interior technicity:unplugged and/or switched on
vol. 17, no. 01
2020
the journal of IDEA: the interior design + interior architecture educators’ association
idea journal
idea journal
interior technicity:unplugged and/or switched on
vol. 17, no. 01
2020
the journal of IDEA: the interior design + interior architecture educators’ association
How do interior technologies bear out their allegiances to various forms of political and economic assemblages while making (seemingly) life better, more efficient, more productive, and more comfortable?
How do interior technologies serve to meet the minimum standards of human welfare relative to air, light, water and well-being as outlined by United Nations Sustainable Development Goals?
What new blended realities and spatial possibilities are being instigated by innovative uses of photogrammetry, virtual reality, augmented reality, laser-scanning, machine learning, and remote sensing?
What cultural references, positions and implications do interior technologies offer?
What influence do interior technologies have on privacy, safety and well-being?
What is the aesthetic signature of an interior technology?
What is the materiality of an interior technology? What happens at its boundary or edge condition?
How do interior technologies, especially overlooked, antiquated, unorthodox or ingenious spatial contraptions confirm, challenge or speculate on what we understand or assume an interior to be?
In a broader context, what is the significant impact of rapidly advancing and widely accessible information and social technologies that are driving the revolutionary upheaval through all that can be conceived as ‘interior’?
How do new mediations between environments, bodies, technology and media, including biofeedback, performative actions and affective gesture, sensory and atmospheric production, challenge or expand our understandings of interiors?
How are interiors implicated in a shifting relationship [convergence?] between bodies and technology.
in this issue
08 introduction: interior technicity
Julieanna Preston
13 the dividual interior: surveillance and desire
Katie Braatvedt
29 learning from mars; or, facing our shit
Lydia Kallipoliti
Jestin George
51 inside the architecture of closed worlds, or, what is the power of shit?
Luke Tipene
68 locative atmospheres: practices in networked space
Kate Geck
82 re:bodying the virtual: a bilateral excavation in virtual interior(s)
Remco Roes
Alis Garlick
94 binding matters: reflecting on the affectivity of a light projection
Isla Griffin
107 catoptric theatres: on devices of atmospheric staging
Izabela Wieczorek
131 unspecified project: scenes of digital media practice in spatial design
Carl Douglas
Susan Hedges
Rafik Patel
Nooroa Tapuni
149 virtually unseen: new digital understandings of reclaimed space
Linda Matthews
170 swipe inwards: the technicities of care in a psychiatric precinct
Laurene Vaughan
Melisa Duque
Sarah Pink
Shanti Sumartojo
187 ‘silvering (slowly)’: augmentation, age, and mattering
Carl Douglas
Sue Gallagher
Rafik Patel
Nooroa Tapuni
Emily O’Hara
205 the paleotechnology of telephones and screens: on the ecstatic permeability of the interior
Kris Pint
221 the one and the multiple
Müge Belek Fialho Teixeira
Frederico Fialho Teixeira
237 memory in suspension: chinatown lost and found
Linda Zhang
introduction: interior technicity
Julieanna Preston
Executive Editoridea journal
Welcome.
It is my great pleasure to introduce the newest issue of idea journal.
Readers will notice some significant changes to the journal since the 2017 issue Dark Matter. In 2019, the IDEA Board appointed me to lead a new editorial team and commissioned us to envision three issues to be published over the course of three years. Over the past twelve months, the editorial team has been engrossed in several interconnected journal specific initiatives prompted by IDEA’s desire to increase the journal’s ranking and profile internationally, expand its readership, update its visual identity and respond to contemporary issues specific and associated with interiors and interiority.
First, we were charged to put the journal on a path to achieve a Q1 or Q2 status, no small task indeed. Our collective investigations revealed that the criteria required an international publisher of merit, open access, a rigorous review process and at least one issue per year and a minimum of twelve articles per issue amongst other less demanding aspects. With the endorsement of the IDEA Board, we secured Art Architecture Design Research (AADR) as the journal’s publisher, Curatorial Editor Rochus Hinkel at the helm. This collaboration prompted the journal to be distributed for the foreseeable future in two different ways: first as an e-pub available to individuals and libraries as a full issue on e-pub platforms such as kindle and iBook, with select articles posted on
the IDEA website, and a year later, the whole issue available on the IDEA website via open access. In addition, the online metadata and cross-referencing markers were refreshed, including using search engines such as Google Scholar to increase and document the citations each article attracts, an important factor in today’s pressures to publish and demonstrate ‘impact’ and ‘uptake’ as research academics. In less than a few months, citation numbers are up significantly. While the journal website portal continues to offer us new challenges, it is proving to be a very useful tool to structure the call, review, revision and production of idea journal.
Our second effort focussed on drawing the journal to the attention of a larger world-wide audience of researchers, students and industry professionals centred on spatial design, interior design, and interior architecture. We extended the journal’s reach beyond the edges of what would be considered a core readership to engage other knowing bodies grappling with similar concerns of space, perception, sustainability, experience, materials, philosophies and technology in culturally specific and diverse communities, geographies, and political circumstances. This initiative arises from IDEA’s commitment to a shared set of values, practices and theories and the rich interfaces these have with other associated disciplines, methods and fields of research.
The changes mentioned above necessitated that the pool of reviewers expand to reflect new aspirations and areas of expertise, a pool that is now in place, doubled in size and actively growing. It also prompted us to refresh IDEA’s commitment to support new and emerging researchers especially with regard to developing critical, reflective and experimental skills to communicate and present innovative design. The forthcoming issues include articles and visual essays from a number of new researchers that have been mentored extensively to bring the text and images to a high standard. In addition, on-going world events remind us again and again of the importance of turning to indigenous writers and makers, a matter that asks us to question our review criteria and processes, become more aware of systemic colonising practices and more open to other world views. These aims are a work-in-progress.
The IDEA Board also gave us the green light to redesign the journal, which included creating a journal-specific logo, revamping the journal portion of the website, and imagining new possibilities for reading the journal in a totally digital format capable of featuring live streaming, animation, videos and other forms of interactive content. You may also note that while the journal’s name has not changed entirely, it has morphed to reflect its changing focus, expanded audience and ethos. What you see before you is the product of that effort, an effort we could not have achieved without the creativity and expertise of Jo Bailey, our graphic designer, and Christina Houen, our copy editor.
There are three issues in the pipeline: Interior Technicity: Unplugged and/or Switched On (September 2020), Co-constructing Body: Environments (December 2020) and (Extra) Ordinary Interiors: Practising Critical Reflection (September 2021). For those enamoured by statistics, this issue, Interior Technicity, includes this introduction and fourteen articles, four of which are visual essays (Braatvedt, Griffin, Matthews, and Roes and Garlick), and one of which is a hybrid article spanning between research article and book review (Tipene). This issue includes research by a total of twenty-seven authors living and working in UK (1), USA (1), Canada (1), Belgium (2), Australia (11) or New Zealand (11). All articles have been through a double-blind peer-review process; some articles have been reviewed twice after substantial revisions.
We hope you applaud these changes and enjoy the new look and publishing opportunities.
‘Interior Technicity’ called for reflection on how interiors have always been augmenting entities and how they continue to be so—in other words, extending, facilitating and consolidating bodies within socio-cultural environments. Rather than seeing an interior as an ‘inside’ in opposition to a world beyond, it asked what modes of ‘folding inward’ have equipped and enabled the spatial environment? Technicity—the world of tools and technical objects that extend and mediate memory, as Bernard Steigler (1998) describes it—has never been what inside-ness, in its sheltering of life, keeps at bay; mediation is from the start
technical, indexed to inscribing practices rich in temporal and embodied implications. By this reading, interiors have always been augmented and augmenting (in the sense of the Latin ‘augmentare’: to increase, enlarge, or enrich).
Like every other journal issue I have edited, the call attracted a variety of topics and responses one could not anticipate. There were twenty-five expressions of interest and a subsequent sixteen complete manuscripts that, after the review process, reduced to fourteen final articles, several of which where collaboratively authored. As the forthcoming articles will attest, articles range from concerns of sustainable responsibility in a world of finite resources, to use of contemporary technology to observe alternative spatial circumstances, advocation of post-humanism and principles of new materialism relative to interior production and unearthing evidence from cultural archives to revision urban
space and ethnic heritage. New conversations on longstanding concerns of interest to interior researchers linger on the nature of inside and outside bodily boundaries, the multiplicity of creative process and experience, and the interrogation of small yet important interior features in health care environs. Rather than summarise these stellar articles, I encourage you to read further, browse generously, and ruminate deeply.
My love of shaping a journal issue happens very much in the same spirit of catalysing a temporal event. Admittedly, I actually enjoy the editing process and thrive when author’s words are refined to be sharp, poetic, insightful and informed by creative work as well as scholarly research. To do this with authors, reviewers, an editorial team, and a publisher is a very rewarding collaborative activity that exceeds the hours of searching for stray punctuation marks, missing references and correct verb tense. Thank you to the IDEA Board for trusting this team to bring the journal through this transformative phase. Huge kudos to Susan Hedges (AUT), Luke Tipene (UTS), Anthony Fryatt (RMIT), Antony Pelosi (VUW) and our external advisor Lois Weinthal (Ryerson) for the hours of reviewing, editing, networking and corresponding. Congratulations to all the authors of this issue, for your patience, openness to critique and willingness to be part of idea journal’s next fresh life.
Julieanna PrestonExecutive Editoridea journalAugust 2020
I am forever grateful for what life in Aotearoa/ New Zealand brings. With roots stretching across the oceans to North America, Sweden, Wales and Croatia, I make my home between Kāpiti Island and the Tararua Ranges, and in Te Whanganui-A-Tara/ Wellington. I acknowledge the privilege that comes with being educated, employed, female and Pākehā, and the prejudices and injustices that colonialism has and continues to weigh on this land and its indigenous people. I am committed to on-going learning and practising of Kaupapa Māori.
Katie Braatvedt
Independent Researcher0000-0002-5780-1066
abstract
In his much-discussed short essay, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control,’ Gilles Deleuze described a fundamental shift in power that occurred in the 20th century. Previously, Michel Foucault had argued that human behaviour was controlled by ‘enclosed systems’ of power: the family, the school, the factory, the barracks, the prison and the hospital. These comprised what Foucault considered a ‘disciplinary society.’ Deleuze argued that Foucault’s ‘enclosures’ are in crisis, and that the current system is instead a control society, effectively governed by a single entity, the corporation. In this society of ‘ultra-rapid forms of free-floating control,’ people are reduced to data points. For Deleuze, individuals are ‘dividuals,’ and masses are data. This visual essay investigates the implications of control society on domestic space, exploring how digital applications and appliances, social media, and surveillance combine to form a dividual interior. Virtual space not only records and stores, but folds back into physical space, as images of domestic life online influence our perception of the built environment. The domestic interior, therefore, translates back and forth between the virtual and the real, each gathering information and informing the other.
the dividual interior: surveillance and desire
introduction
The domestic interior, like much of contemporary urban space, leaves digital traces of inhabitation collected from credit cards, smart appliances, phones, laptops and household utility usage. These traces produce patterns of behaviour and consumption, a digital residue, which accumulates into a detailed record. Virtual space not only records and stores, but folds back into physical space, as images of domestic life online influence our perception of the built environment. The domestic interior, therefore, translates back and forth between the virtual and the real, each gathering information and informing the other.
surveillance
In his much-discussed short essay, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control,’ Gilles Deleuze described a fundamental shift in power that occurred in the 20th century.01 Previously, Michel Foucault had argued that human behaviour was controlled by ‘enclosed systems’ of power: the family, the school, the factory, the barracks, the prison and the hospital. These comprised what Foucault considered a ‘disciplinary society.’ Deleuze argued that Foucault’s ‘enclosures’ are in crisis, and that the current system is instead a control society, effectively governed by a single entity, the corporation. In this society of ‘ultra-rapid forms of free-floating control,’ people are reduced to data points.
For Deleuze, individuals are ‘dividuals,’ and masses are data.
The ‘smart home’ is an example of the spatial implications of control society, representing a kind of dividual interior. This data-rich environment emerges gradually through numerous small exchanges of privacy for convenience: Google Nest home thermostats help consumers use less energy; Microsoft is developing counters that recognise foodstuffs and display recipes; mattresses are available that monitor sleep patterns. Less obvious than these high-tech appliances are apps that monitor domestic chores, step counts and period cycles. There is potential for both applications and appliances to betray their inhabitants: will health insurance premiums be linked to the number of steps taken on a Fitbit, the number of calories taken from a fridge? In Honeywell, I’m Home, Justin McGuirk argues that smart homes are designed not for the consumer, but for the corporation to gather as much data as possible.02 He predicts that, in the near future, all of these devices will cooperate in one large data harvest. By quantifying the minutiae of life, control society nudges us toward a desired norm in small ways that accumulate into a restrictive mould. These modulations, as Deleuze describes them, are decentralised and pervasive.
Beyond the meta-analysis of dividual data, there is the potential for more targeted breaches of the dividual interior. For example, insecam.com live-broadcasts thousands of hacked home security systems worldwide. An endlessly refreshing stream of domestic videos can be flicked between or observed at length. The illustrated screenshots from one 30-minute hack show two men working at a dining table and then, unexpectedly, two women making the same dining chairs into ad hoc beds and falling asleep.03 This series demonstrates not only that domestic spaces are no longer traditionally private, but also that the lines between residential and commercial space are blurring. The dining room is used for eating, working and sleeping.
If data is the new oil, the home is the next Texas. – Joseph Grima‘Home is the answer, but what is the question?’04
Joseph Grima argues that the domestic interior is a site of ‘virtual encounter between everyday life and global economic infrastructure,’ with the house evolving from a ‘sanctuary from prying eyes’ to a ‘geo-tagged broadcasting studio.’05 For Grima, the house has been entirely financialised; its primary function is to accumulate value on the market, and behaviour within it is collected by devices, translated into data, quantified, and sold back to us.
desire
Kurt Ivasen and Sophia Maalsen argue that, rather than replacing disciplinary forces, control society functions in conjunction with disciplinary society in a complex combination of discipline and modulation.06 They argue that individuals are datafied into dividuals and then reassembled into individuals, who are controlled by both fluid modulations and traditional institutions of power.
In the same way that Ivasen and Maalsen argue there is a risk of overstating the decline in the disciplinary forces described by Foucault, there is a risk of oversimplifying the house’s function as a factory producing data. The domestic interior still functions as an individual’s territorial space: it is physically lockable, sheltered from weather and subject to interior decoration by its inhabitant. However, this physical interior exists in constant dialogue with a corresponding digital interior.
Social media platforms, such as Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest, are aspirational online interiors. As Alexandria Lange states in Edited Living, ‘the house that might result from a series of Pinterest pins would be home as a series of events, stage sets for performing particular tasks with maximum beauty.’07 Lange observes how images on Pinterest boards circulate in a closed loop, resulting in a homogenous aesthetic across digital platforms that directly inform a global homogenisation of interior design. In lieu of a physical permanent house, the Pinterest Board becomes a substitute space to curate idealised domestic interiors collaged from decontextualised stills.
As data is absorbed by the smart home, and imagery is absorbed by consumers of social media, a passive interchange between the virtual and the real emerges. Beyond this digital/physical osmosis, however, exists a far more active engagement in digital domesticity, as content creators willingly perform online. The YouTube video, ‘Stanky Breath=Not Cute’ has almost 336,000 views.08 Strikingly intimate, this video depicts a woman in her bathroom demonstrating how to use a tongue scraper. Voluntary breaches of personal privacy are normalised and neutralised by a saturated media environment.
Perhaps as individual data points, these banal details are benign. It is only when it is reassembled into a legible whole that the digital interior is suddenly powerful and terrifying. As architects we can choose to ignore the virtual and stubbornly plough forward, constructing ‘monuments to a lost physicality’ as theorist Mark Wigley described the profession in a recent interview.09 Or we can resist it in practical ways, for example, by introducing digital blackout curtains in the form of faraday mesh and radio jammers into the physical interior.10 Deleuze argues that ‘there is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.’11 Opportunities exist in the blurred spaces between interior and exterior, virtual and real. Productive outcomes must begin by understanding that the contemporary interior is inextricably linked with digital space. Understanding that to watch, to be watched, to consume, and to perform are intimate desires succumbed to in our intimate spaces. Understanding, also, that in the cold glare of the algorithm, this public domesticity is endlessly recorded.
notes
acknowledgements
Thank you to my supervisor Dr Dorita Hannah for your continued encouragement, support and inspiration.
author biography
Katie Braatvedt completed her Masters of Architecture Professional (Hons 1) in 2019 from the University of Auckland. Currrently teaching at AUT and practising at Stevens Lawson Architects, she has also previously worked at 31/44 Architects in London and WeShouldDoItAll in New York.
Lydia Kallipoliti
The Cooper Union
0000-0003-2035-3295
abstractThe intent to inhabit Mars carries many self-contradicting intentions, especially given our clear plan to extract Martian resources, domesticate the planet, and transfer the ideological framework of establishing territory in a newly found space free from jurisdiction. To that end, research into sustaining human life on Mars is highly problematic. Interplanetary habitation is arguably an escape from Earth. The latent narrative is defeat; that is succumbing to the climate crisis, while making alternative plans for a selected privileged population. Nevertheless, research into life on Mars forces us to face our shit on Earth, where resources for sustaining all forms of life have been abundant. Not until recently have we been mandated to consider their finite worth or replacement, or deal with the excessive waste we generate as a by-product of our daily production processes. On Mars, where every resource for sustaining life is precious and rare within a fully enclosed life support, waste becomes integral to our survival. This view from afar, in the words of Claude Levi Strauss, changes our viewpoint on how to retain and recycle waste. Arguably, it is not only insightful for Mars-based habitats, but also for helping in altering daily patterns of dealing with waste and the climate crisis on Earth.
This article presents LIFE ON MARS, a research-design project investigating closed-loop life-support living systems for Mars as giant living machines of ingestion and excretion. It is neither a complete project, nor a ‘solution’ to extra-terrestrial inhabitation. LIFE ON MARS looks at the minimum use of in-situ resources avoiding extraction, as well as the regenerative properties of Earth-based biology and our ability to engineer and tinker with resources through the field of synthetic biology. The project also brings to light emergent forms of habitation in extreme interiorisation and the problem of sustaining life in a sealed interior when the exterior world becomes prohibitive. In this format, it is presented as an inquisitive visual narrative, which raises both existential and scientific questions for further exploration.
Jestin George
University of Technology Sydney
0000-0002-8225-827X
learning from mars; or, facing our shit
outer space and the problem of dominion
Is the action of the body separable from its technology, and how does the technology determine new forms of political action?01
There is something alluring about the emptiness of a blank planet; an uninhabited vast terrain, where every step demarcates the tempering of an endless unforgiving world. As Michael Marder argued for the desert, Mars, as much as it is a real planet afar, is also ‘an invention, a creation of emptiness in the plenitude of existence, an introduction of barrenness into the fecundity of being.’02 The intent to inhabit Mars carries many self-contradicting intentions, especially given our clear plan to extract Martian resources, domesticate the planet, and transfer the ideological framework of establishing territory in a newly found space free from jurisdiction.03 As space archaeologist Alice Gorman writes:
of all landscapes, perhaps space alone can claim to be a true ‘wilderness’… Interplanetary space was a real terra nullius, the land belonging to no-one. It was, nonetheless, a powerful associative landscape, central to diverse cultural beliefs, creation stories, mythologies and scientific enquiry.04
Since the conception of the Mars Excursion Module (MEM) in a 1964 NASA Study, the Martian astronaut, standing firm, masked and geared over a territory unfriendly to the physiology of humans, propagates the
iconography of the heroic settler extending human life through the galaxy; though with clear effects when placed next to the fissures of terrestrial history.05 When looking at Mark Watney, Ridley Scott’s fictional character (played by Matt Damon),06 who was left behind on Mars to grapple with the vast barren landscape of the red planet, there are clear associations between the astronaut and Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, The Wanderer, a painting that defined the Romantic Period and the iconography of the sublime.07 This visual narrative of the explorer as the inevitable victor of a free terrain is entirely subordinated to the burdened history of colonisation, where conflicting groups of power structures are established in their demarcation of dominion. Colonising Mars can therefore not be detached from the power dynamics of relentless capitalism. In recent years, Mars has been envisioned as a tourist destination, while the journey to the red planet has been largely commercialised and popularised. Along with Donald Trump’s recent consent to and encouragement of colonising Mars,08 private companies like Virgin Galactic, Mars One, and SpaceX are leading research, commercialisation and technical innovation in space exploration, while the military is questioning the commitments of the original Outer Space Treaty, put into force by the United Nations in October 1967.09 These ‘new developments present an ever-growing challenge in defining the laws that govern space, raising myriad questions, and rendering a treaty created decades ago obsolete.’10
So, as we find ourselves in a world of increasingly complex and contentious scientific and technological advancements, how do we evaluate and explore the premise of space travel and Martian living? How do we engage critically and meaningfully with life on Mars, not explicitly as a feat of science, technology and engineering, but also as a complex cultural, spatial and anthropological territory? Could we then rethink architectural and living modalities in a different way? Such
ventures require rigorous interdisciplinary research, which is exceptionally challenging, given the highly specialised knowledge forms that need to crossbreed with each other. Such crossovers, setting common foundations across disciplines, require the development of new shared types of language. During the Macy conferences, held in New York City from 1946 to 1953, the fields of systems theory, cybernetics, and what later became known as cognitive