Deep Fakes: Art and Its Double poses crucial questions about the potency of digital replicas to absorb audiences in enduring emotional encounters with universal art treasures. This exhibition opposes the use of ‘deepfakes’ for manipulation and misinformation, to explore very different perspectives, reimagining objects through advanced computational techniques.
Decades of computer science and engineering at EPFL have revolutionized the tenets of verisimilitude and representation. Today’s ‘perfect pixels’ coalesce in imaging techniques designed to replicate cultural artifacts with ultimate fidelity. As artificial intelligence re-performs and reprocesses the visible, it is exposing the optical unconscious of art, questioning objecthood itself. With its propensity for peripheral vision, machine learning has amplified the possible futures for curatorial and artistic practices, antagonizing outdated notions of authority, authenticity and access. Harnessing artificial intelligence approaches for art reproduction, cultural deep fakes are generating perpetually new archival artifacts, concurrently formed and formless.