Without the right images, conspiracy theories would be only half as convincing. Thanks to artificial intelligence, fake images seem even more real. Is there a way out of the simulation? Two photographic artists explain.
The die is cast. Three rooms, measuring at least two meters by two, are located one behind the other on the ground floor of the temporary house of photography. From inside, projectors project like a slide show on the semi-transparent faces of the cube one irritating Internet image after another: images of the sky, images of landscapes, sometimes in black and white, often blurred, sometimes extremely pixelated.
Hallucinations Go Viral
With Orejarena and Stein's exhibition, their two-year series of exhibitions and events "Viral Hallucinations" begins on September 7, 2024. It is about measuring one of the dark sides of the Internet: conspiracy narratives, disinformation and radicalization campaigns on the Internet are decoded, and simulation techniques and current narratives are analyzed and presented using artistic and scientific means.
The exhibition “Tactics & Mythologies” opens with conceptual documentary photography and media art installations. These are not just glass cubes that seem to have fallen into the room as if a higher power had let them out of a cup. “The photos from the archive are sorted on the walls of the three-part transparent sculpture using a twelve-channel projection,” Henrich explains, “you can see what types of images convey the content of the conspiracy theory and what narratives are connected to it.” They correspond with large-scale landscape photographs and other photos by Orejarena and Stein, who have backgrounds in cognitive science and documentary photography.
The artist duo not only collected data online, but also took a road trip across the United States to document locations often linked to alleged visual evidence of the conspiracy narrative that humanity lives in a simulated reality, as in the film “The Matrix.” The map of the “American Glitch” guided their journey. In the glitch, the gap between reality and fiction, an error in the matrix manifests itself, proving the simulation. In the film “The Matrix,” the glitch is referred to as déjà vu.
The idea for their project came to them in 2019, during Donald Trump's term as US president, while they were washing vegetables in the kitchen, Stein and Orejarena tell WELT in an interview. In general, like many people at the time, they spent a lot of time in front of screens. "We were impressed by Peter McIndoe's conspiracy satire 'Birds Aren't Real'," Orejarena explains.
Illumination in the Deichtorhallen
In 2017, McIndoe sought to counter right-wing disinformation campaigns with his own conspiracy. He claimed that all birds were killed between 1959 and 1972 on orders from the US government and replaced with identical-looking drones that they used to spy on the population. Birds sit on power lines to recharge. Bird droppings on cars are used to track birds. John F. Kennedy was assassinated because he refused to continue shooting birds.
The satire was so successful that it found real fans, and it could also be wonderfully combined with the simulation hypothesis. “It was the first time we saw how false information, deliberately spread in a satirical way, inexorably made its way,” said Andrea Orejarena. Years later, the story of the Eiffel Tower fire went viral. The “photographer” of the alleged photographic evidence was an AI. It took time to put out the fire online.
Humor isn’t limited to satirical conspiracy theories, but it’s something that conspiracy theorists and serious extremists also use to promote their wares. Memes that convey questionable or even racist messages can also be satirical. “We like to think of the Internet as a contemporary version of the Jungian collective unconscious that we can all access and share in one place,” Orejarena says, “but it’s hard to imagine that everyone uses it in the same way.”
So there's a whole range of motivations for conspiracy theories, Stein adds: "It's a very original search for meaning, motivated by religion or life. Through a story, life takes on new meaning." So there's "the whole spectrum" of motivations: "Some want to manipulate in a malicious way, others have a poetic intention," he says. Stein doesn't mock the images.
The phenomenon that can be observed is that different conspiracy stories, some of them centuries old, which belong to humanity as rumors, according to Orejarena, are now spreading and combining at the speed of light. When collecting for their archives, they read all the comments on the images, often in series, including different perspectives on the same phenomenon. The artist explains: "You can practically see from frame to frame how the newly added shots and elements merge into new shots that were supposed to have been taken from a different angle."
The real satire, which results from the crossing of Hollywood with reality, corresponds to this everyday culture. "For example, the American army invited Hollywood designers to design artificial villages that were then used by the soldiers for training. This backdrop was then also used for Hollywood films," Orejarena describes in a photo from the catalog of the series "American Glitch", which the two published after the road trip.
Both artists point out that the conspiracies surrounding places that are quickly declared “secret” are in some way an afterburner of their project. They are primarily interested in the simulation and construction of truth and, in this context, the role that such places play for those who are collectively “against.” With their photographs, they have documented the desire for meaning, the thirst for meaning. It is essentially about the construction of truth and the ways in which it is produced.
Telling other people's stories?
That is why a second exhibition room presents another project by the artist duo. For their project "Long time no see", Stein and Orejarena worked for two years in Vietnam in a village founded together after the war by an American and a Vietnam veteran. The multimedia work was created there with the question of who has the right to tell the story of others shaped by violence and trauma over four generations, including the genetic consequences of the chemical warfare agent Agent Orange by the Americans in this lost war.
The photos and videos reflect the dreams and memories of the Vietnamese participants, offering a new perspective. A vision that is not dictated by the historiography of the United States or Vietnam, but rather results from an artistic impulse shared in direct collaboration with the local population.
In the broader context of critically examining the construction of truth and the creation of narratives, the new series of events and exhibitions "Viral Hallucinations" is part of the series, which begins with "Tactics and Mythologies" and also has an educational aim with a view to conspiracy theories. Curator Henrich attaches great importance to free events and reading material, such as a free booklet for the exhibition, explicitly aimed at young people and older people. These two groups are particularly vulnerable to disinformation and conspiracy theories online.
On Friday, 13 (!) September 2024, the Deichtorhallen invites you to the transdisciplinary symposium “Visual Elogies of Conspiracy”. Photographers, journalists, artists and researchers talk about how new types and dynamics of images emerge and circulate. It is also about the potential for critical artistic appropriation.
This will be followed on 14-15 September 2024 by a “worldbuilding workshop” entitled “Untangling the Narrative Ecologies of Conspiracy” led by Juan Diaz Bohorquez, European Director of the World Building Institute Berlin/Los Angeles, who has developed narrative design methods for film and media over the past 20 years. After an analysis, participants will create alternative holistic worlds and counter-narratives themselves. The workshop is free of charge and is also open to students.
