Detached cohabitation deals with the increasingly invasive role technology plays in our everyday life and surroundings. Interfacing architecture and new real-time digital media—specifically Skype—becomes a pivotal tool to investigate how notions of intimacy, distance and spatial perception can be subverted and challenged when the virtual and the real collapse into a bilateral channel.
Master Thesis Project by Marco Busani
Technology and new digital media play an invasive role in our everyday life and surroundings. The consequences of this unstoppable invasion—such as surveillance, online over-sharing, theatricalization of everyday life and so forth, offer new perspectives on the interior sphere.
Detached Cohabitation aims to develop the evolution and use of new digital media in the interior space, while opening up to reinterpretation how these technologies interact with architecture and the domestic realm.
I am interested in transforming technology into a tool that allows living simultaneously in multiple locations. The project intends to allow two or more people who are physically apart to live and experience two distinct places as one unit. These ideas are applied to the bedroom, the central, intimate part of the house which we only share with our beloved. It is a space where two lovers can fall asleep together or where a grandfather can tell a bedtime story to hid little grandson before going to bed.
To explore these relationships, I created two identical rooms placed next to each other with a wall dividing them. From the outside, the two rooms appear as one uni as they are contained in one single, continuous structure. These two rooms can symbolize two rooms anywhere in the world. Each room features a single bed the visitor is invited to lay on, a projector and a webcam. The technological devices are the only means of connection between the two rooms.
The webcam in one room is connected to the projector in the other room. The visitor lying on the bed can then see the image of the visitor in the second room being projected on the ceiling and interact with him or her. The projectors and webcams are always on but the shared rooms experience is activated only when both participants are in. The visitors have an active role and are given the opportunity to steer their own experience.
The interior of the rooms recreates the same intimate atmosphere of a dark bedroom before bedtime, with the only light coming from a device.
Ultimately, the project aims to develop further awareness and sensitivity of the role that technology and new digital media play in architecture, and specifically within the domestic interior. The project shows how technology allows the erosion of distances between spaces without physically displacing anything. Through the digital medium, distant places are put closer and people living apart can share the same experience and cohabit the same space. Accordingly, each person belongs simultaneously to two or more locations.
Create a Core77 Account
Already have an account? Sign In
By creating a Core77 account you confirm that you accept the Terms of Use
Please enter your email and we will send an email to reset your password.
Comments
This project is so sharply poetic!