AI tools applied to images have evolved rapidly during the last ten years. Today they are a medium that can alter your facial appearance on social media, or make you say things you don’t ever remember having said. If we understand how these tools work, we learn to develop the healthy skill of being suspicious of images – but what if we look at them from a creative perspective? Which situations would we like to see our digital double in? What possibilities open up when we start to imagine impossible lipdubs? Which cartoons would we like to talk about our problems? Can we intervene in the most iconic artworks? 

On 7 June, the Estampa collective will offer a participative talk that will reflect on, and put into practice, the creative possibilities and the implications of deepfakes, an AI technique that allows us to create videos of people – anonymous individuals or celebrities – saying or doing things they never said or did.

Within Digital Impact’s Oasi programme, Stelarc offers a keynote speech that takes as its starting point the new concept of embodiment the digital world offers. In the artist’s own words: In the liminal spaces of proliferating Partial Life, Synthetic Life and Machine life, the body has become a floating signifier. An empty signifier. The body now is no body at all. Performing increasingly remotely online, presence becomes problematic. Presence is marked by a double absence. Or perhaps absence is marked by a double presence. We are neither all-here-now, nor there all-of-the-time, but partly here sometimes and partly somewhere else at other times. We continuously slide between offline and online worlds, navigating from physical nano-scales to virtual non-places. The body increasingly inhabits abstract realms of the highly hypothetical and of streaming subjectivity. The digitial is not merely the realm of the digital. The dead, the brain-dead, the partially living, the yet to be born, the cryogenically preserved, the prosthetically augmented, synthetic live and artificial life, all now share a material and proximal existence. At a time that the body is threatened existentially by fatally being infected by biological viruses, what becomes apparent now is that the human species is confronted by the more pervasive ontological risk of being invaded by its digital entities and viral algorithms. The individual body achieves planetary escape velocity but the human can no longer achieve escape velocity from the machinic and digital realm.