Protesters clench their fists, carry signs, march and talk to the camera in “They/Them.” But they’re doing so underneath an “Adobe Stock” watermark in Juan Obando’s riveting video installation now on view at Fiendish Plots.
For the 10-minute video essay from the Colombian artist who now lives in Arizona is a pointed examination of deep fakes, stock footage, AI and political and cultural manipulation in our oversaturated media era.
An important international artwork, “They/Them” comes to the west Lincoln studio of Nancy Friedemann-Sanchez that’s turned into a gallery for Fiendish Plots shows on the heels of its premiere at Paris’s Pompidou Center.
Obando’s work focuses on the intervention of social systems into culture and politics — a previous piece, for example, looked at the “crowds for hire” industry that provides paid “actors” working as crowds for political events and protests.
People are also reading…
As it takes on the use of stock footage in political advocacy videos, “They/Them” also could not be more timely in an election season where there have been multiple reports of stock footage used in political ads.
The question, “What if the (stock footage) image could speak?,” was, Obando said, what inspired the creation of “They/Them.” But its aim of giving the stock characters a voice is to look at the nature and use of stock footage used for political and cultural manipulation.
“It’s a very volatile market,” he said of the stock footage industry. “You’ll see them and then they can just go away in a minute. What if they could talk about that? And, especially in the U.S., they are used so much for political advertising and since this came out, I’ve seen some of these clips in news stories.”
To make “They/Them,” Obando gathered stock footage from multiple sources, primarily Adobe Stock, some of it free, some which was to be manipulated, purchased. He wrote the script that gives voice to the characters, who talk about what they’re doing, have done and their disconnection from reality.
On the most superficial level, that involves scenes depicting social unrest in the U.S. that is mainly produced abroad, from Milan, Ukraine, Latvia and Spain. Only one of the clips in Obando’s video is actually shot in the U.S.
A software program makes the stock image characters “speak,” many of them in the voices of famous actors cloned by AI off the internet, exposing the manipulation of sound as well as the stock images to try to illustrate something the deep fakes are not.
As it does so, “They/Them” delivers a warning about pervasive misinformation and image and fact manipulation that makes it difficult to believe what is being seen and heard. Heeding that warning is critical today for political reasons.
“They/Them” is on view at Fiendish Plots, 2120 Magnum Circle, through Oct. 31. The gallery is open from 1-4 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays or by appointment.