By Nicola Heath
Publication Date: 2025-12-09 23:00:00
What does the truth look like in the age of AI?
This is one of the pressing questions posed by British Tamil artist Christopher Kulendran Thomas in his video installation The Finesse, one of the works featured in Data Dreams: Art and AI at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney.
The Finesse is an immersive work that combines documentary footage with AI-generated elements. Kim Kardashian’s avatar even makes a surprise appearance.
Kulendran Thomas first used AI-synthesized elements, including deepfake characters, in his 2019 installation Being Human, currently on view at MOMA in New York. (Supplied: MCA/Joseph Kadow)
Kulendran Thomas – whose family emigrated from Sri Lanka to Britain when he was a child to escape the civil war – deliberately makes it impossible for the viewer to distinguish what is real and what is fake.
“There are all kinds of footage in this work – there’s real propaganda footage, there’s reconstructed footage, there’s things I shot, there’s things that…”