Swissnex Presents: A Critical Lexicon of Digital Museology with Professor Sarah Kenderdine

Deep Fakes: A Critical Lexicon of Digital Museology Wednesday, November 5, 2025 View our FAQ page for more info, or contact us at [email protected] with any accommodation requests. 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. 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. 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. Located in Switzerland, EPFL is one of Europe’s most vibrant and cosmopolitan science and technology institutions. As a Gray Area Member you get special access to events, behind-the-scenes content and more. Gray Area is a dedicated family of supporters who believe in the power of creative action to catalyze social transformation. Join as a member today to provide sustaining support for our globally unique arts, education, research, and incubation programs.