43Sarah_06 EPFL

Professor Sarah Kenderdine leads a team of software engineers, artists, and curators, 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 90 exhibitions and installations for museums worldwide.

In 2017, Sarah was appointed professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland where she has built the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+), exploring the convergence of imaging technologies, immersive visualisation, digital aesthetics, and, cultural and scientific (big) data. Since 2017, Sarah has taken the first directorship and is the lead curator of EPFL Pavilions, housed in a seminal Kengo Kumar building. Located at the heart of a vibrant international university and elite engineering school, EPFL Pavilions is an amplifier for art, science, and society, a meeting place for all disciplines. Reaching beyond object-oriented curation, EPFL Pavilions blends experimental curatorship and contemporary aesthetics with open science, digital humanism and emerging technologies.

In 2020 and 2022, she was named in the Museum Influencer List – The Power 10 by Blooloop and, Switzerland’s Top 100 Digital Shapers by Bilanz in 2020 and 2021.  In 2021, Sarah was appointed corresponding fellow of The British Academy. She is a regular keynote speaker worldwide. Website: Sara Kenderdine - EPFL

Keywords: art and science, experimental museology, cultural heritage, virtual reality, immersive visualization, new technologies. imaging technologies, interactive cinema, augmented reality, digital aesthetic, cultural and scientific big data, computational archives  

Lausanne – October 13th, 2022

How did you (decide to) become a scientist? I think that science is an exploratory [journey] and a world that opens up as you go deeper and deeper into it. I found my way to the world of art, art philosophy, and art history and culture through the lens of maritime archeology, which was very technical. From there I moved to build large-scale virtual reality systems for culture and heritage, so this was a natural amalgamation of these worlds of art and science together.

What is your drive and excitement in science and in doing what you do now? I have many drivers. I would say that the application of new technologies to the world of cultural heritage is exponentially growing at the moment. We have real challenges in our world, with heritages at risk, things that are being destroyed by iconoclasm, warfare, climate change catastrophes, and the digital has a clear role to play there in creating super high fidelity digital twins. Then, to be able to bring these back into the public domain is also critically important. The art of the science is how to create powerful experiences of digital material. That I find very exciting. And the hybridity of both these science and technologies and this world of public engagement and society is really important.

I’m also interested in the way technologies can be used to address issues of decolonization, and of repatriation of stolen material. Many of Europe’s largest museums contain many objects which potentially should be returned to their original custodians. What role does the digital have to play in that process, what can the blockchain do, smart contracts, the distributed ledger? There are all these developments in technology, which are very applicable to the classical world of art. I see great potential here.

And I like to do big projects. At the moment we are digitizing a classic nineteen-century panorama. There are only fifteen of these panoramas painted in the world. This particular one is a very important national object in Switzerland, it’s the Battle of Confederation from 1476, the painting was created in 1893. We are digitizing this painting, it’s 100 meters long by 10 meters high, so it’s 400.000 images stitched together at 1000 dpi. With 1.6 trillion pixels, it’s the largest image ever created of any object. Ever. I’m interested in projects like that.

I’m also doing a big-scale project in mass movements image archives; these are the major records of the 20th and 21st centuries and yet we have only linear modes of looking at them and searching them often requires specialist knowledge. We asked, what are the new models, how can we use machine learning and visual analytics to get inside these datasets to give the public a new experience of them? For example, we used the Montreux Jazz Archive, which was digitalized by EPFL, to give people a new experience of this archive. People explore it by listening to what they like, not by typing whom they are looking for. Breaking down these barriers to access is very important. Another project that I just finished to exhibition level is the Atlas of Maritime Buddhism. This is an epic story of the spread of Buddhism and entrepreneurship from India through southeast Asia up into China down into Korea and Japan. It took five years of fieldwork and photogrammetry and stereographic caption of hundreds and hundreds of sites and hundreds of sculptures. This is now a series of permanent museums which just received its millionth visitor in one year, and a series of world-touring exhibitions. We plan to expand this deep mapping project even further in the future.

One of my other passions is intangible cultural heritage. I work with Kung Fu masters and Confucius Rituals reenactors in full-scale virtual production documentation. [It involves] lots of motion captures and different virtual production techniques modalities for ‘whole of environment encoding’. The overall framework for all these research projects is called computational museology, which connects machine intelligence with data curation, ontology with visualization, and communities of the public and practitioners through immersive visualization.

Would you have one word to give as a gift to other women and more in general to young aspiring scientists, women or men? Certainly, transdisciplinarity. Because I see that we can’t live in silos, we must have integrative knowledge. Transdisciplinary or multidisciplinarity is critical to where we go next. Curiosity, but also courage, because there are many reasons not to do things these days, many reasons to stay safe. Collaboration is also one of the key drivers for all of us. It’s how we collaborate and whom we do it with. We need to be open: it’s not a singular endeavor, it’s a collective intelligence that enables all these things. The resonance of one’s collaborators is very important.

Would you have one thought for women's empowerment in general? I don’t think about these issues very often, so I’m not sure I have the right words. I think women shine all over the place. They deserve support, of course, absolutely, but somehow, I feel that they shine so brightly that they will achieve what they need to achieve so long as the system is not stacked against them.

Science is my passion… in your mother tongue. My name is Sarah Kenderdine and my passion is art and science.