“In the wake of Nefertiti 2.0, a series of enquiries raised by technologists and journalists raised the question of whether or not it would have been possible for the handheld scanners used by Al-Badri and Nelles to have captured the data released by the artists. Journalists traced a probable source of the data to a much higher- resolution scan commissioned by the Neues Museum itself, made by a private company, which has not been made available to the public. The website of this company presents a scan of Nefertiti that is uncannily like the image released by Al- Badri and Nelles. The artists responded by claiming that they had no specialist technical knowledge and were using data and resources managed by hackers whom they refused to name. If the sceptics are right, then the project is in fact a double hack: drawing attention to museum hoarding not just of ancient collections but of their digital doubles and using the tools of data collection and presentation to undo the regimes of authority and property over which the museum still asserts sovereignty, mocking the redemptive claims of so- called ‘digital repatriation’.”

Haidy Geismar: Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age (2018), S. 112.