By Ryat Yezbick and Milo Talwani
ABOUT
The Innocence of Unknowing investigates news media coverage of mass shootings in the United States since the 1960s. This immersive essay film - performed live by Ryat Yezbick, Milo Talwani, and the AI humanities scholar they built - takes viewers back in time to examine how we have arrived at the horrific reality of rampant gun violence in America today. Created from an archive of news media footage sourced by the artists, The Innocence of Unknowing examines our role as spectators of mass shootings while illustrating the history of the evolving media landscape — from TV to phones to social media — through which we make sense of the violence. This project is the first of its kind to examine our historical relationship to eyewitness news through the lens of AI.
Ryat Yezbick's practice is highly interdisciplinary and research based. As a former cultural anthropologist, they use qualitative research methods to investigate technology’s impact on group identity and collective memory through public archives and collaborations in the era of digital surveillance and decentralized global conflict. However, unlike cultural anthropologists, Yezbick figure's their experience centrally in their work, rooting these themes in a complex set of questions around security, home, gender, family, love, violence, power, and responsibility.
Yezbick's work stems from their experience as a transgender-masculine Arab-American person raised in a Charismatic (Pentecostal) Catholic church in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As a child, they often felt confused about their simultaneous desire to belong and the distinct feeling that they were not of the community. They learned to perform a position in order to fit in with the group for fear they were being watched by a wrathful god. God was their first encounter with surveillance technologies. Yezbick's experiences led me to examine the ways in which people on the margins aesthetically take on and perform the moral majority within their communities as a kind of “threat management” strategy. They explore the costs and benefits of these strategies in my practice through live performance, experimental documentary and installation.
Yezbick is a published author, multi-time grant recipient, organizer, facilitator, and an arts consultant for institutions and universities. They are a current fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Open Documentary Lab and Onassis ONX Studio and academic at Arizona State University’s Los Angeles campus for the film school’s graduate program Narrative and Emerging Media. Yezbick obtained their MFA from CalArts and is affiliated with the Guild of Future Architects. Their work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Melbourne, Glasgow, and Athens, and in notable group exhibitions and performances at the Los Angeles Philharmonic (Los Angeles), REDCAT (Los Angeles), Materials & Applications (Los Angeles), Human Resources (Los Angeles), The Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart), The Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Glasgow International 2018 (Glasgow), The Banff Center for the Arts and Creativity (Banff), Gertrude Contemporary (Melbourne), Space One (Seoul), the Bangkok Biennial MAHA Pavilion (Bangkok), LAXART (Los Angeles), Craft Contemporary (Los Angeles) and the Queer Biennial (Los Angeles), and in Tribeca Immersive.
Milo Talwani is a filmmaker, composer, and creative technologist based in Los Angeles. Recent projects include Dog Movie, directed by Henry Hanson, and orchestration work for the French premiere of Ted Hearne's oratorio, Place. Milo previously served as associate programmer for the New Frontier section of the Sundance Film Festival, focusing on curation and engineering solutions in XR exhibition. Yezbick and Talwani both currently teach in the Narrative and Emerging Media program at Arizona State University’s Los Angeles based campus as a full-time faculty member and lecturer respectively.
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