[Air-L] Deepfakes CFP

[Carl Ohman]

For those interested in Deepfakes and Synthetic media:

Forwarding a CFP in special Issue of ‘Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies’ on ‘The Digital Face and Deepfakes on Screen.’


CFP: Convergence Special Issue: “The Digital Face and Deep Fakes on Screen”

Deadline for Abstract Submissions: June 30, 2020

Deadline for Full Papers: January 5, 2021

“The Digital Face and Deepfakes on Screen”

Special Issue of Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

Guest editors: Lisa Bode (University of Queensland), Dominic Lees (University of the West of

England), Dan Golding (Swinburne University of Technology)

Expected date of publication: August 2021



The past few decades in high-budget screen production has seen the emergence of digital human

faces on screen. The iconic youthful likenesses of dead and aging stars have been painstakingly

recreated for advertising and film franchise prequels and sequels. Actors’ faces have been pasted

over those of stunt and performer doubles for sequences of breath-taking agility, or integrated with

animated animalistic or mechanistic bodies for the purposes of fantasy and science fiction. Such

sequences are notable for the time, labour, and technology required to make them, but in late 2017

things escalated: an open access machine learning application was released online, and the means

to quickly and easily replace or alter faces in moving images became readily available. Since then, socalled

‘deepfakes’ have proliferated on video sharing sites and social media, causing widespread

concern about consequences for persona rights, revenge porn, our perception of social and political

reality, and the potential to further undermine the democratic process in an era of ‘fake news’. Both

deepfakes and the digital human face more generally, raise multiple pressing concerns, which this

special issue seeks to explore.



This special issue examines how the technological processes of creating and altering the digital face

impact on screen cultures, on the reception of the moving image, and on social interactions through

the mobile screen. We seek papers that look at the ethical, philosophical and legal issues around the

use of deepfakes in public life, and those that may explore positive cultural and creative possibilities

for deepfakes and/or digital faces more generally.



The editors welcome contributions from a range of disciplinary perspectives that explore

questions such as:



• What are the implications of digital faces and/or deepfakes for screen labour markets, screen

production, visual effects workers, performers, or celebrity culture?

• To what extent are established legal or ethical frameworks challenged by or vital to approaching

the creation and circulation of deepfakes?

• What older ways of thinking about persona, likeness, the actor/character relation, or illusionism

might be useful for understanding digital faces and/or deepfakes?

• How do viewers respond to digital faces and/or deepfakes in different contexts? What factors

might shape persuasiveness, uncertainty, or suspicion in viewer responses?

• What are the gendered, racial, or other social identity issues around digital faces and

deepfakes?

• Are there distinct geographic, temporal, and cultural differences in the dominant uses and/or

discourse surrounding and/or reception of digital faces on screen?



Deadline for abstracts: June 30, 2020

Please send a 500-word abstract and a 100-word bio to the guest editors: l.bode at uq.edu.au;

dominic.lees at uwe.ac.uk, dgolding at swin.edu.au

Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to submit full contributions by January 5, 2021


Best

Carl Öhman, Ph.D Candidate
Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
41 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3JS, UK