My thesis in creating this blog has been and will continue to be that art - all art everwhere and at all times - is dangerous. It can and has been used to deceive people. It has been used to communicate occult (in the strict sense of the word) messages. It has and continues to be used to educate and illuminate complex ideas and concepts in a concise, distilled format.
In short, art is dangerous.
Over the past few years, we have been increasingly warned about AI "art" and real-time enhanced video and audio that create entirely unreal people, places and things in a way that looks entire real and believable.
A recent example is the story that Donald Trump, US president, retweeted a "deep fake" video of Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, and that this video did not represent reality.
In fact, the video was no more fake than any video you would see on the evening news. It took an actual recording of the Speaker and compressed it via editing to selected highlights. There were no other enhancements or alterations. It was no different than watching a highlight reel of a sporting event. Is the video fake? Yes and no is the appropraite answer.
If you have ever watched the evening news at any point in your life, and you are of any demographic group, then you have never seen anything but fake news and fake video. This may seem like an outrageous claim, but hear me out.
All news operations are businesses of one kind or another. As such, each company has its own agenda and point of view. That agenda is communicated to management, whose job it is to execute the executive directive.
The managers in turn hire on-camera talent and technicians who most closely adhere to management's concept of how things should operate. Management selects which stories will be covered and by whom. Managmeent selects which point of view will be communicated through its news output, based on its interpretation of executive mandates. This affects the entire content of the operation's workflow.
The executives may mandate a desire to show the decay of urban life. Management interprets this as outputting content with a primary focus on crime and police. Management hires reporters that are good at stories of this kind, and camera operators that are fearless and willing to get provacative images of crimal activity and its results.
The field producer/reporter is sent to the scene of a story, where he or she evaluates the event and decides how best to tell the story in words and pictures that will match management's directives and expectations. The camera operator is told what to shoot and from what angles, and may have input that he hopes will enhance the narrative.
Back at the studio, an editor - also selected by management for good fit with the corporate environment - takes the footage and reporter's narration, and usually sitting with the reporter in the edit bay, will assemble the story to best match the corporate ideology, management's directives and the producer/reporter's knowledge and instincts on what makes a good story and presents them in the best possible light to enhance their career options.
The final product no more represents reality than any of the most egrigious "fake news" videos you've ever seen or heard of. It's ALL fake.
Art may depict reality, it may communicate truth, but it is not reality, and in that sense it is fake. From the moment a human created pigments and began painting images, reality was edited and enhanced. From the moment Thespis assumed a role and a character, the art of faking imaginary people - called acting - was created. Magicians have been creating fake reality for millennia, of course. When a woman applies make-up for an evening out, she is creating a fake image of herself.
All art has a basis in reality, starts with reality, but then edits, enhances and manipulates it to project an idea or concept that is important to the artist who creates it. The work of art itself is real - real canvas, real paint - but the content is not, never has been and never will be.
Those selfies on your smartphone? All fake. They representations of real events, people and places, but they are from a single perspective and do not represent objective reality. If you take the image into an editing app and clean up your wrinkles, enhance the colors a bit, and crop out unnecessary parts of the frame, then you have taken the image even further from reality and into the realm of "deep fake".
In the current era, we are creating new and mind-bending tools to edit, enhance and process reality, but the idea of "fake news" and "fake video" is nothing new. It is the very nature of art.
When Robert De Niro took on the role of Al Capone in the great film The Untouchables, were you fooled into thinking he WAS Al Capone? Or were you cognizant of the fact that it was an actor portraying a character based on a real person, but that character has been modified by history, the studio executives, the writer, the director and the actor to suit the task of telling a compelling and entertaining story. No one thought he was Al Capone, only that he was portraying the real person. In other words, a fake.
Claude Monet created the Impressionist movement in paiting, not because he depicted reality in his works, but because he recorded the way his failing eyesight saw the world around him. From an objective standpoint, his painting are fake. They do not represent a true depiction of the objective world, but rather the way he saw it. That the paintings are fake does not lessen our enjoyment of them, and perhaps we can gleen some element of objective truth from them, but they are fake, nonetheless.
Anyone who views a work of art or a recording of an event and thinks it is real is deceiving themselves, or at best allowing themselves to be deceived.
Back to the Nancy Pelosi video. It is fake because it is recorded. It is not happening now in objective reality. It happened in the past and is recorded from a certain point of view. We have no idea whether she is in a crowded room full of reporters and camera operators, or whether she is in an empty studio in front of a green screen.
(Note: apparently YouTube doesn't allow embedding now, so click the LINK HERE)
LINK HERE
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After watching the entire recording, we can see the that edited video did not "doctor" the recording, but simply compressed certain parts of it into a "highlight" reel. It is no more doctored than any video on the nightly news. It is no more edited than any video on the nightly news. It is no more fake than any video on the nightly news.
What it does show us, judging the the outrage and panic from some quarters, is that art is dangerous. By taking reality, and editing, enhancing and manipulating it, we can communicate certain truth even while presenting fake images.
This is nothing new. The 1964 Lyndon Johnson Daisy ad shows us that art in the service of politics has been shocking and disgusting the masses for generations.
LINK HERE
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From the first etchings on a cave wall, to Thespis stepping out from the chorus, to Monet's failing eyesight, to Danish cartoons, to Pelosi videos, art has always been mystical and powerful and has changed history. It is dangerous and changes the path of history. It brings the powerful down and elevates the mundane. Whether it is created by the hand of Man, or a machine programmed by a man, art will continue to provoke.
Art is dangerous.
The Truth can't be comprehended by a dumbed down, self-serving & willfully ignorant public. After all, too much distracting TELL-LIE-VISIONS to watch.
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