Homo e-sapiens presents human isolation in two radically different forms: a solitary body dancing inside a room and a person suspended against the scale of the universe. As part of the cycle 'Permanencia de lo efímero', Cineteca Madrid brought both visions to Sala Azcona, pairing Natalie Bookchin's seven-minute Mass Ornament, made in 2009, with Dominic Gagnon's Space Down.
The contrast gives the programme its focus. One film builds its argument from fragmented online video; the other places images of people experiencing isolation and anxiety alongside figures apparently moving through the sky. Together, they shift the question from how individuals behave online to where human beings belong in a much larger, more disorienting space.
Mass Ornament uses a mass remix of internet footage, placing solitary dances and imitative group choreographies in the same visual field. Bookchin, an artist and theorist focused on digital media, uses the online archive to read society critically. Cineteca Madrid's official description centres the film on the friction between individual freedom and social control, without relying on a conventional narrative.
Its most forceful image is not a crowd gathered in one place. Instead, private gestures repeat until they begin to resemble collective discipline.
Gagnon's Space Down takes the programme in another direction. Cineteca and Matadero Madrid list the film in the Homo e-sapiens screening. Alongside Bookchin's work, it reflects on isolation and distance, and on the human figure's unstable place.
The programme's references establish the route behind the film. After looking in all four compass directions, Gagnon turns down toward the depths of the Earth and out toward space. Space Down assembles human expressions marked by isolation and anxiety, while other people appear to gravitate through the sky. These deliberately improbable perspectives make the human figure look intensely present, yet almost misplaced.
The screening was scheduled for Wednesday 23 September at 19h in Sala Azcona under the Cine category and the Proyección format. Jobo lists the activity as finalised. It formed part of Cineteca Madrid's official autumn 2026 programme, not a private or isolated event; Madrid listings from the same week also placed Cineteca within a broader seasonal cultural cycle. Further programme information came from Cineteca Madrid, while the Matadero Madrid card confirms that Mass Ornament and Space Down were the two films announced for the event.
The programme does not chase technological novelty. Its subject is the human body after connection has been fragmented into repeated gestures or viewed from an impossible distance. Bookchin finds social control in the circulation of online gestures; Gagnon locates anxiety at the edge of planetary and cosmic scale.
The pairing gives Homo e-sapiens a clear editorial force. It makes digital culture tangible as a physical experience of imitation and solitude that can leave people disoriented, rather than presenting it as an abstract system. The programme works best as a compact confrontation between private movement and collective pressure, with experimental video carrying that argument.
