The jungftak must have been a peculiar bird. According to Webster's Universal Dictionary of the English Language from 1937, it was described as follows: jungftak (jŭngf täk), n. a legendary Persian bird where the male had only one wing on the right side, the female only one wing on the left side; instead of the missing wing, the male had a bone hook and the female a bone eyelet, and through the connection of hook and eyelet they could fly – each alone had to remain on the ground. Only when both animals joined together could they move forward. What a touching story.
Too beautiful to be true? Indeed, the jungftak is what's called a nihil entry, a fake encyclopedia article. While fake news may find unprecedented distribution in the age of social media, it has also existed for a long time exactly where one wouldn't expect it: in encyclopedias and reference works. Some scholars make it a point to insert invented things or fictitious biographies. However, nihil entries also have a serious background: they served as copy protection. Based on the made-up articles, it was easy to prove when someone had plagiarized.
But if even encyclopedias, these collections of supposedly reliable information, contain fictitious entries, how can one still know what is true and what is false? Polish photographer and artist Weronika Gęsicka plays with this question in her current work 'Encyclopaedia.' When she first heard about invented entries in encyclopedias, she was immediately fascinated. She spent two years researching the topic, reading scientific articles, discovering fake terminology, some with illustrations. At online auctions, she tried to bid on works containing nihil articles. This wasn't easy because some entries only appeared in a specific edition of a particular year.
Starting in 2022, Gęsicka began illustrating the fictitious articles. As a visual artist, she works extensively with photos from databases and creates collages from them. This is how the image of Bessa Vugo was created, a biologist who is listed in an online encyclopedia, although according to Gęsicka, she never existed. According to the entry, Bessa Vugo was also a theorist of the five senses who experimented with food in various geometric shapes. Do children respond better to taste when presented with pyramid-shaped lemons?
Gęsicka soon hit limits with collaging. She says she particularly lacked suitable archival material for encyclopedia entries from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Gęsicka decided to create her own archival material using artificial intelligence. This is conceptually consistent: she transferred the concept of fakes to the visual level and further blurred what is true and what is false.
With the help of artificial intelligence, the jungftak also found its form in 2023, in nine different versions. However, the image generators were still in their infancy at the time, says Gęsicka. You can see this in the images. The AI was not yet able to deal with abstract concepts. Today, fake images are difficult to distinguish from real ones at first glance – giving fake news on social media even more power.
Disinformation is used to unsettle people and destabilize societies. Gęsicka's work seems refreshingly harmless in comparison. In the literal sense: her images don't hurt anyone. On the contrary, her fakes are not threatening but cheerful. They sometimes seem historical, but their message is highly topical. One should not trust what one sees. Doubt is appropriate.
Take Loriot's famous stone louse, for example. The fantastic creature first appeared in one of Loriot's sketches in the 1970s, then found its way into the medical dictionary Pschyrembel. There it states: "Smallest native rodent with a size of 0.33 mm from the family Lapivora (first description 1983). The stone louse is a ubiquitously occurring, usually apathogenic [non-pathogenic] and mood-lifting endoparasite." They simply put you in a good mood, these stone lice. Weronika Gęsicka oriented herself to the drawings of the animal. Using photos and AI, she then generated her own louse, sitting on an outstretched index finger.
Lies have short legs, as the saying goes. But the stone louse has come quite far over all these years. Weronika Gęsicka, born in 1984, is a photographer and visual artist. With her work 'Encyclopaedia,' Gęsicka was recently nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2026. The photo book was published in 2024 by Blow Up Press and Jednostka Gallery.
