Computational Museology: Between Machine Intelligence, Synthetic Objects, and Embodied Aesthetics

This lecture presents computational museology as a framework that repositions the museum as an anticipatory system linking cultural heritage, emerging technologies, and diverse publics. By integrating machine intelligence with data curation, ontology with visualization, and embodied interaction with immersive interfaces, museums can form new connections between objects, knowledge systems, and participatory practices. Discriminative AI reveals hidden relations within cultural big data - such as Narratives from the Long Tail, which generates narrative coherence across 200,000 hours of archival video - while generative AI produces new cultural forms for public co-creation, as seen in the Public Portal to Anticipation. Through examples of replicas, digital surrogates, and “cultural deep fakes,” the lecture explores how computational techniques reveal unseen patterns in cultural artefacts and challenge ideas of authenticity, authority, and the future of heritage.