Harsh Noise Wally, is a sophisticated mashup mixing strips of Wally, the lazy and cynic colleague of Dilbert with some epic noise music extreme attitudes. Well conceived and assembled.
The digital representation of reality is technically and conceptually a fake, and this “fake” is more and more what we’re used to. The process of reducing in pixels (causing a loss of details), approximating colors (causing a loss of tones) and sounds (causing a loss of frequencies) are definitively creating a distorted (yet enormous) memory archive of the last decade(s). From this perspective, truth is always a negotiation between what our eyes see and what the machine records and stores. So why not intervene in one of the oldest way of representing reality (amateur portraiture), pushing it to the extreme in the “pop” and “automatic” categories?? With Artificial Smile by Stefan Stubbe and Andreas Schmelas every memory is a nice one. Their modified camera is able to turn every portrait into a merry visage, substituting perfect smiling lips for less joyous versions, taken from a consistent database. The result is a seamless “happily ever after” social community artificially shot through a camera with a golden reflecting body. But, unfortunately, that’s only technology, not a fairy tale.