From Underground Raves to Museum Reinvention: Seb Chan’s Radical Journey

Over like the past 20 years, you've really been leading change in museums through the use of emerging technology that helped to connect people with content.

So what's different now about using technology in museums than when you began? Is it like the speed, the complexity, how people interact, engage with exhibits? Like what's been the big change from a technology perspective?

One of the things that's interesting about being a museum of screen culture is the history of screen culture has been around technology and technological change.

It's also been about labor unions and workers.

So the Hollywood unions and all of this, and it's also been this tension.

So it's been this tension between creators, technologies, rapid change, capitalism, distribution, and viewers and viewers as creators as well.

So, you know, this is not something that the museum can separate from.

And we are working through these notions of how do we do it in a way when we're working with artists who are doing these amazing works, how do we make them make sense to people? And so we're really focused on showing people what people do.

So what is the human agency in creating work? So talking about craft and process, because that's what demystifies them and draws a focus down to what did people do here? What were they trying to do? What technologies of production allow them to do? What do visual effects allow storytellers to do when making

films?

all of these sorts of things.

But it's really about what do people do? People make AI, people make choices about software design and programming and all of these sorts of things.

So we use AI tools for our web search of our collection.

You can go to the museum's website, you can search its collection using a bunch of AI tools that allow you to find parts of media in our collection you otherwise wouldn't find.

And we've been doing that for years with machine kind of learning, computer vision and other things.

You can even search for the sound of a dog barking in the background of a sequence of media, which no one is going to catalogue.

That's so cool.

I love that.

Yeah.

Right.

But if you wanted to create a supercut of all the barking dogs, you could do that with our collection search.

So obviously we are doing a lot of work in this space.