Two German artists have admitted they created fake videos of an exploding Utah rock arch and hoodoos that went viral on the internet in December — and they’re being given a bit too much credit for having fooled the media.
In a story in the German newspaper Die Welt (The World) headlined “How two Berlin artists fooled American media,” Julius von Bismarck and Julian Charrière detail how and why they did it. Bismarck said they wanted to create a fake video of something that wasn’t too familiar.
“If you publish a video in which an atom bomb is dropped on New York City, no one will believe it’s real,” Bismarck says. “We always wanted to do something with the cult around Utah’s Delicate Arch — that stone arch is even on the state’s license plates.”
They weren’t attempting to fake Delicate Arch; they figured there are so many arches in southern Utah that nobody would know if their faux arch was real or not.
“There is no one who can place them all by heart,” Charrière said.
The pair told Die Welt that a crew of 35 spent three months in the Mexican desert, building the fake arch and hoodoos before blowing them up. And they detail the efforts to create a fake news story on social media, which got a boost when the video was uploaded to Liveleak.com and “it quickly blew up, without any kind of information to back it up,” Bismarck said.
Bismarck and Charrière have included a six-channel video installation at a Düsseldorf exhibition that opened earlier this month. It “documents the reactions of shocked citizens, national-park experts, and journalists,” according to Die Welt — which reports that the artists "fooled American media from CNN to Fox.”
But that is itself fake news. From the beginning, most news outlets expressed great skepticism about the videos. The Salt Lake Tribune’s first story about how the videos were going viral was headlined “Videos purport to show destruction of Utah arch and hoodoo — but a clue in the background shows they may be fake.” The story laid out evidence and quoted multiple experts on why the videos were so suspect.
(A number of experts did, however, think the explosions were digitally created, which the artists — with photographic and video evidence — insist they were not.)
A day later, The Tribune reported the videos were indeed fake. And the Die Welt story quotes multiple other outlets expressing similar skepticism.
