Deep Fakes: A Critical Lexicon of Digital Museology explores how artificial intelligence, computer vision, and immersive media are transforming the ways we see and preserve cultural artifacts. Replicas are no longer simple copies but prompts that challenge our ideas of authenticity, originality, and permanence.

Through examples from sacred objects to digital surrogates of cultural icons, these technologies reveal patterns and details once invisible to the human eye, while opening new forms of engagement between object and observer. At stake are questions of memory, mimesis, and the politics of replication—especially in contexts where heritage is threatened by war, climate change, or cultural erasure.

As part of LAYERS, an event series by Swissnex in San Francisco exploring science communication, this lecture with Sarah Kenderdine considers how cultural “deep fakes” can act as both fragile copies and resilient reservoirs of memory, reframing the future of museums and the authority of truth in the digital age.

Gray Area is a San Francisco-based nonprofit cultural incubator, with the mission to cultivate, sustain, and apply antidisciplinary collaboration — integrating art, technology, science, and the humanities — towards a more equitable and regenerative future.