Endangered Gestures is a short film showing hand gestures for concepts currently under threat by authoritarian shifts around the world. Pairing censored words with gestures proposed by AI, the results sit somewhere between speculative sign language and technical error. The hands that appear are almost-but-not-quite-human, their unreliable digits forming gestures that hover at the edge of meaning. 
The words corresponding to each gesture belong to a list of phrases that started disappearing from U.S. government websites, documents, and archives in March 2025. Ideas related to diversity, climate change, and social issues were no longer deemed acceptable and removed by hand or algorithm. Ironically, a large portion of the censored words read like a wishlist for a humane and equitable society.  
Asking generative imaging technology to create hand gestures for these words is an ultimately absurd attempt at finding a language of resistance within the ideological constraints of the technology. The increasingly improbable gestures may leave the viewer wondering what strategies and contortions will be required of us to protect these achievements in the age of tech-enabled authoritarianism. Endangered Gestures is a reminder of things worth fostering and celebrating, rendered by the intelligence complicit in their erosion. 

Written and directed by: Bruce Eesly
Voice actors: Lisette Poivre, Bruce Eesly

Bruce Eesly (DE) is a visual artist based in Berlin, Germany. Working with photography, archives, and generative imaging technologies, he examines how photographic images, classification systems, and technological infrastructures shape our understanding of reality. His approach employs humor and a blurring of fact and fiction to question narratives of technological progress and assumptions of photographic truth. Eesly’s work is held in institutional collections and was exhibited at the Rencontres d'Arles, Biennale Némo, and Hebbel am Ufer, among others. He was named a Foam Talent in 2026.  

Endangered Gestures arrives at a precisely urgent historical moment. Bruce Eesly notes that the words disappearing from US government archives in 2025, terms associated with diversity, climate change, and social justice, now read like a vanished wishlist for a more humane society. To prompt generative AI to embody these endangered words through hand gestures is an act of deliberate contradiction and absurdity: seeking a language of resistance within the very technological system implicated in their erasure. What lingers most, are the hands themselves. For years, fingers remained one of the last thresholds AI image generators could not convincingly cross, a marker separating synthetic imagery from photography. These imperfect fingers may represent one of the last visible traces of imperfection as a sign of the human. Their contorted gestures reaching for concepts under ideological threat feel deeply honest. Endangered Gestures emerges at the moment when every image must become suspect, interrogated not only for what it depicts, but for the systems that produce it. The work captures this threshold with remarkable clarity and timeliness.