Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

Contemporary discourse with a critical attention on the postdigital conditioning of urban space continues to become increasingly established, with a range of distinct themes and practices emerging to focus on the technological consumption and commodification of everyday space. Contextualised by frameworks such as platform urbanism (Barns 2019) and surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2018), is the implication of ocularcentric screen-based imaging technologies which infrastructure individuals in regimes of capitalist and state control. In excess to the ‘instagramming’ of architecture and the urban playgrounding of Pokemon Go, are critical (and cinematic) paradigms which include speculative architect Liam Young’s appropriation of laser-scanning and self-drive car machine visioning in “Where The City Can’t See” (2016) and Keiichi Matsuda’s frenetic “Hyper-Reality” (2016) and a dystopic blindfolding of the real circumstances of the urban by multiple layers of Augmented Reality deployed data. While critical practices and theoretical frameworks that relate to the image-based technological conditioning of urban space become increasingly bolder, those which relate to interior space are limited to non-existent. This research paper interrogates a number of interiors-focussed contexts for which image-based digital processing and machine vision apparatus have significant potential. Through practice-based investigations of these interior contexts, such as the Airbnb accommodation sharing platform with extensive datasets of photos of homes and the flattening of face-with-space in Zoom mediated domestic circumstances, this research seeks to propose new critical frameworks for the mediation of the contemporary interior by the screen and other image-based technological praxis.