Can you make new photographs of someone who is dead? Can you talk to them? In this series of photographs and conversations I use digital tools and AI to try to answer this question and conjure my father who died thirty years ago.
Conversations with My Deepfake Dad
My father died when he was forty-four and I was seventeen. He was a screenwriter who used a tape recorder to take notes about his work and life. A year ago I turned forty-four and wanted to talk to him again. I reached out to Resemble AI, a company that creates clones of voices using machine learning, to discuss the possibility of creating a deepfake of my father’s voice. Over the next several months, I found six hours of his recordings and worked with Resemble AI and my mother to think through the ethical and technological challenges of recreating my father’s voice. When the model of his voice was completed I was able to type and speak words into the interface and hear him speak.
Conversations with My Deepfake Dad is a series of six conversations created through my interactions with the audio deepfake of my father. Part of this project will be visiting family members, Gestalt therapists, spiritualists, and others who can help me imagine what these conversations would have been. From the information I collect, I will write and record six different conversations with my dad.
Conversation One: Interviews
Based on interviews with family
What did you love? What did you hope for? What do you regret? What do you miss most? How did you die?
Conversation Two: Letters & Recordings
Based on archival audio tapes and letters
What were you struggling with? How well did we know you? How do you feel about me listening to your tapes?
Photographs of My Deepfake Dad
I start each experiment in this series with found archival objects: super 8mm films, polaroids, formal wedding photographs and 35mm photographs from the 70s, 80s and 90s. I take each found image through a series of transformations, making snapshots into sculptures, freezing video frames and enlarging them as portraits, and capturing projections on film. Along the way I use analogue photography, digital manipulation and artificial intelligence to augment, animate, sculpt and erase. In the final photographs film grain and jpeg artifacts mark the different stages and forms–analog, digital, projection, film, print, sculpture–reminding us that each image is a pastiche of time and place.
In all of the photographs in this series my father seems to slip away. His face and figure are recognizable but also not quite his own. He comes in and out of focus, his body blurs as it moves, and in his most clear form his eyes are closed or not looking at the camera. Throughout the series I am trying to find him but he remains elusive and difficult to capture. In the companion piece Conversations with My Deepfake Dad, my father says that he is both here and not here. In these photographs he occupies a similar space–he has been found and made visible but also remains lost and invisible.
