Starting this Friday, on 1-3 May, museum directors, artificial intelligence (AI) specialists, writers, professors of science and architecture theory and other thinkers are meeting online to discuss what can be done with digital technology, now and in the future. The free-to-attend event has been organised by The Art Newspaper and Factum Foundation, with Il Giornale dell’Arte.
The discussions will consider, but go far beyond the question, if an object can be reproduced exactly, which has the “aura”—the original or the facsimile? They will be broadcast live on The Art Newspaper’s YouTube channel,

Programme

Discussion 1: The Future of Museums, Exhibitions and the Objects they Display

Rethinking the role and value of culture in the shadow of an uncertain future

Friday 1 May, 5pm BST/12pm EST

The role of the museum as a repository of physical objects that give access to collective memory is changing. New digital recording technologies that (among other things) allow exact facsimiles to be made and are providing access to a global audience, while new display technologies are inviting us to look at the nature of the object with new eyes.

This panel discusses the purpose of a museum, its role, what should it show, how and to whom. It will look at the way technology is making a « museum without walls » possible and realigning the relationship between the original and the authentic. Is the “aura” of originality now an obsession that is constraining what can be displayed, how it can be
seen and how it can be effectively preserved?

Chair

Sir Charles Saumarez Smith, CBE, former Secretary and Chief Executive, Royal Academy of Arts

Participants

Sir Mark Jones, former Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, former chairman of the National Museum Directors’ Conference

András Szántó, Author and Cultural Strategy Advisor, Founder of Andras Szanto LLC

Mari Lending, Professor in Architectural Theory and History at the Oslo Centre for Critical Architectural Studies

Marina Warner, DBE,
Writer of fiction, criticism, and history; Professor of English and
Creative Writing, Birkbeck College, London; President of the Royal
Society of Literature

Neil MacGregor, former Director, The British Museum, Founding Director, Humboldt Forum Berlin (2015-18)

Discussion 2: The Circulation of Objects: the Politics of Recording, Training, Preserving and Sharing

Creating a cultural economy based on sharing skills, technologies and knowledge

Saturday 2 May, 5pm BST/12pm EST

For museums and other cultural heritage institutions, digital technologies open up unprecedented possibilities for sharing and collaboration, but they also give rise to new responsibilities. This panel asks how the international heritage community can best work to create accurate records and share both objects and knowledge with audiences across the world.

Chair

Simon Schaffer, Professor of History of Science, Cambridge University

Participants

Anaïs Aguerre, Cultural Strategy Advisor and Founder of Culture Connect Ltd, ReACH Project Director

Jerry Brotton, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London

Hartwig Fischer, Director of the British Museum

Richard Kurin, Smithsonian Distinguished Scholar and Ambassador-at-Large

Bonnie Greer, OBE, playwright, author and critic, former Trustee of the British Museum

Discussion 3: An Intimacy with the Physical World: New Technologies Generating New Knowledge

Compiling, analysing, presenting information in an age of machine learning

Sunday 3 May, 5pm BST/12pm EST

This discussion focuses on the technologies that are creating new knowledge about cultural heritage—on where we are now and where we go next.
Among the subjects to be discussed are new possibilities for image and information analysis, new technologies of display, and the problem of long-term digital archiving.

Chair

Sir Ian Blatchford, Director and Chief Executive of the Science Museum Group, Chairman of the National Museum Directors’ Council

Participants

Brian Cantwell Smith, Reid Hoffman Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Human, Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto

Sarah Kenderdine, Professor of Digital Museology, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

Frédéric Kaplan, Professor and Digital Humanities Chair, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

Carol Mandel,