The Innocence of Unknowing
Ryat Yezbick and Milo Talwani
Artwork Description:
The Innocence of Unknowing is an AI-driven film, installation, and live performance examining how mass shootings in the United States have been mediated and normalized through broadcast news since the 1960s. Created by Ryat Yezbick and Milo Talwani, the project centers a bespoke AI Humanities Scholar trained on critical theory and an archive of 800+ news videos spanning seven decades. Using computer vision, the AI analyzes recurring gestures within the footage—raised hands, guided exits, police formations, and movements of flight and containment—which the artists describe as “choreographies of retreat.” The project reveals how these gestures map the expansion of surveillance, policing, and state control across time. Structured as an immersive essay film performed live by the artists and their AI collaborator, The Innocence of Unknowing examines the evolution of eyewitness news from television to phones and social media. The work combines AI analysis, archival media, live performance, and Gaussian splat reconstruction, transforming archival documentary footage into immersive volumetric environments. Through rewound and fragmented imagery, viewers witness victims repetitively moving backward through scenes of crisis, emphasizing cycles of violence and spectatorship. Perpetrators are removed entirely, shifting focus toward the relationships between the State, victims, media systems, and the public. Rather than treating AI as a neutral technology, the project positions it within a complex political framework, demonstrating how it may function as a vital humanities instrument while raising critical questions about how AI constructs, misinterprets and disseminates information and the immense implications these miscalculations pose for society at large.
Project Collaborators:
Archivist and Original Concept - Ryat Yezbick; Screenwriters - Aurora the AI Humanities Scholar, Milo Talwani, Ryat Yezbick; Executive Producer - Ryat Yezbick; Producers - Elena Rose, Maggie LaCorte; Music Composition - James Rushford; Sound Mix - Joe Talia; Creative Technical Director - Milo Talwani; VFX Creators - Milo Talwani and Ryat Yezbick; Camera Operators - Jen Gilomen, Milo Talwani, and Ryat Yezbick; Editors - Milo Talwani and Ryat Yezbick; Assistant Editors - Cary Cronenwett and Linda Franke; Cast - Aurora the AI Humanities Scholar, Milo Talwani, and Ryat Yezbick; Support Cast - Ashley Bigham, Endira Richardson, Gina Osterloh, Isaiah Acosta, Jeff McMillan, Jenna Tesslar, Osinachi Ibe, Headlands Center for the Arts Staff; Content Consultant - Levi Kalish; This project was incubated at the MIT Open Documentary Lab Fellowship; This project was created with support from Onassis ONX Studio, the Onassis Foundation, Arizona State University, and Headlands Center for the Arts.
