Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Domesticated Mountain



Domesticated Mountain proposes the suburban home as the traditional vehicle for an architectural manifesto.

Positioning the home in an expanded notion of suburbia, i.e. The internet, the suburban home is the accumulation of all the things we do online, and so it needs to be redefined from scratch.
(apparently online you can buy a photo of what your useless things being moved to your new house look like)

In order to redefine what makes our suburban home in the time of facebook and twitter and tumblr and pintrest, we go back to the most primitive state of a home.

The primitive state of such a suburban home is a transport van depositing boxes on the sidewalk.
These boxes contain the house.

(the house itself is a readymade, rented from an online agency of houses, picked from a list according to specifications. In this internet suburbia no more houses are designed, because enough readymades exist already)
(could this be a Villa Savoya made from transport packaging?)

the future of architecture
was often expressed
as a house

This initial primitive state of a house arriving at it's location as a set of transport boxes is a condition that continues throughout the life of this house, and perhaps becomes it's death.
The inhabitants constantly need more products to satisfy their ever expanding needs ("Do we need a raw almond puree maker darling? Yes we do").
But to be exact, they do not need the almond puree maker to make almond puree, they need it to satisfy their need of needing it. They just want to buy it, but not necessarily own it or use it.



So the inhabitants of the house go through evolutionary stages.

 First they bring all the stuff from their previous house, then they continuously purchase more stuff on the internet, but gradually become so saturated with browsing and buying that they forget what they bought. Boxes of bargains arrive at the house but nobody remembers buying them, because they have already discovered another site with better bargains, faster browsing, cheaper shipping.

(still from Domesticated Mountain)











This compulsive internet shopping is part of the inhabitants growing list of compulsive browsing behaviors. Every night they get lost in psychogeographic drifts down the jpeg avenues of tumblr, scrolling down cartesian city grids of thumbnails, making their situationist derives by caressing their ipad screens. 
silently they watched from across the street as their home morphed into a webpage of thumbnails. 
(they just couldn't' wait to start scrolling)


In these derives, they find everything: products to want, and buildings they like and archive material to reblog and bearded guys to make friends with. They find objects to order and have sent home and information to fill up their blogs and clothes to wear while browsing for more.












Soon they are saturated. They have seen all the images that exist on the internet, they have browsed all the bargain bins many times over, but they need more things to scroll through, sometimes not even looking at what they are looking at, just caressing and scrolling. 


(sometimes they shopped in their sleep, forgetting what they bought even before they completed their purchase)

They dont need to buy products anymore, they just add them to their dreamboxes, mark them as favorites, leave them rotting in the shopping cart in case they need something to want later on.

Slowly they realize that their home has become a mountain of things, stacked boxes of almond puree makers and organic ironing kits. And while this accumulating was going on, they got saturated with accumulating, with buying, with owning.

Suburbia is the timeless drift

of the Sleepy Situationist

looking for something to want






Now it was enough to just click on something and it had already partially been consumed. Consumed enough so that you could just scroll down to the next consumable image of product or information or person.
(at some point the citizens of internet suburbia decided to hold a protest against the sorry state of suburbia. But by the time they began, they had already forgotten what it was they were protesting)
Some accused Suburbia
of forgetting about public space
she did not forget
she just needed you to keep
buying




Has this evolutionary process of boxed products reached it's post-capitalist conclusion? 












Suburbia changed how they lived
changed how they shopped
drifting among products
browsing through people


Is it enough to just “consume” online without ever buying anything? Will the manifesto house, and its mountain of objects just evaporate into an ephemeral scroll up to the suburban sky?


Years later the geography of nowhere
became the internet of everywhere
the traditional shopping malls
replaced by the discount power centers
category killer hypermarkets
hooked on large infrastructural networks
feeding on the bloodstreams
of transportation and logistics 


No more products? no more buildings? no more images? no more real people? just a endless scroll of gaussian blurriness, a slow vertical drift into our internet suburbia.

 (photos and documentation fragments coming soon)

Domesticated Mountain
a project by Andreas Angelidakis
curated by Maria Cristina Didero
at GloriaMaria Gallery
opened 18th April 2012 
during the ultimate torrent of objects 
that is the Salone del Mobile in Milano


the exhibition consists of a short firm, video fragments, architectural drawings of an unproposed home, a 3D print that carried it's own shadow, and various furniture made from transport scraps. Oh and a site-specific domesticated mountain of stuff.


texts Andreas Angelidakis, Maria Cristina Didero
3D animation and drawings Sotiris Vasiliou
video editing and additional animation AA
3D printing Sculpteo using a zPrinter 650
special thanks: Angelo Plessas, Adelina von Furstenberg, Priscilla Tea, Fabrizio Meris, Alexandra Syriou, FedEx and the eternal genius of M. Ward


CLICK FOR PRESS MATERIAL




SELECTED PUBLICATIONS


review on ARTFORUM by Marco Tagliafierro


DOMUS video interview with Simona Bordona


review on Arttribune by Riccardo Conti

The Suburban Home as Vehicle for an Architectural Manifesto by Ethel Baraona Pohl / dpr-barcelona

Short interview by Elena Bordignion / ATPdiary.com 


WIRED / Brude Sterling 

"A BOX WILL BURY US" by Daniele Perra, GQ Italia

review by ivanmaria vele

Marriucia Casadio _Vogue Italia

Rhizome New York