Seeing is no longer believing. Visual uncertainty in the post-truth era.
07.05.2020 / 6pm
Whether it’s intentional propaganda, unintentional misinformation, or simply deceiving advertising strategies, visual communication has never been inherently transparent. Although this fact is not new, we still keep believing in what we see. Only recently, in the context of emerging deepfakes and fake news, this belief starts to be shaken. How are we going to face the visual uncertainty of photorealistic generated fakes and other synthetic media produced by artificial intelligence? How to distinguish between what’s real and what’s fake, and does it even matter? Can visual AI-driven tools be used to embrace creative practices without negative consequences?
This artist lecture will present examples from critical and speculative design practice, which aims to find answers to these questions. From the case study on controversial urban development in Bratislava, through critical experiments with AI tools for generating synthetic media, to speculative future scenarios crowdsourced from participatory workshops, the presented work provokes uncomfortable questions and opens up the discussion towards greater responsibility for co-creation of our daily - soon to be synthetic - reality.
Lenka Hamosova is an independent design researcher and lecturer based in Prague. In her critical projects she focuses on the transparency of visual communication and the future scenarios of AI-generated synthetic media. She regularly writes and talks about the frictions in visual culture, design and architecture. Lenka graduated in Design at Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam, the Netherlands in 2014. She co-founded the Czechoslovak platform for critical and speculative design ALTTAB and co-organizes the design-art festival UROBOROS: Designing in Troubling Times.