Replica | Real | Replica

Replica | Real | Replica is a philosophical meditation on authenticity, rendered through the most precise digital tools available. A hall of mirrors where each reflection reveals new questions about what constitutes “real”. This commission for EPFL’s exhibition Deep Fakes: Art and its Double is ScanLAB’s exploration of the question that has haunted art history since Walter Benjamin: what constitutes an original?

The work itself embodies the questioning: it is comprised of two separate manifestations of the same locations - both asking us to examine our perception and relationship to the authentic.

Replica | Real | Replica is a journey through five floors of meticulously restored rooms at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. Each space is filled with original and duplicate fragments of antiquity.

Two of the most iconic collections housed in Soane’s building provide the starting point to venture further afield; we travel to the real and replica Tombs of King Seti I in the Valley of the Kings and its duplicate created by Factum Foundation, via Seti’s original Sarcophagus in the Soane’s sepulchral chamber; and to the infamous human casts set inside the ruins of Pompeii via Soane’s cork replica in the museum’s model room.

We visit both Egypt and Italy in forensic digital detail via their LiDAR doppelgangers. Within these models we find two of the most notorious facsimiles in the world: we discover the data used to create the Factum Foundations near-perfect replica of Kings Seti I’s Tomb, and we reveal the unexpected interior of the Pompeii casts, thought to be copies after originals are believed to have been destroyed by Allied raids in WWII.