The video is narrated from the perspective of a falling sun god, with text adapted from Yeats’ poem The Second Coming. “The firelight falling from the sky” brings together ancient myths of celestial descent and the failures of modern technological experiments, as if the ascent and collapse of civilization were caught in the same repeating movement.
The footage comes from the documented crash of SpaceX’s Starship during its seventh test flight in Texas on January 16, 2025. The rocket reached space, lost contact within minutes, and disintegrated in midair; the images of debris falling across the sky circulated online as a spectacle of technical failure transformed into romantic grandeur.
Process notes
The work treats a real technical accident as a mythological image-making machine. Public footage of the January 16, 2025 Starship crash is reorganized across three horizontal channels, while AI-generated fire, falling bodies, and red atmospheric textures extend the debris into another register. The process keeps the unstable status of the image visible: a documented failure becomes found footage, prophecy, spectacle, and generated landscape at once.
The local dossier keeps the work’s hardware as part of the image system: in exhibition form it can be shown on nine 4-inch displays driven by a media player and video splitter, while the ultra-wide screening file carries the three channels as a continuous 6:1 strip. A Beijing International Film Festival authorization record places the work at Xinhua 1949 Cultural and Financial Innovation Industrial Park, and the Espace Temps installation views show the exposed boards, cables, and small screens as part of the fragile technical body of the piece.
Festivals / screenings
- 2025, Boundless Immersion, Beijing International Film Festival, Xinhua 1949 Cultural and Financial Innovation Industrial Park, Beijing, China — Immersive programme presentation.
Exhibitions
- 2026, I lie in the earth, my lips still stirring., East Gallery, Nanjing, China
- 2025, (un)Systemized, Espace Temps, Paris, France
Links / references
- Beijing International Film Festival WeChat note: The Second Coming Public project note connected to the BJIFF Boundless Immersion presentation.
- SpaceX official record: Starship Flight 7 Official SpaceX page for the January 16, 2025 Starship flight used as factual crash context.
- Guangli Liu official page: The Second Coming Artist official work page with the three-channel video dossier.