Thank you. Let's get right to it. The Obsidian Collection-- the term obsidian comes from a volcanic rock. It's a dark glass that's formed when lava and dirt, certain explosions, all of that come about.
When we get to college, that may be the first time that we start reading texts by black authors. So when The Obsidian first joined Google Arts and Culture, we put out a press release and we got a ton of pickup
They'd have horse races, but they would trade. And that's where obsidian began to move from the Crater Lake area to the Plains was through that trade corridor. So this is our vision of where we want to go.
It's a dark glass that's formed when lava and dirt, certain explosions, all of that come about. So there are lots of obsidian around Hawaii and other places where there are volcanoes. I love the name because I think that's what black culture is-- beautiful, black, shiny formed from high pressure, heat, et
So you only get images from 1940, if you're lucky, but you mainly get crime. So it's important that as The Obsidian uploads all of this metadata onto the internet when you type in black man, black woman, all this-- we're going to be populating it with hundreds of thousands of images that are not the collisions, because that's
So it's chi.vote. That's great. What do you think that The Obsidian , the platform that we're building, which should launch later this year, how do you think those tools can help what you guys are doing?
There's already archive groups that are collecting history, the universities are collecting it, and we got that big, beautiful new black Smithsonian in DC, so why do you need to form The Obsidian Collection? And I think I can best communicate that in telling you about my love of football.
That's an important play. That story is on the Google Arts and Culture Obsidian page and it's a series of images. But just being able to accomplish a feat like that back in those days, and then there were printers in the basement and all of those other feats,
So, I want to make sure that we get that information to you guys. So that's kind of the overview of what The Obsidian Collection is and why we're doing it and what it is. So, to take that forward, I am going to invite my colleague-- my young colleague-- who has been amazing and bold in that
When we get to college, that may be the first time that we start reading texts by black authors. It's going to be as new collections join The Obsidian , our hope is to, as we welcome them, to have a fundraiser to celebrate.
When we get to college, that may be the first time that we start reading texts by black authors. I mean, besides telling the story of The Obsidian Collective-- how do we share those photos?
And this is what makes humans, humans. The first person to carve a knife or a weapon out of an obsidian stone must have had something in mind. What am I going to use this for?
I love the name because I think that's what black culture is-- beautiful, black, shiny formed from high pressure, heat, et cetera. And that's what we're doing-- The Obsidian Collection, we're collecting the black archives. But more than just that, we're digitizing them and making them available for younger generations.
it's a lynching-- it's like that's all that's there. So it's important for us to take the narrative back and that's what The Obsidian Collection is doing. So, we started with The Chicago Defender.
And that was 120 years ago, but we were there too. So, Shorefront has a great archive and now the Obsidian platform, they've joined us, and we'll be able to get those stories to the world. The one in the middle, it's just one of my favorite photos because it's just black boy joy.
When we get to college, that may be the first time that we start reading texts by black authors. So, we see The Tribe as someone-- and The Obsidian Collection-- as someone who can step in and say, here is a more holistic,
When we get to college, that may be the first time that we start reading texts by black authors. And so I've learned a lot about copyright law, but a big part of The Obsidian Collection platform, we're building a very expensive website, yeah--
When we get to college, that may be the first time that we start reading texts by black authors. But we've got like eight legacy newspapers in the queue that want to join The Obsidian .
When we get to college, that may be the first time that we start reading texts by black authors. and get this whole thing kind of, this big obsidian circle, which is the logo-- obsidian circle.
When I say slightly different though, I really mean... slightly different. because these were the old colors for Pixel 9a and now these are the new colors now named Fog, Obsidian , Berry and Lavender. The display at the front, it's the same 6.3 inches with well-rounded corners and semi-thick bezels.
You definitely don't want to try to save all human knowledge on your computer. This started a few years ago with a platform called Roam that has been adopted by Notion, and Logseq, and Obsidian .
You can use Microsoft OneNote, Apple Notes. There's a whole new wave of second brain apps, like Notion, like Obsidian , like Roam. You can take your pick.
And the story from there was with us getting better at refining, and processing, and tuning what we could extract and harvest from the natural world to be better at what we needed to do, better tools, leading up to Stone Age technology of things like very fine chips of obsidian or flint, which give you very sharp spearheads or arrowheads.
When we get to college, that may be the first time that we start reading texts by black authors. And so I know way more about teaching than football, but one of the things that we're doing at The Obsidian
But then I decided that wasn't steampunky enough, so from then on I said it's "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" meets Hornblower. It's set in a world where the surface of the world is very dangerous, and so everybody lives in these enormous black obsidian spires that were built many, many, many moons ago.
years as ago start cropping up were made from things a long, long way away. For example in the Caucuses there is a site where the Neanderthal remains on one side of the valley and modern human remains on the other. The Neanderthal remains are associated with the local chert. And the modern human remains are associated with obsidian from up to 100 miles away. So the earliest evidence for trade is when things start moving long distances.