Experiencing Interruptions?

Consumed Body Purification System : A Meditation For The Consumed

Are you hungry for food but tired of eating? If you answered yes, then you need The Consumed Body Purification System™: the dietary intervention everyone is talking about!

It’s delicious! Refreshing! Cleansing! Meal-replacing! Rejuvenating! Renewing! Simple! Anti-aging! Detoxifying! Low calorie! Cost effective! Curative! Super-charged! And it makes a great gift!

  • Sydney Mills
    Director
  • Sydney Mills
    Writer
  • Sydney Mills
    Producer
  • Parches + Tim Tsang
    Composer
  • Sydney Mills
    Editor
  • Sydney Mills
    Director of Photography
  • Michael Lopez
    1st AC
  • Sydney Mills
    Production Designer
  • Sydney Mills
    Prop Maker
  • Casey Lain Baker
    Prop Maker
  • Todd Black
    Prop Maker
  • Casey Lain Baker
    Prop Master
  • Sydney Mills
    Key Cast
    "Hand Model #1"
  • Michael Lopez
    Key Cast
    "Hand Model #2"
  • Ieva Raudsepa
    Production Assistant
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Short
  • Genres:
    Sci-fi, Infomercial, Commercial
  • Runtime:
    5 minutes 20 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    February 26, 2018
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Sydney Mills

Fueled and inspired by her love of science fiction and popular cinema, one of Mills’s primary goals as an artist is to find a way to distill the moments of terror and wonder she associates with process of learning to understand the messy guts and inner workings of her body, and the human body at large. Mills’s personal understanding of the human body’s fragility, gained through her own personal experiences with various medical maladies, has led her to believe that the eventual mastery over her own body through science and technology will spawn within her pure ontological freedom, something she’s always wished for. While spheres of cinema and spheres of art, though related, are often mutually exclusive, she aims to create artwork that can simultaneously occupy both. Frequently utilizing the aesthetics of advertising to sell her particular brand of futurism, Mills creates artworks that ask viewers to contemplate speculative fictions about the human condition and the larger humanistic, societal and psychological implications of the posthuman body as it ascends further toward its inevitable singularity. Though photography tends to be her medium of choice, Mills also works with sculpture, video, sound and installation.

Mills earned a B.A. in Fine Art with a Minor in Cinema-Television from the University of Southern California (2010) and a M.F.A. in Photography & Media with a specialization in Integrated Media from California Institute Of the Arts (2018). She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

In "Consumed Body Purification System," I invent the kitchen countertop appliance to end all kitchen countertop appliances. Initially shaped like an average coffee machine, the Consumed Body Purification System creates a cleansing drink of cloned and liquefied biological matter based off it’s user’s DNA, which users (or “donors,” as I like to call them) provide their machine with via a needle prick to the finger from the machine’s “Imprint Slot.” As the machine produces the daily cleanse drink of its donor’s bio-matter, the architecture of the machine itself oozes out a bodily pulp and becomes a grotesque and abject physical reflection the donor’s psychological and ontological fears. Neurosis made flesh.

The "Consumed" project as a whole, in all it’s current iterations, is inspired by and refers to the myriad of consumer electronics companies and startups that use new forms of technology to sell consumers health and lifestyle products in the name of wellness and naturalism, something I see as inherently paradoxical. Due to the use enticing slogans and the general trickery of branding tactics deployed by corporate entities and their advertising agencies, many products are sold to consumers as being “natural” or "wholesome," buzzwords deployed to entice the average consumer to adopt new wellness regimes that often seem to promise a sort of reconnection or reunion with nature before we all become cyborgs. To me, the widespread use of phone applications, algorithms and devices, used with the intention of making us into healthier and happier humans, actually points to the path toward post-humanism that new technologies now afford us. Screw nature. We’re already cyborgs.

"Consumed Body Purification System: A Meditation For The Consumed" features a soundtrack I created in collaboration with composers Parches and Tim Tsang and fuses the sonic vibes of new age healing rituals with an endless flow of advertising buzzwords recited by a text-to-speech voice.