2018-08-25

Heaven to hell: the history of deception

① Pornography is awash with videos in which celebrity faces have been pasted onto the writhing, naked bodies of adult actors.

② Earlier this year Jordan Peele, an American comedian, used an artificial-intelligence face-swapping tool to create a clip of what appears to be Barack Obama calling his presidential successor "a total and complete dipshit".

③ These examples show the power of technology to bend reality.

④ But "Thrill of Deception", a new exhibition at the Kunsthalle in Munich, shows that humans have manipulated the senses for millennia.

⑤ The earliest known examples are cave paintings of overlapping bison and mammoths—like the rabbit-duck illusion—dating back 15,000 years.

⑥ Seventeenth-century audiences were bewitched by trompe-l'oeil, a realist-painting technique in which objects seem to emerge from the frame.

⑦ Baroque churches are famous for their ceiling frescos that lift the pious gaze into the heavens.

⑧ Modern virtual reality promises this too, only now we are more likely to be transported to hell.