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The Sounds of Deep Fake

Inspace, Edinburgh until August 28

Four stars

Finding one’s voice isn’t easy in the AI age. As the title of this state of art show implies, however, all that glisters is not necessarily authentic. Everest Pipkin’s ‘Shell Song’ is a push-button recorded monologue that takes in face blindness, talking books and a personal history of the recorded voice.

 

The Unit Test collective’s Samuel Beckett referencing ‘Not I’is a film based show and tell of Speech2Face, a new fangled construction that attempts to generate an image of a speaker’s face based on their recorded voice.

 

‘Whose voice is it?’ finds Holly Herndon, Never Before Heard Sounds and Rachel MacLean compiling a jukebox of machine age bangers generated by Holly+ creation, which puts voice cloning at its mechanical heart. 


Best of all is ‘All the boys ate fish’, Theodore Koterwas’ interactive installation that records and cuts up the voices of those speaking in front of it before playing back what it hears through underfloor speakers. The future just started to sound a lot more fun.


The List, August 2023


ends


 

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