Tellurian Drama
Riar Rizaldi | 2020 | Indonesian, with English subtitles | 26 min.

In 1923, the Dutch East Indies government celebrated the opening of Radio Malabar, a radio station whose transmitters spanned across two mountains in West Java, Indonesia. Fast-forward to March 2020 and the local government’s plans to revive the station as a historical landmark and tourist destination. Tellurian Drama reimagines the untold stories that transpired in the intervening years, offering a speculative and poetic examination of the mountains’ cultural, ecological, technological, and economic significance.

The White Stone
Xin Liu | 2021 | Chinese, with English subtitles | 21 min. 57 sec.

The White Stone is set in valleys, villages, and deserts in Southwest China. It follows a female protagonist who has traced rocket debris in remote areas since the 1990s and has collected testimonies from nearby communities. During her journey, she imagines being the first witness of a white stone’s fall, unnoticed except by animals, marking the terrestrial death of an extraterrestrial object. The visuals-driven investigation, juxtaposing breathtaking aerial shots with documentary images and choreographed performances, speculates on parallel systems of perception across time and space. It questions the lifespan of technologies and ponders on a future history of abandonment and recovery.

Ecology for the Non-futures

Unmake Lab | 2023 | Korean, with English subtitles | 26 min. 30 sec.

Ecology for the Non-futures detects the tension between the natural world and a future promised by technology. Set against the backdrop of burned mountains, several systems of representation and knowledge production—including environmental studies, documentary film and still images, live performance, and AI-generated data sets—are interwoven to form a fresh and fictive narrative. The artists turn AI’s predictive nature into questions about past events to investigate the destiny of endangered or extinct species. Their fictive visualizations, created through generative neural networks, offer a productive perspective on the entanglement of virtual vision and reality, and a future beyond the ecological crisis and human time.

Riar Rizaldi (b. 1990, Indonesia) is an artist and filmmaker whose works have been showcased at prestigious film festivals such as the Locarno Film Festival, Switzerland; International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands; the British Film Institute London Film Festival, England; Cinéma du Réel, France; Singapore International Film Festival, and more. Some of the exhibitions featuring his works have taken place at the Centre Pompidou, France; NTT InterCommunication Center, Japan; Taipei Biennial, Taiwan; Istanbul Biennial, Turkey; Venice Architecture Biennale, Italy; and Biennale Jogja, Indonesia. Solo exhibitions and dedicated screening programmes have been hosted by Batalha Centro de Cinema in Porto, Portugal, and the Centre de la Photographie Genève, Switzerland, among others.

Xin Liu (b. 1991, China) is an artist and engineer who takes a post-metaphysical approach to explore the personal, social, and technological spaces in our world. Her most recent work centres on the verticality of space, extraterrestrial explorations, and cosmic metabolism. Liu received her MA from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, and BE from Tsinghua University in Beijing. She is currently the Arts Curator for the Space Exploration Initiative in MIT Media Lab and an artist-in-residence at the SETI Institute in Silicon Valley. Her numerous awards and fellowships include the X Museum Triennial Award, the Van Lier Fellowship, and the Sundance New Frontier Story Lab fellowship.

Unmake Lab (est. 2016) comprises Choi Binna and Song Sooyon from Seoul, South Korea. The pair transforms predictable, obsessive algorithmic behaviour into irony, allegory, and playful critique, and uses AI as a tool to reexamine the past. In projects such as Popular Creatures, ARTSPACE BOAN 2 (Seoul, 2023), Carnival of Shipwreck (Toronto, 2025) and What an Artificial World (Cheongju, 2025), the historical context of developmentalism is overlaid with the exploitative tendencies of machine learning. Unmake Lab is one of four nominees for the 2025 Korea Artist Prize.