About Mercury XX
One Breath Of Nature -
A Big Step For The World
Mercury XX is a science fiction short film which tells the story of an all female space mission to draw the first breath on another planet. After her decade-long journey across the stars accompanied only by her spaceship’s AI Will becomes conflicted with the realization of having to leave her sole friend behind or taking this next breath for humankind.
The film is inspired by the Mercury 13, a group of 13 female aviators in the Fifties, who secretly underwent all the required tests and preparations for NASA’s Apollo program. Ultimately they were rejected and never flew a mission despite often outperforming their male competitors.
Mercury XX rewrites this history and presents a feminist driven Sci-Fi film, a future that is wild, messy, visceral and fleshy, as opposed to the masculine, mechanical and surgically clean visions of contemporary space exploration.
To design the original look of the film an AI model was trained on thousands of space fashion images and was tasked with generating speculative sketches of costumes and the fictional spaceship.
Film Director Miriam Kuhlmann
"Mercury XX is more than a short film. It's an attitude."
Using new technologies can give women power in every position.
Since 2010 former architect Miriam Kuhlmann is designing and dreaming about a world, in which women and minorities are treated equally to men.
In Mercury XX she tells a story about a woman being an active parts of finding a new planet for the human species to survive, and she is allowed to take the first breath for all humankind to follow. “Will had to say goodbye to her AI spaceship, which adds to the highly emotional event. The wild and visceral environments reflect the unhindered courage, willingness and resilience of a woman fighting for her rights every day in this world”, Miriam Kuhlmann states.
“Mercury XX is more than a short film. It’s an attitude.” Miriam Kuhlmann wants women all over the world to connect and take agency over their own lives. With the help of technologies like Social Media, AI, Medical and Engineering technologies, she wants women to become empowered, united, and with that never lose their sense of femininity and intuitiveness. Miriam Kuhlmann herself will continue to use film and art as her prior medium to express the need of change in our society and encourage women to take part in this journey.
Some Facts 1
Numbers Speak For Themselves
National Space Agencies such as NASA and ESA are being accommodated by private avenues of billionaires: Elon Musk's Space X, Jeff Bezo's Blue Origin, etc.
All of these organizations are led by men.
Are women fit for space?
It is a gift — but also necessity
Looking at the current state of our earth, our environment is getting worse. We have to think about new solutions for our next generation also from a feminine perspective. We as women also want to play a crucial part in all sectors of spaceflight and new technologies. We want to take a breath and discover, not capitalize and colonize. We want to treat new environments with respect and do not want follow men blindly somewhere, until we realize that we forgot to bring period utilities on the new planet, right?
Should we as women actually care about spaceflight?
Design
Technologies
To design the original look of the film an AI model was trained on thousands of space fashion images and was tasked with developing speculative sketches of costumes and the fictional spaceship.
The film features a future that pushes the design out of the rather strict expectations of how a sci-fi film looks like with a wild feminine view. VR supports the messy and visceral aesthetic with its intuitive handling.
The greenscreen technology has been used as an instrument of immersion into the AI generated environments. The print on the costume and the spaceshuttle interior are physical translations of the AI imagery.