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« for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world is an experimental double-screen film that 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, for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world explores the links between financial speculation, speculative science-fiction and the prediction and governance of the future.

Examining the fantasies conveyed by crypto-currencies, the narrative is carried by the enveloping text of an invisible narrator recounting her intimate dreams and fears. Accompanying us on a dreamlike, poetic, historical and futuristic audiovisual journey, she 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.The narrator engages with Finney in an imaginary conversation about faith or fear in the future, and how an optimistic bet on the future might actually endanger its potentialities through the political disengagement from present struggles.

The film also explores the sensation of temporary floating : through the figure of “suspended animation”, it 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. The idea of temporary suspension is questioned through the dichotomy “suspension-free fall”: Is humanity floating in uncertainty, or are we rather in free fall ? How can we differentiate between the two, given the limits of human perception and knowledge ?

for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world works through the non-linear temporality of dream and memory, the broken temporality of time travel narratives, such as the one in which Hal Finney embarks on his cryogenic capsule. »