All right, so I wanted to ask, have any of you ever had a circumstance in your life where there was a worst case scenario hanging out there, something that maybe seemed inevitable? And so you’re fretting about it, you’re agonizing, you’re ruminating, and you’re resisting its very existence. Denying that it’s ever going to come, and then it does, and you survive it, and you’re all right, and you’re better than you were. You’re a better human being. You’re a more informed human being. Well, that’s what has happened to me on a number of occasions in my life, and it’s what I’ve come to start calling an opportunity for resilience. And that’s what I want to talk to you about today. It’s like my story of resilience, but also thinking about your own as I’m visiting with you, and then talking about Vizcaya’s resilience as well.

(01:12)
So my name is Jeff and I work in the technology initiatives here at Vizcaya, including the development of interactive experiences like this. If you look out the window, and some of you have said that you’ve been to Vizcaya before, you’ll see that one of the most iconic parts of the estate is the barge. And it’s a lot of things, it functions in lots of ways, but if you boil it down to its essence, it’s a lot of stone in the shape of a boat.

(01:43)
But I remember the first time that I came to Vizcaya, it was for an evening event, very much like this. I did not work here at the time. But just rounding the corner, you can imagine a blanket of stars in the backdrop, and then the barge was all lighted up, spotlights all around it. It was the most magical thing I think I’d ever seen. And at that very moment, I knew this is where I want to be. This is where I was meant to be.

(02:12)
So I think that was one of those moments of resilience, evolution, that connected me to Vizcaya. And one of the things that I saw in the barge the first time I saw it, was an opportunity, since I work in technology, to look at this as a showcase for interpretive technology, but also preservation technology. Where can we innovate with technology, based on the preservation needs of this estate and its vulnerability?

(02:41)
So my mind was blown, but at the same time, I felt like I was coming home. Now, you could probably tell from the sound of my voice that I ain’t from around here. Some of you asked where I’m from, and I was actually born and raised in a sleepy little museum town in northwest Louisiana. It’s not near New Orleans. That’s the first thing people always ask me. It was not a party town, but my family’s been there since the founding of it in the early 1700s. And so history and heritage has always been a part of my DNA, and it’s been a part of my [inaudible 00:03:18].

(03:17)
From my earliest years, my favorite thing was to listen to stories, and especially stories of older folks. It captivated my imagination, taking me back to another time and place. And also being a country boy, I love to be out in nature. Nature is what revitalizes me, though I work in technology, or work in an office, it’s nature that recharges me. And so I would explore the woods all day long when I was a kid, there was nothing else to do out in the country in Louisiana. So even at nine years old, I would be out in the woods all day.

(03:52)
So getting toward my college years, I was thinking, “Well, what do I want to do?” And with my woods fascination, I was like, “Well, I should be a forester, that will let me professionally explore woods.” Well, I got into college. A couple semesters in I was like, there’s way too much complex math involved in forestry, so it’s like I had to get … has anyone else ever had the career change based on their ability to do math, or a course that is required that you just can’t get through, foreign language maybe? Surely I can’t be the only one. But anyway, so thinking back to what motivated me, which is stories, I switched my major over to journalism and communications, and ironically, I was able to get an internship at a forest products company, which enabled me to work with foresters. And then that became a full-time job after I graduated. So the best of both worlds, right?

(04:53)
Well, fast forward to seven years later, and corporate politics and corporate takeovers and all of these things that … it was really getting me down. I realized that at some point, this is not fulfilling my personal sense of mission. And so presenting, again, one of those opportunities for resilience. But for the first time, I think, at that point I was forced to really think about what motivated me and what was important enough to me, that it would become my life’s work from then on out. And the answer for me, I finally came upon it, historic preservation, and I was so excited. It’s like going back to my history and heritage, and growing up in the sleepy little museum town, that’s what I wanted to do.

(05:44)
And so I was telling all of my colleagues in the field, the fellow communicators, it’s like, “This is what I’ve hit on.” And then they looked at me, and uniformly they all said, “You realize those people are insane, don’t you?” And a lot of people think of historic preservation as always fighting a battle about, “You can’t tear this building down for whatever.” It’s got a little bit of a reputation. But I decided, nonetheless, that’s what I was going to do. And so ultimately at that point, I found myself back in my hometown, and I went back to get my master’s degree, again, in stories, in folk life and oral history. I knew I wanted to do something in the history and heritage field.

(06:30)
The National Park Service had just opened an office. It was a research center focused on the application of preservation technologies, to preserving buildings, to preserving objects, finding cutting edge technologies and adapting them to preservation purposes. So I knew that I was meant to be. I finagled my way into an internship there. Another one of those stories which eventually became a full-time job after I graduated. I was there about 10 years, and one of the things I did there as a communicator in that office was some of the early work in the historic preservation field with social media. So the early … one of the first podcasts on historic preservation, the first social media channels for the National Park Service Office. And that work kind of eventually led me to focus on the applications of technology to interpretation purposes. And I worked in science museums and art museums in other states since then.

(07:35)
Now, one technology field that really fascinated me during my time at the Park Service was generally called 3D documentation, and it is a collection of technologies that allow you to map the surface of structures and objects. It’s commonly used to virtualize those structures in 3D, so that you can analyze them for knowing what needs to be done preservation-wise. What work needs to be done, a lot of it’s not visible to the naked eye. That data helps you decide what to do.

(08:10)
When I came to Vizcaya in 2016, that moment where I saw the barge, one of my thoughts, I admit to thinking, “This is preservation Disney World.” I mean so many possibilities. Because being on the Bay, we are very vulnerable to climate change and its effects, vulnerable to sea level rise. And to me, the barge is like the front lines for climate change and sea level rise. It is literally in the water. It is the first thing that gets struck whenever there’s a hurricane. So our big challenge at that point was, Vizcaya did not have a real digital initiative function at that point. There was a strong interest in it, but no one had actually thought about, “Okay, let’s form a department around it.”

(08:59)
And so selling our executive director and our leadership on this technology that was kind of high level even among preservationists, and this guy having no experience with it, I thought would’ve been a challenge. But I wrote up a little proposal with the conservator. We knew that one of the justifications for this is that Miami had not encountered a major hurricane in 10 years. We were long overdue for one to come through, and sure enough, the executive director saw the vision and adopted it right away and said, “Let’s do this pilot project.” So one of the easiest wins that I’ve had in my career, but also just signifies how visionary our leadership here is at Vizcaya.

(09:50)
So he took a leap of faith, and that leap of faith was rewarded just a few months later, the Knight Foundation reached out to us and said, “We want you to take this data that you’ve been collecting through your 3D scans and photogrammetry, and we want you to be the first museum and cultural site to really adapt that to a visitor facing experience.” So what you see behind me is what happened as a result of that. We were able to virtualize the barge so that it’s something that you can experience and look at firsthand, get a little bit of interpretive material. You can see the statuary that’s on it, and no one had done this before. This data had been used strictly for evaluating preservation purposes.

(10:41)
What we can do, as we virtualize the estate, we’re able to present this immediately to the public, and let you access sites that you would not have had access to before. The barge is out in the Bay. It’s separated from the estate by water, you can’t get to it. But we knew that lots of our visitors would spend a lot of time on this terrace looking out at the barge, wondering what’s it like to be out there? So for the first time, we’re able to offer that to our visitors and our audiences. It’s online as well.

(11:13)
So that was summer we started on that project. In September of 2017, Hurricane Irma starts forming in the Atlantic, and it starts heading our way. We know that there’s a danger there. Every time it looks like a hurricane might even pass anywhere close to us, Vizcaya goes into disaster preparedness mode. We have to prepare as if every storm, every hurricane is going to be a major one, and a direct hit.

(11:44)
So we were doing our best to prepare, hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst. We had just gotten a time-lapse camera for our digital initiatives, to time-lapse things that were going on around the estate that we could present on social media, and one of our security guards, his name was Marvin Mora, had the idea. It’s like, “Well, why don’t we use that time lapse camera, and put it up on the Deering balcony out back, and just record what happens when Irma hits, when it comes in over the bay, what happens to the barge?” And I’m going to show you what occurred with that time-lapse.

(12:27)
So this is the storm coming in. This is about two days that we’ve time-lapsed. Watch the red circles, concentrate on what’s in the red circles, and what happens as a result. You see the storm intensifying. Can you see? Pieces of the barge are just coming down every time a wave hits.

(12:57)
So doesn’t that break your heart? You can imagine how we felt, in going through the experience where you’re charged with being the caretaker of an asset of something that’s part of our collective heritage, and being completely powerless to do anything about it. But we’re powerless, however, every one of these storms, everything that bad that happens results in what? It’s an opportunity for resilience. Irma wasn’t even a direct hit. So what you’re seeing here is like a glancing blow from a major hurricane. Though it was devastated, though, there were lots of pieces missing off the barge, the barge exactly did its job right here. What you see is the barge functioning as it was originally intended back in 1916 when Vizcaya was completed, because part of its major function was to be a breakwater.

(13:58)
If the barge wasn’t here, then this would’ve been flooded. Storm surge would’ve raged right through here, covered this area in muck and seawater, and Vizcaya would have been destroyed many times over, or severely damaged, if the barge hadn’t been here to protect us. So it did its job to protect us. It’s our jobs as caretakers to restore it.

(14:26)
But there were obviously lots of things that came down. There was a lot of destruction, and there was a lot to do to analyze, how do we take all these pieces that have crumbled onto the barge and a lot of them swept into the bay, how do we salvage this and then put it all back together?

(14:44)
So fortunately, the 3D documentation that we did, that spatial mapping where everything was rendered in 3D, giving us all the angles of everything, helped to inform that process. We were able to identify pieces that had crumbled or fallen into the bay, be able to recover that, identify it, and then realize how we put it back together. In particular, one of the herms, so the statues, the human figures that are out there, these. We put it back together. We thought we had all the parts, and then there was a piece of the head missing. It was just a slice of it, but it was so innocuous that finding it on the seabed floor would’ve been virtually impossible with the naked eye. The only way that we were able to figure out what it was and find it on the seabed floor, was because we had that contoured spatial map of what that piece looked like, and we were able to tell people exactly what to look for when we went diving for that piece. We were able to find it, plug it back in, that last piece of the puzzle.

(15:58)
Just looking at earlier this year, the barge was completely restored. It took from 2017 to earlier this year to completely restore the barge. It’s a process, and you’re dealing with FEMA and the funds to do the restoration work. A lot of that is politics or just bureaucracy. It takes a while, but we were able to get it done earlier this year. We did another round of 3D documentation earlier this year, just to be sure that we’re ready for whatever comes in the future.

(16:32)
And ultimately, it’s kind of why we do this. We realize that we’re caretakers of a legacy, that it was built over 100 years ago. If we play our cards right, if we’re savvy, then it can last for 100s of years to come. And the way I look at it from this point forward, Vizcaya, whether it wants to be or not, is a laboratory for climate change response, sea level rise response. Everything we do is going to inform our collective knowledge of what to do and also what not to do. We share our successes and our failures, and we’ve got to be open to that. If we’re bold enough to do it, then we can’t help but help other cultural sites also respond to it. Because we’re on the front lines. We’re obviously right here on the water. We’re here in Miami, but other cultural sites across the country, across the world are going to be in the same situation at some point in time. And if we’ve share our knowledge with them, then Vizcaya could be responsible for not only its own preservation, but other cultural sites around the world as well.

(17:40)
And right now, it’s a very uncertain time. Every story in the news feels like it’s about climate change. It’s very worrying. It feels like the forces of nature are aligned against us. But to me, this barge alone, Vizcaya overall, but the barge itself represents resilience, spirit, imagination, and it’s part of our collective heritage now. So just like my hometown in Louisiana, it’s part of my history and heritage. I identify with it. To me, the barge is part of my heritage as well. And it is for you too, as members or people that love Vizcaya, it’s something that you can connect with, and it is something that people in Miami can connect with. And if we play our cards right, it’s going to keep presenting those opportunities for resilience for a long, long time.