Animating the Archive: Reimagining History with Google VEO

What happens when a historical photograph moves? Google VEO and similar AI video generation tools can now animate still images, generating plausible motion from a single frame. In this workshop, we will use these tools to animate historical photographs from the Middle East — and then interrogate what we have created.

The exercise is deliberately provocative. Animating a colonial-era photograph of a Palestinian village produces something that looks like documentary footage but is entirely synthetic. It fills in motion, expression, and temporality that were never captured. The result may be compelling — but is it history, or is it fabrication? What evidentiary status does synthetic video have? Who has the right to animate the dead?

These questions connect directly to our earlier discussions of photography, television, and the visual construction of reality. AI video generation collapses the distinction between documentation and creation, raising urgent questions for journalism, human rights work, historical research, and cultural memory. This workshop gives you firsthand experience with the technology so that your critical analysis is grounded in practice, not speculation.