AI's Silent Omissions: Redistributing Bodily Agency

AI’s Silent Omissions is a single-channel documentary film (24 min; Japanese with English subtitles) that examines how generative AI systems treat hands that do not conform to the five-fingered norm. Built around interviews with members of the Hand & Foot community in Japan—people living with congenital or acquired limb differences—together with their families and medical professionals, the film traces what happens when image generators, NSFW filters, and human post-production workflows encounter their bodies: hands are “repaired” into five fingers, flagged as errors, or silently discarded. The work reframes this outcome not as a technical defect or a user failure, but as a system logic that redistributes the agency to appear. Some bodies are recognized immediately; others must explain themselves to the machine, or vanish. By counting “three out of three” rather than “three out of five,” the film asks where the norm of five originates—in the dataset, in the filter, in the workflow—and returns the authority of self-description to those the system omits. The work received an Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica 2026 (Digital Humanity).