The tools we use change the way we perceive and understand ourselves. Since the 1950s the proliferation of the amateur camera has allowed for the mass documentation of our individual self and our portrait. The staging of the image and how we 'look' or represent our selves and our body changed as we learnt in part to 'play-to-the-camera'. Editing softwares such as Photoshop lead to further changes and to the 'touching' up of our image in the pursuit of 'perfection'. While contemporary digital image processing techniques such as the auto-retouch function enables digital cameras to alter your image in real-time.

The camera 'Artificial Smile' plays with the notion of perfection and auto-retouch. Created as a picture apparatus, it shows only smiling people's picture to be taken, irrespective of their former emotional state. To achieve this camera takes a picture but overlays it with a smiling mouth drawn from a pre-existing pool of pictures with smiling faces. To generate to maximum level of exaggeration the replaced smiling mouth impression is matched as realistically as possible to that of the initial portrait taken.