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?)
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.
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)
Has this evolutionary process of boxed
products reached it's post-capitalist conclusion?
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?
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)
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
WIRED / Brude Sterling
"A BOX WILL BURY US" by Daniele Perra, GQ Italia
review by ivanmaria vele
Marriucia Casadio _Vogue Italia
Rhizome New York
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