Museums in the Age of Experience
In traditional museums, galleries, and archives, where collections are often inanimate and out-of-reach, how can we move beyond object oriented curation? Research at the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+) blends experimental curatorship with contemporary aesthetics, digital humanism and emerging technologies. We can peer inside ancient objects, scan artworks to the microscopic scale and recreate age-old cave murals in a contemporary setting. These innovations are borne from the emerging field of computational museology, where cutting-edge technologies, artificial intelligence, and data-driven approaches breathe new life into the world of cultural heritage.
In this lecture by researcher Sarah Kenderdine, we explored how computational methods are reshaping traditional curation, propelling museums into the future by seamlessly blending the tangible with the digital. She also gave an overview of EPFL Pavilions exhibitions and focused the discussion on Cosmos Archaeology: Explorations in Time and Space.
About the Researcher
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. Kenderdine has produced over 100 exhibitions and installations for museums worldwide including a museum complex in India and one in Taiwan and received a number of major international awards for this work.
In 2017, Kenderdine was appointed professor at the École Polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland where she built the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+). 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, Kenderdine was appointed corresponding fellow of The British Academy. Her upcoming book is Deep Fakes: A Critical Lexicon of Digital Museology (2024).