>>ANNOUNCER: Good evening, everyone, and welcome to The Media Lab. Yes, I'm talking to a
box. Is our microphone when we get to our Q&A session. This is what we're going to pass around
for all of you to communicate with our guests. But it's a pleasure to have you here. This marks our
first opportunity to collaborate with the ICA Institute of Contemporary Art and the List Visual
Arts Center right behind us at the Media Lab, and we're thrilled that we can bring all of our friends
and collaborators together for this evening. A couple of housekeeping items since some of you
might be new to the space. This is actually a research and educational institution. We asked
that if you take photos or anything. Just to focus on this area not take photos of the different labs
to protect our students' work. If you need to use the facilities, there are right behind these screens
and then right after we conclude our talk we will have a reception downstairs at the lobby, and we
invite all of you to be part of it to continue the conversations that will most likely begin after you
listen to our talk. So with no more to say from my side, allow me to introduce our guests. Lars Jan,
David Henry and Patty Maes and enjoy the talk.
[Audience Applause]
>>DAVID: No that's my chair.
>>LARS: That's what I was told that I was supposed to say here how you like. We can
choreograph that.
>>DAVID: Hello. My name is David Henry. I'm the Bill T. Jones director of performing and media
arts at the ICA Institute of Contemporary Art here in Boston. And then we just got a couple little
introductory remarks here. In today's society the understanding of one's identity is increasingly
influenced by technologies that penetrate our daily lives in ways that are both intimate and
dehumanizing. In anticipation of Early Morning Opera's performance of Lars Jan's the Institute
of Memory Time at the ICA, the media lab the List Visual Arts Center and the ICA have provided
a really good opportunity to explore the ways that art and artists are confronting this new reality and
how their concerns relate to the thinking of designers and engineers. Lars' work is known for
its engagement of live audiences with emerging technologies, and it became clear that Patty
Maes and her research on cognitive augmentation would be a really good match for
this conversation. So I'll begin by introducing Pat giving you more fuller information about Patty and
Lars and then we'll get the questions going. So Patty Maes is the Alexander W. Dreyfoos
Professor of MIT-- at MIT's program and media arts and sciences and associate head of the
program in media arts and sciences. She founded and directs the media lab's Fluid
Interface Research Group. Prior to joining the Media Lab, Maes' was a visiting professor and
research scientist at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. Her areas of expertise as you might know
are human computer interaction and artificial intelligence. She's the editor of three books and
as an editorial board member and reviewer for numerous professional journals and conferences.
She was named one of the 50 most influential designers in 2011 by Fast Company. This one I
like a lot-- Newsweek magazine named her one of 100 Americans to watch in 2000. Time Digital
selected her as a member of the cyber elite. And the World Economic Forum gave her the title of
global leader for tomorrow, which is a title that I would love to have. In 2000, she was recognized
with a lifetime achievement award by the Massachusetts Interactive Media Council, and
she's been an activist and entrepreneur and co- founder of several venture backed companies.
Lars Jan is a director, writer, visual artist and the founding artist-- founding artistic director of Early
Morning Opera. It's a genre bending performance in art lab whose works explore emerging
technologies live audiences and unclassifiable experience. He's the son of imigrants from
Afghanistan and Poland. He has since developed projects in Afghanistan, Germany, Ukraine,
Poland, Haiti, Canada and the United States. Lars has received multiple commissions from the
Whitney Museum and developed his recent project with support from the experimental media
and performing arts center EMPAC, which is at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His works have
been presented by the BAM Next Wave Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Redcat, Hammer m
useum-- the list goes on. He's a TED, a TED senior fellow and he's on the faculty at Cal Arts.
So with that, I'm going to turn to you Lars. Can you begin by telling us very quickly about your two
previous works Abacus and Holoscenes and then go into a bit more detail about your current work
that's coming up at the ICA called the Institute of Memory.
>>LARS JAN: Sure. I just want to first say, 'Hi, everybody.' And I want to thank the Media Lab
and particularly Claudia and the directors' program for having me and for putting together
this collaboration with the List Center and the ICA. I really believe in institutional cross
disciplinary collaborations. I know the media lab does too. I'm so glad that you've joined this
conversation, Patty. Thank you. And David, thanks for bringing my performance to Boston.
So yeah I run a multidisciplinary performance and art lab called Early Morning Opera. And really it's
a loose network of affiliated artists. We reconstitute in different combinations. We always
fold in new blood. A lot of times we work with people who don't sort of self-identify as artists or
as creatives and that goes from sort of like you know data visualization folks down to
experimental plumbers. They become experimental when they work with us. And so one
project is called Holoscenes and Holoscenes was actually-- it's been performed in I think six
cities around the world at this point, most recently in Time Square this past summer and it was
actually performed-- it's a climate change themed piece and it was performed on the same day that
the U.S. pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords. And really what you're looking at is a large
aquarium like sculpture that fills in drains with about 12 tons of water in as quickly as 45
seconds. And this is a photo from Times Square. It's a durational piece it lasts for five hours and I'll
show you. Here's a photograph of the aquarium. There are eight choreographies featuring
performers over the course of that five hour period and they rotate and they perform different
everyday behaviors that we've gathered from folks around the world so we did an open call,
and we've got about a hundred responses back, and it was for everyday behavior so people sent
us really short videos of things they do in the everyday. And I was expecting maybe some sort
of like fantastically different things from around the world but actually mostly what we got was
people making tea, making the bed, and you know commuting to work one way or another and
I was very interested in putting together basically putting together human behavior in the timescale
in which we operate and make decisions. And also the time scale that really determines a life--
meaning like sort of make-- I make coffee every morning. I make it a little different. It takes a little
less long, a little shorter but the order of operations is the same. And once they string all
those things together a lot of those behaviors becomes my life. That's where I put my attention.
And then climate change is big complex problem with all of this data, and it's very it's scary. And I
wanted to create a piece that was in public space which put together this longer-term undulation of
sort of the biosphere, which is working previously on a geologic timeline but now has been
accelerated by us in conversation with the rhythm of the everyday. So I'll show you just a 90 second
video of one of the of one of the pieces this is based on making the bed. And the performer is
Jeff Sobell if we could have some sound. [pause]
>>LARS: And that's me right on the... just kidding.
[pause]
>>LARS: I mean no sound is fine.
[pause]
>>LARS: So I'm an artist. I didn't quite--I had an idea. I had just had a vision but I'm not a hydraulic
engineer. I'm not a structural engineer. I'm not an electrical engineer so I had to reach out to folks
and say hey I want to do this thing it seems kind of dangerous. Can we-- how can I do it safely?
How can I do it with the resources that I have? Or how can I convince people that I need to get
the resources that are necessary? And part of that process is really about sharing vocabulary
and that's one of the things that's most interesting to me is like basically taking folks in different
fields figuring out how we can talk about problems and understand the nomenclature that
goes into a basically parallel understanding?
[pause]
>>LARS: That moment always reminds me of September 11th actually, which is a totally
random association. All right. And this is the experimental media performing arts center in
upstate New York at RPI, which David mentioned, which is really one of the most
phenomenal places to-it's really at the nexus of contemporary art and technology. And it should
be a sister institution of the Media Lab. I'm not sure how many people here know about it, but it's
a really phenomenal space. And this is us prototyping that project. I'm just going to keep
moving to the next project. This is a project called 'Abacus', which was also Experimental Media
and Performing Arts Center so you can see the performer at the bottom. Here's another picture to
get a sense of scale. This is a-- this is a project which was really about how contemporary
persuasion works. In particular it was about the presentation format itself as the lingua franca of
our world today and the double-edged nature of that and sort of basically thinking about the
presentation format and visualized information. For example, oh wait, I don't have that slide
anymore. Visualized information-so I worked with a couple of data visualization folks who work for
major publications and rather than creating sort of responsible visualizations we created these very
dynamic mandalas. And I sort of have come to think of screens as the stained glass windows of
our time. So rather than sort of awing us in there amazing backlit scale, they do so instead of the
depth of their-and with really the depth of their transformability. But here we kind of actually
created almost the stained glass window sort of effect out of layered screens. And what you see it
at bottom are two steady cam operators and who are also dancers. And so we worked with the
inventor of the steady cam, who then trained us for a week because they weren't steady cam
operators. They were dancers. And we learned how to use this particular apparatus as an
extension of the body. And so in our work not only is technology texture which is often how it's not t
he-- I think that this is one of the places where that's really not true, but a lot of times in the
contemporary art field technology is used to facilitate texture in work, and I'm more interested
in technology itself as text. So the screens themselves as subject matter. The kind of
umbilical-- the mechanical umbilical cord attached to the human body carrying a camera,
which can be turned on the self as a kind of cyborg contemporary reality as a metaphysical
sort of statement about what we're becoming-- the idea of in this case perhaps self broadcasting.
Okay that brings me to the Institute of memory time, which is the project, which is at the Institute
of Contemporary Art. So this project was really influenced by this deep blackness. Now what
was that?
[laughter]
>>PATTY: Deep blackness.
>>LARS: Oh this is-this is a 38 second video so I'll just show you some textures from the show
first.
♫ MUSIC ♫]
>>LARS: So that was the voice of [indistinguishable] she's one of my favorite
performers in the world in any genre. And then just some old pictures, but I was born in
Cambridge and I was born in Mount Auburn Hospital and my mother was an immigrant from
Afghanistan and my father was an immigrant from Poland. My father was about 20 years older
than my mom. He came here through very odd circumstances, but eventually worked at Harvard
and eventually at the Kennedy School of Government before it was before it was the
Kennedy School of Government. And I think he was in intelligence. And the reason I bring this up
is because-- well mentioned I was born here. He wasn't on my birth certificate rather he fabricated
a person who was on my birth certificate who they said was dead. And my father lived at 64
Oxford Street in Cambridge. And I never really knew anything about him. I didn't know if he had
any family. I didn't know where he was from. I didn't know where he was born because all of his
documents literally had different birth dates on them spending like 10 years. And he was a true
misanthrope and he passed away in 2009 and I only realized it about a year and a half after the
fact because we'd come-- because we'd become estranged. A few years ago, I was sitting
across the table from a Polish gentleman who runs something called the [indiscernible] Institute,
which is like the Alliance Francais or the Goethe- Institut and he said what do you know about
Tadeusz Kantor? And I said-so Tadeusz Kantor is a visual artist and a theater director of some
repute. He's not that well-known in the United States is much more well-known in Europe. He
didn't have a school or a method of any kind. So he didn't have lots of disciples. He said-- like-- my
theater, my art, ends with me. And he was an obsessive archivist and all of his work really was
a excavation of his earliest childhood memories. So he was trying to go into a lot of really-- he was
in Poland. He was in Poland around the First World War around a lot of politically and well it
was a complex time and there was a lot of upheaval in his life and so he was attempting to
excavate that material and trying to actually really bring it into being from the depths of his-- to the
extent unconscious, unconsciousness. But he didn't have any photographs his father was in his
life either. And these are photographs from one of his seminal works called 'The Dead Class',
which features lots of sort of mannequins, which are ultimately strapped to actors bodies who
much older as they try to put together their sort of first day at primary school. And the gentleman
from Poland said-- you know why don't you think about making work about Tadeusz Kantor and
what that ultimately meant to me after going to Poland and visiting a couple of times was making
a work about my own deep history. And so I'd never made it personal-- I had never made a
personal work before and I hadn't thought about my dad pretty consciously and intentionally in
some years. And I realized that when I was in Poland doing research for this project about
Tadeusz Kantor, I kept on talking about this mysterious figure and how little I knew about him.
And people kept saying to me, 'Have you ever heard of something called the Institute of National
Memory?' I thought that was such a cool name. And no. I hadn't. And it was an archive that was
started by the Soviet secret-- it was started by the Nazis and then continued by the Soviet
secret police so it was a physical archive in Warsaw, kept between 1939 and 1989. And it
was full of documents like this. This is this is a phone transcript typed over wiretap of a family, a
family really talking about Easter holiday and my dad happened to have visited his hometown of
Bydgoszcz in 1958, nine years-- unannounced nine years after he had last been in Poland. And
so there's a few hundred pages in Institute of National Memory in Poland which is of various
kinds of surveillance documents relating to his return to Poland and all of the extended people in
their lives. And so that the project to me became really an attempt to pursue portraits of my father
through various archives. Analog and then moving into digital and my own memory to see
whether he appeared differently in any of the-- in any of the portraits or whether any of the portraits
really helped me feel any closer to actually knowing the mystery that was-- that was him.
This is a photograph of him. He's on the left. As I started working on this project though, I started
thinking more broadly about our contemporary time because all of the archives that related to
him were analog ones, were really paper in folders in you know behind walls and other
countries and so they were really difficult to access. At the same time I was think about this
project revelations related to our privacy and our surveillance state particularly related to Edward
Snowden came about. And so I thought well okay. There's personal remembering and then
there's also national remembering. And in the case of my father, he was very carefully surveilled
in a very conscious and I would even say sort of articulate manner. And I felt like. Yes, we have
something similar going on and yet the Institute of National Memory was an archive that was
intentionally created; whereas, I feel like I'm really creating my own archive and all that an
intelligence officer today needs to do is actually just read the archive that I've already created
rather than go to the effort of sitting on the tram and trying to listen in to the conversation between
the foreman and the neighbor about what we you know what somebody said. So a first attempt
was at Cal Arts where I-I had a group of students basically describe photographs and what they
remember from their early childhood and they would then walk through the photograph and then
sort of become all of the different people and objects in the photograph in space. And then I
would ask them to move to the left or to the right of the edge of the edge of the photograph and see
how much they could reconstitute of the memory. And so this is a-- while doing that, I also used
something called the Lidar scanner, which is really it looks almost like an antiquated
photographic camera, which rotates slowly in 360 degrees and sends out millions of laser points
and creates a three dimensional model of the space in time. And I did that over and over again
as we as we did this exercise. So really this is a composite model of six students over the course
of maybe 45 minutes all during the exercise. And I was trying to figure out well how do we track the
bodies in about bodies in space? How do we-- how does this space or how in the future will we
remember where we really were? What are the different shapes that have inhabited the room that
we're in right now? And is there anything that we can learn from that? So this is what-- this is
these are the shapes that were inhabited in that room at the time. And because it's not a
photograph. It's not 2D it's 3-D. And looking at this image brought up a couple of things. It
brought up sort of the ashen, the ashen figures from Vesuvius. It brought up the shadows from
Hiroshima on the sidewalk from bodies that had been vaporized. And it also reminded me of the
use of Tadeusz Kantor's work- this is idea, these kind of mannequins. So the lasers really
bouncing off the exterior of the body and creating this series of movements. It's kind of a Muybridge
effect in the sense that you're only seeing a few frames of movement and you're seeing some
distortions as the scanners rotating and a person's actually moving rather than still. The
scanner tracks their movement in space so their bodies become distorted. Here's a version of
somebody speaking at a microphone as I actually move the scanner. And so this was-- this is
something that we started using as a material in the performance as well. This is a rhinoceros on
Harvard campus. Outside-- does anybody know? The biology building, maybe? It's where my dad
taught me to ride my bike when I was six or seven years old. And so one of the things I did is I
took this light art to Cambridge and I scanned and created three dimensional models that are
used in the performance of some of my earliest memories to try and capture them and
dimensional them. This ultimately through this project I didn't know where he was buried. And so
ultimately through this -- and I'm not going to sort of spoil how I figured it out but this is his nearly
unmarked grave in Cambridge cemetery, which is just marked with the number of 31. And, darkly,
ironically his father was also buried in the mass grave in 1939. Five days after the beginning of
World War II. So I have-- a lot of the project is about paranoia in relation to the surveillance
state? And an argument as to whether paranoia is really the right word for it. I've got a lot of digital
scans of his body from Mass General Hospital and it's-Yeah, so I'm just going to. I don't' want to
give away too much about the performance but I'll just I'll just say that I was looking at different kinds
of --where are their archives about us? And how are they stored and how accessible are they and
what do they tell us that we might not otherwise know or be able to glean from Facebook.? I think
that's it.
>>DAVID: All right. Thank you, Lars.
>>LARS: Yeah, thank you.
[audience applause]
>>DAVID: So Patty, I'm going to turn to you now. Let me start by saying that I sort of feel your pain
when you mentioned that art is not part of what you deal with a lot. I can say the same thing
about cognitive augmentation. And so I'm wondering if you just give us a really brief
overview of cognitive augmentation.
>>PATTY: Yes. Hi. So welcome everybody to my home, the Media Lab. So as David already
mentioned I'm not an artist. I'm a scientist, engineer, slash designer. I'm especially interested
in how we relate to our personal technologies: our smartphones, laptops etc. And basically I believe
that we are cyborgs-- that we've become cyborgs in the last 10 or so years since the smartphones
were introduced. We have always this technology with us especially the younger generation of
course never can be without their phone day or night. They consult it hundreds of times a day
and that smartphone is really a very central aspect of their lives and their being. And
increasingly that smartphone is becoming sort of a second memory and a second cognition or
something. So we when we talk about our two halves of the brain we used to think of the two
hemispheres. But I think increasingly, we'll start thinking about sort of our natural brain and this
external entity that we rely on for so many aspects of our cognition. But even though we've
become cyborgs and can no longer live without these phones. I think that the way we interact with
them right now is far from perfect. In fact we're constantly splitting our attention between living in
the digital world or doing something in the digital world and then something in the physical world
so we have this split attention sort of and as a result can be very scattered. We're no longer sort
of in touch with what is around us or aware and mindful of the people around us, the environment
around us etc.. So we have been trying to design new ways in which we could relate to technology.
And we've been building prototypes and designing prototypes of systems that are maybe
a little bit more aligned sort of with the user's goals and intentions. Systems that can really sort
of help us in the moment with maybe remembering something or being attentive or
giving us information that may help us make a decision. So we're trying to really make these two
lives a little bit more integrated so that all of us can be less scattered while still benefiting from
sort of what these things can do for us and what they increase-- what they will be able to do for us
going forward because technology is only-I mean it's rapidly progressing. We have artificial
intelligence making huge strides recently etc. and we're especially in my group interested in how
these sort of cyborg technologies could be used to augment some limitations that we may have
like memory. I'm noticing that my memory is no longer what it was when I was 20 or whatever.
Well I would love to be a little bit less embarrassed by sometimes having something
whispered in my ear. I'm sure many of you who are say over 50 have had this experience where
you say-- oh yeah my really great friends. And then you realize I can remember my really great
friend's name. This is so embarrassing. And they may really be a great friend and you really don't
remember almost.
>>DAVID: [laughter] yep.
>>PATTY: So I think that's an example of the kind of moment I think where these technologies could
actually help us and extend our capabilities, extend our cognition or maybe bring it back to the
level where it was when we were at our optimum form. So yeah, we look at memory augmentation.
We look at whether systems could help us with emotional control, whether systems can help us
with mindfulness, with decision making--all of these types of things. I think right now
smartphones of course give us access to the world's knowledge. The world's information is at
our fingertips, but they don't really help us with some of the things that are much more important
for being successful than having knowledge and having access to all this knowledge which is
being able to be attentive, being able to be in control of our emotions, all the-- having
motivation, all of these being able to be creative and think creatively. So I think that these are
interesting goals or challenges for the digital personal technologies of tomorrow whether they
could really help people with these types of issues that are even more important than
information access.
>>DAVID: Thank you. Lars, at the core of the Institute of Memory seems to me is your effort to
reconcile some of the few and fragmented memories that you have of your father. And what
truth you might find two different kinds of archives and looking at and your search was only
moderately successful and in a way.
>>LARS: Thanks. No. It's true. It's true.
[llaughter]
>>DAVID: How would that search have been different today? If your father was alive in the 21st
century so say 70 years from now you're trying to piece together yourself or something. What are
some of the differences that your search would take?
>>LARS: Well I wonder... I wonder about my father specifically in relation to that question
because I think if you take your average citizen say born in 1922 versus your average citizen
born in 1995 I think I think I could answer that. But I wonder the extent to which my-- so my
father's purpose became hiding in a bunker. And so for example, the reason-- one of the reasons I
couldn't-- well I don't. There's something that's like so perfectly my father that I want to give away
because it's important in the show. But he was very rigorous about burying information about
him. And I feel like that's-- I feel like it's still possible to an extent but I think it would make
your life a lot harder and slower. And I think he would be -- but he was he was also an outcast. I
never saw him in the company of another person. So I think he'd be fine to hide. And so I think it's
probably still to an extent possible to do that although you know he didn't have a TV. He didn't
have a computer. He wasn't on the Internet. He wasn't digitally connected. He was-- he lived on
the edge of the science center you know off Harvard Yard. So it's not like there wasn't the
Internet and there wasn't kind of connectivity and technology. He died in 2009. But you know he
consciously stayed away from it. And he was he was concerned late in his life. I tried to apply-- I
wanted to apply to be a common dual polar citizen maybe in 2005 or so and he wouldn't --
even then he wouldn't. He was like in his early 80s. He wouldn't-- he was worried that if he gave
any information on the visa application form about where he was or who his family was or where he
was from that there would be agents who would come to find him. Part of the show details his
interactions with agents in the U.S. in 1967 to 1970 and there were double agents working in the
U.S. I think working at Harvard or MIT I'm not sure, but there were professors in Cambridge
who are trying to turn him work for the Soviets. And so he never stopped thinking that they were
out there looking for him. I think that that he was. I guess you would call that he was he was
repeatedly called paranoid by many doctors and many different sort of forms. Yeah, I don't know. I
don't know that's the case and I don't know the extent to which we should be concerned. I think I
realize that that project really is that that project became about my own paranoia and questioning
whether some of the fears I have about what our future might look like are really paranoid fears
because we're really dissuaded in general from this sort of not taking things off - we can let like
our sensationalist movies do that. But in general you know the idea of being paranoid is not
something that's looked on as - it's looked at as being irrational but it really depends on your
historical moment. And nobody really knows what their historical moment is going to look like.
>>DAVID: Right.
>>LARS: And I would say that's incredibly true of now. In a couple of years, you could really feel li
ke-- the twig could really snap and that's what happened in my dad's life is that it was bending
and bending and bending but one day it snapped and your personal information and access to your
personal identity-- he really realized was something that could be used against you more
than almost -- like you're literally your name would be your death sentence in his case. And to what
extent is that the case now?
>>DAVID: But you think you could still find a way, find a bunker to live in today?
>>LARS: I think there are. Yeah I think I think you could. I think I think the world is still big enough. I
think it's harder.
>>DAVID: Maybe not in Cambridge.
[laughter]
>>LARS: I don't know. I think that maybe the basement here.
[Laughter]
>>DAVID: All right. So Patty, I'm someone who's always been fascinated by how my brain works.
And it's been my observation over the past decade that as more and more archives are
available to my fingers, my brain is giving up more and more information counting on that
phone that you were talking about. And it's been said that human beings can be altered at a
cellular level by nature in the times we're living through. And I'm wondering if there's any
research that's been going on tracking physical changes in the way we think, in our ability to
memorize or am I just getting old?
>>PATTY: Yeah I think there are enormous implications to human memory from sort of the
availability of these devices that we have today that can record every moment of our lives
potentially follow volumetric, 3-D, 360. I think one of the consequences is that we start
remembering less ourselves because we rely on this external technology to do the remembering
for us. Some for example Betsy Sparrow who's a professor at Columbia has looked at how we
read documents differently. When we read them on a computer versus on paper. When you read
on a computer, you basically take the information you don't take in the information you just scan
things sort of to have a sense of what's in a particular article but you don't really let it sink in
while if you read them paper you let things sink in more. And the reason is of course that you sort of
know that if you read something on a computer that you can always go back and find it look at the
details. So you really want to know more sort of what's there as opposed. I mean at a mental level
rather than sort of remember all the details of what you read. Similarly you could argue like if we
one day all have these 360 cameras with us all the time. To what extent are we still going to take
in our experience of the real world? Or will we just say well go I'll go back to it and figure out
where I left my keys by revisiting my recorded memories. I don't have to remember where I put
my keys. I just go back in time through the video and see like oh yeah that's where I left my keys.
So I don't think that there's many conversations about this yet. But there are some people like
Betsy Sparrow and others who are starting to look at how our brains really are being affected by
these tools that we now have available that we can offload a lot of the remembering to and I think
there's sort of pros and cons actually to all of this. Of course digital memories: camera recordings
of events don't are probably more accurate -- less biased than our own biological memories our
own memories are notoriously bad.
>>LARS: As long as you don't use a filter.
>>PATTY: Yes. And I mean if you have a recording of your fishing trip, you'll always know
exactly how big that fish was. It's not kind of growing in size every time you remember the
event. So I think there's advantages and disadvantages. Of course they can be messed
with or they can-- there is huge privacy implications and so on. But I think it goes both
ways.
>>LARS: Something-- something you were saying though about that sort of 360 recording
whether it's like you doing the recording or the environment doing the recording. I feel like that I
can we can go down the rabbit hole of the Big Brother very dark version of that very easily. But
there's something that could be potentially very liberating about it at the same time because I feel
like we're in a very awkward in-between phase and I would say this is very true from my
experience of art. I don't I don't know if you've had this experience where you go to maybe it's not
just the experience or really a beautiful experience of beauty. If you're if you're in front of
something that's beautiful now, you're also probably around a lot of people who are trying to
capture that through what is ultimately like a pretty crappy camera. Yes, it's amazing that it's a
phone but it's ultimately a pretty bad camera and it's doing a bad job with the sunset. And it's doing
a bad job with the installation and it's doing a bad job with the painting and is doing bad job with
your-- It's just doing a bad job documenting the thing that is beautiful that's in front of you and
you're not doing necessarily a great job of experiencing it because you're kind of doing a
boomerang via your phone. And I wonder if we can know-- we can know that we can look at that
later that's actually stored. I wonder if we could actually be there in a moment and so I do you s
hould-Patty and I and David, we had a little conversation before and we were talking about
phones as sort of like the monocle of our time you know of our time in the sense that it's a
midway point between where we're really headed in terms of whether we're talking about
augmenting our bodies but really becoming cyborgs. You know. And versus the contact lens.
Like the contact lenses sort of you don't have to fiddle with it, you don't hold it in your hands, it
doesn't take your focus. It's just there to adjust your vision. So can a personal device of the
future do that? And I obviously it can track you and it can sort of place things there that maybe
we don't want there and it could be a-- it could lead to a certain kind of control at the same time.
I feel like you could say you brought up mindfulness in your -- when you were describing
your work and I think that's something that I feel like is a word that I want to take out of the sphere
of kind of yoga. I live in LA and the west coast and I like vegan food. And I really feel like we
need to work on media literacy in-- on a fundamental level from the youngest ages so that
we-so that mindfulness is not about like Zen meditation, but it's just about actually
experiencing the world through our senses. More. Not exclusively, but just more because I think
something is truly lost as we as the pendulum shifts away from that.
>>PATTY: Yeah. No, definitely the interface of the devices today is very disruptive and it sort of--
pulls you out of the experience or makes you focus on the interface and trying to work your
phone and get it to the right settings, etc. as opposed to just enjoying the experience. But at
the same time like the work of Betsy Sparrow showed, it is possible that if you're read this
amazing moment that maybe you don't take it in completely because you know like well I can
always look at the recording that 360 volumetric recording of it later. So let me think about what's
going to be for dinner instead or something else. So I think there is. Yeah it could go both ways. It's
liberates us because we're no longer fiddling with things. But there is a risk that we are not mindful
because we know that we can access the information when we want to later sort of yeah.
>>LARS: Yeah, I mean you know I mentioned to Patty also when I was when I was a kid, my mom
drove me to my best friend's house for five years from ages of like five to ten and at ten she
said-okay you can ride your bike there. And it was two miles away and I really had been down any s
eries-- no series of streets more in my entire life than that series really almost every day. And I got
totally lost. So because I had never negotiated that series of pathways myself as an agent and I
had never chosen door A, door B or door C before myself, I actually hadn't remembered. I
hadn't really stored it and I understood the kind of textures but I didn't understand myself as a kind
of navigating agent. And I feel like that's also true about relying on something that's passively taking
in information. I don't know that we're really owning that information if it's just being captured.
I feel like there's something about grabbing the information working to put it inside of ourselves
so that we own that it is transformative.
>>PATTY: Yep.
>>LARS: And I don't know what place. And I think this is a good place to ask that question as li
ke-- how does technology and media actually deal with that internalization to make it a deeper
more connected augmentation? So it's not a superficial augmentation but it's really kind of a
profound one?
>>PATTY: Right. Right. Yeah. I'm not sure I have the answer.
>>LARS: Next year.
>>PATTY: Yeah, come back.
>>DAVID: Can I get a time check here? Where we are at? Oh I'm sorry. 6:25? 6:45?
>>LARS: 10:15.
>>DAVID: Oh we've got to move on. So let's talk a little bit about privacy. Your father really worked
hard to maintain his privacy, and we've discussed whether or not he could still do that today. We
discussed about his paranoia about being found if you will. What are the implications of technology
right now in terms of the loss of our private lives? Do you think we can still maintain a private life
outside of technology if we want? Yes?
>>LARS: I think it can be done. But so can a triple axel. [laughter]
>>LARS: And I'm not going to do a triple axel so I'm participating-- I'm participating in 2017 with
everybody else. And so I think if you're participating in 2017 in a certain way basically I
think if you're online then-no.
>>DAVID: If you're on line. No.
>>LARS: No chance. No. If you have a phone, if you have a smartphone, if you have if you're on
line then no chance. And we're only headed I mean the curve is accelerating in that direction.
And I also think places like this malls, streets-- I mean cops are constantly scanning our cars.
Soon streets will be -- soon the street lights will just you scan-- and it's not and I'm not saying this
from a place of like there is some kind of secret cabal that is-- I think we're I think where we're
engineering this reality ourselves. And it's-- I think it's being driven primarily by advertising less than
a kind of nefarious dark state, but couldn't advertising be perhaps the nefarious dark state? I
don't know.
>>PATTY: Yeah,
>>DAVID: Do you think about this in your work?
>>PATTY: Well yeah I think partially the problem is in the case of smartphones and technology at
least, it used to be the case that we would pay for software or applications as a non [Indiscernible].
And but these days applications are basically free or they cost a dollar or something or any
services, computer services, are basically all free. The end consumer ones but indeed the
price we pay is that they want our data and then they use that data to advertise to us or maybe it
will be used in other ways as well. So I think partially that it's that is one of the causes of this
problem is that. Yeah that basically all software is funded these days by advertising and that's a
reason also why the goals of the software or the apps are not aligned with those of the users.
Because basically a user may want to look up the answer to a question but the app that you're using
to do that wants to draw you in so that they can show you more and more ads in that time that
you're trying to look up a question. So the app is only superficially helping you with your problem
but ultimately the app is there to collect data and to show you stuff that you didn't want or that you
didn't ask for.
>>LARS: And I think the difference is-- I think I think we're totally consensual. We're participating
and we're happy too. And I think because the idea of the ideal of privacy has really shifted from let's
say the greatest generation right from sort of like let's say the mid 20th century the idea of privacy
used to be sort of valued and meant something very different than it does to us now. And so I
don't feel like we're-- it's not that it's being taken away. I really feel like it's that we're giving it away
because we don't particularly value it. And I wonder if...
>>PATTY: It become so seductive-- the technology and what we get is so seductive that
we give up our privacy to get access to all these wonderful services.
>>DAVID: Let me shift the word privacy to self in the sense that oftentimes what we try to protect
through our privacy is our self. Are we also giving up our identity? How is this changing who we are
at our core, if you will?
>>PATTY: Yeah.
>>LARS: I don't want to go there.
>>PATTY: Well no. I think we're extending again like sending ourselves with technology but also
through technology with other people. We have these augmentation technologies and they can
give us sort of real time access to anyone in the world who has expertise in that particular area.
So in theory, I could quickly ask somebody for input on something and give you the answer but
the answer didn't come from me, my mind. It came from another person so I think we've
become these-there's sort of a fuzzy boundary around who we are and it's no longer us it's us
plus our friends and plus up in technology and the extended cognition as they call it sometimes.
>>DAVID: Do you have any questions you want to ask each other before I let the audience ask
questions?
>>LARS: I mean I'm curious how whether narcissism plays into your work at all in terms of
argumentation.
>>PATTY: Nacissism. Hum...
>>LARS: Whether kind of reflection or broadcasting of self or amplification of versions of
self have to do with like the augmented-- the kinds of augmentations that you're seeing come
up via your students or what you've seen outin the world. That kind of thing.
>>PATTY: Well I hope that isn't what drives us. I think what we especially try to do is help people
who need more help-- who and sort of bring them to or bring their memory and ability to be mindful
and so on to a level where that is more equal to others or maybe equal to what they used to be
able to accomplish. Yeah, so it's more about assisting people, helping people with certain
limitations that they may have. Yeah.
>>DAVID: Do you want to ask Lars anything?
>>PATTY: Yeah I'm curious. I mean it seems that it's a thing I haven't seen your piece I haven't
seen you piece but I am going on Saturday that time piece but it seems you are through the-- this
piece constructing your memories, your missing memories, of your father sort of the lack of
memories of your father. And I'm curious. Yeah to what extent that affects like everything-- your
relationship or the way you viewed your father and so on that this this active act of construction
of memories.
>>LARS: Well. I became much more sympathetic to him, which was not necessarily
what I was going for because I had a tough relationship with him. But I feel like I understood
the origin story a little-- a lot more. I also, you know, I saw when you just saw over 90 doctors
over about 25 years and when you see a doctor they write a little note about you and different
doctors write very different kinds of notes but when they used to write them they used to write
them handwritten ones especially this is going back into the late 70s and into the 80s. There'd
be like little paragraphs and Henrick looked good today he looked so good you know and they
would talk about the interaction. He seemed like he got really angry about this particular thing. So
he's denying it. So I stopped talking about it this particular medication. And so I saw 90 people's
impression of my father and I could see where the impressions converged, where they differed,
where he said people he liked to have good relationships with. And I was like oh my God my
father had a nice relationship? This person thought he was funny and charming? I can't
imagine. And so that was refreshing but then I also saw through that kind of granular perspective
on him. I also saw over 25 years I saw his descent into dementia and schizophrenia
reflected through the impressions of people and so he was diagnosed that way on his death
certificate. But you could see it you could see it starting 10 years earlier. But none of the doctors
knew that at the time. So only in sort of hindsight did I get to feel-- and that's-- then that's around
the time when I actually had my biggest schism with him was when he was in the early stages of
basically having dementia and he didn't seem any less cantankerous than usual. But clearly things
were starting to go. And part of it part of the disagreement my pivotal disagreement with him
was that I came to see him in the hospital multiple times and he said-- no you didn't. And I
said I was just here last month and I thought he was trying to I don't know what he was trying to
do. I thought he was intentionally messing with my head. And in fact his memory had gone. And I
didn't give him the benefit of the doubt. Yeah. So yeah it's educational. Go check out your doctor's
records of everybody in your family.
>>PATTY: It's interesting these wearable technologies like the ones developed by my group
but also Roslyn Picard is another faculty member at the Media Lab here are increasingly used to
diagnose problems early and actually because all of our technologies again are with us all the time
and so they can notice that there's changes in habits and behaviors that maybe you move
around less. You call people less often etc. and increasingly these records of our behavior of our
digital behavior are being used to do early diagnosis of different problems.
>>LARS: That's fascinating.
>>DAVID: What would y'all like to ask? We have a microphone that we will throw to you.
>>LARS: Whoa, you were totally serious.
>>DAVID: Good catch. Speak into the mic.
>>AUDIENCE MALE: Listen, Lars, your father's story sounds like a unique one. And I think it's
kind of funny that you were trying to uncover his memory and soon there after he was losing his
own memory. It's a sort of interesting wave.
>>LARS: Darkly ironic.
>>AUDIENCE MALE: Have you found knowing that there is probably a grain of truth in what he
said about his past and have you found other people whose parents/fathers were involved in
the spy world that were in parallel to your father?
>>LARS: Not exactly but I'll just say that when I was in Poland and I told this story most people
said you must be Jewish. And turns out that I'm not. But they thought did a lot of people knew of in
Poland a lot of people knew of people with similar stories who basically broke from their personal
histories in a way went into hiding or learned to sort of shroud their data for that particular reason
-- coming out of the crucible of Poland and the Second World War. And so Poland is the only
place where I've ever told this story and people say like yeah that's like my uncle or that's like my
grandfather or that's like my dad you know it's just like somebody else in the family. And then all of a
sudden you say oh well okay, well now maybe Poland makes some more sense, you know as a
place like actually being there like the way that people carry themselves literally the weight of
history is palpable. Versus like Venice California. You know-- it's just there's a there's a kind of
remembered trauma and distrust that is in people who are 20 years old. That's been passed down.
So speaking on a cellular level of national memory, you can see it in their physiology. And
that's fascinating to me. So it's like a generational thing.
[pause]
>>DAVID: Front row.
>>AUDIENCE MEMBER: Lars, you talk about the struggles with trying to figure out your own
identities and memories.
>>LARS: Uh oh. I think the-there we go.
>>AUDIENCE MEMBER MALE: So you talk about your struggles uncovering your father's
memories in an attempt to help, I think, determine your own identity-work it out. I know you're the
father of a beautiful young girl. How has that experience affected your parenthood in the sense
that you end up shaping her memories in a way.
>>DAVID: Could y'all here the question?
>>PATTY: I couldn't.
>>DAVID: As a father now, how is his experience with his father affecting his parenting?
>>LARS: Yeah, so I was. So. The. The day that I found out my father was dead was the day that
my daughter was conceived. And earlier that morning before I found out he was dead.
[laughter]
>>LARS: Not right after.
[laughter]
>>LARS: Cause that would be different. And so there's this sort of-there's a seesaw there that's
pretty apparent. And I certainly in thinking about this project thought about how my daughter might
reconstitute me and I thought well hopefully that's mostly from personal memories from personal
experiences. I didn't go into, but my mother really took me away from my father when I was 20
months old. And so I really barely saw him in my childhood. And so now my daughter is five so I've
made it that far. And. But yeah, that was really my goal was like actually I hope that irrespective of
the archives I leave, I hope that the things that I-- the kind of connection that we have is really these
kind of shreds of. Shreds of memories in here as opposed to a paper trail or a digital trail. That said
I'm going on-- I'm assuming that I'm going to leave her with a few hundred thousand e-mails
that she can comb through at her leisure should she wish to.
[pause]
>>DAVID: What else?
[pause]
>>AUDIENCE MEMBER FEMALE: Sorry for my voice. I have a question for Patty. And I also
believe that the technology is going to help us like-maybe for in terms of health, living better.
But like listening to all these being mindful like trying to catch the patterns. If you call your
friends more or not-bringing your memory. Essentially, do you have-as a beginning do you
have an essential idea about what we should be like? Why am I supposed to be mindful?
>>DAVID: Oh, interesting.
>>AUDIENCE MEMBER: Or maybe I'm not choosing it. Maybe I need some erasers in my
memory. Does this make me imperfect if I use this augmented reality for other devices-if it
catches these erasers-if I just don't want to call my friends often and why a problem? Or like-how
do you set your core values in terms of trying to construct a better life by using all these
technologies? Or what is better? For whom is this better? I'm just curious about it. I mean, this
is like-I mean. I know you're a scientist but like- thinking about from the ethical or [Indiscernible]
point of view. I'm just wondering if you guys thinking about those at the beginning or how are
we regulating these memory issues-like bringing those memories, archiving. How do I? Where is
my [Indiscernible] like how do I regulate those devices? Where is my power as an individual?
Just curious about that.
>>PATTY: Yeah. I think that sort of this cognitive extension or augmentation should be completely
a personal choice that somebody can make and maybe they should be able to choose what they
want to be like. I just think it's hard for some people to be the way they want to be. So I wanted
to give them a tool to become more the way they want to be. I don't want to impose any kind of
norm. In fact, also the more diversity the better. But I think that certain I mean certain people may
not be able to be the person they really would like to be, to be the person who remembers people's
names or to be the person who can pay attention in school for kids or something. So I think there
should be solutions to this. Right now, when people have certain things they want to change, if
you want to be able to control your emotions more or be more attentive to what you do or
what's the only option today, you take drugs. You take Adderall or whatever drugs that really affect
your entire brain sort of and your behavior in very negative and your body in negative ways. So I
want to give people other tools that they can go to. If they want to change something about
themselves that they can't themselves change.
[pause]
>>DAVID: Yeah bring up the drugs. It's an important distinction.
>>AUDIENCE MEMBER FEMALE: Hi there. I'm curious about you were speaking earlier about
kind of this nefarious character who is the one implementing all of this different technology or the
ways that we're able to augment our reality or perception or our memories and similar to your
question about our agency or our power, where are we supposed to direct our anger or our
dissent when we don't want a phone that scans our face in order to unlock it or when we don't
want to have a lens that goes in our eye but that's all that's available? And the option either
becomes you exist in the bunker and hide or you get the phone with the lens. I don't know where
that agency lies and if we're supposed to be angry at the corporations I think it's interesting
we've had this whole discussion but haven't said Apple or Microsoft or android or mentioned the
brands and the actual people and companies that are behind these products that are entering our
lives.
>>LARS: Google Facebook. I mean-I'd say. One part of my I think one response I have is. If
you look at what happened to food around the world and in this country, I think there's and
maybe an interesting analogue there where we went from being like a pretty agrarian culture in a
country where a lot of people grew their own food or their food was very we've grown very close to
them. And we created this ideal, which was the supermarket, where you could get everything
even when it wasn't in season. And that's a problematic ideal. Right? It's like it's sort of
unsustainable and it means that it means that certain kinds of production treatment of animals
and certain kinds of production travel. Right? All of these things go into creating that ideal and then
all of a sudden there's this you know there's movement ever since I guess it's the 70s the
slow food movement and Alice Waters and sort of the idea of farmers markets in our
communities again and buying local became-- so slowly there became a cultural re-emergence of a
priority that was really there a while ago. And it was really about literacy is that we had an ideal
we realized the ideal. We looked around and we said wow this is really what we wanted? This
cheeses like yellow and like way too flat and it's in between multiple levels of plastic. This is
convenient but what else have we sacrificed to get the convenience? And so I wonder about
what's the version of media literacy and the movement around that and around privacy and
surveillance that's going to emerge from us as we realize this ideal of digitopia. And I think it's
just about the -- it's just the conversation. I mean that's I think that's the way to be active is like
have the conversation and be part of whatever that movement is.
[pause]
>>DAVID: You have a question there. Yeah?
>>PATTY: And I think some of that backlash or whatever you want to call it is already has already
started to happen. I mean we used to think in the early days of sort of the World Wide Web and
saw how wonderful it was and how everybody would be sort of be able to be creators as well as
consumers and so on. And we were probably way too optimistic about the impact that all of this
would have and we really believed that they would increase personal freedom and so on and
democratize education and all these kinds of things and there have been a lot of positive
developments obviously, but then also I mean as we saw with all the false news and fake news
and all of that we are starting to send the bubbles that communities find themselves in. Some are
starting to realize the price that we're paying for some of these things that at first sight seem
positive and good for society, yeah.
>>DAVID: 7:30. Oh okay. We still have some time.
>>AUDIENCE MEMBER FEMALE: So when we talk about augmented reality.
>>PATTY: Can you speak up a little bit?
>>AUDIENCE MEMBER FEMALE: Yeah, can you hear me now? The first type of patients that I
thought of was those suffering from Alzheimer's. So we give them this ability to help remember
what they have forgotten. And you know what we -- the benefit of that is that they live a more
fulfilling life as they deteriorate in their memory. But there is also this component of ignorance is
bliss and they start to realize that they are forgetting that they are relying on a technology
and they know that they are forgetting whereas someone who is deep in Alzheimer's might not
realize it. And there is this question
>>PATTY: Speak up a little bit there as we hear some conversation happening up there. It's very
difficult to hear the question.
>>AUDIENCE MEMBER FEMAL: So the question there is happiness. It's happy. Maybe it
improves the life of the family around this patient, but what about the patients themselves. Just
curious on your thoughts.
>>PATTY: Yeah it's a it's a very good question. I mean it's. But. When you give patients other
kinds of drugs if you give someone who's in pain morphine or whatever or some pain killers that
also gives them this wrong believe that everything is wonderful. So I think it should be a choice
again, a choice of the individual if they can make that choice still or a choice of the ones that they
put in charge of their health and treatment and so on, to decide whether they want to live in a more
happy but maybe fake world or something where or whether they want to really sort of experience
life without any kind of augmentation. Same with childbirth. You decide whether you want drugs
and or whether you want to do it the natural way and I know what I chose.
[laughter]
>>PATTY: Yeah.
>>DAVID: Anything else? Oh, yep there is.
>>AUDIENCE MEMBER FEMALE: Hi.
>>DAVID: Hi.
>>AUDIENCE MEMBER FEMALE: My question is-I'm from Poland actually. But my
question is. >>PATTY: We can't hear you.
>>DAVID: Can you talk a little louder? You've got to get right into it.
>>AUDIENCE MEMBER FEMALE: That's better.
>>LARS: I think it's working. If you can just talk louder that would be awesome.
>>AUDIENCE MEMBER FEMALE: You want me to talk louder?
>>LARS: Louder yeah.
>>AUDIENCE MEMBER FEMALE: Okay.
>>LARS: That's great.
>>AUDIENCE MEMBER FEMALE: So my question is you are learning a lot about your past
about your father's past. How can we learn from the past? Is learning from the past still like
valuable for us? And how it can be transferred to this era of like augmented reality and artificial
intelligence?
>>PATTY: I'm not sure. I didn't understand.
>>LARS: I think the question is basically-- how can we learn from-- how can we learn from the
past? And is learning from the past really something that applies-- this is where I don't
quite understand that in terms of like how does that connect to augmented reality.
>>AUDIENCE MEMBER FEMALE: I mean to our current lives and our future lives.
>>LARS: The big question I want to ask right now and I've found myself asking every day is like
where did the critical thinking go as a value of our civilization? And like valuing intelligence. And so
yeah, learning from our past and yeah media literacy and yet like all of this. And yeah, like fake
news. But really like when or when are we going to value at a very fundamental level from the
youngest human beings you know all the way to the oldest? When are we going to value just
encouraging critical thinking skills so that we can so that we can actually thoughtfully think about all
of these things? Because we can't actually even agree on what our past is, if we don't have the
critical thinking skills to discern like propaganda from something even nearly approaching truth.
Because it's just like the particle collider is going bonkers right now in terms of information and we
have to be able to parse. And I feel like it's been a strategy of folks in power for a long time to
eviscerate public education, to degrade critical thinking skills, so this is like the political part of my
perspective. And I feel like that's-- that has all these room ramifications in every field about all of
the problems that we're facing. Because--just because it's obvious I think. Yeah.
>>DAVID: I'm with him on that.
>>PATTY: Me too.
>>DAVID: One quick note for those of you want to see the performance, it's at the ICA on Friday
and Saturday night at 8 o'clock each night. And I have a special offer. If you bring an MIT ID, you
can have a ticket for$10. I can't hear you. Okay, all right. And if you don't have an MIT but you're
here, say Media Lab when you get your ticket. All right. And don't tell anyone else that. You have
been here.
>>LARS: Well, at least this isn't on Twitter or anything. We're not live streaming anywhere so
should be fine.
[laughter]
>>LARS: We'll just do a quick scan facial scan retinal scan on your way out.
>>PATTY: Yeah.
[llaughter]
>>DAVID: Okay, one more question.
>>AUDIENCE MEMBER MALE: Yes. So we are talking about like our memories like in our
generation those devices will be very, very popular. And usual. I will share-a couple of
weeks ago I watched my dad's video. He passed away a few years ago. But when we heard his
voice like it reminds me he's no about him really well because like voices really like connected to
emotion. So you know, also you [Indiscernible] your dad's life and stuff like that. And if we have
those external like memory devices and then many kinds of top notch [Indiscernible] that
synthesize videos, and voices, and stuff like that. Those are you know technology advancement.
How they change the concept of days? I just want to know.
>>PATTY: Yeah, well, I think that until now sort of we've primarily almost constructed our own
memories. There's certain things that you want to remember and there's certain things that you
want to forget. Maybe if someone divorces, they suddenly cut out all the husband pictures of the
photo book and suddenly that person isn't there anymore and all the wonderful pictures of their
kids' childhood and so on. So I think we had more of an opportunity to sort of. And we were more
deliberately creating our own memories previously. But nowadays because our devices
that we carry with us but also all the cameras and everything all around us there is sort of very
concrete detailed memories of everything that really happens. And so we have less freedom to
actually re to create our own memories on our own stories because the truth is out there
somewhere I think. I mean already some politicians in trouble that way with Hillary Clinton
being for example--there was an audio tape where she was talking to a select group and she
had said like of course in public I would never say this or I forget what the detail was and Trump
obviously got into more trouble but not much trouble maybe who is doing similar stuff. So I
think we have less freedom to construct our own memories. I think memories used to be very
biased imperfect-- constructed just like history. Also history is really written by or it is whatever
people make out of it afterwards. And then whoever puts the effort into writing history books
they write history. That's for everybody else then sort of believes going forward. So I think we'll
have less choice sort of in in creating our own memories going forward. Yeah, I don't know
where you agree with that.
>>DAVID: I said one more question. And here it comes.
>>LARS: Can I first just respond briefly to that? I just want to say I think we're biological creatures.
And I think we need to know that we're going to die. And I think other people need to know that
they're going to die and the people that they love and other things that are alive in the world are
going to die. And I think that's part of what this whole thing is. And I think if we pretend otherwise.
It's going to be ultimately unsatisfying. And we also potentially do so at our peril. That's all. Sorry.
>>DAVID: That's deep.
>>AUDIENCE MEMBER FEMALE: I wanted to ask a question about the plurality of memory and
how that relates to how many different ways in which we perceive art. I think that actually being
able to remember an event in many different ways can actually be helpful in experiencing it,
drawing from it what you need when you are engaging with that memory to draw different bits
of information, which is something that I would say is possibly similar to how one perceives an
artwork. You can draw different elements from it's based on the context in which you're experiencing
it. And so how can we draw from what we understand about the experiences we develop in
art into the tools that we creating for memory to make sure that that plurality might still be there?
>>PATTY: I think what would be really cool. We don't have that but if we created the technology
that let you experience an event from somebody else's point of view actually. And we're getting
closer to that. You can record sort of a person's emotions and so on at a particular moment and
their sort of perspective on to a particular conversation or whatever. I think it would be really
interesting to sort of be able to immerse yourself in somebody else's or be in someone else's
shoes literally and their body and experience something from the other side to build more
empathy, understanding and so on. And I think that these technologies like virtual reality are
slowly sort of getting to this and are having a big impact on how people on their lives afterwards
when they sort of are somebody else in VR.
>>LARS: Yeah I don't have an answer. I just think it's a beautiful question. I think the question
is a good answer.
>>DAVID: Okay. Thank you all very much for coming tonight. See you Friday or Saturday at
the CIA.