AI assisted video and sound, 2024, 24:31
The unabashedly totalitarian and fascist leanings of Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and Project 2025, have served as the impetus behind developing an AI assisted video to visualize what it might be like to see Trump do a reading from Hannah Arendt's highly influential 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism . My concept was to create not a “deep fake” but perhaps a “shallow fake”, utilizing newly available, open-source software options which have enabled me to realize the work, that is purposefully rough, revealing the processes of AI technology rather than celebrating them. The result is an AI shallow fake video; over a series of appropriated clips of Trump taken from the internet, He reads Section One of Chapter 11, “The Totalitarian Movement: Totalitarian Propaganda.” The video was created using available AI tools found online, including TopMediaAI for text-to-voice emulation, and Wav2Lip v5, a free-to-use open source software available through Google Colab. Special thanks to creative and technical consultants Dennis Delgado and Remy Pijuan.