The Digital Capture
The Fraudulent Image: Deepfake Technology and the Danger of the New Image
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lanette Gonzalez
The innovation of deepfake technology drastically changes the possibilities of the reliable image. The deepfake, the use of artificial intelligence, specifically a deep simulated neural network, has centered on the manipulation of the video image to such an extent, that they have become indistinguishable from the real image/video. Therefore, implications of using this technology brings forth dangerous possibilities in political and international arenas. The new technology of deepfake/deep learning brings forth the question: if the only image we have of any aspect of visual reality can be manipulated in such a dramatic fashion, are we then able to change real knowledge of that reality. The development of new inexpensive and user friendly artificial intelligence for the manipulation of the image forces us into a paradigm shift; from this point forward, we can no longer really know what is reality as identified through an image.
Properties and Effects: Getting Clear about Resemblances
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jim Hamlyn
Things can resemble one another because they share the same or similar properties. They can also resemble one another due to various effects. A 3D effect is obviously not a 3D property and a shading effect is not a shadow. Ordinary language enables us to distinguish between properties and effects with remarkable subtlety and sophistication. In much philosophy however, this distinction is widely overlooked, often with muddled or misleading consequences. This paper examines a variety of these consequences. Do we need to construct any theories of resemblance in order to get clear about the ways that images work? The above distinction is not a theory but merely an observation about the ways that we discuss resemblances. If pictorial effects can be used to produce illusions, as numerous tricks and psychology experiments show, then these effects must play a part in our perception of many pictures, sometimes leading us to remark that pictures bear a strong resemblance to the things they represent. This is surely why we prefer to view pictures perpendicular to our line of sight: to maximize the effect. There is no mystery here, so long as we are clear about the differences between properties and effects.
Digital Witnessing: What to Tell
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anna Macdonald
This paper focuses on a practice-based research project, which used somatic research methods to explore the relationship between digital practices and embodied affect. Processes of tracking or witnessing are commonly used in somatic research as a way of increasing the "felt sense" (after Gendlin, 1977) of the body. Through tracking the narrative of the body, somatic research generates layers of understanding that rest on embodied experience. This paper considers VR, AR and Mocap as forms of digital witnessing (or tracking) that amplify embodied affect and, drawing on Susan Kozel’s work on the poetics of responsivity (2007), considers some of the complexities and limitations of this interactive cycle of movement and trace. The discussion focuses on questions that arose from the process of making a pilot for a digital artwork, commissioned by Keele University, for an AHRC training event focusing on digital creativity and embodied research. The work, made in collaboration with the digital development team at Keele University, explores the act of tracking, of being seen and asked questions such as: what tracking threshold makes movement visible to the mover? What level of digitally registered movement is registered as stillness in the body and, what do we choose to track if we can’t track everything?
