Working primarily in film, Yuyan Wang excavates the landscape of digital imagery, distilling hours of found footage that trace how image production of extraction and waste mutates and multiplies within digital and visual cultures.

Boring Billion uses online footage to portray an overheated machine haunted by petro-industrial desire. Drawing on automated processes, repair tutorials, and technological environments, the film explores humanity’s longing for perpetual motion. Slick, viscous substances lubricate gears that move in rhythmic, almost erotic sequences. Bionic figures shift between automation and reflex, merging human, non-human, and synthetic matter into a shared logic of optimisation and fatigue. A drone soundtrack, with distorted lines from DeBarge’s All This Love, offers a compassionate view of life across organic and technological forms.

The title refers to the ‘Boring Billion’, a period of stasis in Earth’s history before the rise of complex life. In Wang’s film, however, the term becomes ironic: nothing is still. Refusing to separate the tender from the mechanical, Boring Billion asks whether feeling itself might be planetary in scale.