THE BOOK OF VELES

The provincial town of Veles in North Macedonia has put itself on the map of the world as the epicenter of fake news at the time of the campaign 2016 US presidential election, when young people keen on City technology has been masquerading as information portals American politicians and flooded the Internet with clickbait articles. So that Veles' fake articles were spread to millions of people via social media algorithms, many "information hackers" have earned substantial amounts of money and the sites are often considered as having contributed to the election of Donald Trump. While traveling to Veles, Jonas Bendiksen discovers the landscapes and people that make up the unlikely center of disinformation. In this book, his images of the city are interwoven of extracts and facsimiles of an archaeological discovery from 1919, also called the “Book of Veles,” a cryptic collection of 40 wooden boards discovered in Russia by an army officer, written in a language Proto-Slavic. Formerly considered an ancient history of the Slavic people and of the god Veles himself, the text has since been refuted as a forgery by a scientific consensus. As intelligent as it is visually compelling, the book de Bendiksen examines historical and current efforts to produce and guard against misinformation and chaos.