Bliss.jpg

Co-Director

Directed, Produced and Edited by Emily Rose Apter & Elijah Stevens
2023 | 10 min

Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival, Bucharest, Romania, 2023 - World Premiere
Tacoma Film Festival, Tacoma, WA, 2023 - US Premiere
Light Matter Film Festival, Alfred, NY, 2023
Glued & Screwed, The Hague, Netherlands, 2024
International Festival of Science Documentary Films AFO, Olomouc, Czech Republic, 2024
Mientras Tanto Cine, Montevideo, Uruguay, 2024
Mimesis Documentary Festival, Boulder Colorado, 2024

A travelog through the familiar and unfamiliar terrain of digital landscapes. Pairing 16mm footage of computer desktop backgrounds with soundscapes of sites of technological extraction –  precious metal mining, smelting foundries, microprocessing plants, and data farms – Bliss.jpg excavates and examines the geological and geographical sites that produce our virtual worlds.

Press
“This is a materialist film whose vision is analogical, although its object is not, and is an example of dual or hybrid imagery in cinema. The film is constructed in the analogical but deconstructed in the digital.” - Chute Film Co-op - Bliss.jpg or the Nanoscopic Landscape

“Some of the world’s most famous (digital — in all senses of the term) landscapes, reexamined, almost à la Richard Prince, or rather, a y2k take on the method of James Benning — brought back into materiality through 16mm film.” - BFI - The best video essays of 2023