{"id":5272,"date":"2025-11-18T10:08:00","date_gmt":"2025-11-18T09:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hacnumedia.org\/on-the-artistic-use-of-deepfakes\/"},"modified":"2025-12-10T13:08:31","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T12:08:31","slug":"on-the-artistic-use-of-deepfakes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hacnumedia.org\/en\/on-the-artistic-use-of-deepfakes\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Artistic Use of Deepfakes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Propelled into the spotlight by the rise of AI, deepfakes blur our perception of reality more than ever. Many artists are now working with vocal and visual cloning tools: somewhere between technological critique and new forms of storytelling, they probe the limits of authenticity in the age of algorithms. Who are these artists? How do they challenge us in this era of post-truth? A dive into the artistic use of deepfakes. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n

A contraction of \u201cdeep,\u201d as in deep learning, and \u201cfake,\u201d as in fake news, deepfakes (or \u201chypertrucages\u201d in French) have seen explosive growth in recent months. \u201cThe idea is to digitally graft part of an image onto another, which works for both video and audio,\u201d explains journalist G\u00e9rald Holubowicz<\/a><\/em>, a specialist in the societal impacts of deepfakes. \u201cOver time, the term became a catch-all to describe any video manipulation or identity alteration for malicious purposes,\u201d he adds. Indeed, deepfakes have a troubling capacity to reshape real events, twist the truth, and impose an alternative narrative. This distortion manifests first and foremost in the field of pornography, often used for blackmail or revenge porn. Artists \u00c9milie Brout and Maxime Marion tackled this terrain in Sextape (2021), an amateur porn video found online, altered so their own faces appear in it. Likewise, in 2019, Marianne Vieul\u00e8s created Absolutely Yes<\/a>, a reconstruction of a censored orgasm scene from Extase (1933) by Gustav Machat\u00fd. <\/p>\n\n

Politics is no refuge either. In 2018, filmmaker Jordan Peele<\/a> warned of the dangers of manipulation with Obama Deepfake<\/a>, a viral video in which he impersonates the former president to demonstrate just how easily public speech can be fabricated. In 2019, Nixon\u2019s image was repurposed in In Event of Moon Disaster<\/a>, an installation by Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund at MIT. <\/p>\n\n

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