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 cultural heritage with new media art practice, especially in the realms of interactive cinema, augmented reality and embodied narrative. In addition to her exhibition work she conceives and designs large-scale immersive visualisation systems for public audiences, industry and researchers. Since 1991, Sarah had authored numerous scholarly articles and six books. She has produced 80 exhibitions and installations for museums worldwide including a museum complex in India and has received a number of major international awards for this work. In 2017, Sarah was appointed Professor of Digital Museology at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland where she has built a new laboratory for experimental museology (eM+), exploring the convergence of aesthetic practice, visual analytics and cultural data. She is also Director and lead curator of EPFL’s new art/science initiative, located in a seminal new exhibition building by Japanese architect Kengo Kumar, inaugurated in 2016. Sarah sits on a number of advisory boards including the Royal Commission for Al Ula, Saudi Arabia.
Sarah currently leads the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+) a new transdisciplinary initiative at the intersection of immersive visualisation technologies, visual analytics, aesthetics and cultural (big) data. eM+ engages in research from scientific, artistic and humanistic perspectives and promotes post-cinematic multisensory engagement using experimental platforms. eM+ has nine unique visualisation systems combined with powerful sonic architectures that are benchmarks in the realms of virtual, augmented, mixed realities. These cluster-based 3D systems have been deployed in major exhibitions and installations throughout the world. eM+ works on tangible and intangible heritage and archival materials from many countries including Asia, Australasia and Europe. The lab also creates high-fidelity data in-the-field through a range of state-of-the-art techniques (motion capture, ambisonics, photogrammetry, linear and laser scanning, panoramic video, stereographic panoramas etc). eM+ transforms this burgeoning world of cultural data into advanced ultra-high-resolution visualisation through advanced computer science (interactive graphics, computer vision, deep learning, etc) and HCI.
Formerly she held the position of Professor at University of NSW Art & Design and Director of Visualisation for UNSW’s interdisciplinary Expanded Perception and Interaction Centre (EPICentre) and Director of the Lab for Innovation in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (iGLAM), Deputy Director of the National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA) and co-director, iCinema Research Centre (2013-2017). She was head of Special Projects for Museum Victoria, Australia (2003—2017). From 2010-2015 she was the founding Director of Research at the Applied Laboratory for Interactive Visualization and Embodiment (ALiVE), City University of Hong Kong. In 2015 Sarah was elected President of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (aaDH) a position she continued until November 2017. Kenderdine was Creative Director of Special Projects at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney (1998-2003). She is a maritime archaeologist, former curator at the Western Australian Maritime Museum (1994-1997) and has written a number of authoritative books on shipwrecks. In 1994-1995, she designed and built one of the world’s earliest museum websites (for the Maritime Museum) and subsequently award-winning cultural networks/websites for: Australian Museums Online (AMOL), the ten South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and, Intel Corporation’s Olympic Games Olympia projects in Sydney in 2000.