Wendi Yan is a new media artist, documentary filmmaker, and historian of science focused on questions of the self and the boundaries between us and “others”. Through her research, Wendi is interested in exploring how “our interaction with space and time - in cartesian, hyperbolic, psychological, philosophical and other manners - shape our (de)construction of the self, and thereby our relationships with nature and technology.” In Fall 2023, Wendi will begin an MS in Fiction and Entertainment at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles, CA.

The current interview concerns Wendi’s bachelor thesis exhibition “A Tiny Museum of Mammoth Technologies” which took place in Princeton, NJ on May 8-20, 2023. We touched on subjects such as Arctic exploration, de-extinction, fictional mythology and the future role of AI in history.

You just graduated with a BA in History of Science. Can you tell us about your thesis paper? How does it connect to your graduation show “A Tiny Museum of Mammoth Technologies”?

My thesis was about the early Arctic science in Alaska, specifically the beginning of the Arctic Research Lab at Point Barrow from 1947 to 1949, and the scientists Laurence Irving and P. F. Scholander. These two biologists studied how animals and plants of varying sizes adapted to the low temperature in the Arctic. For example, they found a type of larva that would freeze in the winter and come back alive after thawing in the spring and summer. They also found out that oxygen couldn’t be stored in the glacial ice, but carbon dioxide did — so they speculated that we could detect the composition of the ancient atmosphere through a deep ice core.

Three main themes were: 1) the mythologization of a real space, 2) the embodiment of scientific life in extreme environments, 3) the technology of low temperature and its relationship to life. My show engaged with all three, but especially the last. If we never see something move, does it mean it is not alive? What if it just exists on a different lifecycle that spans much longer than our perception, incomprehensible to our own limited lifespan of 70-100 years?

In my show I tried to convey that sense of confusion between immobility and liveliness, between a temporal pause and a perennial movement. I wanted the objects to look familiar and recent, but also somewhat ancient and as if arising out of a different cosmology. Aesthetically, I was inspired by the rusty metal office objects associated with modernization. I wanted to place the sacred in the mundane, and make a mystical lifeforce pulse through the indestructible metal.

I noticed you tend to present your research / works in dark environments. As part of your show you even encouraged visitors to navigate the space wearing head flashlights. How does this enhance or influence the visitors’ experience?

I like my work to emerge from the audience’s attention. A dark environment emphasizes that. The use of head flashlights was inspired by my visit to the Coal Mine No. 3 in Longyearbyen last summer. Inside the mine, the flashlights on our helmets were the only light source. Wherever I looked, my attention shaped the experience for the other visitors. It was a whole theatrical experience.

In my history research, I also pay a lot of attention to the "subjective involvement" in making "objective knowledge." While the scientists staged meticulous experiments to study how animals and plants adapted to the Arctic, they first had to adapt to the extreme environment, which had its own metabolic rhythm that needed to be deciphered.

Flashlights made attention visible to the visitors themselves, who became aware of their own movement in the exhibition space. They helped make the show visible, and watched themselves make the show happen.

In “Tale of the Mammoth Goddess” you portray a fictional story of a resurrected mammoth that has escaped from Pleistocene Park and prepares for her natural death. These days we are hearing of biotech companies such as Colossal Biosciences and their ‘Wooly Mammoth De-extinction Project’ which uses AI and genetic engineering to potentially bring back species and contribute to conservation efforts. What is your take on “extinction thinking” or “resurrection biology”, and why was it important to include this in your narrative?

The rhetoric in support of this "resurrection" often describes the Pleistocene--the geological epoch before our current Holocene--as a "better nature." On top of this nostalgia it invokes a guilt through the argument that humans' mass killing was the reason mammoths went extinct. Resurrecting mammoths, in this way, can feel particularly eerie, since its extinction corresponded to our rise as civilized humans, the closing of Pleistocene corresponded to the ending of "prehistory."

I see the resurrected mammoth as a symbol for postnatural time. With genetic engineering, we are entering into a new stage of living with nature, in which we can modify, disrupt, and reshuffle components of the "natural timeline."

This species that came before us and was "defeated" by us, is now being brought back to, at once, save us and be displayed as a human technological milestone. A resurrected mammoth consists of technologies, information and materials belonging to different points in time. By bringing it back, we declare the death of the “natural timeline.” Moreover, the resurrected mammoth is never going to be exactly what mammoths used to be. It is an Asian elephant with dozens of genes modified: we are, in fact, creating a new species.

"Tale of the Mammoth Goddess" was the centerpiece of the show, which investigates the relationship between time and technology. I made the animations in Unreal Engine, where I built a whole space for the mammoth – it was as if I was her and “moved into” the coal mine. She spoke in an AI-generated voice that switched between young and mature tones. A resurrected mammoth is a postnatural biotechnical object. It thrives on contradictions. It polarizes people's ideas of "natural order": some think we are "playing god" while some others consider it a natural practice. All the pieces in my show were inspired by this research process, which made me consider the technologies and the power of manipulating time.

There is something akin to film production about your worldbuilding approach (beyond the use of film itself). You use physical props, sculptures, paintings, artifacts that appear to belong to knowledge production systems of a different world. What is the incentive behind this approach, in particular for the section of your show titled the “Synthesist’s table”?

That's exactly my intent behind the presentation! The mammoth film and the physical objects complemented each other in what they could bring to the narrative: film has a linear direction that guides the visitors, objects add a materiality rendering the whole story more believable.

I see the exhibition space as someone's study, and the "Synthesist's Table", which was placed at the center, was the gravitational center of these props. I made glass vessels in organic shapes and connected them with tubing. The vessels rested on mirrors supported by a layer of coal. Glass is sculpted by high temperatures. Coal would burn with toxic gas if caught on fire. This installation directly invokes a different logic of knowledge-making from our world.

As much as I wanted the world to be self-coherent with its independent logic, I also didn't dare to completely shield its non-factualness. So I brought in the director's monitors and the photography lights, to add a self-awareness of the show. In the end, it’s all a narrative, a framework, an imagination.

Recently, I have been interested in a concept I call “Print Fiction” or the use of printed matter by artists to produce documents from alternative realities. During an earlier preview of your research you handed a series of printed cards featuring “reimagined archetypes sourced from different civilizations.” What thoughts did you gather from this experiment? Would you consider developing a more elaborate print fiction book in the future? Why?

Yes! I wanted to share the core of my project’s worldbuilding with a bigger group of people, and it would be fun to have physical artifacts for friends to take away with them. I didn’t think too much when I made the cards, but people have been telling me that I should expand them into a tarot-like system. I’d love to do that once I have a more developed idea!

For a while last winter, I researched Victorian board games and it was crazy to see how much the perspectives about “universal history”, world geographies, and the natural world were implied and conveyed through the visual design of those games. Board games, playable printed artifacts, have definitely been on my mind as a venue to explore. I would see that as a book. I’ve been thinking about the Aspen magazine in a box, too.

In your estimation, what types of reformations or re-thinking must happen within the field of history of science moving forward?

This is a big question! I am still so new to the field. But I worry a lot about how to write history in the age of the internet: so much of what happens today is through texts, emails, online documents. We have largely moved our existence online, but we don't know how to handle a person's "digital belongings" after they die. How will we make archives? How do we preserve evidence?

History also faces the challenge of information overload, like many other fields today. Tons of historical events unfold daily; there are infinite pieces of evidence with infinite viewpoints. How can a historian possibly work through all the information available to them? I don't know how historians will do their work about our era. It’s so overwhelming.

Finally, what sort of role will AI play in the documentation and creation of history?

The historian part of me is deeply concerned. Fact-checking is going to be really hard. If people use AI for work but don't fact check what AI writes for them, the information AI fabricates could end up in publications and websites with enough authority that general readers will accept as facts.

I am very interested in how we will live with history. Are we entering into (or have we entered already) an ahistorical existence that considers itself beyond historical progression? We are already seeing people hesitant to believe in visual evidence presented to them due to its possible resemblance to AI-generated artifacts. Maybe soon enough we will reject anything suggesting historicity.