Body Electric

Mike Hoolboom / Canada / 2025 / World Premiere / 2 min.

synopsis

In an age of the ubiquitous Internet of Things, an electrical socket confesses its loneliness and longing. A found-footage assemblage drawn from an iPhone advert embeds constant surveillance in a familiar AI aesthetic and, with chilling humour, trades the promise of care for the appropriation of a woman user’s lived experience. The smart home becomes the listening body of a world in which privacy has no off-switch.

“It used the feelings of others to clarify its own. It made them its own so completely that it came to believe it had created them.”

biography

Mike Hoolboom (1959) is an avant-garde Canadian filmmaker, essayist, writer and curator. Since 1980, he has made over a hundred films in which he explores issues of identity, memory, physicality and the influence of society and politics on human life. Since 2000, he has been working with the found footage technique. The Ji.hlava IDFF has been presenting his work since 2003, including films such as Imitations of Life (2003), Lacan Palestine (2012) and How to Watch Pornography (2022).