Sympathetic Fluids
Sympathetic Fluids
by Matthew Pagoaga
Sympathetic Fluids
Video • 13:17 • USA • English
Sympathetic Fluids is a film about communication methods. Sympathetic Fluids is a film about psychic snail sex. Sympathetic Fluids is a film about the internet. Using layered chroma key visualizations in combination with original and stock footage, the film relays a shadow play narrative of wireless connection, snail slime, and embodiment. Accompanied by a dream-pop score and swirling ink intertitles, the film submerges audiences in a lush, enveloping world of colored goo and strange reenacting silhouettes. Intended as a sort of "Ken Burns from the fifth dimension" documentary, Sympathetic Fluids aims to expose the distant past, present, and speculative future of both humanity and gastropod alike.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
Matthew Pagoaga (he/him) is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work explores representations of altered states in cinema, ego-death in media viewership, capitalist sites operating through dissemblance, and tensions between corporatism and community. Using cinematic deconstructions and transformative digital data processes, he critically explores technology’s dual nature - as a tool of oppression, entanglement, and destruction, and as a catalyst for fecundity, engendering new thought and energizing change. Matthew holds an MFA in Art + Technology from California Institute of the Arts and is currently pursuing a doctorate at the University of California, Los Angeles.
