Cultural Heritage in the Digital Age

Offering great music in an exceptional setting in the Alps, the Montreux Jazz Festival is a unique event in the world of music created in 1967 by Claude Nobs. Over the years, the Montreux Jazz Festival has become an essential event, generating fantastic stories and legendary performances.

The first edition of the Montreux Jazz Festival China (MJFC) will take place in Hangzhou, in the province of Zhejiang, from October 5 to 8, 2021. This new Festival will offer an eclectic program on the theme “When West Meets East”, combining Chinese, Asian music and jazz. This new partnership pursues the Montreux Jazz Festival’s desire to forge links with other continents and to mix different musical cultures.

As the innovation partner of MJFC, Swissnex in China, in collaboration with Zhejiang Conservatory of Music, will host an online talk featuring the Montreux Jazz Digital Projects as well as other digital cultural heritage projects at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).

From the very beginning, the Montreux Jazz Festival’s founder Claude Nobs has recorded all its concerts using the latest technologies. In partnership with the Claude Nobs Foundation and with the support of numerous sponsors, EPFL is in charge of the project to digitize and enrich the collection of Montreux Jazz Festival recordings, as well as its long-term preservation. This unique collection of audiovisual archives has been recognized by UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.

In the upcoming lecture, we’ll invite Prof. Sarah Kenderdine, Lead of Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+), Director & Lead Curator of EPFL Pavilions to present “Computational museology: interfaces to cultural big data” and Dr. Alain Dufaux, Operations & Development Director of EPFL – Cultural Heritage & Innovation Center (CHC) to talk about Montreux Jazz Archives and the associated research and innovation projects.

PROGRAM

* Language: English (Chinese interpretation available)

15:00-15:05 Welcome by Swissnex in China

15:05-15:10 Welcome by Zhejiang Conservatory of Music

15:10-15:30 Presentation: Computational Museology: Interfaces to Cultural Big Data

Prof. Sarah Kenderdine, Lead of Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+), Director & Lead Curator of EPFL Pavilions

15:30-15:50 Presentation: Montreux Jazz Archives and Innovation Projects

Dr. Alain Dufaux, Operations & Development Director, EPFL – Cultural Heritage & Innovation Center (CHC)

15:50-16:00 Q&A

SPEAKERS

Bio

Prof. Sarah Kenderdine
Lead of Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+), Director & Lead Curator of EPFL Pavilions
Professor Sarah Kenderdine researches 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 90 exhibitions and installations for museums worldwide including a museum complex in India and received a number of major international awards for this work. In 2017, Sarah was appointed professor at the École Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland where she has built the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+), exploring the convergence of cultural heritage, imaging technologies, immersive visualisation, visual analytics, digital aesthetics and cultural (big) data. eM+ engages in research from scientific, artistic and humanistic perspectives and promotes a post-cinematic multisensory engagement using experimental platforms. Since 2017 Sarah is Director and Lead Curator of EPFL Pavilions a new art/science initiative housed in a seminal Kengo Kumar building inaugurated in late 2016 (formerly known as ArtLab). EPFL Pavilions blends experimental curatorship and contemporary aesthetics with open science, digital humanism and emerging technologies. In 2021, Sarah was appointed corresponding fellow of The British Academy. In 2020, she was named in the Museum Influencer List 2020 – The Power 10 by Blooloop and, Switzerland’s Top Digital Shapers 100 by Bilanz.

In 2021, she curates and produces three major exhibitions:
Buddhist Maritime Silk Road, Fo Guan Shan Monastery, Taiwan (a permanent exhibition)
The Atlas of Maritime Buddhism, Indra and Harry Banga Gallery, Hong Kong
Deep Fakes: Art and Its Double, EPFL Pavilions, Switzerland
Bio

Dr. Alain Dufaux
Operations & Development Director, EPFL – Cultural Heritage & Innovation Center (CHC)
Alain Dufaux’s field of expertise is in signal processing for audio and images, with a dual profile in both academic and industrial worlds. Alain completed his electrical engineering studies in 1994 at EPFL before moving to University of Neuchâtel, where his research mainly focused on speech / audio compression and automatic recognition. After obtaining a Ph.D dedicated to impulsive sound detection and recognition, he joined the hearing-aid industry in 2001 as a low-power algorithm design specialist, with roles in advanced signal processing applications, ultra low-power implementation for DSP processors, and field application engineering.

Alain came back to EPFL in 2007, first heading a computer vision research group with focus on micro-engineering for the watch industry. Involved more and more in academic project setup and follow-up, team management, lectures and co-direction of PhD students, Alain had the opportunity to join the team of the EPFL Vice-Presidency for Innovation and Valorization in 2011. As part of the Metamedia Center, he took care of the audio/video digitization operations and associated research actions defined in the frame of the Montreux Jazz Digital Project. Developing skills in audiovisual archiving, he acts as the executive director of the EPFL Cultural Heritage & Innovation Center since 2014, where he coordinates projects in a wider range of research and innovation domains.

PARTNRES

The online talk is organized by Swissnex in China, in collaboration with Montreux Jazz Festival China, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), the Music Engineering Department of Zhejiang Conservatory of Music and the Key Laboratory of Intelligent Processing Technology for Digital Music, Ministry of Culture and Tourism.