Media Manipulation in an Age of Deepfakes
BA Major Design – Graduation Project
2021.1
Video – The Weekly Report on Vimeo
Ever since humans understood that it is possible to gain personal profit from passing on information in an altered way, information has been manipulated.
We arrived at a point where almost everything can be faked. In 2017 «deepfakes» reached the mainstream media, when a video of Barack Obama is showing a speech of him which he never held. Deepfakes, composed of the words «deep learning» and «fake» are synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else’s likeness. Voices, motions and facial expressions can be modified to the point where the viewer can’t tell its authenticity. Through deepfakes, the line between real and fake media is getting increasingly blurred.
Distrust against politics continues to grow and if misinformation reaches a point where it becomes uncontrollable it can seriously harm our democracies. To guide our way into a more open-minded future, we need to constantly adapt our media skills. The project explores credibility through notions of reality and attempts to decode misinformation and conspiracies. A fictional narrative that plays with humour and clichés invites the viewer to question our approach to news media.
