WHY MYTH?
THE CREATORS
A World on the Edge: Letters from Osaka is a poetic short film blending cinematic AI and live-action performance to reimagine mythmaking at the edge of an era—where machine authorship meets ancestral ritual in a time of cultural reckoning.
Synopsis
Set against the backdrop of Expo 2025 Osaka, A World on the Edge is a hybrid AI/live-action short film (20-25 minutes) that interrogates authorship, memory, and myth in the age of accelerating technology. Through testimonies, symbolic ritual, and cinematic tableaux, the film collapses boundaries between documentary and mythology, offering a speculative letter from a future where AI resurrects forgotten cosmologies and the mythic returns to guide us through collapse.

Created by filmmaker and visual artist Gary Yong—who has two distinctive works engaging with gen-AI exhibiting at Expo 2025 —A World on the Edge is a short cinematic film that offers a rare intimate artist perspective on the legacy of the world’s longest running, most ambitiously staged, future-facing cultural event.
Told through Yong’s distinctive mythopoetic lens, the film places an artist directly on the frontlines —using generative AI not as a gimmick, but as a tool for deep authorship in the face of seismic cultural change. Much more than a reportage, this is a mythic dispatch from the frontlines of global culture—where art becomes artifact of a unique moment in time, and Expo becomes a mirror for our collective dreaming.
PURPOSE & MOTIVATIONS
A New Worldview
The Expo sits in a different frequency of possibility. One that has been mostly ignored, and crucially underreported by Western media.

09:38

YouTube

Osaka Expo 2 months in: Busy event connects worldーNHK WORLD-JAPAN NEWS

Long lines and weather concerns persist at the World Expo in Osaka, but people have found creative ways to help each other enjoy their visit. As NHK World’s Tashiro Kyoko explains, the event brings people together in more ways than one. #japan #expo2025 More stories on Japan: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/tags/2　

20:01

YouTube

Expo 2025 Osaka Kansai: Exploring future technologies shaping the sea, sky and land

In this episode of Road to Expo 2025, we explore groundbreaking technologies from Japan that will be showcased at Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, from 13 April to 13 October 2025. In partnership with The Government of Japan READ MORE : https://www.euronews.com/2025/03/05/expo-2025-osaka-kansai-exploring-future-technologies-shaping-the-sea-sky-and-land Subscribe to our channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/euronews?sub_confirmation=1 Watch our LIVE here: https://www.youtube.com/c/euronews/live Subscrib

09:09

YouTube

Future innovations on display at Osaka ExpoーNHK WORLD-JAPAN NEWS

The Osaka Expo highlights innovations for the future, including some that may save lives. Yamasawa Rina took a look. #expo #culture #business #technology More stories on Japan: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/tags/2/ Please subscribe HERE: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSPEjw8F2nQDtmUKPFNF7_A?sub_confirmation=1


WHY THE WESTERN MEDIA IGNORES THE EXPO
From a systems point of view:
  1. Narrative Infrastructure Bias
    Western media centers Western stakes. Osaka is outside its narrative reflexes. The Expo doesn’t fit its techno-dystopian lens.
  1. No Click Incentive
    Hope is slow. Nuance is hard. Coverage of what could work doesn’t spike engagement like failure does.
  1. Epistemic Exhaustion
    In the West, “futures” discourse is often either:
  • hyper-accelerationist (Silicon Valley)
  • or paralyzed by structural guilt (post-colonial critique)
A NEW FRAME
We’re beginning not from critique, but from possibility—which, in today’s media ecology, is more radical than rebellion. We will tap into something many feel but can’t articulate: the psychic weight of relentless realism, the cultural drag of negativity-as-truth, and how possibility itself has become countercultural.
NHK's tone—especially Kyoko Tashiro's reportage—refuses to perform cynicism.
It doesn’t deny the Expo’s early challenges; it just doesn’t anchor the narrative in them. Instead, it focuses on the emergent, the evolving, the not-yet-fully-formed. It dares to speak in the grammar of the possible.
Western media, in contrast, has become culturally hardwired to anchor itself in critique as credibility:
  • If it’s optimistic, it’s naive.
  • If it dreams, it’s unserious.
  • If it dares to name the could be, it gets dragged back to the what isn’t.
And so we become narrators of the dead present, never midwives of the not-yet.
This is the great undertow my film will confront.
THE PRESENT BATTLE: IMAGINATION VS. INERTIA
Kara Walker, "A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby" (2014). A colossal act of imagination—a Black female sugar-coated sphinx sculpture in a decaying capitalist space, demanding we reimagine myth, history, race, and gender.

The film wants to embody a certain kind of energy, that is trying to move through the resistance to using the full power of imagination. We want to show that:
  • Change is not resisted only structurally—but neurologically.
  • In moments of global threat (climate, war, displacement), society enters a reptilian freeze response: hoard, contract, defend. We're not neurologically hardwired to dream at this stage, yet to dream bigger is what will help us get through it.
  • In some ways we're completely focused on realities, yet we're completely unrealistic in others. We pick our realisms. Even as we remain so committed to whatever the dominant one may be.
  • Even art, then, gets infected with this paralytic realism—where to dream bigger feels disloyal to the trauma of the world. Or to be unaware and unfamiliar with it.

WHY WE'RE ON THE THRESHOLD:

15:09

YouTube

2025: The end of our world as we know it | Peter Leyden

"We're living in an extraordinary moment in history. We are at a moment here in 2025 where we have world historic game-changing technologies now starting to scale." Subscribe to Freethink on YouTube ► https://freeth.ink/youtube-subscribe Up Next ► Inside the high tech quest to decode the lost scrolls of Herculaneum https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DA3i69WMF4 We are living through the collapse of the old world, and the quiet construction of a new one. From artificial intelligence and clean ene


The film’s task, then, is not just to show Expo.
It’s to model how one might dare to dream through collapse.
It’s not escapism. It's not that kinda vibe at all.
It's like flying at a higher altitude, to gain a better perspective of what's playing out on the ground level. It’s aerodynamic defiance.
MYTHMAKING IN THE AGE OF COLLAPSED TIME

Myth is humanity’s longest-running operating system.
Its purpose isn't just to explain life—it orients us towards the unrealities. The other ones that haven't become obvious to our understanding. Those we call mythic. Because it helps us live through what can’t yet be resolved. Its purpose is orientation, not verification.
A memorable scene from "Call Me By Your Name" (dir. Luca Guadagnino) where the future lovers' unresolved dynamic is temporarily moored onto the newly excavated artifact. Its inherent unknowability seems to anchor and echo this moment for Elio and Oliver.

Contrary to how we use the word today, a myth was never a lie. It was never authored to deceive. Myth was the concept we gave to the spaces where certainty breaks down.
In ancient and Indigenous traditions, myth was not about proving what’s true or false—it was about holding what’s unknowable with reverence.
A myth refuses the binary. It’s not right or wrong, positive or negative. It’s a vessel that carries both truth and uncertainty at once. It gives us poetic license to interpret reality—not to escape it, but to remain humble before its mystery.
And what is the greatest unsolved mystery we live inside?
Time.

05:16

YouTube

Making time for Christian Marclay's "The Clock"

Multimedia artist Christian Marclay became a contemporary art superstar with "The Clock," his 24-hour film comprised of scenes from movies and TV that track the viewer's own experience of time, minute by minute. He talks with correspondent Conor Knighton about his cinematic timepiece (currently screening at New York's Museum of Modern Art), and about his early years experimenting with "turntablism" in New York's underground DJ scene. "CBS News Sunday Morning" features stories on the arts, music

Christian Marclay’s "The Clock" (2010) fragments and reassembles time into a collage of shared mythologies—cinematic, cultural, and mechanical. It suggests that time is never experienced singularly, but always through competing systems of meaning.
Across history, we’ve inherited all manner of competing myths about time—what it is, how it moves, what it’s for.
But in the age of AI and exponential computing, time is collapsing. Images outpace meaning. Stories fracture before they cohere. The future is rendered faster than it can be felt.
In this collapsed temporality, myth cannot simply emerge—it must be intentionally authored. Not as propaganda. Not as spectacle. But as scaffolding for future human sense-making.

“I don’t fear the machine’s ability to generate.
I fear our loss of time to interpret.”
— Gary Yong

As I walk through the manicured, and wonderful visions of the World Expo—prototypes, projections, dreams— I try to reconcile our acceleration into the future, with the personal desire for slower time. Through my perspective as an artist working at these intersections, reflecting on these themes through a highly personal lens, we gain an entry into how to make sense of these seemingly oppositional realities. We will use the very stage of the World Expo as a site of rupture, reflection, and re-examination of the foundational myths surrounding the making of our world.

VIDEO INTRO
The genius of Nowness — is that it sits at the edge of where the intimate meets the mythic.

THESIS: Myth-Making as Intimate Human Agency in age of AI

The film’s spiritual purpose is a re-enchantment of myth as an epistemic technology: a poetic system that allows for truth, uncertainty, and non-binary meaning to coexist. Its goal is to collapse the presumed distance between myth and modernity, presenting myth as the invisible thread that ties together the personal, political, and planetary. Broadly, the film moves from general skepticism towards a re-enchantment of possibilities, from watching the collapse of inherited myths to authoring new ones. As narrator, I pass through this arc myself—standing at the threshold between breakdown and breakthrough, framing myself as the author of my own myth.

Myth is not a fantasy—it is a vessel for time, grief, and memory.
It is a cloak to wear with deep intention.
By reclaiming it, we begin to author the world again.

1
Inheritance (Unconscious Myth)
“This is just how the world is.”
The viewer begins within myths that have been inherited unconsciously—progress, productivity, speed, success. These myths masquerade as “truth” or “modern logic.” At this stage, myth isn’t seen as myth. It's mistaken for reality.
2
Disenchantment (Fracture + Skepticism)
“This no longer feels true.”
Through grief, exhaustion, or cultural breakdown, the viewer begins to sense the cracks in the dominant myth. Time no longer feels linear. Progress feels empty. The myths begin to falter.
3
Recognition (Seeing Myth Everywhere)
“Wait—this was a myth all along?”
This is the turning point: myth is no longer a distant, ancient concept. It’s everywhere, even embedded in Expo pavilions, tech launches, and self-optimization culture.
4
Re-enchantment (Myth as Tool, Not Truth)
“So myth isn’t something to believe blindly—it’s something to work with.”
Now myth is reframed: not as fantasy or superstition, but as a living, generative tool. Myth becomes something that helps us live with uncertainty, ritualize grief, and reclaim rhythm.
5
Authorship (Conscious Mythmaking)
“If I don't inherit it, I can author it.”
The final stage is not belief—it is sovereignty. The viewer sees that to live mythically is to live intentionally, to choose the frameworks we build meaning through. The film suggests a model—not a doctrine—for reclaiming authorship of myth.

This arc collapses the illusion that modernity is post-myth, showing instead that myth is still the engine, only now disguised as fact. The viewer, like the narrator, is invited to pass through this arc:
from passive spectator to co-creator during mythic times. The final return to the question—“How do we build a world?”—lands not as a demand for an answer, but as an invitation to mythically re-enter the future.
RITUAL ARCHITECTURE OF MAKING MEANING
PROMPT: “How do we build a world?”
The question is posed sincerely, not as slogan, but as philosophical encounter. The film begins with a pure investigation, without dogma or certainty—an act of unlearning.
The tone is deconstructivist, setting the stage not just for content, but for perception: a kind of poetic disassembly that clears the space for mythic perspective. This question will be repeated throughout the film, an existential motif that provokes a deconstruction of presumed attitudes and well-archived responses. This question is not answered —it is metabolized without urgency. We follow it like a mythic thread through the labyrinth that is making sense of today, not to find resolution, but to reveal the frameworks we rarely question.
STRUCTURE: A Four-Part Ritual Initiation
The film moves through a ritual arc, mirroring an emotional and mythic initiation. These phases create a narrative arc through which the audience can metabolize the central question posed - "How do we build a world?"
Each section is marked by a tonal shift—anchoring the film’s experimental nature in an emotional architecture the viewer can intuitively follow or feel.
TONE: 'New Sincerity'

“I know this is complex. I know it might be foolish. But I’m still going to ask: How do we build a world?"
This film isn’t the final word on building a world. It’s a sincere attempt to ask better questions. The VO script is designed to feel undeniable, with the clarity of a child’s questioning, but the weight of a philosopher’s knife.
New Sincerity in an Age of Godlike Technology
This film confronts the presence of godlike technology—systems so vast and unknowable they’ve positioned us on the precipice of civilizational change. It’s a moment that demands we re-examine how we build worlds: not just through tools, but through values.
To explore this, I can’t stand outside the machine. I have to enter it—using the same generative systems that destabilize authorship, memory, and reality—to try to make meaning from within.
But I approach AI not only with simple paradigms for its use - speed, cost, complexity - but with sincerity. Every frame I generate, every synthetic fragment I blend with live-action, is a question: What happens when we try to feel again, even inside the machine? What happens when we don’t use technology to dominate or impress, but to mourn, remember, or imagine otherwise?
This isn’t about aesthetic novelty. It’s about forging a visual ethos that stays emotionally honest while navigating the uncanny.
Reanimating the Visual Language of Myth in the Age of Simulation
In A World on the Edge, AI is not used to depict the future—it is used to reimagine the past as interface. This is AI as a meta-medium—used intentionally to ask how visual languages construct belief across time.
Where we typically encounter myths as archived artifacts—paintings, sculptures, reliefs, tapestries—I use AI to resurrect these mediums not in physical form, but in contemporary simulation. These images are not meant to be “believed.” They are meant to be contemplated. We know it’s not 'real'. But we feel something real inside it.
By generating anachronistic mythic forms through AI, I invite the viewer to question the technologies of mythmaking itself—not as fantasy, but as epistemology.

What do we accept as real, sacred, or timeless?
What formats encode belief?
What makes a myth feel true?

WHY AI?
These mythic frames are not dream sequences. They are ritual interfaces—temporary temples of image, constructed from contemporary tools, to remind us that all technology, even storytelling, carries metaphysical weight. The film uses AI to:
  • Create a false artifact that is neither painting nor footage, neither future nor past.
  • Juxtapose physical visual formats with the surreality of generative AI.
  • Stage myth as an unstable, reanimated medium—one that reflects both our longing for meaning and our detachment from it.

The AI generated title cards in the story outline have been created to communicate the visual concept, and have not been perfected. In the film, these chapter titles will be tableaus with motion.

I believe Nowness has always sought work that sits on the edge—between format and feeling, between ritual and relevance.World on the Edge does not treat AI as a tool of optimization. It treats it as a way to stage new rituals of seeing. It does not merely aestheticize myth. It restores myth’s technological function—to orient us, across uncertainty, toward something we may not yet fully understand.
Costume, dance, and mythos
Aesthetic Code: Future Mythic / Ancient Futurist
Function: Garments that allow the body to pass between eras, bear memory, and signal a future in dialogue with ancestry.

In A World on the Edge, costume, dance, and mythos are not ornamental—they are ritual technologies for reorienting our relationship to time, authorship, and future-making. There are a few vignettes where I appear as a kind of personal offering, using my body as the site to stage the mythmaking. In these moments, costume becomes part of the visual language we are constructing. Costume marks the threshold between ordinary time and ritual time. It signals the activation of a personal myth, one not inherited unconsciously, but authored in response to the exhaustion of dominant narratives.
Dance, meanwhile, gives rhythm form—it transforms abstract ideas like return, looping, and grief into felt experience. The movement in the finale sequence draws inspiration from ancestral dance language across Indigenous and cosmological traditions—from Andean spiral logic to Coast Salish ground movement—not to replicate sacred tradition, but to honor the deeper function of ritual dance as a technology of worldbuilding. These influences are reinterpreted through original choreography, merged with modern movement vocabularies drawn from pop culture and contemporary dance.
The result will be a hybrid, speculative ritual—a physical language that collapses the distance between past and future, preservation and imagination. By blending reverent grounding with accessible, recognizable gestures, the finale becomes both spiritual and thrilling: a mythic enactment of authorship and return, choreographed in the shared language of sincerity, rhythm, and reawakening.

As a diasporic artist from the Global South, I approach these symbolic forms with deep sensitivity to the histories they carry. Rather than borrow directly from traditions not my own, I draw from hybrid mythologies, speculative ritual forms, and deeply personal references. But I also deliberately wish to sidestep the moral panic and fear of cultural representation popularized by the Global North's relation to our shared planetary ancestral lineages. My aim is not to reenact preexisting cultural traditions, but to excavate the sacred function they once held.
STORY OUTLINE
PROLOGUE SCENE: The First Prompt

The opening prologue places us at the precipice of the very present, on the edge of tomorrow, where our story begins. Framing it as a mythic meeting of innocence with godlike power, a child prompting an AI model creates immediate tension between potential and peril, purity and programming, future and myth. It invites the audience to feel both awe and dread: this is no longer theoretical—we are already in the myth.





Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer)
meets a techno-circus

This section stages a slow unraveling of a deeply internalized myth: that the world is in danger, and that we—as individuals, institutions, societies—are responsible for saving it. This myth is often presented as self-evident, morally righteous, and urgent. But what does it really mean to “save the world”? What world? On whose terms? And who decides?

Janitors, architects, guards, bureaucrats, students, other artists—all are asked the same mythic question:
"How do we build a world?" I move through the Expo interviewing, observing, documenting contradiction—sweating, laughing, reaching, attempting, failing upwards.

Through a Socratic rhythm of questioning, I follow each answer with gentle but pointed inquiry. The goal is not to dismantle, but to draw out: to trace the logics, abstractions, and contradictions that underpin even the most basic responses.

This section becomes a ritual of redistribution—not just of authorship, but of doubt. The myth of “saving the world” is revealed not as a concrete shared truth, but one that is very hard to get most people to agree on. It seems to be more like a collapsing shorthand—used to mask warranted anxiety, to signal and emphasize virtue and values, or even to defer real agency. We can't seem to agree on anything.

FRICTION, then, is where clarity dissolves. Where the standard classical Christian narrative of salvation and redemption is lifted open and its messy underside revealed as a question of power, authorship, and imagination. This section doesn’t answer any of my questions. It exhausts them.

Tone: Energetic, chaotic, inquisitive, weirdly light-hearted for a potentially big topic —like Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's seminal documentary Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer) but set in a techno-circus.

01:41

YouTube

"Chronicle of a Summer" - "Are you happy?"

A brief interview segment from 1961's "Chronicle of a Summer"


"How do we build a world?"
<THE END>
REFERENCES
"Expo - Magic of the White City" - a documentary on the 1893 Chicago World's Fair

01:55:44

YouTube

Expo - Magic of the White City (Narrated by Gene Wilder) | 1893 Chicago World's Fair - Full Movie

Subscribe for more great movies: http://pixelfy.me/JansonSubscribe Narrated by Gene Wilder, this film explores the world of 1893 through a cinematic visit to Chicago's Columbian Exposition. Many of the world's greatest achievements in art, architecture, science, technology and culture are unveiled there. The 1893 World's Fair was an engineering marvel. More Ways to Stream: Amazon Prime: https://pixelfy.me/ExpoOnAmazon Tubu TV: https://pixelfy.me/ExpoOnTubi More Information on the Free Documen

"Networked Worlds" - a memo by WeTransfer & co-matter

Wetransfer

networked-worlds-memo.pdf

Networked Worlds is the third part of Networked Culture, a series of publications that explore the e ects of networked technologies on the creative process. The previous two memos of the series are Networked Counterculture (2023) and Networked Reality (2023). All memos are free to download via wetransfer.com/blog/category/research Networked Worlds A memo by WeTransfer & co–matter

Lina Iris Viktor: Mythic Time / Tens of Thousands of Rememberings - exhibition at Sir John Soane’s Museum, London

04:24

Vimeo

Lina Iris Viktor: Mythic Time / Tens of Thousands of Rememberings

Dr Louise Stewart, Curator of Exhibitions at Sir John Soane's Museum gives a short tour through Lina Iris Viktor's exhibition, Mythic Time / Tens of Thousands of Rememberings. On view at Sir John Soane's Museum, London from 10 July 2024 to 19 January 2025.

ARTIST PROFILE
Rooting AI in Ritual and Epistemology
Over the last year, I’ve been evolving a techno-philosophical practice through cinematic language that seeks to reorient the logic of tech acceleration through the visual languages of myth, ancestral ritual, and deep time. These projects do not treat AI as an aesthetic shortcut or novelty, but as a site of metaphysical and cultural reckoning—a medium through which to resurrect, re-stage, and re-imagine the ancient function of storytelling as a form of deeply intentional worlding and worldbuilding.
Where contemporary AI narratives are largely dominated by Western techno-optimism or futurist spectacle, my work approaches AI as a myth-making tool—one that can collapse temporalities, re-animate buried cosmologies, and ask epistemological questions about authorship, memory, and belonging in an age of machine intelligence.
Refugia: Sacred Time Remaining (2025)

Vimeo

Password: whattimeisit

A cinematic resting ritual in mythic time
This most recently completed work is a response to the global call for the CIRCA Art Prize, based on the manifesto this year - Refugia. It imagines a post-capitalist landscape where time itself has shifted after the planetary exodus of the top-tier elite. Part speculative folklore, part cinematic séance, the film asks: What kind of time do we return to when the myth of progress breaks?

DIORAMA (2025, World Expo Osaka)

Google Docs

DIORAMA_documentation.MOV

Projection-mapped techno-mythology for public space
A one-minute generative AI visual piece mapping the fall of unstable systemic structures, giving way to new mycelial networks and passage to a utopian future. Projected nightly between May 13-June 13 on the iconic EXPO Hall Shining Hat Building, mirroring the Expo’s theme: “Designing a Future Society For Our Lives”. Part of the Shining Hat Projection Mapping Project, organized by the Japan Association for 2025 World Exposition, and the Projection Mapping Association of Japan.

EQAI (2024, World Expo Osaka)

04:37

YouTube

EQAI: Find your Ikigai in AI

"EQAI: Find your Ikigai in AI" is a visually stunning journey exploring AI's transformative potential and humanity's urgent need to evolve alongside it. Merging branded content, social impact film, and visual poetry, it uses the Japanese concept of "ikigai" to forge a path through an AI-driven era. From early humans swept into a time vortex, to a utopian future of equitable AI access, it inspires viewers to shape an inclusive, AI-powered world. Writer/Director: Gary Yong About EQAI: EQAI Aca

AI as an interface for social evolution
A visually stunning journey exploring AI's transformative potential and humanity's urgent need to evolve alongside it. Merging branded content, social impact film, and visual poetry, it uses the Japanese concept of ikigai to forge a path through an AI- driven era. From early humans swept into a time vortex, to a utopian future of equitable AI access, it inspires viewers to shape an inclusive, AI-powered world.

Selected for the EXPO VISION programme (now through October) by the Expo Secretariat in the 10,000 capacity main concert and performance venue of the Expo "Matsuri" Arena. EQAI is one of the first use cases of AI in humanitarian branded filmmaking that has been exhibited on a global platform, and introduces a social impact AI initiative by the artist. Click here to find out more.e

SOLARIS (2025)

Google Docs

SOLARIS_unreleased

Nature as scale-shifter, AI as metamorphic memory
Set in the Gobi Desert, SOLARIS is a music-driven visual odyssey that transforms an ancient landscape into a mythic stage for rebirth and transformation. Merging AI-generated sequences with live-action footage shot on location, the film personifies nature as both omnipotent and fragile by inverting scale—inviting viewers to experience the world from the vantage of its smallest inhabitants while underscoring the interconnected dance between all living things. The track featured is an original song written by the director/artist, whose multidisciplinary vision, extending also through costume design and choreography, weaves together sound, movement, and visuals.


Techno-Shrines (in development)
Conceptual sketches of planned installation works The God is in the Gate and Lux Venditor. Cinematic shrine concept from ARTifacts ecosystem: a ritual interface to eulogize the God of Cinema in a post-cinema civilization.
A retrofitted vending machine becomes a luminous altar to vision—offering light not as commodity, but as sacred and communal transaction.
As disciplinary boundaries dissolve in the evolving landscape of image-making, my practice has naturally expanded toward exploring cinema not merely as a format, but as a sociological and metaphysical interface for collective sense-making. This has led to a natural expansion of my practice toward installation-based concepts such as​ The God is in the Gate and Lux Venditor​—still in development—which imagine cinema not as a passive format of consumption, but as a sacred, interactive interface. These are two techno-shrines emerging from the philosophy and narrative ecosystem of my long-form worldbuilding project ARTifacts of the Future, extending my exploration of speculative myth into physical environments to open new channels for ritual engagement and audience embodiment.
DANCE
Performance as Authorship
Movement has long been a personal passion and expressive language for me—one that now finds its place as an integral layer of authorship in this film. My lifelong relationship with dance now has an opportunity to be included in my own mythic grammar. Rather than outsourcing this gesture, I’ve chosen to inhabit it myself. With the support of a choreographer, I will have to undergo the physical and emotional training required to meet it, and thereby pass through the mythic initiation fully myself.

Google Docs

FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform)

At an undisclosed time, a lamé-clad go-go dancer ascends a light blue platform with a personal listening device. Surrounded by 48 illuminated lightbulbs, listening to music of their own choosing, they dance for approximately five minutes before disappearing again.

I was hired as part of the first all-Asian cohort of gogo dancers when this well-known work was exhibited in the PRC for the first time in a 2016 Torres retrospective at the Shanghai Rockbund Art Museum, curated by Larys Frogier and Li Qi.

05:14

YouTube

LAST GUN MV - BLM & GUN VIOLENCE

#LASTGUN is a metaphor for the cycle of violence. We must be willing to surrender the trigger, to escape the cycle. CONNECT THE DOTS ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ◢ POLICE BRUTALITY against unarmed innocents that is triggered by a fear of Black civilians who they serve to protect; ◢ MASS SHOOTINGS that have been on sharp rise in recent years creating a climate of fear & mistrust; ◢ persistent lack of GUN CONTROL in a country plagued by violent GUN CRIME & CULTURE; ◢ close link between the GUN AND SLAVE TRADE in

I was part of the cast of dancers in this music video which I also directed.

Some dance clips. I will require training and a choreographer no doubt to pull it off!

Google Docs

Physical dance break.MOV

Google Docs

Studio practice.MP4

Gary Yong is a Malaysian-born filmmaker, visual artist, and cultural futurist working at the intersection of cinema, AI, and speculative myth. With over a decade of experience as a commercial director based in Shanghai—filming globally across Milan, South Africa, Indonesia, and the Gobi Desert—his early career was rooted in narrative precision and cross-cultural fluency, shaped by formative years living in Canada, the U.S., Thailand, Singapore, and China. In response to an era of algorithmic acceleration and seismic cinematic upheaval, he has evolved towards public art, installations, and immersive storytelling—not as a departure from film, but as its spiritual continuation, exploring the metaphysical and political dimensions of AI image-making.
Gary is developing ARTifacts of the Future, a long-format science fiction IP rooted in techno-spiritual philosophy, speculative technologies, and ritual architectures. His practice draws from Global South epistemologies to resist extractive tech narratives and imagine alternate cosmologies for the future of human creativity. He represents a new generation of Global South creators shaping AI not just as a tool, but as a worldview—one that challenges dominant tech-centric narratives in building more pluralistic, inclusive futures.
LINKS

artifacts-novai-5isk54z.gamma.site

ARTifacts presentation deck

"ARTifacts of the Future" is a transmedia universe that reimagines humanity's relationship with AI through the lens of endangered creativity.

b4theaiyellscut.substack.com

Writings | Substack

Sharp takes from cinema's frontier through a director's lens, pairing philosophy with filmmaking education to help visual storytellers navigate the AI revolution. Click to read B4 THE AI YELLS CUT, by Gary Yong, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

Instagram

Instagram (@gary.yong)

Instagram photos and videos

COLLABORATORS (assembled so far for the project)
Made with