Martyna Marciniak
Blobsters, Slop and Hyper-Events: negotiating visual trust in a post-optical era.
In early 2023 a series of highly realistic synthetic images produced by newly advanced, generative tools marked the perceived ‘beginning of the end of visual truth’. Any image from now on would fall into two categories: real or fake. Identifying the fake, as the argument goes, is our best defense against the possibility of a mass misinformation event… Yet, could there be a value in ‘staying with the fake’? Can it reveal something much more meaningful about our collective beliefs and misconceptions around the aesthetics of visual evidence?
In this keynote talk Martyna Marciniak will unpack the complex landscape of synthetic image misinformation using a collection of images from 2018 until now. The talk will use her recent research and artistic explorations as a strategy to navigate the tension between the techno-doom on one hand, and AI ‘gold rush’ optimism on the other. Approaching synthetic images as exaggerated portrayals of our past visual language, the talk will unpack selected case studies as a pretext to reconsider and organise the visual language of trust, evidence and attention.
The second part of the talk will question the AI misinformation panic as a potentially dishonest reversal, ignoring existing problems of visual evidencing and policies, while potentially inflating the value of the state of AI technology, ultimately acting as a market manipulation tool.
It’s time to reconsider the otherwise hidden mechanisms of synthetic image misinformation, and who benefits from them. Countering the prevailing dichotomy of the real vs fake, a dubious gift of post-trumpian political parlance, the talk will propose a new lexicon that names the nuances of the synthetic and evidentiary images and identifies their operational value, while undoing the harmful anthropomorphisation of AI concepts.
