Text by CLOT Magazine
[The art happens here] is an online platform dedicated to showcasing digital art in its natural habitat launched by Annka Kultys, a gallery specialising in artists making art that engages with technology and the internet.
Until August 10 is on view the exhibition Bill Posters: Dissimulation, an online exhibition of two ‘deep-fake’ new media works that critically interrogate humankind’s relationships with new technologies of power, hierarchies of knowledge and the broader systemic tensions that exist concerning dataism, privacy, surveillance capitalism and democracy.
Both works in Dissimulation —Veridical fakes (2020, 4 min 52 sec) and Big Dada (2019, 3 min 05 sec)— are made up of a series of visual narrative deep fake new media pieces featuring monologues from the artificial intelligence (AI)-synthesized personas of current global celebrities. The celebrities whose synthesised personas feature in Veridical fakes are Morgan Freeman; Kim Kardashian, Donald Trump; Mark Zuckerberg, Marcel Duchamp, and Freddy Mercury; the world-renown performance artist Marina Abramović.
London-based artist Barnaby Francis works under the pseudonym Bill Posters. He is an artist-researcher interested in art as research and critical practice. Through his work, Posters explores computational forms of image-making, including deep fakes and deep video portraits.
Dissimulation is an extension of Spectre, the hyperreality concept created by Bill Posters and Daniel Howe.