Digital Fireplace Upside Down Promotional Video

2011, 13:40 min, color, sound, HD video

Combining slow zooms of domestic spaces with trite slide transitions and saccharine music, Bell-Smith creates a "promotional" video for the "Digital Fireplace Upside Down" DVD—a frame-filling image of a burning fireplace, flipped upside down, designed to "light up your life with a romantic, smoke free, beautiful, burning fire." Nearly fifteen minutes long, the mock advertisement is at once strangely hilarious and contemplatively tedious, alternating between the conspicuously empty living rooms and close-ups of the upside down fire quietly crackling, its movements repeating in gif-like falsity. Bell-Smith plays with the constance of repetition to foreground the absurd banality of domesticity and the plasticity and artifice of the contemporary moment, with the television set as its vehicle. Taking the promotional content to its logical conclusion, the DVD is for sale through Printed Matter, The Whitney Museum, Ooga Booga, and Family.