A Deepfake Revival
New York Resident artist Sarah Sweeney joins us over Zoom to talk about her residency and give us a preview of how the rest of her project, Conversations with my Deepfake Dad will pan out.
Tell us about your project, and how you utilized the CultureHub Residency
Resident Artist Sarah Sweeney
My project is called My Deepfake Dad, or Conversations with my Deepfake Dad. It's a project that's about where I developed a deep fake of my father's voice with a company called Resemble AI. I had some audio samples of his voice from Cassettes that he recorded a long time ago, and since I had just turned the same age when he died, I wanted to have a conversation with him, so I worked with CultureHub to make it all come together. During my residency, we created the first conversation in the series, which is written like a script and is based on information that I got through interviews with my mother and my sisters. So this version of my father in the first conversation is based on who they thought he was.
When I got to CultureHub, all I had was a script. That was it, and the most amazing thing about working with CultureHub is I had no idea what the visuals for this thing might be, or how it might live in the space, or even how to show anything that was sound based. So it was great to have Billy and Mattie help me figure out what this thing could actually be in reality.
Another important piece about working with CultureHub was helping me with the DeepFake Software because the way that it works is that you have to say the words, and it then gets converted into my father's voice. I tried to do it for a day or so and my voice just wasn't working. I often work by myself, and CultureHub is this incredible place where people are just so willing to help people, and Billy stepped up to the plate to complete the voice acting on my father’s behalf. I learned one of the best lessons I think I've ever learned is that when you work with somebody else there's such a surprise and appreciation for the thing other people do. Because when you're working by yourself you kind of know what's going to happen, and you know, you hope it's gonna work the way you want it to work. There were all these pieces of my dad that I just didn't even know how he would respond to, yet Billy took a script, and he made it into this incredible performance, and it really brought so much to my dad that I didn't have. I have never trusted anyone in my process like that before, and it was just such a lovely thing to have somebody bring this other amazing talent to the project and make it better.
Can you speak on your inspirations for creating this project?
One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently was that I was really interested in deep fakes and just playing around with them. Because when a new technology comes out, I'm really interested in what it can do and especially the ones that are visual where you can kind of puppet a person. What fascinates me is how they're part real and part imagined, like this weird version of reality, right? They're based on this real information so that’s kind of like a new and an old together. And I think that’s what was really interesting to me, like, what is a deep face? Right? We think it’s just about impersonating somebody else, which you can do in every way. But I think the way it joins old documentary stuff with something new and sort of imagined, it feels like the idea of being able to puppet something old is really compelling and an odd new thing with this sort of technology. There was the personal aspect of it too, being my dad, and reaching that particular age of my life when he passed. But I think I'm also really interested in what it means to have something old that can be manipulated at this moment.
How would you describe the engagement you received from the audience During the exhibition?
Projection created by Deadra Anthony
Again, I will say it was like a totally new thing, as I’ve never done any sort of performance of any kind before, so it was really special having an audience be there in a time-based way, and committed to the work. I think one of the things I found that was really special about CultureHub, is the way that CultureHub helps set the space for the intensity of listening that reflected what was gonna be asked of the people who came in, and what was created became a very intimate space. It was a very relaxed space, so being able to sit together with the audience and experience the conversation together was really amazing for me. And you know the beautiful, incredible collage that Deandra made just set the scene of warmth, and a space for thinking and feeling which I didn't understand how much intentionality goes into creating.
I thought the conversation that people had, and the questions people asked felt like we were all in it together. It was the first time it had been really out there in the world, and since we made it in a week I had no time to process how it felt or what it was, and so it was really kind of a revealing experience for me to have this first moment with this piece together in a room with all these people who are intentionally listening in and then asking some really beautiful and complicated questions of the piece. I’ve shared this piece with a couple of my classes, in a gallery space and over Zoom, but I think that this moment was my favorite. Maybe because it was new for me, but also because it felt so quiet and respectful, and it felt like it was happening in real-time. Which is really interesting, and I think the way the two different voices came from these two different speakers, back and forth, along with Billy turning off the projector just so we could all listen felt like such a really beautiful way to honor it and to make it clear that we are listening, and then we went back into the space that was kind of warmer and image-based, it was a really beautiful moment. It felt like a beautiful kind of emotional experience that we all went through together, it seemed important.
Tell us about a current artistic inspiration or obsession of yours!
So right now I'm kind of really interested in historical versions of sound and recording and presence. I’m really interested in spirit photographs, and how those are related, like the nineteenth-century spirit photographs, and I've been doing a lot more research into sort of the audio versions of those things. Thinking through how sound has in lots and lots of situations been a way to connect with a more spiritual world, and the kind of recording technologies of that. I am in this kind of odd world of belief. Right? This project itself is like, what does it mean to believe in something, and know it isn’t true at the same time, and whether that matters or not. Holding those two things in your brain at the same time is really complicated, and you know we think about spirit photography as a hoax, but like, I actually don't think it's totally a hoax for a lot of the people who were involved with it at the time, so again, what does it mean to use these technologies to show us something that we couldn't see, and what does it mean to believe? Something right? I think one of the things I've been most interested in this project has been hearing people say, “I lost myself in it.” and forgetting that the Deepfake itself was in fact not my father.
Do you have any plans for what's next artistically?
There are a total of six conversations and I'm currently working on the second one. The second one is based on the tapes of my father, so all the things he said that was captured on Cassette tapes. So I got those all transcribed, and then, based on the first conversation my mother found all of these letters of my dad's, and at Thanksgiving, she sat me and my sister down, and she was like “We're gonna go through these letters.” And I think that was because of some of the stuff that was in the first one, she didn't agree with. The goal with the second one is that everything that he says is something that he did say in some way or another in these letters or in his tapes, so it's a little bit of a different puzzle than the first one. There are these ways he actually spoke in these letters and in the tapes, so I'm really interested in like, how does that differ from the first one? What does it mean? I'm interested to see how much more complicated it is to create because it's such a small archive in lots of ways. What’s exciting to me is seeing how the first one is already influencing the second one. The last one is shaping this one, and the things that are confusing and different, and you know, didn't quite make sense in the first one are going to hopefully influence how this one's made, and then the next one. They kind of change along the way and I think the second one is gonna change because of a lot of that.
The third conversation will be based on empty chair therapy sessions that I've been doing with my therapist, where we sit there, and I imagine him in the other chair, and then we go through the kind of ideas and thoughts I am having.
The fourth one is gonna be with a medium I’ll be talking with, and having them tell me what they think he's saying at that moment. So I'm currently trying to work through what that will mean and where that will take place.
The fifth one will be using AI, feeding it as much information as I can about him, and seeing how it responds to me in a conversational setting.
The sixth one is actually inspired by the conversation we had during the Residency interviews, where Mattie said to me, “I think you need to go into the car and have these conversations with your dad because that's where they first started.” That really inspired me, so I’ve been going into the car and at first, using a cassette tape just like my dad used, which ended up being a huge headache. So I said to myself “My Dad was using the best tech at the time, so I’m going to do the same!” and I have since switched to voice memos. I hope that conversation becomes the echo of where these conversations originally came from.
Sarah Sweeney is a digital artist who explores photography and other documentary media through the lens of digital manipulation. Her work raises questions about the media objects we use to preserve our lives. She is an Associate Professor at Skidmore College. Sarah is a CultureHub NYC Resident (2022-2023).