Panel discussion on 'New Technologies and the Preservation of Cultural Heritage'

EPFL College of Humanities professors Sarah Kenderdine, head of the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+), and Frédéric Kaplan, head of the Digital Humanities Lab (DHLab), will participate in the 3-part series, "New Technologies and the Preservation of Cultural Heritage", organized by the Art Newspaper and Factum Foundation, with Il Giornale Dell'Arte.

Each discussion will take place on Zoom and will be livestreamed on The Art Newspaper’s YouTube channel.

Professors Kaplan and Kenderdine will participate in the following discussion:

"An Intimacy with the Physical World: New Technologies Generating New Knowledge"

Compiling, analysing, presenting information in an age of machine learning

This discussion focuses on the technologies that are creating new knowledge about cultural heritage – on where we are now, and where we go next. Among the subjects to be discussed are new possibilities for image and information analysis, new technologies of display, and the problem of long-term digital archiving.

Chair: 
Sir Ian Blatchford, Director and Chief Executive of the Science Museum Group

Participants:
Brian Cantwell Smith, Reid Hoffman Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Human, Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto
Sarah Kenderdine, Professor of Digital Museology, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne
Frédéric Kaplan, Professor and Digital Humanities Chair, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne
Carol Mandel, Dean Emerita of New York University (NYU) Libraries
William Owen, Founder of Made by Many

Date, time and location: Sunday, 3 May - 18:00 CEST on YouTube.

About the series
Before Covid-19, 15 million people visited the Forbidden City every year; every day tourists packed into the Sistine Chapel, and crowds jostled in front of the Mona Lisa. What will happen now to museums and heritage sites? Will we see changes over the coming months and years to the ways in which we share, enjoy and learn from the material evidence of the past? What role will technology play in allowing access to collections and keeping attention focused on vulnerable heritage from across the world? At a time when we are all being forced to think hard about what we value, how, and why, Factum Foundation and The Art Newspaper are launching a series of discussions on the role of digital technologies in the preservation of cultural heritage. The three, 80-minute, online discussions will consider the increasing prominence of high-resolution recordings of cultural heritage and their place in the display spaces of the present and the future. The discussions will focus on the potential of new technology to influence the nature of access, ownership and understanding while addressing fundamental questions about originality and authenticity, relics and replicas, context and movement.

Friday 1 May - 18:00 CEST: The Future of Museums, Exhibitions and the Objects they Display
Saturday 2 May - 18:00 CEST: The Circulation of Objects: The Politics of Recording, Training, Preserving and Sharing
Sunday 3 May - 18:00 CEST: An Intimacy with the Physical World: New Technologies Generating New Knowledge