Doors 7:30p
Program 8:00p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We’re delighted to bring you an evening of cinema with filmmaker and researcher, Gala Hernández López!

Her films delve into the intricacies of algorithms, revealing found footage within virtual communities, showcasing their depth and complexity. Hernández López’s work explores transhumanism, focusing on the subjective experiences emerging within the internet and how algorithms amplify certain unsettling aspects of these experiences. The vast planes of the internet are compiled into a documented body of work questioning masculine fantasies of control and the struggle with accepting human limitations, particularly in relationship with the seemingly boundless potential of the internet.

We can’t wait to share this curious and innovative way of filmmaking as we screen two of Hernández López’s sci-fi fiction documentaries for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world and La Mécanique des fluides, as well as a clip from her in progress film.

Program

for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world

France 2024, 19 mins

A woman dreams of a future economic crisis affecting the cryptocurrency market. Thousands have been cryogenized, waiting for better times… for here am I sitting in a tin car far above the world, a two-channel work, is a dizzying psychedelic epistolary laden with doom and unease. Are we all suspended or are we falling into the void? And what strange relationship do we have with the future?

La Mécanique des fluides/The Mechanics of Fluids

France/Spain 2022, 38min

In 2018, an incel (i.e., an involuntary celibate) posts a suicide letter on the Reddit platform with the title “America is responsible for my death”. The Mechanics of Fluids is an attempt to find answers to his words. A virtual drift through the internet in search of his digital traces that ends up being an inner journey between our connected solitudes.

Program Duration: 57 mins

Bios

Gala Hernández López is an artist, filmmaker and researcher. Through interdisciplinary research and the production of docu-fiction films, video installations and performances, her work explores new modes of subjectivation, specifically as produced by computational digital capitalism. From a feminist and critical lens, she examines discourses and imaginaries circulating in virtual communities as fictional symptoms of a state of the world. Her work has been selected at Berlinale, DOK Leipzig, Cinéma du Réel, Punto de Vista, SEMINCI, Transmediale, Centre Wallonie Bruxelles, FICCI, Clermont-Ferrand and the Salon de Montrouge, among others. Her film La Mécanique des fluides won the César for Best Documentary Short film in 2024 and the Experimental Work Award 2023 of la Scam (France), among a dozen awards. She is a PhD candidate at the University Paris 8, where she is finishing a research-creation project on screen capture and where she has taught for 3 years. She has been an Associate Professor (ATER) at the University Gustave Eiffel and a visiting researcher at the Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf (Germany) thanks to a DAAD research grant. In 2023-2024, she is an artist in residence at the French Academy in Spain – Casa de Velázquez. She co-directs the research and creation collective After Social Networks. She regularly gives workshops and lectured-performances, in places such as the Filmuniversität Konrad Wolf, Beaux-Arts de Marseille, The Photographers Gallery or the Locarno Film Festival.