Deepfake Pornography: The Mourning Illness of Network Society (Video Essay)

utoronto.academia.edu/FilipAndjelkovic

www.trinitythecat.bandcamp.com

The technologies we use to produce images are motivated by an ideal wish – the impossible desire to create reality by merely representing it. Today's deepfakes are embedded in this psychological prehistory of image-making. Unlike photography or cinema, the deepfake does not merely attempt to technologically perfect the eye, but to reproduce the inner workings of imagination.

Although impossible to determine a number, the overwhelming majority of deepfakes are pornographic. And pornography, like all other forms of representation, is not just consumed. Pornography is a text to be read – revealing much about the society in which it is produced. And pornography, is a privileged text – telling us more about a society than most others. Just as a culture’s monsters reaffirm the socially constructed boundaries of knowledge and identity, pornography (de)monstrates cultural limits – what can and what cannot be depicted, what is and what is not transgressive or obscene.

Pornographic deepfake emerges out of both technological, as well as psychological cultural developments. And in turn, the pornographic deepfake ratifies the boundaries of image-making technologies, as well as the limits of acceptable desire.

Ultimately, the pornographic deepfake is the symptom of a broader mourning illness that plagues contemporary society. What the deepfake tells us, as a cultural monstration, is that the ideals of omnipotent realism which have motivated image-making from cave art to cinema, are both lost yet unable to be mourned. Frozen and undead, the ideal omnipotence of realism, is a cultural ideal whose loss cannot be processed. The very possibility of depicting reality is evacuated, with no replacement.

Human minds can no longer imagine the present, never mind the future. Without us realizing it, the present has become a nonrational patching together of images – a monstrous mosaic of the cut-up real, pieced together by a machinic mind.

01:19 - I. The Pornographic Deepfake
03:08 - II. History and Myth
05:57 - III. Algorithmic Nonrationality
08:03 - IV. The Mourning Illness of Network Society