that was fake news. That didn't actually happen.So how do we know what video, what media, what images, what news we can trust? That's going to be a challenge for us. I wanted to take a moment to think about the two ways in which I think we can think about the work of the past. I've realized that I'm of a generation that remembers the joy of the early internet, when it was fun, when you could teach yourself, when you could make, crappy Flash animations, when you could use JavaScript without having megabytes of additional download. When the web was fun, it wasn't all funneled into a purchase channel or into surveilling you, or into doing something, creating agenerative AI model with your data. It wasn't always trying to sell you something back, and I think that was the joy of Vincent’s projects as well. It was just exploring technology, seeing what it can do for you, how it can make you feel, not what it can sell you. But I also think we need to make room for the generations who were born into the technologies that we have now, because the technologies that exist when you were born you experience differently, understand the affordances of those technologies differently.I'm bound by ideas of libraries that began when I went to my local library, and when I went to my school library, when I've worked in libraries. People who are coming through now have different ideas about what libraries can be, and that's where some of the creativity and thinking about how we reinvent the library of the future is going to happen.So how do we make sure that everyone is involved in those conversations so we get all perspectives on what libraries could be? One really practical thing that we're doing at the British Library, and it's kind of the secret sauce that makes our library quite adventurous in terms of how we deal with technology, is we have a really strong internal training program that's been running for about 12 years now.We have a range of different formats. We do talks where someone comes in and they tell us what they've done with our collections or with collections like ours, and that gives people stories that they can then relate to someone else. They'll be like, ‘have you tried handwritten text recognition?’ I saw saw it work really well in Carolingian manuscripts.Then everyone's like: ‘oh, fantastic!’. We have Hack and Yacks which are hands on sessions. They're often self-guided, so we'll find a tutorial and do it together. And we're modeling how we learn together, how we figure out command line issues together. We’re not being the person on the stage telling you how it's done, we're learning with you. We do formal courses and workshops and we have a reading group which sort of rounds things out in terms of giving a space to discuss the ethics, the ties to traditional librarianship to other forms of digital scholarship.Each of these generally, they're quite sort of mix and match. You come up to, you come to the things that you're interested in doing. And we have over the years had people from all sections of the library, everyone from security guards who've come to business in IP centers, curators, marketing, whatever. It's actually one of the benefits is that kind of cross library conversation about what's possible.And libraries are exploring new technologies. We’re not all dusty and all those stereotypes. AI has a lot to offer in terms of what we can do. A lot of the AI stuff is really just machine learning, but it does mean that we can improve search. You don't need to know how to search the fabulous catalogue of illuminated manuscripts.You don't need to know the exact keywords that will get you to the really good stuff, because we'll expand your search in the back end. This kind of stuff is really good at identifying people and places and links, but also it won't recognize everyone. It will recognize people who are already in the canon in some way. So how do we make sure that, it recognises Australian accents, as we've heard, people from the National Film and Sound Archive talk about. And how do we make sure it recognises people who aren't as known in the kind of the Silicon Valley circles. But it has a lot of potential in terms of being ableto translate text, rewrite text for different audiences, give us a sense of sentiment. Mostly, if you do a survey, it will probably tell you that your toilets aren't good enough, because that's what everyone experiences. But you can use that to kind of understand at scale how people are experiencing your venue or your space. And we can also contribute back to train better machine learning models.And I'm going to leave the final word to Professor of Digital Humanities Ted Underwood, because, we need to be in this space. We need to make sure that library values, that the values of museums and libraries and archives and educational institutions are present as we make decisions about the technologies of the future. So I'll stop there.Thank you.0:45:51 - 0:47:42
Ana Tiquia
Thank you so much for such, such generous and fantastic in-depth presentations on your practice and work, Vincent and Mia. My name's Ana Tiquia. And as mentioned by Paul and Jana, I’m the Head of Digital Strategy, Research and Insights at State Library Victoria, and also was very lucky to be a part of the first cohort, of Frame DocLab artistslast year. When we heard that Vincent and Mia were going to be in Melbourne at the same time, we really, felt like we had to bring this conversation together. And we really wanted we were really interested in bringing you into conversation, I guess, you know, Vincent, yourself as a digital maker and creator, and Mia as a digital curator at the British Library. We're really interested in looking at that whole, I guess, life cycle of, what now is so much of our cultural production, you know, asthe majority of us increasingly live our lives, online and we might bemaking, our culture more digitally, distributing it through digital channels. What kind of implications does this have for how we document our culture, and particularly for organizations such as libraries and other collecting institutions, as well? I know you spoke to it a little bit before Mia, about the background that you had and where you started. And I know from a little bit of a chat with you as well, Vincent, that you've come fromalso a background with a lot of different kinds of paths that you've followed. I was wondering if you could maybe briefly talk to the role of sort of hybrid or multi-disciplinary practice in your work and what you saw as might be the role of this in both, creating and, curating or collecting digital culture? Yeah. I think for me, the having a background in technology means that I understand how things are made.0:47:42 - 0:49:06
Mia Ridge
the technologies change all the time. Frameworks get more complicated. But I know the basics of, like, this is how you can put things together. And I have had enough experience making things and them not quite working, and then going back and thinking about why they didn't work, to sort of understand the process end to end. And I think that, understanding how you get from the very beginning of an idea to something that people are really happy to see in front of them, and being able to represent the kind of museum and library and archive practice, as well as the technologists, means that I spend a lot of time being a translator.And I guess the kind of a voice of doom in the sense of like, this might not work. Here are the reasons why it might not work, but also here, three different ways that we can try and solve this problem. So I try never to be like, it won't work, but always, ‘have you thought about the privacy implications of this?’,‘Have you thought about conservation?’. Have you thought about the things that I've kind of learned about through having experienced both sides of, work in GLAMs and work in technology? Yeah. I think my, like, my desire to show old stuff was a bit to put that bit in that perspective of a cycle and seeing some project s that seems, in 2025, pretty archaic and kind of, old in its aesthetic and its mechanic.0:49:06 - 0:51:07
Vincent Morisset
But when you think of in, in the context, it's like just 20 years ago. But even in my own practice, I used when I crossed the border, I was putting programmer as a profession. And then when I did the Neon Bible, I put in the credits like I directed a website. And that was kind of really like people like, like kind of a bit kind of smiling a bit.But for me, I had to kind of a, a strong belief that this platform could also be a place for authorship and for me, it kind of... crystallized, like, an idea of my own identity through that. I was like, okay, I'm doing, I'm creating, I’m telling a story through this, array of possibility. And, I should be able to say that I can sign it and, so it's been, a kind of a evolution, and I think it's, I think a sense, a bit of seasons passing and sometimes a sense of deja vu, of evolution, of how we engage with this, digital, post-digital, world. I thinkis, as you said, like we're evolving into, another era that is, a bit more, I would say cynical, but a bit more, with, a bit more critique, around the some of the practice or a bit more ???. So anyway, I think it's just a, it's interesting... to see, to...stay open... about the practice and continue to be able to embrace it as it as it transforms itself.0:51:07 - 0:51:51
Ana Tiquia
I was really struck by the fact that, you know, in both your work, these kind of themes of participation and the agency of the user or the audience or the visitor are really prominent and I guess these have often been seen or talked about as, some of the inherent strengths of digital technologies and, and, practices.I was really curious about how you've maybe seen that evolve, or how you might be feeling about the role of participation and agency in the forms of digital culture we are encountering now. For me personally, I think it's, it will always be part of my, my, DNA.0:51:51 - 0:52:46
Vincent Morisset
I think it's something that can evolve, but it's mainly an idea of, of a mindset of being able to see the other and receive, and this idea of exchange. And, so I think this, this concept is a bit of a mindset of just kind of saying, okay, well, it's a, it's, bidirectional exchange. I think being in the libraries that is a that you encounter, you're there and there is an exchange between people.And I think mainly that's a bit the, the goal – to kind of have an offering where it's not thissingle channel, and we're in the kind of a more horizontal and more organic dynamic. I see it that way. It's so interactivity, like in the 90s, it feels like a buzz word, but I think I'm beyond that. It's just it's part of my vocabulary. I think the DNA is in a kind of a nice way of thinking about it.0:52:46 - 0:55:29
Mia Ridge
It's just always been part of my practice. I think again, that 90’s sense of, like, the web was yours to make – and not in the web 2.0 sense, in the kind of mid-noughties where you could say something back on social media – but the channels were predetermined by someone who'd set up a company. It was you could make anything that you could think of.It might look terrible. It might be really slow, and you might need to say update to Netscape Navigator Six or something. But there was that kind of freedom in terms of what you can do. And I think working in museums and libraries, my sense is that collections come alive when they're looked at and when they're properly looked at, not when you just kind of walk through a gallery really quickly, but when you actually stop and encounter them.And I think those encounters with different minds are really important. And things like crowdsourcing are the best way that I know of to get someone to stop and look. Because if you, I sort of discovered it accidentally. I made a project with the Science Museum in the UK a long time ago now, but I got people to look at scientific instruments.And I found my art history friends who had never come to visit the Science Museum with me, because they did art history and I worked in the Science Museum discussing astrolabes. And I was like, ‘hang on, why are you suddenly interested in 18th century scientific instruments?’. And it was because they'd been looking at them on a crowdsourcing project that I'd set up, and I was like, there's something about them looking enough to say something about the images that got them really engaged, or got them thinking about how they worked, about how they were constructed, how they were, how they appeared in people's lives, in a way that going to the Science Museum neverappealed to them as a kind of call to action. So I think there's something about giving people opportunities to experience collections that's really, really powerful. And I think the moment that we're in now, when machine learning and AI can do so much of the image tagging, the transcription, the translation, is figuring out how we hold space for those encounters, like how do we invite people in in ways that are less formal and less of a hassle than go to an exhibition or go to a reading room?Like, how do we mean that you can stay on your sofa and you can still have an amazing encounter? I think that's the kind of, one of the challenges that we have at the moment is like, how do we have a meaningful activity? And maybe like more art is a way of doing that. Like different ways that are less about, ‘help us with this kind of productive task,’ and more about deliberate encounters with collections.But it's for 20 years now, it's been how I do things. I think.0:55:29 - 0:55:56
Ana Tiquia
I was interested – one of the sort of, questions that was coming up in our conversation as well is, really around thinking about digital cultural production and, you know, thinking also about, you know, what is the role of digital preservation and thinking about its, you know, hopefully eventual collection or documentationwhen you're creating it. Vincent, is this something that you consider in your work? Is it something that, is front of mind when you're creating0:55:56 - 0:57:51
Vincent Morisset
I think... since I'm the founder of a studio, I might have had a producer. I used to code then. Now I don't have my hands in the in the code anymore.And I created them, so I, I cherish those pieces, so I'm really emotionally attached to them. So each time I learn something is endangered, there is an impulse to kind of work. And I think that love or that care is one of the keys to, to this and then trying to find solutions together and with the National Film Board of Canada, like they have this big, kind of conservation department for, film and archives.But then when they started this interactive studio, there was no, kind of way of, of and so I was like every couple of months sending in emails, ‘oh, what's up with this?’ And then at one point like then Adobe was like all Flash would be plugged out in a year, and then in six months.And then it was like, okay, a whole part of the fun internet was going to disappear completely. And finally there was result into that. Like the NFB kind of partnered with, Rhizome in America and developed this web recorder that now is called Conifer that allows you to kind of browse old school Flash projects through a computer that has an old OS.So you can still see BLA BLA or my Arcade Fire Neon Bible, a bit laggy, but still you have – it's not just a recording that as you shot – you have the sense of the interaction. So I think it's like these, as you say, like it's a nightmare, it's complicated, it's pricey. But caring about the thing is, I think part of the equation.0:57:52 - 0:59:19
Mia Ridge
Yeah, I have, so I work in Western heritage, which means mostly stuff before 1900 and the Contemporary Britain Department and the library works with contemporary collecting. And the library had a ransomware attack in October. Most of our systems still aren't back. The fragility of digital preservation is just terrifying. We probably will get most of our things back, but there's a lot of change around that.The UK Web Archive is one of the systems that's gone down. So now the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle’s project is one of the main sources of British Internet history. So no matter what your searching, if it's something that happened since the 90s, you probably also need to use web archives to understand how societies did things. And that's incredibly fragile.And I think we as well as all the, the format complications, the licensing complications, all those kinds of things, we also need to think about distributed networks, the idea that lots of copies keep stuff safe. And that's a legal challenge. And it’s a storage challenge, and it's a bandwidth challenge and all these things. But if we don't take it seriously, this, this period of time will be much less known than the 19th century.I work in the 19th century. Kind of. That's great. But I also live in the 21st century. So, you know, I want the society that I live in now to have the same physical, long term presence as 19th century people.0:59:19 - 0:59:43
Vincent Morisset
Yeah, I almost put a slide, just before the last one of a box with tons of all our drives. It's terrible, but that's because it's too heavy to put on the cloud.But it's literally like a ten years old drive in a box. That's my my. Yeah, what is left of this period of time. So it's the yeah. Yeah. It's a bit scary.0:59:43 - 1:00:19
Mia Ridge
I do wonder actually just about the role of collecting institutions in collecting community archives, and people's personal archives because, I've done like an oral history project on museum technology where I was interviewed as someone who had been part of the history of museum technology.But we don't we could do that for every field. And as people, clean up the houses and maybe don't realise that their CD ROMs are deteriorating on the shelf, like, is there a role for libraries and archives in collecting those kind of personal community histories as well?1:00:19 - 1:00:59
Ana Tiquia
Following on from that, I was really struck Mia by one of your comments about – in your presentation – about the fact that we need to consider what libraries might be or consider possibilities for libraries in the future.I was curious to ask what both of you might see emerging in your spheres and in your work and your practices. As people who are working with digital material in different and diverse ways, what sort of changes are you seeing emerging that you think might impact the future of libraries? And or, just to complicate things, if you think we need to be imagining completely different futures for libraries, based on what you're seeing as well?1:00:59 - 1:02:43
Mia Ridge
I think one of the really evident challenges is I don't know how many people here have, like the Libby app on their phones.You might be borrowing books from your library all the time, but you don't really know that it's your local library because it's a national service or a local or regional service. So libraries can be like really, really busy with people using their assets all the time. But the buildings themselves might be quiet. That's not the casefor a lot of libraries, they are really busy in the UK, as libraries are being warm, spaces, as well as everything else. And we've actually sent crowdsourcing ideas to those libraries so that people being in the library because it's warm can also do something, while they're there as a kind of like you're not only here because it's warm. But I think local libraries are really good at reinventing themselves, but they need resources to do that because they're so close to the communities,they know what people need. They probably have a good sense of who's not using them as well. I think for national libraries, it's kind of harder to make us we have so many sort of set purposes, services that we offer: we’re research collections, we have legislative functions in some cases. But the relationships that we nurture, I think is one really changeable space.So you see libraries that are really opening themselves up to the cities, that are inviting people in in different ways, that are taking away the kind of the mystique and the fear that people have about going into those spaces. And I think that's a really important part of being a library for everyone, for every citizen, for every non-citizen, for every visitoris thinking about the relationships that you want and the invitation that you want to give to the community.1:02:43 - 1:03:51
Vincent Morisset
Yeah. And I remember when we were discussing, like, you know, perspective of a digital creator as me. That goes my library is like, on the other side of the street and the challenge of sometimes – things will kind of, spread organically, but sometimes you, you won't reach some other audience.And having a physical space, being able to curate and choose some of the digital offers and have kind of a, some kind of physical, a bit like as you stumble upon a book on a shelf, having a bit that, that role of physical getting back to the digital. I think it could be an interesting, companion to the online offer that the libraries already offer.But because we're swarmed into, a mass of content, so sometimes these kind of unusual projects get lost.1:03:51 - 1:04:01
Mia Ridge
Yeah. I think that libraries as a space for serendipity is a really lovely idea. It’s a space where you didn't know that you needed to see that thing, but you'll encounter it there, and that could change your life.1:04:01 - 1:04:03
Vincent Morisset
Yeah.1:04:03 - 1:04:34
Ana Tiquia
I wanted to open the conversation up to all of us, actually, in the room here tonight. I think we do have a roving mic or two. And I just wanted to invite any questions that any of you might have for Vincent or Mia. If you want to raise a hand, we can send a mic your way.Yes. Maybe up the back first.1:04:35 - 1:05:14
Audience Q&A
Hello. That was a great talk. Thank you. You're both amazing. You're all amazing. I am a person who works in the library industry. And of course, like any major cultural institution, we're always behind. So I'm really curious about, from an archiving point of view, even though libraries are still dealing with ‘what is the internet?’, I'm curious, like, what do you think is actually the role of machine learning for us?Not in the future, but now? Because I think that's the question that a lot of us have right now is, ‘it's here now, do I jump deep in the waters, or do I actually have to tread really lightly in this world?’1:05:14 - 1:05:19
Mia Ridge
I think that is very definitely a question that a lot of libraries are, dealing with.1:05:19 - 1:05:37
Ana Tiquia
And in some ways it depends on the kind of library you are. So if you have resources that are born digital or digitised, you can do a lot more than if you have historical collections that aren't digitised. And maybe all you have is some metadata. But I'm a curator, so I think about things from a collections point of view.1:05:38 - 1:07:46
Mia Ridge
And the way that machine learning can sort of look at every pixel on a page and tell you more about an item is incredible. It can really improve discoverability. I think getting away from search and into browse can be important as well, and not just in the kind of like I mean, recommendation systems are also an important part of that.But there's a lot of work H.R. departments are looking at. Your marketing department is looking at it, your security. Everyone is looking at it. So I think a really important thing to do is have a conversation about where you won't go, like, what are the ethical standards that are important to you. And in collections it might be, not using software that surveils readers or not using software that is likely to redistribute biases in terms of who it recognises as being important and named.But it might also be that you, need to think about computer vision and, CCTV or hiring practices or anything. And I think having, a conversation about the ethics of your institution, your values, and how people will know the kinds of decisions where that comes into play. So when people; I’m really big on, like, how you procure things is how you express your values, the same as how you spend your time is really what your values are.And if you buy software that is like really skeezy, then you've kind of voted for that. So having a whole institution, a whole library conversation about how do our values play into the choices that we make. But I would also start with the problem that you're trying to solve. Like, what would be different about using machine learning that would really put you so much further ahead? Because it can make a massive difference.But it's also really easy to like, try things out but not have something that scales up to production. But there's a I think there's a lot of room for experimentation as well. And I always say like experiment with others, talk to other people, other institutions. There's so much that you can do in this community, like AI4LAM that have an Australian New Zealand chapter to kind of share ideas, so don't try and do it alone as well.1:07:46 - 1:07:51
Ana Tiquia
I think we had a question from someone just up the back.1:07:51 - 1:08:26
Audience Q&A
Hi. Hi. Thank you so much. It's been so interesting to hear you all speak this evening. I've got so many questions, but I will stick to one. Currently, my understanding is , currently, the, State Library accepts copies of books that can be lodged that were written by Victorians.Is there already or is there thinking about, how artists and or individuals can lodge their digital works or productions with the library? And I suppose, what does that mean for artists?1:08:26 - 1:08:43
Ana Tiquia
That's a really great question. I don't know if I'm quite the person to speak to it, but, I'm wondering if there's anyone else at the library who can.Yeah, Paul? Or Paula?1:08:43 - 1:09:51
Paul Duldig
Thank you for the question. Yeah. So you’re dead right that works that are published in Victoria, are legally required to be deposited with the State Library Victoria. And that goes for whether they're in digital or print form. So that's the published works. With respect to artistic creation. No, that's not a legal requirement. It's an interesting question, though, as to what where is the library's acquisition or collection policy extend and where doesit stop? Because we do have a vast art collection and we have a vast photographic collection already. So yeah, it's a really interesting point. I think we do we do have material manuscript materials, which includes archival materials and so on, and some artworks offered to us quite regularly. And we go through a process of assessing whether or not that fits within our collection practice and whether we can be the appropriate custodian of it.But it's not a general sort of, you know, deposit here and have it, you know, see whether that happens. It's much more sort of case by case. It's a really good and interesting question. Yeah. I mean, I yeah,1:09:51 - 1:09:56
Audience Q&A
It’s just that the artists - you know, there's all these artist books.1:09:56 - 1:09:57
Paul Duldig
Yeah, yeah.1:09:58 - 1:10:00
Audience Q&A
Which are often written.1:10:00 - 1:10:02
Paul Duldig
We do. Yeah.1:10:02 - 1:10:05
Audience Q&A
This whole, do we want the digital to be sitting on the other side?1:10:05 - 1:11:25
Paul Duldig
Yeah, yeah. We do get offered quite a lot of material and we do accept quite a lot of material. And I think, can I just build on that as a slight pivot? Yeah, I've got the mic. Sorry. One thing I think the nightmare scenario is really scary as well, where there's this moment in time in 50 years when someone says, what were they doing in that in that 20 years, what happened?Like, you know, it's all in Vincent's hard drives in his shed. And, I heard good things about it, but, I found some, ephemera that might have told us what was going on, but but not the actual raw material. And I think that's, you know, in a sense, your your point as well as how do we it's what is the I think about it is the, the first contact, born digital is the most at risk because it's in older formats.I think we're getting better at stuff that's sort of in the web era. But stuff that was first contact, like we've all got no doubt digital photos on hard drives in our sheds. In that first 10 or 15 years of the digital camera before the before the iPhone. That's the bit that really worries me is, is the whole sort of decade and a half of stuff that... where is it?Question mark.1:11:25 - 1:11:42
Ana Tiquia
Yeah. Mia you've mentioned something to us about the fact that a lot of podcasts aren't even being collected currently. Are there things that you're seeing, that libraries are collecting really well or gaps where things are, where sort of digital culture is really, yeah – being absented?1:11:42 - 1:13:52
Mia Ridge
Yeah, I think so. The British Library uses a kind of a model that was created for the legal deposit of books and publications for websites, because that's how it could get through Parliament.So you have to go into the library's physical premises to look at the websites that are archived, and only one person can look at them at a page at a time, because it's literally modeled on as if it were a book. And that doesn't really work. I mean, it means that we can collect things, but it doesn't mean that people can do really cool things with them.So we we collaborate with researchers to give them access to the data sets. And they've done some really nice, like computational linguistics stuff. But the speed at which things move is far beyond sitting terms of Parliament. And I wonder if there's a way of having a kind of thinking about models of liability that would allow people to collect and then get permission.And this is not in any way library policy. It's just thinking about the the really practical aspects of, ‘how do you move at the speed of technology when you're moving at the speed of a library, godbless, and also at the speed of law?’ Which are just not sort of at that same speed. And I know a few... Melbourne Museum, and I think the State Library years ago did, like, Family or Biggest Pictures Australia or something.It's a website, a project where they went out and collected people's biggest family album, I think it was called. Digitised People's Family Photos and made a website that was, I think, across the whole of Australia. So there's a kind of model for people actually like getting in a car and going out around places. And we could do that with, digital technologiesnow. We could encourage people like bring in those CDs, those hard drives, and we'll help you read them and help you deal with the digital preservation challenges and maybe with artworks as well. But it kind of takes, a commitment to doing that and to valuing those different kinds of collections. And if your job is to, make certain kinds of research possible, maybe you don't see that quite as being in your remit, but I think there's a real gap for different kinds of institutions.A lot of stuff is falling through the cracks at the moment.1:13:53 - 1:14:02
Vincent Morisset
I like the, you know, the example you have about the crowdsource, and it was almost gamified to give a purpose and a frame to, to do these things a reason1:14:02 - 1:14:03
Mia Ridge
And a time1:14:03 - 1:14:56
Vincent Morisset
And in a time and kind of a sense of accomplishment that I think people were kind of driven to like, ‘oh, I helped,’ and maybe there's a way to kind of establish a system where about creating a canvas where you, you encourage people and help them to do this thing because; I, my mother has also tons of those hard drives and like - what to do?And just by just having that; like I am a subscriber to a thing called Story Worth that where she's a writer, the story of her life. But then but then it just kind of encouraged her to kind of revisit her pictures and include them and just kind of have that sense of purpose into the the kind of personal digital archiving maybe one of the key because it just gives an incentive to people to, to help into that collective.1:14:57 - 1:15:27
Mia Ridge
Yeah. Around the centenary of the First World War, there were these collecting roadshow days where across Europe you could take, your family memorabilia in and it would be digitised and put into context. And it was a really kind of – there were queues out the door for people who wanted to share their stuff. So I think there's a real, hunger to have, like that connection, to put things into context, for things to be saved and for them to be valued by society as expressed by libraries and museums and archives1:15:27 - 1:16:15
Vincent Morisset
And, and also like when you were talking about the law, like in Quebec, we're just, we just announced with the, thefunding, the cultural policies are evolving so slowly that we're just barely kind of acknowledging my practice into the culture along like books, film. And we were kind of in the liminal space where we fitted nowhere, but just changing those laws also has a collateral effect on all because you exist and it it can have, collateral impact on that on the public libraries and things like that, where you will have a new mission about including these type of practices.1:16:15 - 1:16:21
Ana Tiquia
I think we have just enough time for one more question. So, yeah, just at the back.1:16:21 - 1:16:31
Audience Q&A
I just want to say this is not a question, but while you've been talking, I went to Motto and worked through the first chapter. It is very moving and charming experience.1:16:31 - 1:16:33
Vincent Morisset
Okay. Thank you.1:16:33 - 1:16:43
Ana Tiquia
Thanks for sharing that. I did see that there was someone just to the side who did have one question, and I was wondering if you want to ask that.1:16:43 - 1:17:20
Audience Q&A
Thanks Ana, I don't want to open things up at the end, but, I'm quite interested in Vincent talking about the challenges of long term preservation. I come from the Digital Preservation Coalition.So one thing that also occurred to me because I'm also a copyright lawyer is, have you taken any innovative approaches to your approach to copyright? If you're thinking about long term preservation of your work, because, you know, the duration of copyright is so long and that has an impact on this problem of having a hole in the record.And I'm just wondered if you'd thought about that as an artist?1:17:20 - 1:19:38
Vincent Morisset
Like, it's been quite recent that like, again, related to the cultural policy, most of the stuff that I've done in the last 15 years, I don't own anything. Even with the National Film Board of Canada, I've created my own work, but it's owned by the National Film Board of Canada in a good way, because now they are they are forced to take care of it for eternity.Technically, making a gallery means this thing is working on it??? But, it's a it's a good question. I haven't thought about the copyright, aspect. To be honest at the moment, it would just kind of, just kind of have a sense of, ‘oh, now I'm trying to develop a project that I can initiate having funding and create things that I can own’.So it's it's kind of a novel reality, to me, but just make it available so that people – and it's a, it's really short life, like a five, for instance model, like a couple, two months ago, there was a problem with the https. So then I had to write. So it's a kind of constant battle also but in a 5 to 2, three, four year period, we're already kind of putting, gaffer tape to make it work.But hopefully, like with the advance of technology and maybe emulation and AI, like we will laugh about it and then everything will be playable and everything, and it's going to be super chill [Laughs]. But it's a, it's a really interesting question. And a reminder of like the first Mickey Mouse being available is kind of a shocking reminder of how these policies have been, kind of, tricked...But, yes, you've kind of made an inception in my brain. I'm sorry if it's that not a good answer, but1:19:38 - 1:20:00
Ana Tiquia
Just to wrap up, I love how you both centered joy and joyfulness around both digital making as well as the curating and I was just wondering if one of if you could offer, just any thoughts that you had on what might contribute to a joyful future of our digital culture and technology?1:20:00 - 1:20:03
Mia Ridge
I guess.1:20:03 - 1:20:05
Ana Tiquia
So it's meant to be a joyful question, but [Laughs]1:20:05 - 1:20:42
Mia Ridge
I guess joy can be so personal. I think there's – I was really struck Vincent, by the video where people, just a part of their faces appearing in the artwork, and there's something so thoughtful about the way that it wasn't everything about them. It was just like a part. So they were recognisaby there.But it wasn't creepy. You weren't singled out in any way. And I think that care to create experiences that honor the person, that honor their contribution, while also shielding them from looking stupid. I think that is kind of the thing that we can do to contribute to other people's joy.1:20:42 - 1:22:09
Vincent Morisset
I think, part is, ethical and, and empathical – I don't know if you can say that in English – way of approaching this vocabulary, as you saw, my practice, is not technological centric.I don't talk about technology, but I constantly think about how to use it in a way that will be empathic and fair. And Motto was a big questioning about that idea of sharing fragments of reality and how people could feel okay, and that we won't record any audio, that people will have the choice to record or skip, and that we don't punish them if they skip things.And just having a sense of that, that they understand what they're getting to. So that this idea of, so I think this, I think we need more, like it seems a bit nostalgic, but kind of break a bit from this kind of world that is kind of a digital world that is, it's kind of starting to be really rigid and have more authors, and singular voice, I think is good, but also like give the, the, the, the voice to the people.And I think, libraries is a good place to kind of, infuse that bidirectional exchange.1:22:09 - 1:22:21
Ana Tiquia
Brilliant. Thank you so much for being in conversation with us and and sharing your work tonight with us here at the Library. Mia and Vincent and I just wanted to invite all of us to give our speakers a round of applause, because they’ve been wonderful. [Applause]1:22:21 - 1:22:26
Vincent Morisset
Thank you, Ana. Thank you,1:22:26 - 1:23:10
Ana Tiquia
And thanks to all of you actually for such great questions and lovely comment too. So, thanks. Stay tuned. We're, going to be offering more of these conversations and talks. We've got, upcoming artists, and we'll be having some talks also in, in partnership with Frame Documentary Lab in April and June.So come back and stay tuned. We'll have more in this space and hopefully have some more really interesting conversations and presentation of artist work around kind of digital culture and collecting, technology, experimentation and libraries, of course. Thanks all for joining us tonight. It's been really lovely to see you all here.

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