Tarantella, tarantula: one’s a lively folk dance and the other’s a fuzzy arachnid, but they are linked by a bizarre common history. Once upon a time, the lightning-fast footwork of the Italian pizzica tarantella was the symptom of a terrifying malady, supposedly caused by a spider bite. Read on to discover the dancing plague and musical cure of medieval southern Italy.

Amelia lives in Chicago and writes the column ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ for JSTOR Daily.

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Amelia Soth

@AmeliaSoth

Author

Image gallery

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La Tarantella; woman in costume dancing

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How the symptom of a terrifying sickness became a lively folk dance in southern Italy.

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Woodblock: Ambrosia altera

Explore stories inspired by the objects, manuscripts and more in our archives.

Stories inspired by the objects, manuscripts and more in our archives.

Inside Our Collections

Southern Italy’s centuries-long dancing mania

Rob Bidder is an artist based in south-east London and a Visitor Experience Assistant at Wellcome Collection. He also plays music in a ramshackle manner. He is a Gemini with a Libra ascendant.

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Rob Bidder

@robertbidder

Artist

Comic

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Past thoughts, feelings and experiences are but the basic ingredients for future ideas

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Sport

Body Squabbles

Ideas

Being deceived isn’t always a case of believing a lie told to us by someone else. Experiments have shown many of us can come to see our own fictions as truth – as in the famous case of the fake 9/11 survivor.

Tania Head was everything that the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network needed as a public face for the cause: she survived the 9/11 attack, she was compassionate, hard-working and likeable. She also seemed scrupulously honest and generous – she never accepted any money for her campaigning work and donated considerable sums to the group. She also understood the power of public engagement, so she invited the filmmaker Angelo Guglielmo to make a documentary about the survivors connected to the charity. What happened next was unexpected and deeply troubling.

In 2007, the New York Times contacted the network, looking for an inspiring profile to lead on its sixth anniversary coverage, and they had no hesitation in recommending Head – she was the obvious choice. As the normal background checks were being made for the article, something didn’t stack up. Head had claimed to be working for Merrill Lynch when the attacks took place, but the company wasn’t based in the buildings at the time. She’d also claimed to be a graduate of both Stanford and Harvard, but neither institution had heard of her.

Was it just a case of an embellished CV, or were all of Head’s claims now suspect? As the NYT and Guglielmo dug further, it became astonishingly clear that Tania Head was not a survivor of 9/11. She’d made the whole thing up – including her story about the day of the attack, in which she attributed a pre-existing burn on her arm to an injury sustained during her escape.

Tania Head is in fact Alicia Esteve Head from Spain. On 11 September 2001 she was nowhere near New York and reportedly attending a class for her master’s degree at ESADE, an educational institution in Barcelona. 

Guglielmo’s film soon shifted gear from a portrayal of genuine trauma into one that tracked the slow reveal of Head’s deception, but it was a task he undertook with a heavy heart. Like many others, Guglielmo had grown fond of her, and he had genuinely admired her work for the network.  

In 2008 it was reported via a mysterious email that Head had committed suicide. However, she was spotted again in New York in 2011 with her mother. In 2012 she was reported in the Spanish press as having lost her job at an insurance firm in light of the publicity surrounding the revelation of her ruse – Guglielmo’s documentary ‘The Woman Who Wasn’t There' came out that year. Her whereabouts are currently unknown.

Like a method actor who lost track of their original self, did she start to believe the lies she was telling about her new heroic persona?

Was Head simply telling lies, or can her bizarre fraud be attributed to a pathological form of self-deception, which should actually provoke a sympathetic response? There are many psychological disorders listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) – the ‘psychiatrist’s bible’ – that perhaps point towards a definition of such a condition. 

When experiencing a delusional disorder, patients struggle to tell what is real or imagined. In a histrionic personality disorder, sufferers are characterised by patterns of attention-seeking behaviours that result from an excessive need for approval. And then there is the controversial condition of pathological lying, referred to diagnostically as pseudologia fantastica, where a person tells incessant lies that are mostly aimed at inflating their own importance. 

However, there is no consensus on the condition, since there are conflicting ideas about whether such behaviour is wilful or automatic (and thus unintentional).  

I’m not a psychiatrist, so I should probably stop there in my amateurish attempts to diagnose a serious case. All the same, it seems to me that there is more to such extreme deceptive behaviour than meets the eye. 

After all, we all tell lies from time to time, so was Head’s alternative life narrative just an exaggerated version of what we all do? Like a method actor who lost track of their original self, did she start to believe the lies she was telling about her new heroic self? And if so, what does such an extreme case tell us about our own tendencies to self-deceive? 

False confessions and forced fabrications

In a 2018 study by the psychologist Laura Paige, 42 experimental participants filled out a questionnaire about what they were doing the day before; however, on half the questions they were told to tell a lie. Forty-five minutes later they had to fill out the same form again, but this time only give true answers to the questions. After being questioned at a later stage, some came to believe that the original lies were in fact truths – particularly participants in the older age bracket of 60 to 92. 

Data derived from the respondents’ brains’ electrical activity also illustrated that the act of lying engaged the parts of the brain responsible for working memory – it was as if the original lies had infected the ‘truthful’ recollections, thus resulting in the innocent confusion later in the experiment. 

When it comes to more substantial lies involving whole events, it seems the same applies. In a landmark 2008 study into forced fabrication by Quin Chobrak and Maria Zaragoza, participants were asked to invent entire accounts of fictitious events in their lives, including experiences with people, locations and events they’d never seen. 

Their initial response was resistance – participants felt uncomfortable about creating such reports, but from within the ethical confines of the psychology lab they were ‘forced’ to do it. A week later those involved were still able to clearly identify their invented fake story against true accounts. 

After eight weeks the response was markedly different. Nearly 50 per cent of those who took part freely reported their forced fabrications as real, even if they had refuted them at the earlier week-one test. The original source of the information in the form of a lie had become lost in the minds of the participants.

Lawyer Justin Brooks with an Innocence Project client, Tim Atkins, outside a courthouse.

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Justin Brooks and CA Innocence Project client Tim Atkins outside courthouse

Such an automatic propensity to believe knowingly false information has major implications in a legal setting. Police interviewers have often used false stories to trigger an association, or used misinformation that will confuse a suspect. After lengthy interrogations, what is recognised as ‘truthful’ becomes blurred and can on occasion lead to false confessions. The Innocence Project has worked tirelessly to exonerate those who have falsely confessed under such conditions and forensic psychologists now train police in interview techniques that negate such risks, by referencing deceptive experiments like those described above. 

If original known lies can unconsciously become truths then there are obviously potential consequences in our private and public lives. The example of Tania Head could be seen as a more extreme playing-out of such a phenomenon, if indeed there was an original point when she recognised her lies for what they were. 

The implications for the political realm are also stark – what seem like obvious lies to some of the electorate might feel like hard truths to the politician and their supporters. 

What such studies teach us is that under certain conditions a significant percentage of the population can come to believe ‘as true’ false information that they have originally created. It’s tempting, then, to conclude that such a cognitive flaw can only ever be used for harm and that we should very simply always endeavour to just tell the truth. But is there something in our ability to unknowingly self-deceive that can actually be used positively? 

In the final part of this series, I’ll be asking whether it could be ethically justifiable to use our tendency to be deceived by others and by ourselves, in a clinical setting to improve our health.

A R Hopwood is an artist and Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellow. He has collaborated extensively with experimental psychologists to create art projects about memory, belief and misdirection including WITH and the False Memory Archive. He is co-curator of ‘Smoke and Mirrors: The Psychology of Magic’.

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A R Hopwood

A R Hopwood's website

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False memory archive: Crudely erased adults (lost in the mall)

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Being deceived isn’t always a case of believing someone else’s lie. Experiments have shown that many of us can be manipulated into accepting our own fictions as true.

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Artist A R Hopwood examines the applications of deception in visual culture, the therapy room, and the science lab and asks: are there any circumstances under which deception can be justified?

Is fake news killing fictive art?

Rose Mackenberg’s deceptive activism

Lost in the mall and other false memories

Manipulating the evidence with deepfake technology

When self-deception becomes global hoax

Believe yourself better

The political consequences of widespread misinformation are becoming ever more apparent, and anyone using deceptive strategies in their work should take extra care. In this series, artist A R Hopwood examines the applications of deception in visual culture, the therapy room, and the science lab and asks: are there any circumstances under which deception can be justified?

The Ethics of Deception

It’s tempting to diagnose famous figures from the past using modern definitions of mental health conditions. But without a fuller picture in the person’s own words, revealing what they thought and felt, the retrospective psychologist is on shaky ground. 

I suffer from OCD, a hugely misunderstood and trivialised psychiatric condition, as well as periods of severe depression, and I understand the desire to seek past figures with whom to identify. It can be comforting to know that your suffering has a history. But we tend to make assumptions about historical figures, who in fact inhabited very different mental worlds from our own.

In ‘Diagnosing the Past’, I introduced the pitfalls of retrospectively diagnosing diseases from written sources. Here, I will examine the diagnosis of mental disorders in the past – ‘retrospective psychiatry’ – using the modern classification ‘obsessive compulsive disorder’ (OCD) as a case study. 

In the 1520s Ignatius of Loyola, the Spanish theologian and founder of the Jesuits, produced his ‘Spiritual Exercises’, a work of prayers and meditations to guide those undertaking religious retreats on their spiritual path. In this, Ignatius wrote: “After I have stepped on that cross, or after I have thought or said or done some other thing, there comes to me a thought from without that I have sinned, and on the other hand it appears to me that I have not sinned; still I feel disturbance in this; that is to say, in as much as I doubt and in as much as I do not doubt.” 

Some people see this as evidence that Loyola suffered from OCD. But taking evidence written in a specific context and for a certain purpose to make a medical diagnosis flattens out the interesting aspects of the suffering of individuals in their own contexts.

Retrospective psychiatry sprang out of an Enlightenment ideal to replace ‘religious’ explanations with ‘scientific’ ones. It is an interesting phenomenon in psychiatry’s development, but ultimately tells us more about the psychologists doing the diagnosing than any of their historical subjects. 

Mental disorders are without doubt the most difficult conditions to retrospectively diagnose. There is, at present, no way to gather physical evidence (from bones or other physical remains) for modern mental disorders. And writers noting down which behaviours were considered abnormal or deviant depends on societal context.

Charles Darwin suffered throughout his life with a variety of mental and physical symptoms, including obsessive thoughts about his and his children’s health.

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Charles Robert Darwin

Additionally, much less is understood about psychiatric illnesses than physical disorders even in the present day: if our modern categories are prone to change – the medical guidelines are updated every few years, after all – then it is even harder to apply them to people in the past. 

Madness did not always equal illness in the way we understand it today. What we might interpret now as mental distress might, centuries ago, have been a way to prove saintliness or demonic possession. It could have resulted from a superfluity of humours, an excess of study, a lack of sex, or it could be the consequence of Divine punishment.

More: Read about how confession was considered good for your health in the medieval period.

Also, because much of the written evidence we have about past figures was not committed to paper by those people themselves, we don’t know how they actually felt, which is crucial in the modern diagnostic process. Diagnosis now involves a dialogue between doctor and patient, recording how the patient thinks and feels in their own words.

Armchair psychiatry isn’t just a problem for long-dead subjects: it has officially been deemed unethical for psychiatrists in the present day to speculate about the mental condition of a notable living figure they have not examined in person. So taking a step even further away and diagnosing a person who existed in a completely different time and place is even more fraught with complications.

In the media, OCD is often trivialised as a perfectionist quirk that might make a character clean a lot or continually flick light switches. In reality, OCD is a serious and debilitating – but highly treatable – anxiety disorder. It is an extremely distressing and time-consuming condition that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with being orderly or clean.

OCD can be diagnosed when a person has both obsessions and compulsions. Obsessions are recurrent and persistent thoughts, urges or impulses that are experienced as intrusive and unwanted, and usually cause anxiety or distress. An obsessional worry could be: “What if I have contaminated that person simply by touching them?” Questions tend to begin with “what if?” and are impossible to answer with complete certainty. The person experiencing them attempts to ignore or suppress them or tries to neutralise them with some other thought or action, such as a compulsion.

Martin Luther was said to have experienced ‘obsessive scrupulosity’ and ‘compulsive confessing’. 

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Martin Luther

Compulsions are the repetitive actions we take to try and alleviate the worry, and might include hand-washing, ordering or checking, or mental acts such as praying, counting or repeating words silently. A person performing a compulsion is responding to an obsession, and does it according to their own rigid rules. 

A person with OCD believes that performing a behaviour or mental act will reduce anxiety or distress, or prevent some dreaded event or situation. But compulsions are not connected in a realistic way with what they are designed to neutralise or prevent, or are clearly excessive. Sadly, compulsions simply fuel obsessions by providing short-term relief without a long-term solution. 

Sometimes seen as a predecessor of OCD, scrupulosity is an intense preoccupation with moral or religious matters. The first known public description of scrupulosity occurred in 1691 in a sermon by Bishop of Norwich, John Moore. Moore called it “religious melancholy”, and described sufferers as having: “… a flatness in their minds ... which makes them fear, that what they do, is so defective and unfit to be presented unto God, that he will not accept it ... They experience naughty, and sometimes Blasphemous Thoughts which start in their Minds, while they are exercised in the Worship of God ... despite all their endeavours to stifle and suppress them ... The more they struggle with them, the more they increase.”

This sounds like OCD: a cycle of obsessional questioning and compulsive attempts to push the thoughts away, leading to a worsening of the problem. 

So does it make sense to map OCD onto religious melancholy? Put simply, no. The quote above cherry-picks the parts that fit the argument for OCD from a much longer, more complex work. 

People with OCD can of course experience obsessive religious thoughts, but that doesn’t mean that religious melancholy was OCD. What Moore described was a religious and moral issue, with a religious solution, specific to the beliefs prevalent at the time. The modern diagnosis of OCD is an anxiety disorder with a behavioural and often medical solution – the treatments with the best evidence base are cognitive behavioural therapy with exposure and response prevention, and sometimes medication such as SSRIs. 

Martin Luther (1483–1546), a key player in the Protestant Reformation, is one of those retrospectively diagnosed with OCD. In 1958, psychologist Erik Erikson wrote ‘Young Man Luther’, diagnosing Luther with, among other things, “obsessive scrupulosity” and “compulsive confessing”. Much of Erikson’s evidence didn’t come from Luther himself, though: his conclusion rested heavily on the writings of Luther’s protégé, Philipp Melanchthon. For example, Melanchthon stated:

‘The Life & Acts of Martin Luther by Philipp Melanchthon’, p.9

“often when contemplating the wrath of God, as exhibited in striking instances of His avenging hand, suddenly such terrors have overwhelmed [Luther’s] mind, as almost to deprive him of consciousness; and I myself have seen him whilst engaged in some doctrinal discussion, involuntarily affected in this manner, when he has thrown himself on a bed in an adjoining room, and repeatedly mingled with his prayers the following passage ‘God has concluded them all in unbelief that he might have mercy upon all.’”

Luther’s fear for his own salvation and repetition of prayers and mantras have been taken as evidence for a diagnosis of scrupulosity by some, but this alone isn’t enough to make a firm diagnosis: and this key piece of evidence does not come from Luther himself.

Writer John Bunyan (1628–88) is another candidate. Several 19th-century psychologists examined his life and works, and diagnosed him with a range of mental pathologies, including scrupulosity. This was most recently emphasised in Christian psychiatrist Ian Osborn’s 2008 book ‘Can Christianity Cure Obsessive Compulsive Disorder?’. But, as Paul Cefalu, Head of English at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, pointed out in 2010, “although early modern theologians do manifest scrupulosity, such religiosity was a culturally acceptable, even recommended component of spiritual progress, a necessary means of receiving an unmerited bestowal of God’s grace.” 

Exaggerating these parts of Luther and Bunyan’s characters, then, would have been a way of emphasising their sanctity and piety; and, crucially, their suffering was regarded as positive.

Samuel Johnson, according to his author James Boswell, had tics such as skipping over cracks in the pavement.

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Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson (1709–84), the polymath most famous for his dictionary of 1755, has been retrospectively diagnosed with both OCD and Tourette’s syndrome (the two often occur together). The evidence presented for this diagnosis comes almost solely from ‘The Life of Samuel Johnson’ by James Boswell, published in 1791. Boswell followed Johnson around, making copious notes, so we have good evidence of Johnson’s outward compulsions and tics: skipping over cracks in the pavement and touching doorknobs. 

But we have very little autobiographical material revealing how Johnson felt and thought. What is presented as evidence in his own words is either from prayers or novels that he wrote (which are hardly representative of an author’s true feelings), or reported speech via Boswell. So it would be unfair to Johnson to assume that his tics were a reaction to obsessive thoughts.

Charles Darwin (1809–82) suffered throughout his life with a variety of mental and physical symptoms. Keen to pinpoint the explanation, various scholars have retrospectively diagnosed him with OCD, as well as Asperger’s syndrome, panic disorder with agoraphobia, and psychosomatic illness. So there is hardly a consensus as to what caused these multiple issues.

However, we do know from Darwin’s own words that he suffered with obsessive thoughts about his and his children’s health, and displayed what could be called compulsions: reassurance-seeking from others, repeating mantras, and checking behaviours. But Darwin was very much a product of his own time and place. A much better question to ask than “Did Darwin have OCD?” is “How did Darwin and those around him conceive of and deal with his suffering?”

The most important point to make in conclusion is that these individuals (and many others in the past) suffered greatly with whatever afflicted them: Luther and Bunyan’s tortured worry over their salvation, Johnson’s tics, Darwin’s health fears. For me – someone who has been through intense periods of mental suffering in the present day – that is enough with which to identify.

For more information or advice on OCD please contact OCD Action or OCD-UK. 

Dr Joanne Edge is a historian who specialises in late-medieval and early modern European social and cultural history, with an emphasis on medicine and the ‘occult’ sciences: divination, magic and astrology. She did her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the University of London, and afterwards held a four-year postdoctoral position as Assistant Editor on the Casebooks Project at the University of Cambridge She is currently Latin Manuscripts Cataloguer at the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester.

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Joanne Edge

@hagenilda

Thomas is a London-based photographer working for Wellcome. He thrives when collaborating on projects and visual stories. He hails from Italy via the North-east of England.  

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Thomas SG Farnetti

Thomas S G Farnetti

Photographer

Essay

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Read about how it’s also dangerous to retrospectively diagnose figures from the past with physical conditions.

Discover a personal account of living with OCD in Hattie Porter’s ‘Unthinkable : a zine about managing OCD and intrusive thoughts’.

Visit the exhibition ‘Misbehaving Bodies’ and reflect on the challenges of living with a chronic condition.

Mining the writings of and about famous historical figures, retrospective psychologists try to diagnose their mental health problems. But, inevitably, partial evidence is open to misinterpretation.

Diagnosing OCD in the past

Kathleen Vaughan believed that a pregnant woman ‘must regard herself as an athlete in need of training for her special job’. Top obstetricians considered her advice ‘constructive hygiene at its best’ – so what did the first modern ante-natal exercises involve?

Angela is a Research Development Specialist at Wellcome Collection with a background in film and sound archives. She has worked with artists and television producers on various archive film led projects. She co-curated ‘Here Comes Good Health’ and works with the exhibitions, publishing and policy teams on sourcing collections material.

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Angela Saward

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'Childbirth as an athletic feat' a film by Kathleen Vaughan

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Desperate housewives and suburban neurosis

Read about 1950s doctors’ fears that labour-saving devices might drive housewives mad and harm their children.

Read ‘Safe childbirth; the three essentials’, written by Kathleen Vaughan in 1937.

Being Human

Plan to visit the new ‘Being Human’ exhibition when it opens this autumn, and reflect on how the environment affects our health in many different ways.

Is childbirth an athletic feat? Kathleen Vaughan certainly thought so, developing the first modern exercise class for women in pregnancy.

The birth of ante-natal classes

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Ghost

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It's hard being a ghost when a silent 'boo' is all you have.

Even the dead aren’t safe from digital reanimation and political manipulation. As technology makes it ever easier to twist reality, we face an increasingly urgent question: what are the ethical implications of the ‘deepfake’?

I remember seeing it for the first time. I was sitting on the sofa with my partner in our old flat watching TV. We were both occasionally glancing at our phones (like you do) when she turned to me and said “you’ve gotta see this”. She held her phone out in front of us on selfie mode and told me to align my face on the screen with one of the two small smiley icons – she did the same. The phone took a long, deep breath until it spat out a startling, uncanny image. The camera was still recording the scene in front of it, but we’d changed – our faces had been swapped onto the other person’s head and we were experiencing the illusion in real time. As I moved my body her face moved with it; as I spoke her jaw seemed to track my speech. In a few seconds I’d lost my double chin and regrown my hair, whereas she’d changed from an elegant beauty into someone who resembled an Amish-styled Nosferatu. 

Despite my initial squeals of delight at such wackiness, I actually found the experience of seeing my likeness so convincingly superimposed onto someone else unsettling. I’d not long started my research into false memory and had grown fascinated by a 2002 experiment by Dr Kimberley Wade that explored for the first time how doctored images could affect memory.

More: Designing death in the virtual city

In the study she presented a fake photograph to participants of them enjoying a hot air balloon ride as a child, alongside a series of real images from their past. After subsequent interviews, around 50% of those who took part in the study could remember the false event. As I sat looking at real-time face swap technology for the first time, I couldn’t help but imagine how such extraordinary developments in image doctoring could be used to engineer convincing false memories in far more potent contexts.

Using false photographs to create false childhood memories, experiment by Dr Kimberley Wade

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From Using false photographs to create false childhood memories, experiment by Dr Kimberley Wade

Wade’s balloon study was the first in a number of image-led psychology experiments that explored how faked evidence can work alongside suggestion from an authority figure to create false memories. But when the encounter with a doctored image is in an everyday setting, the influence is still more profound. 

In 2010 the cognitive psychologist Steven Frenda designed a series of doctored political images in collaboration with the US online magazine Slate. This included one of Barack Obama shaking hands with the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a faked photograph of George W Bush holidaying with a baseball celebrity during the Hurricane Katrina disaster. The images weren’t declared as fakes – readers were simply asked to report whether or not they remembered the events depicted and then fill in a short questionnaire that established their political orientation. 

More liberals remembered Bush’s insensitivity and a higher percentage of conservatives recollected Obama’s controversial handshake.

Over 5,000 people took part; 50% remembered the ‘events’ happening and 27% recollected seeing the stories play out on the news. Most significantly, more liberals remembered Bush’s insensitivity and a higher percentage of conservatives recollected Obama’s controversial handshake.

This startling study was the first to link false memories elicited by faked photographs with pre-existing political beliefs. However, it only looked at the impact of static images. What if equally convincing fake video footage had been used? Would the effect have been more powerful? Does such technology exist?

Supasorn Suwajanakorn from Vistec University in Thailand is a computer scientist at the vanguard of video-doctoring technology.

In 2017 his study Synthesizing Obama: Learning Lip Sync from Audio he presented highly-convincing doctored videos of Barack Obama giving a fake presidential address. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) he created controllable 3D representations of Obama from data derived from thousands of photographs and videos. 

One of Suwajanakorn’s original ambitions in developing the tech was to bring significant people ‘back from the dead’ by presenting highly-convincing 3D representations of them to new audiences. During his TED talk, he said of the theoretical physicist Richard Feynman: “wouldn’t it be great if you could bring him back to give lectures to inspire millions of kids, not just in English but any language?”

Synthesizing Obama: Learning Lip Sync from Audio

The unintended consequences and political misuse of such a seemingly wide-eyed technological quest became clear to Suwajanakorn during his studies, and no doubt during the 2016 US presidential elections. Frenda’s experiment presents hard evidence that doctored political static images can produce false memories that reinforce existing prejudices, so there are likely very real risks that such deepfake video technology could be used in the future to spread highly-convincing political misinformation.

Suwajanakorn is attempting to produce counter measures that fight against such misuse of his work through a platform called Reality Defender – a web browser plug-in that can flag potentially fake content automatically. He’s also acutely aware of the challenge of raising public awareness about the pervasive nature of AI-generated political footage. He’s currently working with the AI Foundation and First Draft News – a Google-led initiative to fight online misinformation – to design suitable interventions that keep them ahead of the fakers.

Suwajanakorn has legitimate concerns about the political misuse of his technology, but it’s also worth considering the ethics of his original justification for creating it: to digitally render dead historical figures for educational purposes. The notion of informed consent is a key ethical concern in medical practice or when justifying human participation in an experiment. For example, in experimental psychology, researchers should, so far as is practicable, explain what is involved in advance and obtain the informed consent of participants. In experiments where the ‘greater good’ justification for a deceptive process has been approved, then the informed consent must be given after the study has been performed in the form of a comprehensive debrief.

In visual culture, such safeguards are often impossible and sometimes undesirable to enact. Artistic freedom tends to trump all else in such settings. However, there are still legal and ethical concerns that artists have to reconcile – not least in the unapproved use of someone’s image. It’s perhaps fair game for the artist who wants to use image technology to ‘punch up’ at an authority figure, as with Bill Posters’ recent ‘deepfake’ video of Mark Zuckerberg. But is it alright to use a stranger’s image to highlight how facial recognition technology can be used to track down someone on social media, as it was in Egor Tsvetkov’s chilling project Your Face is Big Data? 

If someone was to create a controllable 3D representation of Richard Feynman so that he could posthumously deliver his lectures, would his unavailability to grant informed consent render such an ambitious project unethical from the outset? Roy Orbison’s 2018 hologram world tour and similar projects involving uncannily lifelike representations of Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston have recently brought this question into sharper focus.

My instinctive response is to dislike the idea – not only because of the lack of consent granted by the posthumous performers, but also because it plays to a mawkish nostalgia, where emotion trumps all other considerations. But with its immersive quality and proximity to ‘real’ experience it also feels significantly different to using text, image and video to communicate the legacy of a dead celebrity. 

We’re used to seeing characters in films played by actors who died before the project was completed. We then bear witness to the extraordinary special effects that can render on-screen anything a writer can imagine. These visualisations have until now been produced on huge budgets by skilled technicians. However, as such technology becomes more user-friendly, it’s clear that it carries risks in the political realm as well as great creative potential in visual culture.

Understanding how such footage actually works to influence memory and belief ‘in the wild’ is a pressing concern that calls for an interdisciplinary response. In a near future where it’s possible to easily create convincing digital representations of any kind of truth, we must learn how to guard against our propensity to believe what we want to hear. How do we know when we might be wrong, if we can always engineer footage that can prove us right?

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How can you be sure that the person speaking on the screen is genuine? Find out how sophisticated digital manipulation is blurring the boundaries between real and ‘deepfake’.

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