sextape #78

“sextape” consists of an amateur pornographic video, found online and with no particular qualities, manipulated with deep fake algorithms so that the faces of Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion can be recognized. It plays with the tension of two radically opposed strategies of reputation-shaping: revenge porn (the sharing of a forged video to discredit and humiliate a person) and the voluntary leak of a real and exciting document by public figures in order to gain credibility and media visibility. The brutal evidence of this rectified ready-made clashes with its ambiguous nature: what is it, exactly? Why was it made, and why was it published?