True Lies, Deep Fakes: Platforms, Knowledge, and Alternative Communities

• Art/Photo
• Legal, Politics & Economics

It goes without saying that corporate platforms increasingly structure our reality and, in turn, our social and political lives. On these platforms––and in the more remote nooks and crannies of the internet––new regimes of truth are being cemented as the old ones crumble. While this is just the nature of a centuries-old cycle of knowledge production and reification, new questions have arisen about how the internet’s infrastructure itself impacts these processes and how it might be harnessed for something other than “red-pilling,” or the indoctrination of users into the views of the violent alt-right.

In order to address these questions, True Lies, Deep Fakes brings together a panel of practitioners––writer Rahel Aima, New Models cofounder Caroline Busta, artist/researcher Matt Goerzen, and artist Josh Kline––to explore online platforms, the social dynamics they engender, and alternative models for community building and artistic production. How do new models for aggregating and distributing information generate new ontologies of truthmaking and community?