HEADER/FOOTER GALLERY: Melissa Huang

I first learned about deepfake around five years ago on Reddit. Users were posting about fake celebrity pornography and where to find it. The discussion centered around which videos felt the most real and how users could find more like them, or even make their own. It was an alarming concept: that famous women (and sometimes even women outside of the spotlight) were being forced into a pornographic role without their consent. This new technology raised a lot of ethical questions about privacy and rights to our own likeness.

Deepfake uses artificial neural networks and machine learning to take the person from Video A and transpose their face onto the person from Video B. Using this, you can create videos of people saying or doing things they did not actually say or do. Deepfake is most commonly used to create fake celebrity pornography, resulting in glitchy, unconvincing, and uncanny videos, although amateur users and academics have found many other applications. As an artist, I am less interested in the polished, realistic deepfake videos and more interested in the glitch imagery and mistakes discovered within the program. This video was the first in an ongoing series of deepfake artworks I am creating in collaboration with my husband, artist and designer Drew Tetz.

In this video, The Most Beautiful Women, I used found footage from Youtube, taken by a man doing a video walkthrough of the American Art Museum’s Neoclassical collection. In his own words: “I have long thought that the most beautiful women in Washington D.C. (when my wife isn’t in town) are in the Smithsonian American Art Museum – the Hiram Powers neoclassical busts and sculptures in marble. They are perfection and a marvel to view in person.”

Through deepfake technology, I have been able to create video that imposes my own visage as an Asian American woman onto these sculptures representing the western cultural ideal. What does it mean to merge with a statue, to become “yellow” flesh on white marble? Does this uncanny combination really produce the most beautiful woman?

I’ve also included two gridded images that are created by the deepfake program. You can render these sample images at points to see how well the deepfake process is coming (the longer you run it the more “real” your video can become). The sample images are beautiful in their own right as you see the AI learning how to translate flesh into marble and vice versa.