Talk & Workshop (Age: 18+)

With: Katrien Jacobs (Adjunct Associate Professor in Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, BE), + Guest workshop facilitator
When: Wednesday September 4, 2024, 19:00-21:00
Where: neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK), Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 11/13, 10178 Berlin.
No technical skills or equipment needed.

Talk: 19:00-20.00

Deepfake technology is a form of Artificial Intelligence that creates video and aural content by synthetically merging recorded faces, facial expressions, and speech patterns onto other videos. The technology is commonly used to modify the statements and performances of political leaders and celebrities as political satire and/or artistic experimentation and has also become a widely used tool of fake news and disinformation. The commodification of deepfake technology has led to large quantities of sexualized deepfakes featuring politicians, celebrities or activists. Sex scenes and facial data are stolen and synthesized for pleasure and entertainment, and then repackaged as hate-media intended to impact and silence public figures. In this talk and workshop, we will try to find out to which extent such deepfakes can be seen as an aspect of far-right “fashy” media culture.

Since far-right leaders are weaponizing conspiracy theories and “gender phantasms”, including a full denial of gender identities and LGBTQ rights, how can porn movies fortify these claims? As a strictly censored yet resilient media trend, why is deepfake technology being used by anonymous creators to “fornicate” with democracy while eroding the livelihood of gender, sex and porn cultures?

Workshop: 20:00-21.00

Since non-consensual deepfake content as hate-media has become a widespread practice, the workshop will ask participants to reimagine and reinvent common AI and deepfake content with focus on gender inclusivity and queer creativity. Would it be possible to develop inclusive and artistic deepfake content that is made with ethical standards, which means that the actors/actresses and deepfake figures or personalities had to give written consent for their facial, aural, or bodily features to be used? The workshop will invite people to deepfake consider tech experiments and debates regarding sexual experimentation and otherness.

Katrien Jacobs

Adjunct Associate Professor in Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, BE

Katrien Jacobs is Adjunct Associate Professor in Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is also a Research Associate in the Department of Languages and Cultures at the University of Ghent. Jacobs has lectured and published widely about sexuality and gender in and around digital media, contemporary arts and online activism. She received several Hong Kong government-funded GRF grants and authored four books about Internet culture and gender/sexuality. She is currently working on a book for Bloomsbury Academic entitled, Deepfake Bodies: the Sexual politics of AI. Jacobs is an artist-scholar who has produced several art works such as documentaries and performance art pieces alongside her academic, curatorial and ethnographic fieldwork, which can be accessed on her website www.katrienjacobs.com.

I.M. workshop facilitator

Mathematician & AI Researcher

I.M. is a Berlin-based digital rights activist and technofeminist. She has a background in mathematics with a focus on network science, AI, and data feminism. She founded LODelle, for digital feminist networks and initiated a collaborative project to regulate major online pornography and rebuild the industry with consent and more cyber intimacy. Irma is involved in researching AI bias and working on AI auditing and ethics, and is researching girl blogging and girl math for the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam.

Disruption Network Lab is part of New Perspectives for Action (2023-2027). A project by Re-Imagine Europe, a collaboration between Paradiso and Sonic Acts (NL), Elevate Festival (Austria), A4 (SK), INA GRM (FR), Borealis (NO), KONTEJNER (HR), RUPERT (LT), Semibreve (PT), Parco d’Arte Vivente (IT), Disruption Network Lab (DE), BEK (NO), Kontrapunkt (MK) and Radio Web MACBA (ES). Co-funded by the European Union.