Deep Fakes

Deep Fakes: A Critical Lexicon for Digital Museology is an illustrated monograph articulated through a comprehensive lexicon of key concepts in next generation museology. Each of the book's ten chapters explores specific terms in the lexicon, further interpreted through installations from the 2021 exhibition Deep Fakes: Art and Its Double in Switzerland.

Deep Fakes: A Critical Lexicon for Digital Museology contends with the intensification of questions compounded by rapid technological change affecting contemporary museological and curatorial authority. This book introduces a novel theorization of computational techniques and their transformation of museological objects in the form of cultural deep fakes—the consummate shape-shifting doppelgangers of the post-digital age. This co-authored monograph elaborates on a spectrum of established theoretical concepts, including affect, aura, authenticity, embodied knowledge, mimesis, the post-original, presence, replication, reenactment and the simulacrum. Grounded in the methods and techniques of computational museology and participatory visitor experience, it critically examines the practical, epistemological, societal, and ethical implications of emerging technologies and their cultural heritage material. Harnessing the affordances of these transformative approaches for communities and societies, this critical lexicon empowers future-focused curatorship for memory organizations.

This book supports museum professionals to navigate the ramifications of dynamic technological change. Readers include directors, curators, researchers, and designers. Archival and imaging scientists, data managers, and software engineers are also broadly implicated. It has added significance for research disciplines in the history and theory of art and media studies, critical and cultural theory, digital humanities, and museum studies, alongside artists and producers in the cultural domain.

About the Authors

Lily Hibberd is an interdisciplinary artist and writer working across frontiers of time, memory and the cosmos. Presented in more than fifty international exhibitions and festivals, her work combines performance, writing, painting, photography, sound, moving images, and installation art. She is founding editor of the art writing publication unMagazine, and a frequent author and co-author of books, essays, and journal articles. Lily Hibberd is a researcher at Université Paris Cité and EPFL Laboratory for Experimental Museology.

Sarah Kenderdine is a professor of Digital Museology at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. She leads the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+), working at the forefront of computer graphics exploring the convergence of immersive visualization, digital aesthetics, and cultural big data. Sarah Kenderdine directed EPFL Pavilions from 2017 to 2024, and is currently Visiting Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University. She has produced more than one hundred exhibitions for museums worldwide and numerous scholarly publications.