Swissnex Presents:
A Critical Lexicon of Digital Museology
with Professor Sarah Kenderdine
Gray Area and Swissnex invite you to Deep Fakes: A Critical Lexicon of Digital Museology, a talk by Professor Sarah Kenderdine on the unstable boundaries between preservation and simulation in digital heritage.
Deep Fakes: A Critical Lexicon of Digital Museology
Wednesday, November 5, 2025
Doors: 6 PM
All Ages
Seated Performance
View our FAQ page for more info, or contact us at [email protected] with any accommodation requests.
About the Event
Deep Fakes: Art and Its Double explores how artificial intelligence, computer vision, and immersive media are transforming the ways we see and preserve cultural artifacts. Replicas are no longer simple copies but prompts that challenge our ideas of authenticity, originality, and permanence.
Through examples from sacred objects to digital surrogates of cultural icons, these technologies reveal patterns and details once invisible to the human eye, while opening new forms of engagement between object and observer. At stake are questions of memory, mimesis, and the politics of replication—especially in contexts where heritage is threatened by war, climate change, or cultural erasure.
As part of LAYERS, an event series by Swissnex in San Francisco exploring science communication, this lecture with Sarah Kenderdine considers how cultural “deep fakes” can act as both fragile copies and resilient reservoirs of memory, reframing the future of museums and the authority of truth in the digital age.
Speaker
Sarah Kenderdine
Professor Sarah Kenderdine is a leading researcher in interactive and immersive experiences for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. She is Professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, where she directs the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+). From 2017 to 2024, she served as Director and Lead Curator of EPFL Pavilions and now holds the position of Curator-at-Large. Professor Kenderdine is internationally recognized for pioneering the field of computational museology—an innovative framework that integrates machine intelligence with data curation, ontology with visualization, and public engagement with embodied, kinaesthetic interaction. Her research advances new paradigms of cultural production and experience across immersive and interactive media. She has conceived and produced over 110 exhibitions and major installations worldwide. Her forthcoming book with Lily Hibberd, Deep Fakes: A Critical Lexicon of Digital Museology, will be published by Routledge in 2025.
Partners
Swissnex in San Francisco
Swissnex in San Francisco is an initiative of the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI). Our vision at Swissnex in San Francisco is to connect tomorrow by empowering the next generation of innovators to collaborate and create futures where the planet and society thrive.
EPFL
Located in Switzerland, EPFL is one of Europe’s most vibrant and cosmopolitan science and technology institutions.
eM+
The Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+) at EPFL is a transdisciplinary initiative at the intersection of immersive visualization technologies, visual analytics, aesthetics and cultural and scientific (big) data. eM+ engages in research from scientific, artistic and humanistic perspectives and promotes post-cinematic multisensory engagement using experimental platforms.
eM+ has developed a range of unique visualisation systems combined with powerful sonic architectures that are benchmarks in the realms of virtual, augmented, mixed realities. These cluster-based 3D systems have been deployed in major exhibitions and installations throughout the world.
At the heart of the research framework conceived at eM+ is ‘computational museology’. Computational museology provides a scaffold to unite machine intelligence with data curation, ontology with visualization, and communities of publics and practitioners with embodied interaction through immersive interfaces. It empowers cultural organizations to link all forms of culture and materiality: objects, knowledge systems, representation and participation.
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