To Dally with Dalí: Deepfake (Inter)faces in the Art Museum

This essay focuses on the nascent symbiotic relationship between deepfakes and art museums and galleries, as demonstrated by three case studies. The first one, housed at the Dalí Museum in St Petersburg, Florida, is a life-size talking avatar of the artist generated from archival footage. The second one, Warriors by James Coupe, revisits Walter Hill’s 1979 film of the same name using deepfake algorithms to insert visitors’ faces into key scenes, sorting them into gangs based on data-driven analysis of their demographic and economic markers. Finally, Gillian Wearing’s fake ad, Wearing Gillian, uses deepfake technology to enable a series of actors to appear on screen with the artist’s face as a way of interrogating questions of identity in a networked digital world. Based on these works, my article examines museums’ employment of deepfakes for advertising, audience engagement, and educational outreach, and the curatorial, ethical, and creative opportunities and challenges involved therein. While deepfake esthetics will be discussed wherever relevant, this is not a formalist analysis; my goal is not to focus on close readings of the deepfake pieces themselves, however fascinating their esthetics. Instead, I will look at the promotional and critical discourse around them in order to unpack the ways in which the acquisition of creative deepfake works by cultural institutions functions as a legitimizing force that is already shifting the narrative regarding the artistic value and social functions of this technology.