Director Bill Balaskas
Special thanks Venediktos Kapetanakis

The gadgets that surround us often combine the promise for ‘digital perfection’ (and the invitation to buy them) with the assertion that the ‘special’ moments of our lives only deserve an equally ‘special’ and ‘perfect’ means of documentation. In reality, however, this is a very short-lived perfection, since it ceases to exist long before the release of our gadget’s latest version; in effect, it ceases to exist the moment when we import our photos and videos in our computers in order to make them even more ‘perfect’.

“For this project, I set up and documented such a stereotypical, ‘perfect’ moment, using the gadget that has acquired an almost symbolic status in today’s digital culture: Apple’s iPhone. After applying filters that ‘fix’ digital noise on both image and sound, I juxtaposed sequentially a frame of original footage with a frame of manipulated footage. The value of the filters applied on each manipulated frame is slightly bigger than the one applied on the previous frame. As a result, the oxymoronic effort to ‘improve digital perfection’ ends up becoming an agent of disruption, confusion and decay. The final product of this accumulative process aspires to expose the untenability of the idea of ‘digital perfection’, and, perhaps along with it, the untenability of any idea of absoluteness imbuing our lives.

Bill Balaskas