Deep Fakes: A Critical Lexicon for Digital Museology

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 doppelgängers of the post-digital age. Conceived by Sarah Kenderdine and written by Lily Hibberd, this volume 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 in navigating 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.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution‑Non Commercial‑No Derivatives (CC‑BY‑NC‑ND) 4.0 license.

Lily Hibberd is an interdisciplinary artist, academic, and writer working on questions around 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 the founding editor of the art writing publication un Magazine and a frequent author and co-author of books, essays, and journal articles. Dr Lily Hibberd is a researcher at Université Paris Cité and EPFL Laboratory for Experimental Museology, and Adjunct Lecturer at UNSW Sydney.

Sarah Kenderdine is Professor of Digital Museology at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. She leads the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+), exploring the convergence of immersive visualization, digital aesthetics, and cultural big data. Sarah directed EPFL Pavilions from 2017 to 2024, and now leads international touring exhibitions as curator-at-large. She is Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Visiting Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, and Adjunct Professor at UNSW Sydney. Sarah has produced more than one hundred exhibitions for museums worldwide and numerous scholarly publications.