short film

Visions of Phosphine Earth (2025)

Commissioned by Berggruen Institute for Proxima Kósmos

Team
Director, Editor, CGI Set and Animation, AI Art Direction - Wendi Yan
Cinematography - Iaroslav Iakubivskyi, Shira Wolfe
Music Composition - Jessica Shand

About the Project
Visions of Phosphine Earth explores the visual and metaphysical imaginings of a research-based fictional planet harboring life in its sulphuric clouds. The meditative, nonnarrative short film emerges as a journey between fiction and science, macro-landscape and micro-imaging, revealing the unbelievability of life's existence beyond terrestrial constraints.

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.

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)