+apt

+apt is a formula of text from Julio Cortázar’s short story ‘Las babas del diablo’ plus frames from the film it inspired, Michelangelo Antonioni’s ‘Blow-up’.
Imitating the protagonist’s successive enlargement of a photograph, the regeneration of A.I. video from adjusted camera angles reveals an internal fiction where artifacts of the medium become apparitions, exposing the artificial imagination as a new reality.
While the video is degraded with each generation, sometimes to the point of abstraction, the identity of the narrator is similarly cast onto secondary characters who become the embodiment of his self-projection and conduits of his fantasy. The corruption of the image parallels the corruption of youth, while the violation of privacy is justified by the shared consciousness that A.I. personifies. This disembodiment is highlighted by excerpts of instruction manuals for technology referenced in the original short story. Like A.I., these contemporaneous tools frame, shape, and create a truth.

Directed by Miroslaw Gwiazda (Canada)