The Book of Veles explores disinformation and credibility in computer generated images.
Originally published in spring 2021 as a photobook about the Macedonian town Veles, where local youth ran hundreds of websites that pretended to be American news portals, earning quick cash and helping Trump get elected. This story also weaves in a sneaky pagan bear-god called Veles and the 1919 discovery of a forged ‘ancient’ manuscript. After the project circulated for months, a mysterious social media persona named Chloe Miskin revealed that the project itself was a forgery: all the subjects are 3D renderings and the text was written by the AI machine learning system GPT-2.
This NFT collection features all the project’s intriguing strands: The “journalistic” images, the “historical” documents, the AI text – as well as a unique model gallery where the 3D avatars and objects can be traced back to the original images.

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Jonas Bendiksen

The Book of Veles 021 - Evening streetscene by Jonas Bendiksen

The contemporary photo essay from The Book of Veles, telling the story of the fake news industry in Veles, north Macedonia. The town became a global epicenter for fake news production in during the Trump-Hilary election of 2016. After being published as a successful photo book in 2021, a mysterious social media persona named Chloe Miskin revealed that the entire project was a forgery: all the people and subjects in the book are computer-generated 3D models which Bendiksen had posed and inserted into empty backgrounds.

Edition: 1 of 1

Fellowship Studio

The Book of Veles 021 - Evening streetscene

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