Sounds of deep fake exhibition

A new exhibition at Inspace Gallery is bringing together international artists working with sound and emerging technologies to explore deep fake audio.

Premiering as part of the 2023 Edinburgh Festivals, the exhibition is a collaboration between Inspace Gallery, the Institute of Design Informatics, and Creative Informatics.

Each artist asks what it means to synthesise and replicate reality, to bring together human and machine voices, and to literally put words into others’ mouths through their unique creative and critical perspectives.

The Sounds of Deep Fake includes three artworks and an associated exhibit featuring work with sound and emerging technologies to explore deep fake audio. The works ask what it means, personally and politically, to synthesise, clone and manipulate voices to replicate reality.

Participating Artist, Theodore Kotwerwas, said: “Right now, so many of these technologies are capturing the public’s imagination. There are a lot of news headlines and scare stories, so I think it’s important to cut through this hype to address AI in a way that people can engage with, and ask questions about, instead of just being given answers from experts, corporations or governments. It is also important for us as artists to engage critically and to engage people with this subject in an accessible way.”

Theodore’s interactive installation ‘All the boys ate fish’ brings the human body back into contact with voice clones to explore how feeling them vibrate through us changes our experience of them. Through this work, an artificial agent interacts with listeners through the floor, repeating what it ‘thinks’ the previous listener said in a voice cloned from them and prompting the current listener to speak. It then adds what it ‘thinks’ was said and begins cloning the new listener’s voice.

All the boys ate fish is titled after the phrase known to be used in the deep fake production process, that involves all the mouth shapes needed to make it convincing.

Nicola Osborne, Creative Informatics Programme Manager, said: “We are thrilled to be supporting this exhibition as part of our Creative AI demonstrator project, which is exploring the opportunities, challenges and implications of AI. These works bring AI, through Deep Fake, to life in beautiful, tangible and emotionally engaging ways that ask meaningful questions about what it means to create, collaborate and live with AI. Throughout Creative Informatics we have worked with creative people and companies to help them use data in new ways, supporting research and development but also understanding of complexity, ethical approaches, and the potential of new technology. We are excited for the potential of AI, and to see how artists and creatives can shed new light on our understanding and critical engagement with these complex technologies. It is a joy to see audiences respond to the works in The Sounds of Deep Fake and we hope they will find it as exciting, thought provoking and challenging as know this space to be.”