The private living space has always had a function as a place of refuge, comfort, but also as a repository of personal identities.
Since the outbreak of the pandemic, the exceptional position of home quarantine, and an immensely high focus on our personal living spaces, the “home” can no longer be regarded as the once closed unit, it appears instead as a space of progressive exposure -not least due to the constant exchange of data with public digital networks.
“See you at Home” is an installation oscillating between the physical and the virtual dimensions, with the aim to explore the meaning of private and intimate space in times of ubiquitous connectivity. It represents the concept of a public living space, providing a stage for encounters, joint awareness, and personal exchange.
The foundation piece of this work is an ever-growing global archive in Virtual Reality of glimpses into the domesticated private spheres of a digitally networked population. This VR Experience manifests a multitude of fragmented narratives of personal spaces, intimate routines, and memories; a variety of snapshots collected in more than 40 countries during the most intense periods of self-isolation and home confinement over the past two years.
Through a series of interactive lecture performances, hosted in Zoom and on Mozilla Hubs, this archive of privacy expands with local, individual content. In these performances, the audience is invited to a collective room journey through their own homes and the private spaces of carefully chosen protagonists around the globe, to open up the discourse on intimacy in the digital age and sharpen the perception of the privilege of privacy.
Link to the Online version of the project
“See You At Home” was produced in collaboration with Goethe-Institut China and ETH Zurich. The VR Archive “The Smallest of Worlds – A Landscape of collected Privacy” was developed during CPH:LAB, part of CPH:DOX Documentary Film Festival 2021 and funded by Pixel, Bytes + Film 2021, BMKÖS (Federal Ministry of Arts, Culture, Public Service and Sports, Austria), and Deutscher Künstlerbund, Neustart Kultur.