C4D, Australia’s Wildfires and Fake News

As a crimson sunrise cracked the dense morning air in Brisbane, Australia, digital artist Anthony Hearsey awoke to a landslide of text messages, emails and social media notifications. He was thrilled at first because Australia is Burning, a digital art piece he’d created using Cinema 4D and Corona Render as the country’s wildfires raged on, had gone viral. But then he realized the reason: his work had been posted with an incorrect caption that had essentially turned it into fake news.

Anthony, who specializes in photography and creative imagery, made the 3D image using a compilation of hotspot data he gathered from NASA’s website. He considered it an experiment and told me: “I honestly believed the unrealistic texture of Australia and exaggerated landscape would have been enough to separate it from a photograph.”

But it wasn’t. Australia is Burning got posted and reposted to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Imgur and other social media and image-sharing sites as a NASA photograph taken of the fires from the International Space Station. To make matters worse, when Anthony tried to correct the mislabeled artwork, people didn’t believe him. “Instagram and Facebook flagged my account as “False Information,” which was so frustrating because the claim was based on a post with false information that wasn’t mine,” Anthony recalls.

Snopes, a third-party fact-checking site that strives to get to the bottom of claims of misinformation and fake news, flagged the image as “miscaptioned,” and posted the topic on their website, explaining how composite images can often be mistaken for photographs. Their post includes Anthony’s own explanation of what happened.

But how many people are going to see that? Anthony feels like the whole thing has tarnished his work by association, which is something that could happen to any artist in these times where everything can be so easily shared and altered by mistake – or on purpose. Artists need to share their work, and there’s probably no sure-fire way to protect yourself completely from this kind of mislabeling, or worse. But, looking back, Anthony does think there are things artists can do to garner attention for what they do while also being mindful about not becoming fake news.

“I think it’s important to understand how significant a single image can be, even if you think it’s nothing special,” he says. “To avoid misleading people, I’ve learned that careful attention needs to be paid if external sources are being used. On the flip side, it’s comforting to know that a small-time artist can make a global impact. It’s easy to lose faith in your own work when it doesn’t gain traction, but it doesn’t mean it won’t happen. The more art the better. Creatives hold more power than we think.”