This is the presentation given by Peter Kaufman (Intelligent Television) as the Opening Keynote of Screening the Future 2011.
Over the past decade, television and film archivists, working with government funds, philanthropic support,and private partners, have been adding moving images and recorded sound to the searchable corpus of human knowledge online. That corpus now embraces billions of words, images, moving images, and sounds – our memories, much of our creativity, and, as it grows, much of our collective intelligence. But in what ways will the addition of greater film and sound assets to the digital record be likely to improve our understanding of the world – what we know and do as cultural heritage workers, producers and consumers, citizens of individual countries and common economic zones, and members of the same single species? And how will the collective intelligence we have established over thousands of years benefit from the Vesuvian overflow of images and sounds from the billions of cameras, screens, speakers, and computers now in operation worldwide – and from the new tools we have for making sense of the new rush of sounds and images? With an eye on policy recommendations and cost-effective investments, this talk puts forward a concrete agenda for the work of PrestoCentre and its stakeholders for the years ahead.