True Fake: Troubling the Real in Artists’ Films is a new online series on e-flux Video & Film, programmed by Lukas Brasiskis. Responding to the current political, technological, and environmental conditions, this series of screenings highlights 20 contemporary and historically important films and videos that examine unstable boundaries between fact and fiction, nature and artifice, objectivity and subjectivity, mediation and exposition. The title True Fake has been chosen as a statement alluding to audiovisual images perceived as fabricated or non-indexical and yet that surpass a simple true/false, documentary/fiction division.

Part Three of the series, Tracking the Coded Real, presents four films, Forensic Architecture and Praxis Films’ Triple-Chaser (2019), Manu Luksch’s Algo-Rhythm (2019), Louis Henderson’s Black Code/Code Noir (2015), and Chris Kennedy’s Watching the Detectives (2017), all of which look at artificial intelligence and the algorithmic functioning of the media as methods to investigate cases of state violence and violations of human rights. Focusing on tracking technologies that are becoming a significant agent in post-internet control societies, the films presented in this chapter ask: What new possibilities do digital tracking and encoding open for censorship, as well as for the creative revelation of hidden truths? Each film will be screened for two weeks.