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Interview: Host Tony Kahn, of Public Radio International
November 1997 with Margaret MacLean and Ben Davis
Tony Kahn: I’ve been talking to as many people as I can about the work that they do and the issues it brings up for them. And it’s part of what seems to be a broadening definition of what art and culture is. I’m getting the impression that this is a highly collaborative place. And that you often have to stop and make judgments about what the effect is going to be, how involved you can be in the different process of saving a piece of art or identifying what is culture. But, this is an opportunity, it seems to be to talk about something that hasn’t happened yet. And that’s, the future.
This is an Institute which has obviously been built to last a long time. And, which is finding a way of trying to respond to change all the time. I gather that even in a process of making the building, you know, there are a lot of decisions that were made on the basis of people saying, “Oops, that idea of ours that needed two people, it’s now 20 people. And we just heard from this place, we really should reconfigure this that way.”
Now you’re tackling something that is the biggest issue of all -- and that is the future, in a sense, of art and of how the discoveries of this place and the work of this place is going to be transmitted and kept. Your conference, called “Time and Bits: Managing Digital Continuity”...let me begin by asking just what is the conference about and why is it important to have it.
Margaret MacLean: It’s important on a number of levels. This is a brainchild of Stewart Brand the Long Now Foundation and the original founder and publisher of the Whole Earth catalog. We were talking about the problems of saving information about art, or about culture. And because of this very enthusiastic embracing of digital media on which to record information about culture or art. Or, in some cases a primary sources are going into digital form and leaving behind little of a hard copy. We needed to start, we needed to look at the issue of protecting it over the long term.
There are two ways that information can slip away from us. One is the disintegration of the medium on which it’s stored. And one is the lack of access ten years from now, what will your computer be able to read from disks written to now? If we’re looking at extraordinary archives of information, or community archives of information... we’re pretty sure those people don’t want to commit their cultural memory to an unstable medium.
Kahn: Let me give you a very concrete example of that, just in terms of my own working life. I’ve been in the media for 25, 26 years. Some of the first things that I did for television were on something that was called helical scan equipment. It was a half inch video, black and white thing. I don’t know if there’s a signal left on that tape that even has a picture or a sound, but if there is, there’s no machine left on which that tape can be played. Maybe there’s somebody in some outlying community who collects these machines and might be identified someday by the Smithsonian. But otherwise, it’s lost.
Now, here’s a piddling television program that’s lost, but the question is, what about all the information that you put on hard disks and stuff now? Whose going to read that? What do you do about that problem?
Margaret: Well, that’s one of the things we’re going to be looking at. We can’t necessarily stop the makers of hardware and software from doing what they do, which is their business. But there is, I think, some contribution that we can make by shining the light on this problem. To bring it out into a sort of social context, a cultural context. To bring the makers and developers of these things into a common understanding of what the issues are and their responsibilities vis-ˆ-vis protecting the information over the long-term. You cite the issue of your television show, but multiply that by zillions. It’s for example, the soul of the Navajo community in Arizona that is stored on videotape. All the interviews with the elders of the community made in the 1970’s are becoming unreadable. Videotape is not a stable medium. Ben and I are putting together a list of frightening stories--horror stories, really, of information lost because of this problem.
Kahn: Ben, tell me some of those horror stories. What’s on the list?
Ben Davis: One of the big ones is early NASA images of the earth. Actually, the photo that Stewart Brand used for his Whole Earth image...
Kahn: That the earth is seen from a great distance--?
Ben: Yes, right. It’s not readable now on the NASA tapes that were the original recording media for those images. And there are many, many stories--the Jet Propulsion Lab here in Pasadena has lots and lots of space images that are on lost formats that no one right now sees the need to resurrect, but we know from an historical perspective that down the road somebody will want to look at those. And I think the whole problem is bound up in issues of standards and the relationship of standards to a free economy where people are obliged to create new standards in order to create new industries.
Kahn: In other words, something new so that they can sell it.
Ben: Right. And those things are not so problematic for advertising or for automobiles really, but once you get into the realm of recording cultural information, people’s heritage, people’s collective memory, then there’s an implication of what you’re going to lose if you use that same system for those materials.
Kahn: Give me some examples from other parts of the world if you can of things that have been stored on media that maybe are fading, or have faded, or are in danger of being lost.
Ben: Well, there’s a wealth of information in the recording industry that’s lost because of changes in formats. From vinyl records to tape to digital materials and so forth. One I’m thinking of, also, the whole category of... theft of digital files and theft of computer equipment and so forth. Recently in Romania a whole collection of museum materials was removed because the thieves took the computers as well as the data that was on them. There were no back-ups and these kinds of things are--
Kahn: What was on those tapes?
Ben: All kinds of art historical information about the Romanian art... art and architecture of Romania. And so there are all kinds of ways to look at these individual disasters. That’s a really physical removal, but they were not thinking in the long-term about those digital materials, about keeping the records of the copies of the hard disks somewhere else. Not paying attention to the sort of digital long-term question of where do you keep these materials and how do you keep them and how do you refresh them. Because one of the methods--it’s also interesting dimension of copying materials over, that you think will actually be used and deciding “well, we’ll copy this and we won’t copy that.” So who makes the decision about the materials are preserved in a copy mode. So there are all kinds of issues around the longevity and the managing of what we’re calling “managing digital continuity.”
Kahn: What would be your hope of what would come out of this conference? And what are you doing to try to ensure that it does?
Margaret: First of all we’re not intending to come up with a solution to this problem. Certainly not in the first meeting. We’re hoping that this will become a series of meetings, addressing various aspects of a problem and involving different groups of people.
One of the extraordinary things that we have at the Getty is the ability--of which we mean to take advantage--of being able to commit resources to creating opportunities for people to come together and address these issues that are very long-term. The computer software business tends to be very short-sighted. They want to get a piece of software up and out almost immediately. But this is really a societal issue, we think, and requires a more considered, steadier sort of examination. So we’re hoping that this first meeting has a significant impact on the people involved, and also on the people who see the results of the meeting -- which we’ll make public on our Web site. So that we can keep the light shining on the problem until the right people are brought to the table and actually can take some action that will mitigate the destruction of memory.
Kahn: Now, I’m smiling a little bit because this is probably the closest that I’ve come in the two days of interviews to hearing an arm of the Getty take what strikes me as being a kind of strong, aggressive direction to wake up a certain part of society to some important values. It’s “pro-active” to use a horrible term. Is this, am I right in saying that? And is that tricky?
Ben: I think you’re right. And it is tricky in many ways because it brings to bear a kind of notion not just of strategic thinking, but substantive thinking. What is required to raise a certain consciousness about the problem? How to get the people to the table who might solve the problem. And then how to distribute the information from those meetings to other people who may have a comment on the problem or may need to be brought into the situation to understand these things better.
So I think it is very tricky. I think that the notion that we’re moving into a digital world--there’s not much controversy on that issue anymore. I think the fact that we have a history of losing cultural information just as you’ve described in terms of early television that we have done, technological things that facilitated recording information with our eyes closed in a sense.
The digital revolution is a revolution with its eyes open. And I think it’s a unique moment. And I think a place like the Getty also has its eyes open in that regard can work on a problem like that and bring other people to the issue.
Kahn: At the same time--let me restate the way I’m sort of seeing this. In a sense, you are prepared to sort of play the role through this of trying to awaken a sense of conscience and responsibility on the part of people who have enormous power in the world’s most rapidly changing, leading industry, which is creating the most fundamental tools which may end up being the weakest tools for preserving art.
Okay, you’re taking on some pretty big people in the interest of perhaps some of the world’s smallest people, including the people who haven’t even been born yet. Preserving this stuff. But, at the same time, you’re one of the big guys. You have an enormous endowment. Isn’t there the danger that people will criticize this as being a struggle among giants for the control of the culture of the world? You know, that oh my gosh, these big things are in the hands of too few people.
Margaret: That’s a rather apocalyptic vision, isn’t it? (laughs)
Kahn: It’s late in the day. And feel free not to answer it, you know.
Margaret: First of all, I don’t think we’re taking anybody on. We’re just having them over -- to focus in what I think is a pretty nice context and environment, and to talk about these things. And we hope that each group, particularly this first group and then successive ones would then go forth and discuss this in other forums. It’s a little bit odd for us referring to your question about the battling of the giants. It’s quite unusual for us to be so pro-active in the kind of work we do normally. In many cases, the projects we do (GCI) are very much in partnership with foreign governments or archeological agencies or cultural heritage organizations of some kind. And the partnership normally begins with a request or statement of a problem from the prospective partner. We wouldn’t dream of going out into the field and sidling up to the Tunisians and say, “Here’s your problem and we’re going to fix it for you.” Never in a million years. However, the issue at hand is very important and far-reaching
I’m delighted we’ll have this opportunity to bring these people together and commit the Getty to do some follow up on this.
Kahn: Is it possible that the solution might be, well, that it is happening too fast. And the technology is spreading a little bit too quickly and it’s too seductive. And maybe the solution to the problem, since we haven’t figured it out a medium yet that we can trust to the ages, to slow down the process of documenting stuff digitally. Is that an alternative?
Ben: I don’t think it is. And I think that that is really at the core of the problem. We can’t stop that development. I think that the other, if you want to call us one of the big guys, and the other big guys, the people involved in the industry know they have a problem. And they’re looking for solutions too, although they’re working so fast to keep development going and to keep their companies going that I think they’re looking to other organizations like us to take the long view to help them understand what it means to be in the business they’re in. And I think that.. there’s no way we could recommend that they slow down their businesses because it’s all going too fast. I think we have to recommend best practices and include them in the conversation.
To go back to your thing about television. This was never done when television was invented. No one sat around a table and decided “okay, everything’s going to be on magnetic tape. What does this mean in the long, long term?” It was just get the shows done, get the stuff out--
Kahn: They didn’t do it for movies either. They didn’t even assume that the stock they were making it on was something they should think about the longevity of.
Ben: Right, so the irony, the very interesting thing to me is the digital people, the people in the business of making digital equipment and so forth do have a kind of consciousness about it that previous generations didn’t. And I think that they’re very--the people that we’ve talked to that we’re bringing to this meeting, are very excited about being at the table. So I think it’s all a very healthy situation.
Kahn: Well then I won’t sound so apocalyptic.
Margaret: Thank you.
(laughter)
Kahn: Help sketch in the picture of how important this digital technology is in the kind of work we are doing. It’s one thing to say, we’re not sure how long it’s going to last as source of information, but how is it being used that makes it so seductive in art now? We saw the Siqueiros project earlier today. That’s something that’s using a lot of digital measuring and storing isn’t it?
Margaret: Yes it is. One of the reasons that I think that the technology is so seductive for us, certainly in the conservation world, is that with a digital photograph of a wall painting for example you have the ability to enhance the image in various ways that bring out details that you might not be able to see otherwise. So it deepens your view--
Kahn: How does that work with the Siqueiros? How is it used to do that with that painting?
Margaret: The wall painting itself is very faded. It’s a ghostly version of its previous form. And the digital image that we captured first of all, to create a visual base for any future conservation activity that’s very, very accurate. It can be enhanced in various ways from the small amounts of paint that are still on the surface so you can get a better idea of what it looked like. We have black and white photographs of the original, but there are no color photographs of the original. The combination of the old ? the digital data come a little bit closer to fact. We wouldn’t intervene on the painting and repaint, but having the virtual record, the virtual wall painting and being able to play with that is an enormous advance for condition reporting and for monitoring over time.
Ben: Another angle that has been talked about by the participants in this conference that makes digital technology unique is that there is the potential for saving everything that, with advances in the computer industry, has nothing better to do than create new compression technologies that allow you to keep more and more information in a smaller and smaller space.
One of the participants in the Time & Bits conference will be Brewster Kahle who is an entrepreneur who is archiving the World Wide Web. He actually downloads the whole Web everyday and saves it. And his intention in doing that--and is able to do it on a machine that’s about the size of a refrigerator is data mining the material on the Web to understand patterns of information or to understand potential for new products or to understand cultures inherent in the digital technology. A whole variety of things.
But his whole approach to this is that the technology may make it possible not to get rid of anything. So then what do you do? How do you decide what’s valuable and what isn’t? And what you may not want to read later and so forth. So, bringing those people to the table who have those kinds of perceptions of this technology are very, very interesting to us. In the archeological field work, in art historical reference materials, we’ve all experienced saying just keep it all, put it on another floppy, put it on another CD-ROM, put it on DAT tape as you’re doing with this interview. And put it on a shelf. Put it somewhere and we’ll figure out what to do with it later. But technically, we can do this.
Margaret: In Ben’s example... the information is there if one talks about archiving the Web, one can download all of the data and then sort it, rearrange it, look at it in entirely different ways. One can do this with remote sensing data as well. The information has always been there, but it hasn’t been retrievable or manipulable up until the time we had digital technology available to us. It’s enormously seductive for very good reasons. It’s just a matter of how to save it, how to make sure that it gets to the next generation intact.
Kahn: You’re also in a sense--with this conference--raising the question of how important is art and culture and the future of art and culture in the marketplace when it’s teamed up against the business of change. That’s a huge question to be undertaking. Do you see that somehow as part of this conference as well?
You say that you have the cooperation of the people who are feeling that they do have to think about this and it’s important, but you’ll also hear from them about the forces that militate against their taking the time necessary and the investment of money, perhaps, to do it.
So in sense, aren’t you asking them to figure out how important art and culture really is?
Margaret: I think there are other reasons that they will find that will make this meaningful to them. I don’t think we need to talk them into our perception of how important culture and art are. But I do think that there will be significant benefits that will accrue to the industries as well. They’ll have to sort that out for themselves I think. The idea of art and culture in the marketplace sends shivers down my spine. That’s when I get dark and apocalyptic. We’re living in an age where there’s quite a lot of confusion I think about the role or the place that art and culture should have in daily life, that art should have in the school day of a child. I suppose that many of us work here because we hope that consciousness of art and the appreciation of it will carry on into future generations.
Ben: I think it’s really interesting from the technological side of it to hear the computer industry and the digital, technological industries now talking about the importance of content. And no one could have predicted the World Wide Web ten years ago. Computer networks for exchanging information, for exchanging content, now content in the Web is our business. And I think for people in the arts and humanities, content has always been the issue. It’s not so much the medium, but it’s the message.
And now, we are finding out that products and services come out of content. They come out of cultural behaviors and they come out of cultural heritage--tendencies. I think there’s a very interesting moment here with the digital technology where, they will call it “content” we will call it “arts and culture,” but the thing that people have learned from digital technologies is that no one can really predict the future products. They seem to happen. And they seem to happen based on styles and fads and fashion and practicalities and things that we can’t imagine. I was thinking the other day that the Web is starting to look like the invention of television. It’s very clumsy, it’s very bad visuals and text--and continuous streaming high-resolution images from television in that regard look like the future, you know, but they’re actually the past. So things are very out of joint because of the technologies. And because of the malleability of the digital medium, it can be converted into anything else. So we have a lot of realms to cut across.
Kahn: I’m intrigued by this image of having the entire content of the Web downloaded and then analyzed for trends. Since this piece is really going to be about the Getty Center and whether one can ever create an interesting set of images about what it is at any one moment, where it’s going, what it’s trying to do.
If you could somehow from your own experience of this place, and your talking to colleagues, put it all together, you know, one day’s activities at the Getty Center and then try to search for trends, what would you say is this place doing now? What would you hope it would be doing? Here you are, you’re talking about the future, an incredibly complicated field where it’s very hard to even know what is going to happen next, and you got some scientists there who are dealing with tiny little bits of 6,500 year old pieces of bronze and trying to draw conclusions from it without getting morally involved, although, in some sense they’ve got to make judgments that may affect what happens to somebody else over there. And you’ve got somebody who’s advising to somebody about restoring a mural in a community which is going to be changed once the thing is finished. Do you have--what’s going on in this place? What do you think is the trend? Does it have a direction?
Ben: I’ll speak as a newcomer and Margaret can speak as the old hand, I’ve only been here for two years. But, my experience especially coming into the new Getty Center is that there is a I wouldn’t call it a real identity crisis, but there is a--real interesting moment where and I was just describing the building of the Getty to someone, people don’t quite know what this is. And we can think of it as a Millennium event or whatever, but... it’s a museum. It has a whole world onto itself of research and education and the arts. There are all the institutes that have their various specialties and all these specialties overlap in different places as Margaret and I are collaboration, we’re realizing what the overlaps are.
And in the process there’s this definition, this emergent, if you will, self-organizing kind of thing occurring here that from my perspective and I’ve been a teacher and I’ve been a researcher so I’ve never seen this happen like this anywhere before. And I think that’s what’s one of the fascinating things that’s drawn me here is that freshness and that ability to admit really that this is going on and that we’re all together trying to understand it, trying to experience it. Trying to move projects that touch these aspects and give us answers.
Kahn: Give me a moment if you can where you have that feeling or you get that hunch that something may be emerging here. Does it come in a meeting with somebody? Does it come when you’re driving home at night and you look back at the place? Has there been a moment, where you say, “oh this is amazing what’s going on here.”?
Ben: I think for me one of those moments was seeing the construction of the Getty buildings for the first time. And coming to Los Angeles from the East Coast and saying to myself, “my goodness, it’s the end of the 20th century, it’s Los Angeles, California, and look what’s going on here.” This kind of building has never happened, won’t happen again and so it’s a moment. I think there’s a real moment happening here.
And then getting to know people here who are concerned on so many different levels with their own levels of expertise, what’s happening socially, what’s happening in the city, what’s happening in the country, what’s happening in cultural events around the world that they’re connected to these amazing projects that have been going on for years. And it’s... it’s sometimes very overwhelming driving home at night thinking that you’re in the right place at the right moment and how fortunate you are.
Kahn: What about your viewpoint with a bit more history added to it?
Margaret: What I was thinking as Ben was speaking about Los Angeles, this is, I see the Getty Center as an extraordinarily hopeful and positive thing. Los Angeles was the model for “Blade Runner.” It’s always seems to be seen in the movies and comic books as this dystopia, this dreadful end-of-the-world sort of vision, but in fact, this is a real investment in the future.
It’s interesting for me particularly--I’m an archeologist. I see the world from that perspective. And often from the past looking forward. The work of the Institute and the Getty generally, is closely related to the reason I got out of archeology and went into protection of the heritage. It seemed to me at the time, and still does, when I left the academic world that there was too much archeology going on and not enough thinking about the heritage and this protection going forward.
It’s the same kind of issue that we’re dealing with in “Time & Bits.” How many more buildings do we need to dig up? How many more artifacts do we need to pull out of the ground before we pay attention to what we have? And before we pay attention to how we’re going to take care of it over the long-term?
It seems to me irresponsible to keep doing that in the field without having made those provisions. So it means a lot to me that the Getty is willing to invest in this sort of attention.
Kahn: I’ll tell you my own impressions and they’re the freshest of all and probably the most misconceived, but it’s been only two days that I’ve been here and I’ve been just excited and exhausted by the experience of coming across so many fascinating minds, working on so many fascinating projects, requiring so much patience, collaboration, and perspective.
The thing that amazes me about this place is that I don’t see anybody in charge. Granted, I haven’t interviewed anybody who is in charge so I haven’t had a chance to understand what his or her thinking is, but I don’t feel that whoever is in charge has insisted upon issuing directives. I feel that there’s something like a mandate or purpose to this place but that basically it’s being allowed to sort itself out. And your conference is doing something which seems to go against the whole grain of how history and progress happens, which is you hold onto what you got until it blows up in your face and there’s a crisis and as a matter of survival you say we got to make a change, what’s available.
You’re trying to get ahead of the curve. Tell me whether this makes any sense or if you disagree, whether there’s a kind of process going on which is trying to handle major problems in a new way and it doesn’t yet know what that’s going to be.
Ben: I would tend to agree with you from my perspective so far. I think that so far because we are working in the area of digital technologies that we are in the front end of that kind of work and applying some of the older ideas to that new medium is sort of raising this kind of image that you’re bring up. I think that would be an appropriate role for an institution that has the ability to take a long view. To take that kind of attitude toward longevity as a goal. It’s very interesting to me to see this happening in Los Angeles. I think there are certain ironies to a city that has wiped out a lot of its architecture and a lot of its past, creates movies about the future. But it’s a very visionary place. There are more visions of the future here than there are anywhere else. And there are more diverse cultural backgrounds and histories. I there’s a reason that it’s happening here, I think there’s a reason that it’s happening at the Getty. Whether we can completely articulate it is a little bit impossible. It’s a little bit like, what do we do with digital technology, well let’s get together and see what happens.
Kahn: I think this is an incredibly open-minded place. Is that the case? If so, can it stay that way?
Margaret: Well that’s a wonderful question and what a challenge. One of the things that Ben was saying, when you think of the World Wide Web for example, it’s the most democratic thing you can imagine. No one runs it. Anybody who has anything to do with it runs it. They run it for themselves. They pick what they want to see, what they want to put up for other people to see and it’s a wonderfully level playing field.
I think in some ways we can approximate that in some areas of the Getty. We have, although you may not be able to see this, we have a pretty well defined mission at the Institute. At the Information Institute there’s also a well defined mission and the Trust itself also has the same kind of thing. They’re meant to fit together somehow. And I think they are more and more, and that’s helped out by the moving of all the Getty entities to this location.
Kahn: What is the major overall mission. It’s funny, you know, usually you go someplace and it’s “abandon hope all you who enter here.” I haven’t seen anything written on a wall. I don’t know what it is.
Margaret: Goals change of course, depending on what’s needed in the field. But the mission of the Getty has to do with arts and culture and the educational importance of these things and a central place that these should have, we feel, in the lives of men and women.
Ben: I think actually the mission of the Getty has been relatively well defined, but what is the particular issue now and what you have been noticing in terms of the fluidity and the lack of a centralized dictatorial direction is that the Getty really is in the midst of trying to find a metaphor for itself. Because it’s the metaphor that’s going to inspire people and the metaphor itself is still missing. In part because the rising of these buildings out of the hilltop has inspired people to think of the Getty as wanting something new, another mission, or wanting some other metaphor for itself. But also in part because the burdens of this building rising out of the hillside are such that it could be either apocalyptic or millennial and in price of either being apocalyptic or millennial, both of which could lead to great disappointments, the Getty realizes that it’s going to have to find a metaphor for itself about some after transformation that it can be a part of, if not guide.
Kahn: What’s likely to make that happen? Will it come out of here or is something going to happen out there that’s going to make the Getty realize what it’s got to do?
Ben: Well I think the first problem we’re having is we’re talking about the Getty with a capitol “G” as this monolithic organization. And it’s not monolithic. (laughs) But the people at the Getty are part of the community, very few of them are hermits and most of them want to be a part of this community. So what’s going to work for the Getty and what’s going to stimulate them toward another metaphor is that they will see how at the moment people are imagining the buildings and not the people. The community is seeing the buildings and not the people. The next step is for the community to engage with the people at the Getty. Not just with the exhibits at the museum, but the people at the Getty. And from that I think will come the stimulus for the people who work at the Getty to begin to develop a new metaphor for themselves inside the community.
If in fact they remain a center on the top of a hill like a university on the top of a hill, then they’re going have tremendous problems because they are going to be seen by the community as being elevated but not part of Los Angeles.
And very often this is what institutions in Los Angeles do to themselves. They create a sanctuary for themselves in the midst of what’s called “hostile Los Angeles” and this can too easily perhaps become the fate of the Getty up on the top of this hill. And I think people are, people who work at the Getty are aware that this could become the fate. They’re working as hard as possible to make it different.
Kahn: I just have one last question for all of you. We’ve been talking about what the Getty does and whom it’s aware of and whom it has to deal with... Is there any part of the world that needs to be heard from that can’t get in through the door here at the Getty that you’re concerned about in particular?
Many have serious problems and many people define culture and art in their own way and it’s their life and their future and they may be at a disadvantage and maybe the Getty can’t hear them. Do you worry about that?
Margaret: Absolutely. And it’s part of the reason why we all spend rather a lot of time on the road. What we do only makes sense if it serves the audiences that we have decided to serve. If what we’re doing is out of the reach of the people and the communities holding cultural heritage and valuing it enormously, then we’re not doing it right. If it’s not accessible or if it’s not understandable then we’re being too elitist.
We have quite a range of cultures represented here on the staff and languages spoken. And we hope that our concern about this issue and our attention to making sure that we’re in touch with all levels of audiences regarding cultural will keep us honest and keep our eye on the ball.
Kahn: You are in this conference moving toward a more political, pro-active position, you say you got worry about something, there’s another big issue that people talk about. And that is the globalization of culture. Whatever the heck that means. But that basically there’s a kind of consumer culture which is accessible now through dishpan antennas that sprout all over the world you know, that are sometimes bigger than the roofs of the houses that have them. They can’t afford much but they can somehow afford to watch this stuff. And it comes in like a crack cocaine.
You know, it’s so appealing and so compelling is that an issue that the Getty is going to try to address as well? Or is that outside your daily work?
Ben: I think it’s an issue we’ve approached in the Information Institute and so has the Conservation Institute in a variety of projects that connect people together that are not really reliant on the technology as a way to bring people to the table. We’ve done things like try to encourage people in Los Angeles, for instance, that don’t have access to the Web, we’ve given them access, we’ve taught them how to build Web materials.
But the process of doing that, of bringing those people together in a room, in a workshop is equally as valuable as the thing they produce on the Web. And I think that that’s one of the things we don’t want to lose sight of here. We’re facilitating things with people--getting connected to other people so that they can share their cultures and their concerns and their worries about the future in a very active way.
So I think it’s sort of fostering that people-to-people process that a lot of the projects are, the underlying reason for doing the project.
Kahn: Well I guess the hardest conclusion to accept about some things as important as art and culture is that it’s a process. There ain’t no conclusions and this building, which is soon about to open, will from day one, start to change.
Anyway, I want to thank you both very much. Would you be kind enough to give me your name and your position here at the Getty?
Ben: Ben Davis, Program Manager for Communications at the Getty Information Institute.
Kahn: How did you get here by the way?
Ben: By car.
Kahn: (laughs)
Margaret: I’m Margaret MacLean and as of a couple of days ago I’m in charge of Special Initiatives here at the Getty Conservation Institute.
Kahn: And how did you get there?
Margaret: (laughing) Through the back door, as most people in this institute do!
Kahn: This comes as a surprise, what were you before?
Margaret: Yes, I was Director of the Documentation Program. We’re in the middle of a restructuring really to coincide with the opening of the building and the entrance of our new President and CEO. And also to reflect some of the changes that we’ve made by adopting a strategic plan that we’ve been developing over the last couple of years.
This week we’ve been unrolling it and talking with the staff about all the implications of this. It’s an interesting time. There’s a lot going on. Even without the opening, there’s a lot going on. But we’re all looking forward to having the public up here. It’ll offer some interesting opportunities for exchange too.
Kahn: I guess this whole move has done two important things, it’s brought all of the operations together into one place. That means that you’re now one huge marketplace, you’re one huge camel bazaar where you’re going to be knocking into each other and things will happen. And the other thing is it’s bringing in the public, to also be present in what some way or other as part of the process of the Getty.
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