Chapter Five: The Visual in an Era of Hyperreality and Disinformation: The Deepfake Video

In our discussion of postmodernism in the previous chapter, we began to explore how several emergent cultural arrangements of contemporary media, literary and entertainment practices, readership and spectatorship together make possible the aspect of fake news known as ‘deepfakes’. We build here on our key point that a creative culture that has embraced bricolage and pastiche in such a way as to bring together facts, truthful accounts and false or misleading material into a text that no longer warrants a referent or a grounding in verifiable sources. Although often critiqued separately from the wider issues of fake news and disinformation, the term ‘deepfake’ has emerged in the past half-decade to describe a significant new tool that draws on advancements in computer processing power to create and make available false and misleading visual material for both powerful creative or artistic purposes and for surreptitious use in creating and ‘proving’ disinformation.