Anna Greenspan and Laura Tripaldi in The Ideas Letter:
In her recent video installation Boring Billion, the artist Yuyan Wang traces a strange genealogy of machines. Pieced together from found footage of industrial processes, engineering experiments, and scientific laboratories, the short film stages a wordless drama whose protagonists are not humans but uncanny robots and alien-looking machines.
The film begins underground, with close-ups of excavators and other heavy industrial equipment leaking lubricants and motor oil. The images, lush to the point of grotesque, depict technology as it burrows into the earth, digging holes and tunnels through rock and mineral. The camera then follows a narrow passage out of the subterranean depths and into the light, eventually revealing that the first-person perspective emanates from inside the brain of a humanoid robot. The heavy industrial machine begins to mutate and, as it struggles to claw its way to the surface, takes on human-like traits. A montage follows, showing a range of robotic simulations, with people training their artificial doubles to blink, stare, grasp, and walk. Then the robots start to glitch, falling and squirming as they transform into a variety of bizarre, alien, and purposeless forms, ranging from aquatic organisms and microscopic bodies to birds gliding across the sky. The video ends with shots of satellite capsules drifting off into space. The background soundtrack is composed of an immersive, drone-like R&B remix, in which a distorted, looping voice intones a haunting metallic lullaby: “You told me to take this chance and learn the ways of love.”
“Boring Billion,” the title of Wang’s film, is also the geological term for the vast period of evolutionary stagnation that stretched from roughly 1.8 billion to 0.8 billion years ago, after the earth’s land had stabilized into a single solid continent and its oceans were a warm, sulfuric soup with very little biological diversity. During this seemingly uneventful age—between the Great Oxidation Event, when the rise of atmospheric oxygen wiped out much of the planet’s anaerobic microbial life, and a period of rapid evolutionary change—life’s development appeared to stall.
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