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The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
Anatomy of Non-Fact. Chapter 1: AI Hyperrealism
Credits: Courtesy of the Artists
Credits: Courtesy of the Artists
Credits: Kilian Blees
Credits: Martyna Marciniak
Credits: Martyna Marciniak
Credits: Martyna Marciniak
Credits: Martyna Marciniak
AI Hyperrealism is the first chapter of the Anatomy of Non-Fact project informed by independent forensic, technical, visual, cultural and historical research. The project is a response to the increasing threat posed by synthetic, image-based disinformation.
The work follows Jean Baudrillard's notion of ‘proving the real through the imaginary, (...) art through anti-art’, and seeks a definition of aesthetics of fact through investigation of fakes and hoaxes.
This first chapter focuses on the fake Balenciaga Pope, which captured the attention and imagination of many during the so-called ‘AI boom’ of 2023. In the nearly 18-minute video, mechanisms of AI-generation, visual journalistic languages, and digital cloning are augmented, partly stultified, and reified.
A monologue reflecting on the nature of fact, and delivered by the Balenciaga Pope, speaks to the mounting concern with synthetic images’ potential to provoke mass-misinformation events.
Meanwhile as photographic images become fed into AI models as raw data or reflection of reality, the Balenciaga Pope calls for a reconsideration of the still unresolved relationship between photographic images and truth.
In the video, elements of slapstick comedy are employed to point out the absurdities of the established aesthetics of trust including techno-optimism and evidentiary notations.
A series of definitions, old and new, inform the project’s unique lexicon. They are woven throughout the video piece, de-anthropomorphizing the existing AI-related terminologies, and re-naming phenomena connected to issues of misinformation.
In the exhibition space, the audience becomes confronted with a materialized version of the Balenciaga Pope’s coat, glasses, cross and ring: the impossibilities, lapses and glitches of the synthetic artefacts are physically reconstructed, while references to history of visual truth, from baroque to the recent AI-generated blobsters, are embroidered in the coat’s lining.
Links: https://www.martyna.digital/projects/anatomy-of-non-fact-chapter-1
Written, produced, and directed: Martyna Marciniak
Balenciaga Pope played: Derrick Jenkins
Hands played: Rojia Forouhar Abadeh, Martyna Marciniak, Kotryna Slapsinskaite
Sound design and score: Marco Pascarelli
Production management: Kotryna Slapsinskaite
Videography: Hagen Betzwieser
Design consultancy: Edward Grace, Joanne Grace
Technical consultancy: Jan Schluter from Johannes Kepler University
This work was released in part within the framework of the European Digital Deal Residency program at Ars Electronica with support of the Creative Europe Culture Programme of the European Union.
Martyna Marciniak (PL) is an artist and researcher. Her practice is informed by a critique of political structures, research on systemic violence and their visual strategies. Her practice bridges media theory, and legal imaginaries to trace how power inscribes itself through image regimes and visual narration infrastructures. Her work engages in a form of dataforensics—poking at the tropes of scientific and forensic aesthetics, revealing their uncertainties, contradictions, and lapses. Oscillating between sculpture, video, and animation, she writes visual counter-histories, and smuggles in other ways of seeing.
The first Award of Distinction is awarded to Anatomy of Non-Fact, Chapter 1: AI Hyperrealism by Martyna Marciniak, a complex and multi-layered analysis of what we consider to be an image today. As the first chapter of an ongoing exploration of image-based disinformation, the work takes the figure of the fake Balenciaga Pope as a starting point to map out a vast and entangled web of art historical, pop cultural, and media theoretical references. Interwoven throughout the 18-minute video, these references confront the audience with their own entanglement into the ‘social authority’ of technological media and provoke a rethinking of the century-old relationship between image and truth. In doing so, the artist points out a practice that dwells on and exploits the difficulties and inconsistencies, arising from a critical and timely research that is deeply engaged with the present moment and the fallacies in what we receive as truth.