“Why Aliens Love America” (2024) dir. Ruby Justice Thelot. Courtesy the artist.

On Art and Aliens

“Why Aliens Love America.” This is the title of Ruby Thelot’s film, but also the point of his interest—the threshold where the sheer scale of alien sightings and popular interest in extraterrestrial life is catalyzed by the cultural particularity of America, with all its paranoia, fear, and violence. Pointing to a map of UFO sightings across the globe, he asks why they have been so heavily concentrated in our country, taking on a form of supernatural American exceptionalism. 

America is by and large a schizophrenic culture filled with imaginatively paranoid and abjectly delusional motherfuckers. Superstitious, delusional, paranoiac, and violent—but not without their reasons. It’s with this understanding that Thelot brought together videos by contemporary artists Wendi Yan, Clare Koury, and Dana Dawud for a screening titled XTRATRRSTRLS.

A cyberethnographer by trade, Thelot curated the XTRATRRSTLS at the Wythe Hotel alongside ACOMPI, a curatorial project founded by Jack Radley and Constanza Valenzuela. The duo balances their day jobs as cultural workers at respected institutions with more roving, experimental productions; last summer, they produced a play on the Tram to Roosevelt Island, while earlier this month they mounted a fashion show inside a former landfill on Staten Island. This is how I found myself sitting in the basement of Williamsburg’s Wythe Hotel, in a stretch of the neighborhood between the water and the Bedford Ave L stop that has largely been evacuated of artistic culture. On my walk from the subway to the hotel, I heard someone holding a comically large smoothie in one hand bark at someone on the phone about the need to “transform antiquated processes with AI.”

The films in the program exhibited several different points of entry into non-human life, emerging from internet subcultures, institutional commissions, science, culture, and myth. Thelot’s film set an informational tone for the context in which the others were received and the more oblique artistic strategies that they employed.

“Why Aliens Love America” addressed the driving forces behind alien sightings, linking blurry found footage with the long arc of American cultural politics, pointing to 17th-century Puritan settlers, the Middle Passage, and the mores of the Cold War. Against abstract footage of objects moving in the sky, text from his essay of the same name appears on the bottom of the screen. “From its inception, aliens have kept a watchful eye on America, making frequent short apparitions like a deadbeat theurgical god-figure,” it reads, the virtually generated voice employed by Thelot stumbling through to keep a natural pace, tripped up by certain vowels and consonants. To me, this suggested an alien, or at least inhuman, narrator, an uncanny element that helps to modulate an otherwise informational tone. It felt familiar yet cold and jarring, a formal echo to the reasons Thelot gives for the enduring American romance of aliens hiding in plain sight. During the Cold War, he argues, aliens represented the horror of collectivism that American culture saw in the Soviet Union: a kind of unthinking and anonymous hive mind. Crucially, he also points to narratives of trauma as part of the persistence of alien sightings in America. In the late 20th century, particularly in works of fiction, this is what aliens and especially narratives of abduction came to represent: bodily violation visited by strange authorities, myths that would have been eerily real to the American public from their own history, such as syphilis experiments on Black sharecroppers, the forced sterilization of Native Americans, or nonconsensual scientific experiments conducted as part of MKUltra.

Alien sightings do form a particular kind of American exceptionalism, not only because of their concentration but due to just how heavily they feature in popular culture. Historians of religion have long theorized UFO sightings in a broader sense, but it is aliens specifically that “are embedded in America,” as Jodi Dean writes in her book Aliens in America, a title strikingly similar to Thelot’s film. From tabloids and Hollywood to consumer electronics and rave culture, by the 1990s, images of aliens were woven deeply into the fabric of  American culture, if they hadn’t already been during the Space Age.

In recent years, a significant body of critical responses to the phenomena of alien sightings has emerged, many engaging with the same analytic categories as Thelot’s film: trauma, the specter of the other, and Cold War fears. Dean wrote about aliens and conspiracy in relation to the loss of control experienced by many Americans during the gravitational changes of globalization, and the way that abduction so often allegorizes trauma and repression, and the loss of memory. Bridget Brown’s 2004 book, They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves: The Cultural Politics of Alien Abduction, covers much of the same ground, emphasizing that abductions and sightings were not a purely rural phenomenon, but often appeared as a method of expressing anxieties about secular and scientific authority.

“Visions of Phosphine Earth” (2025) dir. Wendi Yan. Courtesy of the artist.
Commissioned by Future Humans at the Berggruen Institute for the Proxima Kósmos project.

The second film of the evening, Wendi Yan’s “Visions of Phosphine Earth,” emerged out of collaboration with scientists at the Berggruen Institute, where she was commissioned to make two films: one functioning as a work of art, the other as a documentary. This film stages science fiction firmly within scientific authority. The scientists she was working with were researching stem cells, she explained during the Q&A, studying the properties of emergent life and the possibilities of germinating a new and alien form. Beyond this premise, the piece often felt reminiscent of sci-fi genre tropes: wide shots of vast and uncanny landscapes, slow pans that reveal futuristic objects, steaming craters seen through hazy colored filters. This association is partially because Yan made her film using game engines and CGI software often employed by mainstream commercial productions. These more “cinematic” sections, with what seemed like film grain or digital noise added in, felt like 1950s-era outer space movies or the kind of science film that would be projected in a classroom setting. The film later pivoted to focus on microscopic imaging, moving from the macro of space to the micro of biological matter. At times this had a lightly psychedelic effect, similar to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos—a wide openness to the philosophical substrate of life, whether biological or astronomical (to wit: in the 1970s, Cornell University published a book on UFOs edited by Sagan). If Yan’s film was a work of science fiction, it was a deeply speculative one, an artistic approach to the edge of scientific experimentation, itself using experimental technology and software.

There were moments in Yan’s film, however, which weren’t strictly simulation, and which seemed to carry the imprint of the documentary she mentioned in the Q&A. For instance, the shots of a computer in a scientific lab seemed to be in-situ to the institute that commissioned the film, with a level of ambiguity left to the viewer about whether the microscopic imaging on the computer screen was “real” scientific software or another instance of biological imaging clearly generated via some form of AI, as in some sequences with garbled, incomplete text and biological imagery that slowly mutated shape and color. Those sequences felt more in line with a different type of art that is more procedural than narrative or research-based. As a result, I found myself wondering if the alien is located in the biological material or the apparatus being used to simulate and represent it.

With a similar interest in minute details and overarching systems of knowledge, Clare Koury’s film “Circles” focused on the universal, mythic figure of circles, from physics experiments to crop circles, equal parts Carl Jung and Ancient Aliens. Originally made as her contribution to an exhibition at Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art, the edit that Koury presented as a theatrical version at The Wythe featured a remix of “Circles” by Post Malone, slowing the song with reverb and mixing in devotional music in the form of a raga drone. As with much of Koury’s work, there were moments of humor that truncated gestures of spiritual and scientific sincerity: aging hippies sat in crop circles holding crystals to their heads while vertical videos clipped from TikTok appeared on the screen: more crop circles, fractal patterns, and CGI renderings of sacred geometry.

During the Q&A, Koury explained the film was inspired in part by watching Ancient Aliens with her father while growing up. She appreciated the program’s mixture of scientific and mystical imagery, which suggested a longer history and deeper impulse behind the desire to see something in the sky and find new forms of life that challenge what we think we know. Her film was closest to that of a believer, or at least someone who wants to believe in that which can’t be captured through objective means.

“Monad+” (2024-) dir. Dana Dawud. Courtesy the artist.

Dana Dawud’s film “Monad+” stuck out from the others for being deeply rooted in the internet. Dawud is part of the loose movement that has come to be known as “internet cinema,” often in the context of the Open Secret screenings that she has organized in cities across the world, from New York and London to Budapest, Jeddah, and Beirut. “Monad+” is just one iteration of the larger Monad project; Dawud is based in Dubai and depends on global collaborators to contribute to and complete her work, forming a kind of borg-like cultural force. Different voices and figures appear in her video, loosening a sense of authorship and narration. In a recent interview, Dawud claimed that the Monad project was inspired partially by reading Chris Kraus’s Aliens and Anorexia in the desert. Although “Monad+” opens with footage of an unidentified flying object and features segments with halo-like light beaming down from the sky onto an otherwise unilluminated body, it’s the film’s use of collective, anonymous protagonists and the spectral, practically spiritual aspect of digital images that feel more directly connected to Dawud’s approach towards the alien. Forming a narrative around a fictional “blurring expert” using intimate voiceovers, shaky vertical iPhone footage, rapid cuts between landscape and urban scenes, dancing women with their faces blurred, and fragmentary and interrupted sound, “Monad+” gestures towards the alienation and enchantment of digital representation that is inextricable from what it feels like to live life online. In an age that demands branding and immediate legibility from individuals, the choice to confuse and blur is as much an aesthetic decision as a conceptual one.

As the lights came back up, and chatter about other conspiracies and artists filled the room, I found myself back in a more rational place, for better or worse. As I reflected upon the videos, I thought about another book about UFOs, The Resonance of Unseen Things, an ethnography of alien abductees by Susan Lepselter. In the book, she quotes one of her informants as remarking that, “A cult is a culture.” A cult is a culture, whether we like it or not. Despite the overtures of military authorities and the clamoring demand of the people, a single bombshell document revealing a new truth about extraterrestrial life seems unlikely to arrive. But looking to the sky, and looking within, we find structures and seeds for new forms of life. Is there someone else coming, something from beyond, a final truth? Maybe one day we’ll find out for sure. Maybe not.

“Monad+” (2024-) dir. Dana Dawud. Courtesy the artist.