For his latest project, artist and photographer Justin Aversano (of “Twin Flames” fame) set out with a simple compass: love. Just a camera, intuition, and an unspoken promise to document humanity across all seven continents.
The result is “Moments of the Unknown,” a living archive of global intimacy, presented as both an exhibition at Glitch Gallery in Marfa, Texas for Art Blocks Marfa Weekend this month and a documentary screening at the Crowley Theater down the road.
Decrypt sat down with Aversano for an inside look at his journey, reflections, and creative process. At first, he said, the film was planned to be a much quieter affair.
But somewhere between continents, the project evolved into an audio-visual experiment, with the hundreds of brief, video portraits stitched together with soundscapes sourced from humanity’s most iconic artifact of love and hope. All of the sounds were pulled from the “Voyager Golden Record,” a phonograph record containing sounds and images of Earth. Carl Sagan was the chair of the NASA committee that assembled the record, which was sent off to space in 1977.
“I wanted to reintegrate that historical movement in culture and space exploration — and use it as the soundtrack for a film about cultures and continents around the world and how they’re connected,” said Aversano.
Each location resonates with its own fragment from those sounds, as voices speak in 55 languages; delegates from the United Nations say just one word: Hello.
It all leads to the film’s final line, “Hello from the children of planet Earth.”
“Moments of the Unknown” is about love, but not just romance — the type of love extends to family, friendship, and oneness.
“What I discovered while shooting is that love has so many forms,” Aversano said. “It became about unity, closeness, intimacy. The love of humanity and recognizing we are one human family.”
Aversano said he didn’t scout for subjects for each day’s 10-second portrait video. He woke up each morning unsure of who he’d meet, with no checkboxes for diversity or specific goals in mind — just human encounters as they came. Children, elders, strangers, twins, entire families.
Even the recurring sound of heartbeats in the soundtrack isn’t abstract.
“That’s family,” he explained. “My dad, my sister, my brother. Moments where I felt presence and love.”
Aversano always inserts himself into his projects, but quietly. In this one, his first appearance is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at a barbershop in New Orleans.
Another self-portrait appears at Stonehenge, on his birthday — an intentional bridge back to his earliest work, “The Birthday Project.” He calls it “an Easter egg,” a thread tying 10 years of his art together. People reappear over time. They age. Twins show up, old and new.
“I always run into twins,” he laughs, referencing one of his past projects, Twin Flames — a project that caught fire with collectors after the photos of twin siblings were minted as NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain in 2021. Those tokenized photos even landed at auction house Christie’s and yielded celebrity admirers like Snoop Dogg and Gary Vaynerchuk.
The most remote chapter, he shared, was in Antarctica: “A two-day boat from Argentina. Seven days there, two days back.”
When asked which country is his favorite, he answered in the abstract: “You can’t choose a favorite when it’s all one.”
Aversano shot the project two years ago. He’s releasing each portrait and video on the same calendar day it was taken. It began on April 8, and will conclude on April 7, 2026. Every evening, he wrote a diaristic entry about the person he met that day.
Aversano is now auctioning each daily portrait as a single-edition NFT. He hasn’t missed a day. At 12 pm ET, every day, he hosts an X Spaces to discuss the daily auction.
When asked what people should take away from the film, Aversano didn’t talk about legacy, sales, or impact.
“Did you feel something?” he asked. “That’s all I want.”
When asked about the reception he received in Marfa last weekend, where he was moved to tears, he replied: “I feel blessed, grateful. What more can you ask?”
