Join us on November 02, 22:00 Beijing Time for “X Virtual Workshop: A Mammoth Gathering,” presented by Artist Wendi Yan.

A Mammoth Gathering extends from artist Wendi Yan’s years-long project, “A Tiny Museum of Mammoth Technologies” (TMMT), which culminated in a solo show consisting of videos, sculptures, and paintings. TMMT’s center mythology was “Tale of the Mammoth Goddess,” an animation short telling the story of the first mammoth to be resurrected by synthetic biologists: she knows humans want her help, and yet decides to escape. With Unreal Engine, Wendi built the abandoned coal mine where the mammoth resides, honours her ancestors and prepares for her natural death.

In imagining an apathetic mammoth, “Tale of the Mammoth Goddess” meditates on a synthetic nature that holds unpredictable and mythical power, departing from anthropocentric storytelling. The rest of TMMT continued examining how images of scientific methodologies build a sense of time different from modernity’s autobiography. In particular, taking inspiration from her archival research on Arctic science history, Wendi uses glassblowing to speculate alternative ways of making knowledge and making sense.

At A Mammoth Gathering, participants will convene in a cave built specially for X Virtual, and practice speculating Mammoth Technologies together. Wendi will share the process behind working on TMMT, and the conception of Mammoth Technology, as participants roam around the cave and collect inspirations.

Mammoth Technology is a theory and practice of esoteric progress. It is performing surgical experiments on historicity. Temporarily relocating to a different metabolic rhythm, and shifting the collective attention to the geological scale, participants will join Wendi in honouring the unknowable and the unstable in the technological possibilities of the modern present, in the crevices of progress.

About The Artists

About The Curators