02- INNER CARBON01 - MAMMOTH TECHNOLOGY00- PRIMORDIUM
InformationExhibitions
WritingsSpeaking
Interviews
Visions of Phosphine Earth art film
Film
13 m 07 s
Director - Wendi Yan
CGI Set and Animation - Wendi Yan
Cinematography - Iaroslav Iakubivskyi, Shira Wolfe
AI Art Direction - Wendi Yan
Music Composition - Jessica Shand
Editor - Wendi Yan
Dr. Sara Seager—the 2024 Kavli Prize winner—and her team at MIT have researched exoplanets and the possibility of life in Venus's clouds. "Phainoterra", the "phosphine Earth", is their speculative exercise imagining alien life in the clouds of an alternate Venus. Drs. Seager and Iakubivskyi's chemical simulation will materialize in a mission to Venus in Spring 2025.
Working with Dr. Iakubivskyi, Yan made a virtual 3D set in Unreal Engine for Phainoterra, including its planetary view, cloud layer, and landscape models with animated acidic pools, smokes and clouds. Yan also made a balloon suspending in the clouds as the space vehicle.
Editing together footage by Dr. Iakubivskyi from Ijen's volcanic lake in Indonesia and MIT lab, with Yan's 3D animations and AI hallucinations of microscopic imaging, the audience journeys through a world harboring life as we don't know it.
This nonnarrative film moves through four chapters: entering Phainoterra from space, landing in Ijen with its lake color modified to resemble Phainoterra, then to an MIT lab where a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) "reads" samples taken from Ijen, eventually moving into the AI-generated microcosmos based on the SEM images.
Emerging from this journey between fiction and science, between macro-landscape and micro-imaging, is the unbelievability of life's existence at all. Yan shows that the nature of Dr. Seager and Dr. Iakubivskyi’s knowledge-making process is always moving between planes of reality: their will to surpass the comprehension of life conditioned by Earth, is a feat of epistemic courage.
Exhibitions/Screenings
New Syntax, SV Studios, Los Angeles (2025)
Lightsout Lightson, Stiftung St Matthaus, Berlin (2025)
Cosmic Arclight, BAM, Shanghai (2025)
Lagrange Point, Slash, San Francisco (2025)
FWB Fest, Idyllwild, CA (2025)
Dr. Sara Seager, Professor of Planetary Science, Physics, and Aerospace Engineering at MIT
Dr. Iaroslav Iakubivskyi, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department Of Earth, Atmospheric, & Planetary Sciences, MIT
Proxima Kosmos Team
Director and Editor - Claire Webb
Producer - Adrianne Toomey
Managing Editor - Ulysses Yarber
About Proxima Kosmos
Developed under the leadership of Dr. Claire Isabel Webb, Proxima Kósmos is an interdisciplinary collaboration uniting leading planetary scientists, astrobiologists, designers, and science-fiction writers to construct a simulated exosolar system—each of its nine planets shaped by scientific modeling and radical imagination. The project challenges assumptions about habitability, evolution, and intelligence beyond Earth.
Making Phainoterra
documentary
Film
13 min
Director - Wendi Yan
CGI set and animation - Wendi Yan
Ijen and MIT footage - Iaroslav Iakubivskyi
Music composition - Jessica Shand
Editor - Wendi Yan
Working closely with Dr. Iakubivskyi, who filmed himself during research expeditions to the Ijen volcanic lake in Indonesia and Hawaii, as well as within the labs at MIT, the film follows his dual role as both a fictional scientist in the world of Phainoterra and his real-world role as a researcher at MIT. An interview with Dr. Sara Seager provides the narrative backbone to the film, weaving together both the science and the thinking behind the fiction. The film's editing flows between journalistic interview and sci-fi narrative.
Based on scientific documentation of Phainoterra devised by Drs. Seager and Iakubivskyi, the filmmaker created the planet's 3D environments inside Unreal Engine, including its planetary overview, cloud layer, and terrain surface. Running virtual cameras through Phainoterra inside the game engine, the film brings the planet to life to image science and imagine the future at once.
Dr. Sara Seager, Professor of Planetary Science, Physics, and Aerospace Engineering at MIT
Dr. Iaroslav Iakubivskyi, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department Of Earth, Atmospheric, & Planetary Sciences, MIT
Proxima Kosmos Team
Director and Editor - Claire Webb
Producer - Adrianne Toomey
Managing Editor - Ulysses Yarber
About Proxima Kosmos
Developed under the leadership of Dr. Claire Isabel Webb, Proxima Kósmos is an interdisciplinary collaboration uniting leading planetary scientists, astrobiologists, designers, and science-fiction writers to construct a simulated exosolar system—each of its nine planets shaped by scientific modeling and radical imagination. The project challenges assumptions about habitability, evolution, and intelligence beyond Earth.