To Örebro University

In recent years, an increasing body of literature has turned its attention towards deepfakes. Deepfakes are AI manipulated images that can, with great sophistication, for example, place one person’s face onto another person’s body, blurring the boundary between the real and the synthetic. This marks deepfakes as potentially powerful tools for “fake news” and propaganda. With the help of open source, these technologies have also undergone a form of technological “democratization” making them available to pretty much anyone. These developments have led scholars to point out the political and ethical threats deepfakes pose to contemporary society.

This paper therefore particularly focuses on analyzing these visual artifacts from a feminist posthumanist and technoscientific perspective to contribute to the understanding of gendered dimensions in AI-generated media content. According to Venema (2020), women are especially exposed to becoming subject to deepfakes. However, previous research does not say much about how gender is constructed in the visual content. This study aims to fill these gaps by addressing the gendered dimension of AI technologies and AI-generated imagery, to contribute to better insights into the gendered dimensions of a technology on the rise. Specifically, the study asks – what visual strategies and discourses are materialized in the series and how is gender constructed in these videos?

The presentation investigates a political satire show – Sassy Justice, released on YouTube on October 26, 2020. The web series uses deepfake technology to portray the world of the fictional television reporter Fred Sassy as he encounters various politicians and celebrities. Behind the series are the creators of South Park – Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and Peter Serafinowicz. The study thereby intends to contribute to an understanding of constructions of gender in relation to both AI technology, political satire, and disinformation.

It is Saturday, September 9th 2017, and we are watching a family television show on Norwegian Public Broadcasting (NRK) – “Stjernekamp” (“Star Battle”). The show concept is having artists performing songs from different genres. Tonight’s genre is country music, a genre we only know superficially. The first artists all make decent performances and the mood in the sofa is good when the artist Aleksander Walmann enters the stage. To our surprise, tears are running down both our faces by the end of the first verse as he sings about heartbreak and how the lovers in the song “put a bottle to their heads and pull the trigger.” 

Studies about country music lyrics often point to the lyrical importance in setting the stage and how some topics are typical for country music lyrics, such as lost love, loneliness, memories, and nostalgia. Further, they often construct a closed narrative that rarely comments actual events in the real world (Jaret 1982; Neal 2007). One tool that is being used to construct these narratives with these topics is alcohol. Alcohol has been shown to be particularly common to describe both unhappy love, pain and anguish, loneliness and failure, and, conversely, enjoying life and a comfort (Connors & Alpher 1989). 

In this study we turn our focus to the different functions of alcohol in country music lyrics and explore the purposes and meanings of alcohol in the genre from 1990 up until today. Through a mixed methods approach, we have, first, quantitatively analyzed songs and album songs nominated for Country Music Awards (CMA) (N=1291). The qualitative analysis includes songs where alcohol plays a particularly important part. The lyrics will be analyzed through a narrative analysis and explored through Barthes’ concepts of myths; liquid modernity, and retrotopia (Bauman 2017).

This chapter explores the communicative, spatial and institutional in-between emplacements of graffiti in conversation with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of nomadology. It shows how Swedish graffiti writers relate to these in-betweennesses, through ethnographic fieldwork. Related to in-betweenness is the intervening character of graffiti. By intervening, refer to the moments when graffiti functions as disturbances of the hegemonies of the urban. This will entail a focus on what the makers consider themselves to be intervening in, why they are doing it, how they regard the city and how/if they envision other alternatives. The chapter provides an ethnographic exploration of how makers of graffiti are (de)territorializing urban space through aesthetic and spatial interventions in Stockholm. It suggests that writing graffiti can be considered performing a spatial and aesthetic politics. In terms of urban communication, aesthetic and space 'becoming-graffiti' is fundamentally subversive and exterior.