THE MECANICS OF FLUIDS

In 2018, an incel (involuntary celibate) posted a suicide note on Reddit titled “America is responsible for my death “. The film is a virtual drifting around the Internet in search of his digital traces.

I am very interested in thinking about the plastic and sensitive strategies that cinema has at its disposal to represent the affects and the psychic and physical sensations that we experience when we surf the internet. I think there is a lot to explore in this sense, as if, for some strange reason, cinema has difficulty in representing or making us feel the internet. When I started the project, I wanted the experience of the film to resemble the one I live as an internet user: the constant jumping between contents that have often opaque links between them, the disruption of notifications, the leap between various applications and platforms, between very heterogeneous regimes of images and texts, numbers, icons, gifs… All this semiotic density of the internet experience seems to me at times close to a hypnotic trance, overflowing and overwhelming due to the extension of the “domain of struggle” (to quote the most incel writer I know). (1)

Gala Hernández López

(interview by Gabriel Bortzmeyer, Debordements.fr, january 2023)
(1) Michel Houellebecq, Whatever, Serpent’s Tail, 1998)