Screening domesticity

Abstract

Screening Domesticity explores the mediatisation of domestic space over the past century through four exploratory case studies – the Villa Müller (Adolf Loos, 1930), the Maison de Verre (Pierre Chareau, 1932), Case Study N°8 (Charles and Ray Eames, 1949), and the Nautilus project (Arturo Torres, Jorge Christie, 2000). Screens are technical apparatuses as well as dispositifs; meaning that they are not just pieces of material technology, but complex objects embedded in discourses and social practices. The increased use and prevalence of them in our environment and their ever-increasing penetration of the domestic realm has changed our conception of privacy and domesticity and the way media forms are themselves understood. As media has been domesticated, the domestic space has been mediatised.

The appearance at the beginning of the nineteenth century of new media of mass communication and technologies of reproduction not only transformed what had previously been stable boundaries but also the very definition of the subject as self- reflective and centred being. Media technology has opened-up new understandings of human cognition and perception. Among its consequences has been the view of the unconscious as a system of inscription and information processing and of psychoanalysis as a science for decoding it. Working with elements of media archaeology and psychoanalytic theory, the first part of the thesis focuses on the consequences of photography and film informing the domestic space of Adolf Loos’ Villa Müller and Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre. Through an optical survey of its interiors, the design component of the research analyses the optical hierarchies inscribed within the house and the changing conditions of subjectivity triggered by new optical relations.

As an exemplary model of post war-domesticity, Charles and Ray Eames Case Study N°8 is explored through the lens of their film House: After Five Years of Living (1955). The concept of screening is animated by an important ambiguity – on one hand it conceals and hides, and on the other it shows, makes present. Working as a kind of ideological dispositif, the Eameses’ film is able to project a new domesticity while simultaneously obscuring the anxieties immanent to that domesticity’s Cold War context. Issues of surveillance, domestic superabundance, material technology and material knowledge that constantly inform the work of Charles and Ray Eames are explored and unpacked in the context of an acceleration of informational media that is interconnected with the escalation of military technology.

The Nautilus project is a recent art installation consisting of a transparent glass house placed in the city centre of downtown Santiago, Chile. Nautilus became for two weeks the house of an actress who performed domestic routines in front of hundreds of passers-by and the media. This last case study is explored in relation to the rise of reality television shows and the presentation of the self via distributed digital platforms. The project opens up a series of questions regarding contemporary forms of exhibitionism and voyeurism activated by intensifying socio-technological mediation and the emergence of domestic space as itself an instrumental medium through which to discharge our mediatised subjectivities.

Through drawings, physical models and installations, Screening Domesticity, discern the screen practices that operate in the organisation of these different interiors, which are accessible through their particular mode of media dissemination. Therefore, in this study, the topos of the screen is never fixed, but rather wanders through multiple places and representation systems. We can find this in the technological media apparatuses, as an architectural element, as the mechanism of subjective formation, and also in the same design process. From this perspective, the screen is conceived as a practice, not simply as a material piece of technology. Therefore, the name of the thesis, “Screening Domesticity”, does not just reveals but also displays and exhibits what is discovered. This information is produced and conveyed primarily by the different drawings found throughout this work. Thus, design-research is constantly guided by the drawings through a mapping process, wherein the different media representations (photography, film or television images) fold back into architecture — following the conventions of architectural representation. Throughout a process of continual permutation, the drawings (the practice of mapping) transform the media conditions of the interior into alternative forms of material manifestation, proposing new modes of subjectification.