One of the more cogent YouTube replies to In the Event of Moon Disaster takes the form of a quote from Orwell posted by user John Riskin: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Contained within that line are myriad counterpoints which are present in the film itself. In the Event of Moon Disaster, directed by Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgung, is a deepfake short film, using AI to help viewers “consider how new technologies can bend, redirect and obfuscate the truth around us.” At seven minutes and forty-six seconds, the film consists of an AI-simulated Walter Cronkite broadcast of President Nixon explaining to the American people that Apollo 11 is stranded on the moon, supplemented by footage of the spacecraft malfunctioning. The film’s painstaking technical approach, outlined in the accompanying behind-the-scenes documentary How to Strand Astronauts on the Moon, aims for a maximally realistic rendering of its alternate history.
Widely-exhibited, Moon Disaster was shown at the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Kansas, this summer, alongside How to Strand Astronauts. At the Ulrich, the film screened in an installation of a 1960’s living room, complete with Leslie Gore records, a fake newspaper called The Informer (headline: “Astronauts Stranded on Moon”), and a gratuitous array of ashtrays. The Ulrich exhibited Moon Disaster as part of its ongoing film-series “Some Possible Futures,” and the vocabulary of this particular future is grim, with its emphasis on danger, caution, and awareness. Understandably so, considering the applications of deepfakes and their negative media coverage. In a January 13 breakdown called “What are deepfakes — and how can you spot them?”, The Guardian wrote that “the more insidious impact of deepfakes… is to create a zero-trust society, where people cannot, or no longer bother to, distinguish truth from falsehood.” That is the point of Moon Disaster, one rather pedantically made. The film is not a “film” in the cinematic sense, but a conceptual exercise designed to make one disbelieve one’s eyes. The intended reaction: if this thing I know didn’t happen appears to have happened, how can I believe anything?
Debuting in 2019, Moon Disaster is even more relevant in the wake of our voguish outrage at ChatGPT and other AI-generated information. While the moon landing, freighted with conspiracy, might seem a low-hanging event for disruption, it appropriately mirrors our current face-off with AI. Both events represent high points of human accomplishment, and both are bound up with our aspirations, anxieties, and identities. Not until the space race did we question the obvious fact that humans are confined to the Earth. And not until more recently did we question whether our consciousness was exceptional, our machines mere appendages. As Donna Haraway realized in 1985, and wrote in The Cyborg Manifesto:
There was always the specter of the ghost in the machine … But basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous … They were not man, an author to himself … To think they were otherwise was paranoid. Now we are not so sure.
The twin-anxieties of the eras render the Ulrich’s ashtrays obsolete: we’ve no need to dress the set. We are, in 2023, just as bewildered as Joan Didion when she wrote, regarding the ‘60s, “I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it.” That’s the trouble with AI; it forces us to contend with the mutability of our scripts.
Moon Disaster follows a script of its own: the comfortable mid-century parlor indicates affluent domesticity as the default mode of life in 1960s America — one feels like they’ve entered The Twilight Zone by way of Mad Men. Or take Panetta’s attempt at nuance in How to Strand Astronauts:
“Cheap fakes are actually more problematic [than deepfakes] — more people have got their hands on the tools of being able to manipulate video and audio to deceive people.” Her conflation of accessibility with danger begs the question of who, exactly, is threatened by greater epistemological equity. Unfortunately, Moon Disaster doesn’t lean into its own fear, refrains from asking that if our realities are so susceptible to distortion, mightn’t we reconsider our relationship to them? Nowhere is there question of the supposition that a more pliable reality is bad, nor any acknowledgement that reality has always been the purview of elite truth-makers — was, during Orwell’s own lifetime, observably authored by those “who control the present.”
In the Event of Moon Disaster grieves the loss of a time and place. One where fewer of us had “mislaid the script,” where we could more easily believe our eyes. One I doubt very much existed except in the hermetic chamber of human myth. Regretfully, Moon Disaster succeeds only at demonstrating that the old myths no longer work, but it offers no new ones. Like Haraway said, we are now “not so sure,” and we’d better get used to it.
