Sarah Kenderdine uses data science to enrich the cultural experience

Sarah Kenderdine, the head of EPFL’s Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+), is a pioneering figure in the digital humanities – and especially digital museology. The prestigious British Academy elected her a Corresponding Fellow in late July in recognition of her outstanding contribution to her field. Kenderdine works with museums around the world to develop interactive, immersive experiences so that visitors can explore collections in exciting new ways. At EPFL, she studies how data science, computer graphics and the latest technologies can be employed to create enhanced visualizations of a society’s cultural heritage. We spoke with the New Zealand native about her role at the crossroads of science and the visual arts.

Like many islanders, Kenderdine has always been inspired by the sea. “Until I moved to Switzerland in 2017, I’d always lived by an ocean,” she says. The descendant of a ship captain who emigrated to New Zealand, she moved abroad often as a child, learning to fish and dive along the way. She also became an excellent swimmer and won several national competitions. As a Bachelor’s student, she majored in anthropology/archaeology and the phenomenology of religion before hearing about a graduate program in maritime archaeology. Signing up seemed like a natural choice, which meant transferring to the neighboring island of Australia.

“The program was run only every five years, and there were just three such programs in the world at the time. It all sounded so exotic!” says Kenderdine. The school was located in Western Australia, which is a mecca for maritime archaeologists who come to study the region’s gold-laden Dutch shipwrecks. “Maritime archaeology is all about images, whether they’re taken from light planes, or underwater with stereographic cameras,” she says.

From websites to big machines

In the mid-1990s, Kenderdine began working as a curator at the Western Australian Maritime Museum in Perth, where she helped develop the first website in the southern hemisphere for a cultural institution. “We were hard coding back in those days, but it was a lot of fun,” she says. “I designed a homepage with a black background – possibly the world’s first!” She then took a job with the Powerhouse Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Sydney, where she created a virtual exhibition on the archeological site of Olympia, Greece, to coincide with the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games. This multi-million-dollar project used elements of virtual reality to supplement the visitor experience in a dynamic way. “After that, my interests started to shift away from website development. I felt that all the revolutionary ideas about the internet had been explored when it was brand new, and that creating websites offered little challenge. I was most interested in the relationship between the digital and the real in physical spaces such as galleries. That's when I started designing and building big machines.”

The pandemic and global warming are making it even more important for cultural organizations to adopt digital technology

The “big machines” she’s now working on range from a panorama viewing system to a dome, a platform, a virtual room, a cave and a linear navigator – all of which are designed to give the viewer a role in the cultural and learning experience. This kind of technology also allows more people to enjoy museums and other cultural sites. “The pandemic and global warming are making it even more important for cultural organizations to adopt digital technology,” says Kenderdine. Her focus is not just on culture, but science too. With the systems her lab is developing, users can travel virtually through the galaxy, watch the physics behind nuclear fusion and plasma, identify the micro-movements made by an athlete, and run simulations on just about any kind of scientific big data. “Researchers need new ways of visualizing big data, and we’re exploring different possibilities for meeting that need,” she says.

At the interface of two worlds

Kenderdine’s research and network of contacts have taken her across the globe – not just to Switzerland but also to Cambodia, China, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, India and the Middle East. For instance, she just completed a study of the maritime routes through which Buddhism expanded, and her Atlas of Maritime Buddhism is being presented at permanent and traveling exhibitions starting this month in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Other museums in Asia are also interested in her work – and she’s delighted. “Museums in Asia are very dynamic and progressive,” she says. Her next challenge will be digitizing a painting of the Battle of Morat, where the Swiss defeated the Duke of Burgundy in 1476 near Bern. This will be the first time anyone will have digitized an image 100 meters long and 10 meters high.

So does Kenderdine see herself more as an artist or a scientist? “I’m a little of both. I guess you could say I sit at the interface of these two worlds. And I’m really lucky to work with so many professors at EPFL who have the same big-picture vision I do. At my lab, we help them develop the tools to implement this vision. I also team up with talented engineers, technicians and programmers whose work I have the background to understand. But it’s true that what we do requires a great deal of artistic design, creativity and innovation.”

Although far from the sea, Kenderdine is enjoying life on the shores of Lake Geneva. Especially while she was unable to travel during the pandemic. “The lake is so big that sometimes when I look at it, it feels like I’m staring out into the ocean. Its humidity, its mist and its life create a maritime atmosphere. I think of Lake Geneva as an inland sea,” she says with a smile, her eyes reminiscent of the South Seas.