Camille Thai
@measuredbyinfluence
ACTS OF LIVING
@MEASUREDBYINFLUENCE
Advisor: Kristy Balliet
STATEMENT
According to Wendy Chun in Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media, “Internet users are curiously inside out - they are framed as private subjects exposed in public,” the internet and its cultural practices are becoming undeniably invasive, even more so after the pandemic. Media tools completely took over the home with webcam, microphones, lights, someone else’s furniture, etc. The thesis began with questioning the influence of social media in private space, observing consumer behavior and the technosocial phenomenon that requires people to surrender their privacy online to upkeep a standard of living. With the blur between a “home”, a “homepage” and the #home, one’s idea of a domestic landscape is constantly coupled with the information and products they consume online. The delineation of the current states of the home embraces the fragmentation and the multiplicity of the domestic landscape as portrayed in fragmented, composed posts. The private realm becomes questionable with the invasion of things that are meant to satisfy a larger audience; therefore, a traditional home no longer reflects the things our current society values.
The project takes on the existent typology of a home in Los Angeles to establish a place of familiarity and intimacy. Using the idea of a home as a storytelling tool, the design exists in the form of three methods of interventions to fracture the found domestic landscape, identifying the manifestation of social media domestic space as interventions of objects, materials, and staging.
The thesis is a curated installation consisting of four separate acts: the map, the objects, the scenes, and the feed. Together, ACTS OF LIVING is both a critique and a proposal for our extremely, anxiously connected world through an assessment of the proliferation of internet culture today enabled by our own habits. The thesis brings forward the unspeakable shifts in our culture in regard to identities and marketability in regard to the social media landscape while embracing them as a-matter-of-fact to provoke an architectural solution. To capture a parafictional perception of reality, the project plays with the idea of making a scene, intertwining traditional orthographic architectural representation with media and set design to create a sense of fragmentation and immersion. It is overall an exploration of an architectural narrative and an illustration of social phenomenon andsubculture in architecture.
As it is reduced to nothing but objects that define the inhabitants and the feed that defines the brandability of their identities, the “home” becomes a commodity for the collective entity. Hence, the thesis aims to reveal a critical technosocial phenomenon of the time using an architectural narrative. By borrowing the typical landscape of a home, the thesis aims to unfold and disrupt the idea of living and working today behind the ideals that exist online.
FIRST BOOK