NEW WORK:
The Computerized Confessional
Interactive art, 1984/2024
In 1984, when I was studying graphic design at San Jose State University, I took the first offering of a new course in “Computers in Art and Design”. Inspired by Joseph Weizenbaum’s critial chatbot demonstration project from the early 1960’s, “Doctor”, or more widely know as “ELIZA”, the computerized therapist, I created my first interactive artwork. The “Computerized Confessional” invited users to kneel at an Apple II computer and go through the process of Catholic confession. I had been raised attending Catholic schools in San Francisco and thought this would be an appropriate and creative critical riff on Weizenbaum’s concept. This work was made in a largely pre-digital era – automatic bank teller machines were just being introduced, personal computers were, as of this time, quite rare. I meant this as a transgressive act and at the same time the work represented my emerging atheism, but perhaps more importantly, it is the first project I created that reflected my sceptical engagement with digital technologies. It was intended then, and now, as a critique of emerging ideas and practices involving so-called “Artificial Intelligence” (AI).
This new version was developed from memory, I have one photograph of the original piece as most of my slides were destroyed in a flood of my studio in 2005. We added sound to this version, including the voice of the digital priest, this was not possible in 1984. Special thanks to Maya Hilbert for her technical and creative help with remaking this project for the exhibition Algorithms of Resistence at CUNY.
NEW WORK:
The Origins of Totalitarianism:
Donald Trump reads Hannah Arendt
AI video and sound. 2024, 24:30mins
I’ve just released a new project. The work is a shallow fake video of Donald Trump reading from Hannah Arendt’s seminal book The Origins of Totalitarianism. He reads Section One of Chapter 11, "The Totalitarian Movement: Totalitarian Propaganda." The video was created using readily available AI tools found online, including TopMediaAI for text-to-voice emulation, and Wav2Lip v5, a free-to-use open source software available through Google Colab..
In 2019, so called “deep fake” technologies were being reported with breathless concern over the rise of the capabilities towards subverting our experiences of the moving images in entertainment, news, and politics. It was sometime thereafter that I had the initial ideal to create a “deep-fake” video of Donald Trump, this was during Trump’s first term as President of the United States. The first concept was to have Trump do a reading from Guy DeBord’s Situationist classic text, “The Society of the Spectacle”. I chatted with some colleagues in computer science in early 2020 about how we might do this, we discussed training an AI model on various data, including voice and imagery. The pandemic soon hit and the complexity of the project and the difficulty of working remotely to produce such a complex project derailed any further efforts. When Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, I thought, this project, thankfully, has no need to exist. Wishful thinking I know!
It was with the re-emergence of Donald Trump as the Republican Party candidate for President in 2024 that this idea resurfaced. I thought, however, that “The Society of the Spectacle”, which was definitely an interesting first concept, was not longer as relevant. The unabashedly totalitarian and fascist leanings of Trump, the Republican Party, and Project 2025 that led me to reconsider how best to approach the work. It was in this rethinking of the concept that I decided to have Trump do a reading from Hannah Arendt’s highly influential 1951 book, “The Origins of Totalitarianism”. My concept was to create not a “deep fake” but perhaps a “shallow fake”, utilizing newly available, open source software options which have enabled me to realize the work, that is purposefully rough, revealing the processes of AI technology rather than celebrating them. After a month of production, the result is a nearly 25-minute-long video of Donald Trump reading from Chapter 11 "The Totalitarian Movement", Section I. "Totalitarian Propaganda".
The work was created by media artist and activist Joseph DeLappe. Special thanks to creative and technical consultants Dennis Delgado and Remy Pijuan.
