Using Omer Fast’s recent video, The Casting (2007) as a point of departure, this paper examines a set of contemporary art practices that expose the ways in which the malleability of reality is manipulated by media practitioners and documentary filmmakers, especially as it relates to imaging current political events in the Middle East. In his 4-channel video installation suspended from the ceiling, the Jerusalem-born artist conflates fact and fiction by splicing footage from his two interviews of a U.S. Army sergeant just prior to the officer’s redeployment to Iraq. By weaving the original interview fragments into a new, noticeably ruptured script, Fast reproduces a fabricated reality that is then doubled by actors who interpret the scenes on diptych screens that back the two on which the interviews take place. The Casting serves as a case study that allows me to conduct a broader analysis of postproduction strategies, particularly video editorial effects, employed by other artists with ties to the Middle East; and allows me to explore questions related to the ways in which reworked images inform and navigate our often uncritical consumption of constructed political realities throughout the region. In this paper I conduct a critical examination of the politics of aesthetics, and discuss how (new) media specificity challenges commonly held assumptions about authenticity and originality as they concern much of the art that is currently produced in and about the Arab world. The artists I discuss share a common refusal to perform identity for their global audiences, and their work contains signs that likewise deny concrete or locatable ideological signification. I conclude by examining the effects of such artistic production on the expectations of consumers of the “global” art market.