for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world
Director
Gala Hernández López
France / 2024
18 min.
/ Original version
Original language
English
The experimental double-screen film addresses the links between crypto culture and cryogenics as two speculative technologies for which the future becomes an economic resource to be exploited. Through a collage of YouTube videos, archival images, and 3D animations, the film explores the links between financial speculation, speculative science-fiction, and the prediction and governance of the future.
Examining the fantasies conveyed by crypto-currencies, an invisible narrator recounts her intimate dreams and fears. She accompanies us on a dreamlike, poetic, historical, and futuristic audiovisual journey, and evokes the figure of the American extropian and cypherpunk Hal Finney, a crucial figure in the history of Bitcoin but also a cryogenic patient since 2014. In the narrator’s dreams, after a future Great Depression, Finney integrates a part of society that has gone into suspended animation or subsidized biostasis in order to accelerate economic recovery.
Exploring the sensation of temporary floating through the figure of “suspended animation,” the film also evokes a historical epoch marked by a high degree of unpredictability and uncertainty, due to the acceleration and disruption of new technologies, as well as to the multiple consequences of the Anthropocene. Is humanity floating in uncertainty, or are we rather in free fall?
Gala Hernández López is an artist-researcher and filmmaker. Her work accentuates interdisciplinary research with the production of essay films, video installations, and performances, which explore new modes of subjectivation specifically produced by computational digital capitalism. She examines, through a feminist and critical lens, the discourses and imaginaries circulating in virtual communities as symptomatic fictions of the state of the world. Her work has been shown at DOK Leipzig, Cinéma du Réel, IndieLisboa, Transmediale, and the Salon de Montrouge, among others.
Production Gala Hernández López, Quentin Brayer, Yannick Beauquis. Production company Don Quichotte Films (Paris, France). Director Gala Hernández López. Screenplay Gala Hernández López. Editing Gala Hernández López. Music Diego Delgado. Sound design Mathias Arrignon. Animation Xinxin Kong. Executive producer Gala Hernández López. With Olivia Delcán, Joseph Grossi.
Films: 2022: La Mécanique des Fluides / The Mechanics of Fluids (38 min.). 2024: for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world.
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