Miles Skarin directs a creepy deepfake music video for Steve Wilson
The use of deepfakes has become more common and convincing in recent years. While their needs have been dubious, their use in music videos has often yielded creative results. For example, in 2018 Charli XCX used simple deepfakes in her 1999 video to put her face on the Spice Girls and Troye Sivans on the Backstreet Boys. And just last year we wrote about the deepfake video by Bill Posters for Lil Uzi Vert's track Whassup, which cleverly parodied life under lock and key and featured many familiar faces.
It seems that the trend is still going strong, as evidenced by British musician Steven Wilson's new video for Self from his album The Future Bites. Filmed by longtime associate Miles Skarin, the video uses the open source deepfake system DeepFacelab – the same technology that created the Channel 4 Alternative Queen's speech last year – to turn Wilson into a range of personalities in the to transform public life.
In the clip, Wilson's face twisted into a number of famous faces in subtle ways as he sings, including Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Scarlett Johansson, David Bowie, Mark Zuckerberg, and many others.
The lyrics flash in red capital letters on the screen, while the rest of the video is kept in black and white for a smooth transition between faces. While Wilson sings about self-obsession and selfish acts, the effect is equally impressive and terrifying.
"In our early discussions about self-video, we talked about the concept of identity in the digital age, how your face is not only your key to much of the media you consume, but also who you are – or who you pretend to be in Your online roles, ”explains director Skarin.
“One of the most intriguing new developments in recent years has been the ability to create deepfakes, where a computer runs a machine learning algorithm to predict what one face would look like if someone else posed. Anyone with the right tools and skills can now transform into another. What does that mean for identity? "
For Wilson, this concept perfectly sums up the key themes behind the track. “Self is about our new age of narcissism and self-obsession, where a human race that used to look curiously at the world and the stars now spends much of its time looking at a small screen to watch itself again reflect the mirror of social media, ”he reflects.
“With that in mind, anyone can now participate in the concept of fame and have the potential to share their life with an invisible mass of people they will never meet. The video goes a step further by exploring the idea that anyone can now project a version or "self" that has no impact on reality, and by using only familiar faces, the delusion is made transparent. "
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