02- INNER CARBON01 - MAMMOTH TECHNOLOGY00- PRIMORDIUM
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go in a specified direction, typically slowly or by an indirect route.
Wendi Yan (b. 1999, Beijing) narrates metamorphoses of the scientific self through building research-based worlds between science and fiction. Using CGI software and game engines, she crafts alternative fictions of science and its history, presenting them as films, games, or archival displays of sculptural objects. She examines the embodied challenges of facing alien epistemic systems across time. Wendi makes art as a practice of constructive philosophy and critical belief, modeling alternative scientific devices, animating technological creatures, and making videos and games that inhabit other laws of nature, geometries of history, methods of knowing, virtues of epistemes, and ways of seeing life.
Wendi collaborates frequently with scientists and engineers, from synthetic biology to astrophysics, to explore the frontier between science and entertainment, between imaging and imagining. She also writes on the history and future of scientific discovery. Her research on the history of artemisinin discovery, published by Asimov Press, was named “Best of Journalism” by The Syllabus.
Wendi holds an A.B. in History of Science from Princeton University, where she won the Horace H. Wilson ’25 Senior Thesis Prize in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology, and a M.S. in Fiction and Entertainment from SCI-Arc. She has been supported by the Arctic Circle Artist & Scientist Residency, Berggruen Institute, Cosmos Ventures and the Ethereum Foundation. Her work has been published by WeTransfer, Wallpaper, and Coeval Magazine. She has given talks at X Museum, Trust, Gray Area Festival, Skywalker Ranch, and Rhizome. Wendi was an inaugural member of the Steve Jobs Archive Fellowship (2023).
Currently based between New York and San Francisco, Wendi is a New Inc Y11 member in Creative Science, and a finalist for the 6th VH Award by Hyundai Motor Group. Her latest work will premiere at House of Electronic Arts (HeK) during Art Basel and at the Ars Electronica Festival in 2025.
CV
Headshots [1] [2] by Jessica Chou