Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. Steve Seitz
and Chuck Dyer used view morphing to digitally reveal a side of the Mona Lisa
we've never seen before. What it would look like if she stared
directly at us. That's her but it seems a bit
unfamiliar. I mean, there is only one iconic
view of the Mona Lisa. There's only one physical object you can look at
to say that you saw the Mona Lisa with your own eyes.
Photographs exist. There are copies you can also look at.
There are forgeries, there are parodies but the true
original Mona Lisa is in the Louvre. That's where it is.
But where is this video?
Seriously,
where is this video?
I mean, it's on your screen right now but it's also on a lot of
other screens. Where's the original? Well,
it's stored on YouTube servers and the original export is on my hard drive
but those are just instructions for making
the video. This video is anywhere.
Every stream, every viewing of this video is, as Bill Thompson would say,
"a digital simulacrum of something that has no original".
So, how does a museum curator or an archaeologist deal with this?
Well, they are rethinking curating.
I mean, take a look at this sculpture.
"The distance from this sentence to your eye
is my sculpture." That's pretty cool, but
how do you put something like that in a museum? This sculpture and this video can be
endlessly copied and every version is made out of different
stuff at different times, a bit like
your body. There's an identity crisis going on. As I discussed before,
every few years nearly all of your atoms are replaced.
Old ones leave, new ones come in. Where is the original
you?
Like this video, you are really just the result of a set of instructions being
followed. And in our cases, interestingly, those instructions
are kind of forgeries. 'The $12 Million Stuffed Shark'
is a great book about the art world. It mentions that, at one point in history,
there were 600 Rembrandt's hanging in museums
and 350 Rembrandt's in private collections.
The only problem is Rembrandt scholars say that Rembrandt only ever made
320 paintings. Mistaken identity,
forgeries and phonies have been around for a long time.
In 1496 a young Michelangelo, the same Michelangelo that painted
this, forged a statue. He treated the statue with acid to make it look
not like his own work but like the work of ancient Greeks or Romans,
so he could sell it for more money. But really, what's wrong with a forgery?
I mean, sure, supporting forgeries is like supporting plagiarism but as far as
intrinsic aesthetic properties go, what's the difference?
Whether painted by Da Vinci, or a dog, or copied perfectly by a robot,
wouldn't the Mona Lisa smile just as mysteriously
and cooly? Well, here's the thing.
We feel like the original, the Mona Lisa Da Vinci originally made, has
an aura about it. As Richard Wiseman discussed
in Quirkology - a great book - psychologist Paul Rosen once studied just how obsessed
we are with relics,
things important merely because of their auras. He found that people were more
willing to wear a sweater
that had been dropped in dog poop than they were to wear a sweater they had been told
what was once
owned by a mass murderer. We are influenced by auras.
Right now, I am in Mougin. The city in southeastern France where Picasso
died. On one occasion Picasso refused to sign a painting
he knew he had painted, saying "I can paint a fake Picasso just like anybody else."
You can disown your own paintings
and you can disown your children but you can claim to have created your own paintings,
but can you really claim to have created
your own children?
Let's explore a metaphor. Your mother is a 3D printer that printed you.
But hold on, your parents conceived you
and curated you, cared for you. But the actual blueprints that made you
were outside of their conscious control.
Your blueprint is a forgery.
It has been copied, replicated, over and over again, ever since the very first
group of molecules were arranged in a way that automatically replicated
billions and billions of years ago. It's not a perfect forgery.
Changes occur every time, making successive copies a little bit different.
But 99.9 percent of your DNA
isn't different from anyone else's.
Now, you might say, but wait, Michael, we all look so different.
Kind of. But that's also because your brain
is particularly good at recognizing differences amongst things that you are
familiar with.
It's called the cross-race effect and it's the reason
new twins you've never met before look totally the same, until you get used to them.
It's the reason people from a culture you're not use to tend to be
more difficult to distinguish. And the reason, say, a big group of black labs
you've never met before
all kind of look like the same black lab.
We all have a common descendant, a common person our DNA has been replicated from
over and over again,
making us, in a funny way, a big bunch of forgeries.
Go back 50 forgeries ago, 50
generations ago, and that's enough to connect every single human living on Earth.
I've said this before, you are at least 50th cousins
with everyone else living on the planet today. But we can go back further than that,
as Guy Murchie famously did. You see, animal populations, and even
molecule populations, experience replication
variation and selective pressures, which means
you are trillionth cousins with all life on
Earth and, technically speaking, quadrillionth
cousins with water and trees and rocks.
It's a beautiful notion but it's anything but new.
The word 'human' comes from a word for soil.
And compare the Hebrew word for 'ground' with their name for the first man.
You are quadrillionth cousins with dirt,
with rocks, with trees, with plastic, with the very clothing you are wearing
right now. So whether you're fighting with a stranger in a bar
or stubbing your toe on a rock, it's all
just a family squabble.
And as always,
thanks for watching.
Oh, hey, you're still there. This is great because I have some
really cool news. Vsauce was just nominated for a Webby,
in the news and information category. It's a really big honor
and I want to thank you guys for making this possible.
You can be a Vsaucer in a whole new way now by voting for Vsauce in the
Webby's. Just follow
the link at the top of this video's description. All the nominees, by the way,
are great. It's great that the universe has these channels, so check all them out.
And as always,
thanks for watching.