Cristina Barbiani, scientific head of the Digital Exhibit Master’s course at the IUAV University of Venice, will introduce the new possibilities of digital technology for the creation of multimedia and interactive systems, combining knowledge and technologies related to ‘computer vision’ and aimed at the creation of museum displays, for design, architecture, multimedia and performing arts.

This talk discusses Jorge Otero-Pailos’ approach to art as a method of experimental preservation and argues for its relevance in imagining a future for the existing built environment centred on mutual care. Jorge Otero-Pailos draws from a series of recent works in which he employs material residues of buildings and sites – including airborne atmospheric dust, waterways, traces of sweat, and body sounds – to render their invisible meanings visible. In particular, he focuses on his Ethics of Dust series, explaining how he uses art as a method for the experimental preservation of dust, the kind the atmosphere deposits on buildings. This important historical and environmental record usually goes unrecognized. The artworks in The Ethics of Dust series isolate dust and make it tangible by transferring it from the surface of buildings onto translucent casts. Jorge Otero-Pailos also presents a selection of dust casts taken from the Doge’s Palace, Westminster Hall, and other buildings around the world, and discusses the unexpected histories that each of them unveils. He connects the dots between these punctual histories to outline a larger concept they all contribute to, namely that of atmospheric heritage.
The talk is also a presentation of Jorge Otero-Pailos’ book Historic Preservation Theory: An Anthology, Readings from the 18th to the 21st Century.

Computational museology is a scaffold that unites machine intelligence with data curation, ontology with visualisation, and communities of publics and practitioners with embodied participation through kinaesthetic interfaces. Computational museology empowers cultural organisations to link all forms of culture and materiality: objects, knowledge systems, representation and participation. Research at the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+) reaches beyond object-oriented curation to blend experimental curatorship with contemporary aesthetics, digital humanism and emerging technologies.

This lecture curated by Sarah Kenderdine explores key themes including interactive archives and emergent narrative, deep fakes and blockchain sovereignties, embodied knowledge systems and performative interfaces and scientific visualisation for museums in the age of experience. She will also give an overview of EPFL Pavilions exhibitions and focus the discussion on Deep Fakes: Art and Its Double.