-Let me take you back in time, the Bronx, 1973, when a community of teens launched a global culture that we now call hip-hop.

One of the beautiful things about early hip-hop was that it was improvisational and ever-changing.

To experience it, you had to be there in real-time.

But, man, have things changed.

Instead of going to a party or watching a bombed-out train ride through your neighborhood, now, these physical environments and objects from the past can be replicated in 3D, creating digital twins, virtual simulations of the past, present, and future.

Who gets to decide what gets digitized, archived, and preserved, and moreover, who owns it?

How can you participate in documenting history?

If you've used your phone to see if a bookshelf fits in your living room, taken a virtual tour of a house, or even found a landmark with your GPS, you've used the digital twin.

This concept may feel new, but it's been around for a long time.

The idea was born when NASA simulated rocket models for the Apollo missions.

Today, the use of digital twins is ubiquitous, prevalent in industries like manufacturing, healthcare, automotive, and urban planning.

Likewise, cultural institutions and communities online have turned the digital twin into a tool of exploration and communication.

For hip-hop, the digital twin provides new avenues for people to experience the culture's history and art.

One of the key spaces at the forefront of this is the Universal Hip Hop Museum, a museum dedicated to the celebration and preservation of hip-hop and rooted in the Bronx community that birthed the culture.

-The purpose of the museum is to preserve hip-hop culture.

That's the overall purpose.

-It was founded by the pioneers of the culture, taking control of its own narrative, not letting outside organizations, whether it be record companies or universities or whatever, interpret hip-hop or say what they thought hip-hop should be.

-It's going to be in the Bronx, the mothership is the Bronx.

However, no matter where you are on planet Earth, and even if you travel to the International Space Station, you should be able to access parts of the museum and parts of the hip-hop experience, no matter your location.

To me, that was the essence of what hip-hop is.

Democratizing those things that are out of reach.

Hip-hop makes those things reachable.

And so I said, "Let's make sure that this museum is accessible to anybody around the world."

-Hip-hop is the most connective culture that the world has ever seen.

It really unites everyone from all over.

Our virtual museum is almost not a museum in the traditional sense.

It's more of an experience.

A photographer who donates 150 photographs to our museum, I can't probably put those up on a wall, but in the virtual world, space is not the issue.

We can have 300 pictures, we can have a maze of pictures.

-When we all think about the museum, it's in our minds much more of a collaborative institution.

That's the nature of this digital twinning capability of we could have somebody in Ghana or South Korea or Brazil or wherever actively participating in our collection.

That's the new thinking.

That's what we're trying to show other cultural institutions as possible.

-For a culture that has been at times excluded from having a say over how it's studied and remembered.

The act of archiving is political.

How we remember ourselves and the stories we tell about who we've been shapes who we imagine ourselves to be as well as what we imagine is possible.

Community institutions are trying to figure this out.

One important one is KAOS Network, a multimedia lab, performance and healing space in South Central Los Angeles.

-The KAOS spirit is exactly that ethos that I would see in the DIY space.

It's something that starts a hub that people gather around.

This is like thousand-year-old technology of human interactions, situations going on right there.

-KAOS Network has become a hub for artist innovators to participate in this.

Two of these people are VerBs and Jonathan Williams.

VerBS runs Bananas, a performance workshop, and artist showcase held at KAOS Network.

Jonathan is an immersive media producer.

Both have been experimenting with digital twin technology to document culture.

-I've been using photogrammetry just to really document history, finding as many Black history things as I can and scanning them.

I think that is what it's primary use should be.

-We're going to die one day, so I'm trying to make my archive.org like page super lit, building up my online profile so when I'm dead, I'm not dead, I'm still here.

-Once you have that digital representation, you're turning them into assets, which can be used across the board for anything.

So if you were to scan a drum, you can now use this drum in a video game you're making.

You can use it in an AR filter and use it on one of the different social media platforms.

You can just have it up online for people to see.

You can turn it into an NFT.

There's so many different things you can do with these once they become digital assets.

As people start to use these assets in different forms, you're going to start to see them pop up and there'll be different places where they can sit.

More libraries opening up.

-For 40 years, KAOS Network and its founder, Ben Caldwell, have nurtured LA's creative community and provided a safe space for hip-hop.

Ben is using digital twins not just for documenting the past but also for imagining and creating new blueprints for the future.

-The role of technology is really pretty interesting.

The idea is to look at our culture minus the colonizing.

What would our world look like if we hadn't run into the conquistadors?

One of the things that really sticks out with that is technology has been one of the major things that we've created in this new world that we've been in.

This is under stress.

I was wondering, "What would have happened if the stress wasn't there?

How would we build things out?"

[music] -Digital twins bring similar challenges because anyone can pick up their phone and scan something into 3D space.

The issue is figuring out who these digital objects and simulations belong to, who has access to them, and who profits.

These are never easy questions to answer, especially when you document something that's living and changing every day.

-I will say the biggest drawback is licensing and ownership.

I can go and scan something and I made that digital copy, so I own that now.

If you are the owner of this physical thing, now we have a little bit of a clash as far as rights are concerned.

-Ideally, as the museum, we will help to establish these rules as we build these things out.

I don't know what they are.

I'm not even sure what's necessarily fair because this is new.

Nobody's been here before.

But I think there's stuff we can look back upon and see what hasn't been fair and make sure we don't make those same mistakes again.

-With these common tools becoming easier and better, how can you use them responsibly?

-I think the more open we are, like the open-source structure that the computers run on, the stronger we'll be as a group of people because there's so much creativity happening.

When people pull back to control those things, stops the explosion and the natural growth of what art could really do.

-Hip-hop continues to lead by using new technologies in unique ways.

Today, it's helping to reshape the conversation about digital heritage and cultural preservation.

What do you think are the benefits of digital twins?

Does it change how you see cultural preservation?

What do you want to start documenting?

Let us know in the comments.

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