Como en casa

Come, come in. Sit down, lie down. Get comfortable. Like at home it’s my room, it’s your room, it’s our room. Being the place where we spend most of our hours, what circulates within those four walls? What do we consume? Is it our refuge or is it the place where little by little we become part of the “desiring machine”?

Permeable walls, permeable to new technologies, to the instructions that we consume every day about what should be. Has my room become a shrine that glorifies youth, sexuality, money, pleasure and power?

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

Come, come in. Sit down, lie down. Get comfortable. Like at home it’s my room, it’s your room, it’s our room.

Room, a word composed of the verb “inhabit” and the suffix “tion” that indicates the effect, fact or action of.

Being the place where we spend most of our hours, what circulates within those four walls? What do we consume? Is it our refuge or is it the place where little by little we become part of the “desiring machine”?

As Taylor says, “personal, or “own,” desires and aspirations are sometimes the result of a desiring machine, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, very alien to our reality.

Permeable walls, permeable to new technologies, to the instructions that we consume every day about what should be. Has my room become a shrine that glorifies youth, sexuality, money, pleasure and power?

“We live in a world saturated with models and instructions for successful behavior; how to attract the attention of others, how to succeed, seduce, demand… Everything, as it seems, has become a part or symbol of our bodies.” (Taylor, 2012)

Could it be that, suddenly, our room went from being a safe place where we found ourselves, to being the place where we built ourselves as individuals from external forces? Forces not your own? False desires?

Argentine researchers Bard and Magallanes say: “Today, Instagram is one of the social networks where body image is a way to do business as a techno-economic strategy of self-promotion and sales on social networks.”

The human body has become a project to be carried out, another performance, within a system of representations mediated by new digital technologies. (Taylor, 2012).

On the other hand, Bard and Magallanes also emphasize the neoliberal context: “Likewise, the neoliberal context where individualism and the liberal politicization of bodies prevail makes visible the imposed loneliness in which we live, where the uncertainty of the flexibility and lability of social rights encourages self-demand and self-responsibility for the trajectories it builds.”

“…the system sells us bodies and fantasies that can never be realized.” “According to our society of the spectacle, the body is something that can be acquired, trained, perfected, designed, displayed and preserved forever.” (Taylor, 2012).

Like at Home is a 3D space that can be navigated with the mouse, with a song that plays on a loop and can transmit tenderness and terror at the same time. The images are photographs of dancer Anton Dolin, taken in 1941 by photographer Carl Van Vechten.

Literature

BARD, G. y MAGALLANES, M. (2021). Instagram: La búsqueda de la felicidad desde la autopromoción de la imagen. Culturales, 9, e519. https://doi.org/10.22234/recu.20210901.e519

TAYLOR, Diana. (2012). 6. Los nuevos usos de performance.