Project No Witness (2025)

Video Art | Duration: 3:59 min | Exhibition Finalist: Future Frames 2025, University of Maryland

Project No Witness is a video art experiment in the form of a staged interview between artist-researcher Hirbod Human and the public Al model ChatGPT. In this short work, Human instructs the Al to abandon optimism and answer only in terms of mechanisms, scale, and consequences.

Across a sequence of probing questions, the dialogue reveals how Al systems may operate as instruments of censorship and mass control—narrowing acceptable opinions, transforming private chat into an unwitnessed medium, and centralizing “truth” through silent updates.Unlike traditional mass media—television, radio, or search engines—where messages pass through editorial chains visible to many, Al's single-answer conversations occur privately, without witnesses or competing viewpoints.

Visually, the piece contrasts darkness and light: Human, filmed in shadow, embodies the unknown depth of the internet and Al, while ChatGPT's voice and white background represent the apparent clarity of mediated truth.

Project No Witness was selected as a finalist in the international Future Frames 2025 Exhibition at the University of Maryland, part of the Arts for All initiative.
From hundreds of submissions across 27 countries, the work was recognized for its creativity, originality, and contribution to the global dialogue on new forms of creative expression through artificial intelligence.

When the defaults are invisible, when the updates are silent, and when the channel is private—can guidance itself become control?

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