Authenticity Unmasked: Unveiling AI-Driven Realities Through Art
AI-generated content is reshaping how we perceive truth and authenticity. From viral deep fakes to AI-altered political videos designed to manipulate public opinion, digital authenticity is increasingly uncertain. AI tools can even rewrite personal history, generating images of moments that never existed or altering past memories.
The three commissioned artworks presented at the exhibit will challenge our understanding of authenticity, engaging audiences in questions such as: When do we care if content is authentic? What shapes our perception of digital truth? How can we foster trust in digital media?
This commission programme is presented in collaboration with Adobe and the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), co-founded by Adobe in 2019 to enhance transparency and provenance in digital media.
The exhibition is part of the Edinburgh Fringe 2025 program [here] and Edinburgh Arts Festival 2025 [here].
The three commissioned artworks presented at the exhibit will challenge our understanding of authenticity, engaging audiences in questions such as: When do we care if content is authentic? What shapes our perception of digital truth? How can we foster trust in digital media?
This commission programme is presented in collaboration with Adobe and the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), co-founded by Adobe in 2019 to enhance transparency and provenance in digital media.
The exhibition is part of the Edinburgh Fringe 2025 program [here] and Edinburgh Arts Festival 2025 [here].
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Opening times
Mon-Sun, 7 – 17 Aug, 2025 10:00 – 17:00 | Free/Drop-In Location G.07 Informatics Forum, University of Edinburgh Address 10 Crichton St, Edinburgh EH8 9AB Venue access information G.07 Informatics Forum |
Featured Artworks
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Grokh Tung Tung
dmstfctn A series of characters embodying AI systems tell short stories drawing from real world examples of anomalous AI behaviours, including trickster tall tales and meandering jokes about "reward hacking". Through silhouette characters and an imitational language derived from the abnormal outputs of text-to-audio models, Grokh Tung Tung explores instances of unproductive misalignment - errors, shortcuts, and glitches - as a form of AI-native behaviour. Length of the piece: 10 minutes |
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The View from Above
Kinnari Saraiya The View from Above is a new commission that explores how artificial intelligence, weather systems, and mapping technologies shape our understanding of territory and power. Set within a virtual world rendered in real time, the work responds to collective user input and live atmospheric data to generate shifting environmental conditions—fog, light, wind, and rain. At the centre of this world is a camera tethered like a kite to a central axis, referencing the use of aerial surveillance kites by colonial powers to map, monitor, and dominate land from above. Today, those same mechanisms persist through platform infrastructures: APIs that redraw borders depending on who is looking, AI systems that interpret space according to inherited bias, and datasets that erase as much as they reveal. The View from Above questions how these systems author perception. It treats climate as interface, geography as computation, and visibility as political design. It does not ask who owns the land. It asks: who authors the sky? CREDITS Unreal Engine Development: Muhammed Babatunde & Matt Hutchings Weather System development: Harold Starr and Gabriel Langmaid, with support from The Mechatronic Library Kite fabrication support: Pankaj Saraiya The View From Above has been presented at the Summit Photo 2025 at the Royal Geographical Society, London, September 2025. |
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Mimetic Virtuosity
Georgia Gardner Comprising six performances, Mimetic Virtuosity explores discipline and love in classical music and the disembodied mimicry of generative AI in art and its affective impact. The dyadic films centre embodiment, recognising the coupling of musician and instrument as a sonic body: a body of commitment, discipline, and intimacy. Mimetic Virtuosity reflects on the familiar and esteemed image of the classical soloist, contemplating love, embodiment, and the somatics of music through a conversation with an instrument-less alternative. The sonic body of musician and instrument is disrupted by a machine listening rendition. Throughout the performances art is established as a site of reciprocity and self-recognition, and embodiment is established as a state of resistance. The machinic ear listens to the sound of embrace—bodiless, loveless. Confronting the emotional and cultural consequences of generative AI art replacements, Mimetic Virtuosity asks: what is art without love? CREDITS Double Bass: Cole Morrison performing Double Bass Concerto in F# Minor, movement II by Serge Koussevitzky. Violin: Momo Ueda performing Sonata for Solo Violin in D Major Op. 115: I, by Sergei Prokofiev. Classical Guitar: Finlay Anderson performing Introduction and Variations on a Theme by Fernando Sor. Recording and Mixing Engineer: Jolon Yeoman |
Artists
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dmstfctn
dmstfctn, (f.k.a Demystification Committee), is a London-based duo formed by Oliver Smith and Francesco Tacchini, working with installation, performance, films, and video games. Their work has focused on opaque systems of technology and power, most recently looking at anomalies in artificial intelligence. dmstfctn often directly involve audiences in their work, inviting them into the 'demystification' of systems by replicating and replaying them together, and into their 'remystification' by building worlds, characters and myths atop them. They have performed and exhibited internationally in venues such as Berghain, Serpentine, HKW and Onassis, and at festivals such as Unsound, CTM and transmediale. https://dmstfctn.net/ |
We've been searching for the deceptive characters role-played by AI systems for the last few years. We look forward to think back and think further on this with a new research community.
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Georgia Gardner
Georgia Gardner is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher from Scotland, working with research-driven performance, video, sound, and writing. Georgia’s practice explores embodiment, (dis)obedience, and intersecting forms of reproduction that create a social template for success. This template instigates a rhythm of other-oriented striving and quiets self-conceptions of worthiness. Queering this template that often correlates otherness with failure, Georgia’s practice spends time with our everyday, embodied, and empathetic rebellions. https://georgiagardner.com/ |
I am interested in researching how the central concepts of my practice interact with the developing technological ecology in the arts. Particularly, I am thinking about technomorality and how my artistic values—empathy, embodiment, and introspection—conflict with artificial production.
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Kinnari Saraiya
Kinnari Saraiya (b. Bombay, based in London) is an artist, curator, writer and thinker of the colonial present. She works within the gaps in knowledge, the inaccuracies of interpretations, the mistranslations of a text, where myth weaves around a historical narrative forcing the collision of pre-humanist thought and posthumanist desire. Through the recovery and binding of ancient and new tools, resources, and technologies, her work constructs a portal, a time capsule that helps define, find, create, escape, and imagine a fluid future. https://www.kinnarisaraiya.com/ |
I’m really excited to be part of this commission, experimenting with artificial intelligence, algorithms, and archives to build speculative stories and challenge how we remember, interpret, and imagine new futures.
Co-curators
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Caterina Moruzzi is the co-curator of the exhibition and the research lead of the project. She is a Chancellor's fellow in Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh and BRAID Research Fellow. Her research spans the fields of philosophy of art, human and artificial creativity, and the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence. As Co-Investigator in the UKRI-funded CoSTAR (Realtime Lab) and DECaDE projects, she investigates the disruptive effects that emerging technological innovations have on creative workflows. Caterina is Lead of the research cluster "Creativity, AI, and the Human" at the Edinburgh Futures Institute.
Personal website: click here [opens in a new tab] |
Image credit: Chris Scott
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Theodore Koterwas is the co-curator and producer of the exhibition. Theodore is an artist, designer and musician seeking to draw critical attention to aspects of daily experience that go unnoticed but profoundly impact on how we understand each other, technology and the environment. His AI generated interactive video installation The Nth Wave was shortlisted for the 2021 Lumen Prize for Art and Technology. Currently he is focused on physical interactions with artificial intelligence, utilising haptics, computer vision, deep reinforcement learning, and natural language processing to investigate the impact of embodied engagement on how we perceive, collaborate and empathise with ‘others’, both human and artificial.
https://www.designinformatics.org/person/theodore-koterwas/ |
