Abstract:

Computational museology is a scaffold that unites machine intelligence with data curation, ontology with visualization, and communities of publics and practitioners with embodied participation through kinaesthetic interfaces. Computational museology empowers cultural organisations to link all forms of culture and materiality: objects, knowledge systems, representation and participation. Research at the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+) reaches beyond object-oriented curation to blend experimental curatorship with contemporary aesthetics, digital humanism and emerging technologies. This lecture explores key themes including interactive archives and emergent narrative, deep fakes and blockchain sovereignties, embodied knowledge systems and performative interfaces and scientific visualization for museums in the age of experience. She will also give an overview of EPFL Pavilions exhibitions and focus the discussion on Deep Fakes: Art and Its Double.

Biography:

Professor Sarah Kenderdine researches at the forefront of interactive and immersive experiences for galleries, libraries, archives and museums. In widely exhibited installation works, she has amalgamated tangible and intangible cultural heritage with new media art practice, especially in the realms of interactive cinema, augmented reality and embodied narrative. Sarah has produced over 100 exhibitions and installations for museums worldwide. In 2017, Sarah was appointed professor at the École Polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland where she built the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+). Sarah is also director and lead curator of EPFL Pavilions, a new art/science initiative on campus located in a seminal Kengo Kumar building. In 2020 and 2022, she was named in the Museum Influencer List 2020 – The Power 10 by Blooloop and in 2020 and 2021, Switzerland’s Top 100 Digital Shapers by Bilanz. In 2021, Sarah was appointed corresponding fellow of The British Academy. Her upcoming book is Deep Fakes: A Critical Lexicon of Digital Museology (2024).