Deepfakes are synthetic images created with machine learning algorithms in which a person's face is replaced with someone else's. Using videos of speeches by public figures as primary media, the system only needs a few minutes of processing and a single photograph to animate a participant's features.
The resulting videos highlight the growing simplification of new technologies exploring the tension between people’s desire to engage with them and the problematics that lay beneath.
"Playing with that dynamic, that tension between people's desire to see their faces on the big screen and their realisation that it could be problematic for them personally."
Read Maintaining Composure, an accompanying conversation between Tamiko Thiel and Sarah Cook.
Read MoreGo Fake Yourself! uses deepfake artificial intelligence technology to animate single photos of faces with facial expressions and body language "borrowed" from driving videos of public figures. With deepfake AI technology, the face - the most intimate and yet public part of the self - and the emotions it expresses can more and more easily be manipulated and placed in contexts out of the control of the "lenders" of the faces themselves.
About Tamiko Thiel and /p
Tamiko Thiel is a visual artist exploring the interplay of place, space, the body and cultural identity. She works in a variety of media ranging from supercomputers to digital prints and videos to interactive 3d virtual reality worlds and augmented and mixed reality artworks and installations. The artist /p has been collaborating with Tamiko since 2018 on many media art projects.
