Living Downstage

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(adv.) at or toward the front of a stage.

SETTING THE PLAY

Living Downstage

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Graduate Thesis 2022

Camille Thai

© 2022 EDITION BACK-OF-HOUSE

CONTENTS

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Provoc rovoca ations

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Pos osiiti tio ons

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Pro rojject

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RAIN & FEELINGS

“Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.”

- on Society of Spectacle by Guy Debord.

There is an invading realm of the private: the mise-en-scène.

We live in the era of the Influencers, the time of instant fame and fall determined solely by the effectiveness of a mere image, or seconds of animation alongside a catchy tune. The most valuable advice today to someone wanting to lose weight is to start an Instagram, give your accountability to the mass, give up your vulnerability and your privacy, and you will see the change as the mass and yourself compel it altogether.

The home is becoming a stage by default as we consume so much perfection everyday that we are slowly living it. The distinction of our self and the world around us is blurring, even more so after the temporary disappearance of public space after quarantine. If the home, the ultimately intimate private is not longer a place of self, where is it?

Using the delineation of the current states of the private to embrace the fragmentation and the multiplicity of the domestic landscape. As it begins to be reduced to nothing but objects that define the inhabitants, the feed that define the brandibility of their identities, the “home” becomes a commodity for the collective entity. The thesis aims to narrate a critical technosocial phenomenon of the time using an architectural narrative that embraces its multimedia nature.

“You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug.

Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.”

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (1)

Samiha Keem, Post Everything

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there is an invading realm of the private: the mise-en-scène.

We live in the era of the Influencers, the time of instant fame and fall determined solely by the effectiveness of a mere image, or seconds of animation alongside a catchy tune. The most valuable advice today to someone wanting to lose weight is to start an Instagram, give your accountability to the mass, give up your vulnerability and your privacy, and you will see the change as the mass and yourself compel it altogether. We consume so much perfection everyday that we are slowly living it. The distinction of self and surrounding around us is blurring, even more so after the temporary disappearance of public space after quarantine.

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THINGS TO CONSUME this weekend @w1d1_app

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It seems like the one principle that lives through and through is the idea of continued production and efficiency.

When do things get back to normal?

How quickly can we adjust? Continued consumption - online shopping, information from media, images on social media. The boom of Tiktok, the heavy shift onto animated images, everyone and anyone can be made famous overnight. Blindly consuming keeps us distracted from dread, from dwelling on our worst version of reality.

The least of my concern has always been nice furniture, spending 20 hours in studio rendered my apartment almost useless. And yet here I was, in the middle of quarantine, gushing over couches like like depended on it. My obsession displaced, and grabbed on to the nearest thing that manifest fulfilment. I was content, I must be; in order to keep producing, I must have this couch.

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During my instropectively look at quarantine last fall 2020, one of the many questions that COVID-19 brought up was how quickly can we truly adapted our culture to unforeseeable events such as a pandemic. Our new culture unfolded like a dream, unfolding but never acknowledged as reality.

DOMESTIC LANDSCAPE EXPOSED

Designing seems more like an effort of the mass. Our Pinterest board often comes first, Instagram Explore and Saves comes second. Algorithmic and image matching determine how we want our project to develop, every conversation seems like a continuation of another. We don’t question it anymore, just take, consume, and produce.

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UPDATING TO REMAIN THE SAME: HABITUAL NEW MEDIA Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

“New media are wonderfully creepy.”

“Through habits users become their machines: they stream, update, capture,share, grind, link, verify, map, save, trash, and troll.”

“Habits are creative anticipations based on past repetitions that make network maps the historical future. Through habits, networks are scaled, for individualtics become indications of collective inclinations. Through the analytic of habits, individual actions coalesce bodies into a monstrously connected chimera” “New media are N(YOU) media; the new media are a function of YOU. New media relentlessly emphasize you: youtube. com; What’s on your mind?; You are the Person of the Year.”

“Internet users are curiously inside out-they are framed as private subjects exposed in public.”

“New media erode the distinction between the revolutionary and the conventional, public and private, work and leisure, fascinating and boring, hype and reality, amateur and professional, democracy and trolling.”

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ITALY: THE NEW DOMESTIC LANDSCAPE Emilio Ambasz

“The pro-design environments pay special attention to new forms emerging as a result of changing patterns of life style: more informal social and family relationships and evolving notions of privacy and territoriality, as well as the exploration of new materials and production techniques.”

“Each environment occupies a 16 x 16 foot area in the galleries. Among them are Ettore Sottsass’ micro-environments in plastic, each on casters so occupants can easily re-arrange them to fit their needs; Joe Colombo’s fixed plastic units for bath, kitchen, sleeping, and storage that can be put into any existing space; Gae Aulenti’s molded plastic elements which can be combined to form architectural multi-purpose environments; Rosselli’s aluminum mobile house which expands from 7 x 14 feet to 20 x 29 feet; ZanusoSapper’s house, an aluminum container from which two plastic molded shells housing bedroom and bathroom/ kitchen units telescope; and Mario Bellini’s glass-walled “exploration” car can also expand when stationary. La Pietra’s environment suggests a bridge between the pro-design and counterdesign proposals; he believes we can liberate ourselves from present conditions by better use of the communications network.”

“Complementing the environments, there will be a display of 180 objects produced it Italy during the last decade by more than 100 designers. These examples of product design (furniture, lighting fixtures, flatware and china) were selected for their design quality and to illustrate the various intellectual design positions which have evolved in Italy in the last 10 years. The objects section illustrates three prevalent attitudes toward design in Italy today: “conformist,” “reformist,” and “contestatory,” Mr. Ambasz says.

Most are by conformist designers who are concerned with exploring the aesthetic quality of single objects such as chairs, tables, bookcases, which answer the needs of traditional domestic life. Bold use of color, imaginative utilization of the possibilities offered in new hard and soft synthetic materials, and advanced moulding techniques characterize this work.”

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Making: A Play, 2021

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Graduate Thesis 2022

THE SOCIETY OF SPECTACLE Guy Debord

The Commodity as Spectacle Our reality has been willed by the images around us for some times. News, advertisement, propaganda, entertainment - all exists the spectacle of life. Guy Debord’s book frames all societal events in the scope of influence. We witness countless times in history where a spectacle takes precedent, followed by supporters and evidence, and the affirmation of “facts” that concludes it. Today’s greatest spectacle is one thing: commodity.

How we value something depends on how we perceives it as a society. In the novel Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, there is a quote that stays with me throughout my years in college: “Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.” The metaphysical properties that Guy Debord talks about regarding the commodity resonates through many works and writings that critique capitalism, equaling our society as becoming reduced to objects and posession. I always feel the eeriness of these “metaphysical properties”, how can something physical be metaphysical, when can we really ever escape capitalistic means as humanity when it is the realest thing we have in life? As the critique on consumption runs dried, we see more metaphysical things becoming consumables. If we cannot break it or change it, we becomes it.

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life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.

The spectacle presents itself simultanenously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification. the domain of delusion and false consciousness The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images It is a world view that has actually been materialized, that has become an objective reality the heart of this real society’s unreality the commodity, which seems at first glance so trivial and obvious, yet which is actually so complex and full of metaphysical subtleties a standard that the commodity has lived up to by turning the whole planet into a single world market the abundance of commodities - that is, the abundance of commodity relations - amounts to nothing more than an augmented survival

In design, we are plagued with horrific and shocking images. The collection of Plastiglomerate images by geologist Patricia Corcoran and sculptor Kelly Jazvac is one of the many centerpieces that help us discuss the topic of ecology.

GUCCI FW18 featured a model holding her own head makes onlookers look twice.

“In the world that has really been turned upside down, the true is a moment of the false.”

Borrowing the words from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Debord repeatedly uncovers that in all of humanity’s spectacle, there is some truth afloat the false, or perhaps there is only truth in the false. The power of the spectacle is beyond itself as it manifests elsewhere.

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INTIMACY AND SPECTACLE: THE INTERIORS OF ADOLF LOOS Beatriz Colomina

Home - to Adolf Loos, is a theatre of sort. Colomina’s analysis of Loo’s interior reveals most of the interior spaces as stages, with the bedroom being the theatre box in the Muller house. The house is about both intimacy and control in this case, with the most intimate space inward facing, watching the rest of the spaces in absolute control. In the Josephine Baker’s home, the control is shifted onto the corridors as it wraps around the swimming pool, voyeuris-

As Roland Barthes put it: “The age of photography corresponds precisely lo the irruption of the private into the public, or rather, to the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumed as such, publicly (the incessant aggressions of the press against the privacy of stars and the growing difficulties of legislation to govern them testify to this move­ment).”

The private has become consumable merchandise.

Maybe that explains why Baudelaire writes: “Your eyes lit up like shop windows.” Even to look into the eyes, traditionally the only way to see into the private space of the mind, is now but to look at a public display. The eyes are no longer a “mirror of the soul” but its carefully constructed advertisement.

For Loos, the theatre box exists at the intersection of claustrophobia and agoraphobia Thus she sees herself being looked at by another: a narcissistic gaze superimposed on a voyeuristic gaze. This erotic complex of looks in which she is suspended is inscribed in each of the four windows opening on to the swimming pool.

PRIVACY AND PUBLICITY: MODERN ARCHITECTURE AS MASS MEDIA Beatriz Colomina Colomina’s analysis of the domestic landscape extends from her observation of Loos’ interior. In the age of mass media, she looks closely at the domestic spaces of both Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos and their comparisons. Unlike Loo’s inward looking interiors, Le Corbusier’s house is to observe outside, embracing the primordial definition of “shelter”, the windows are eyes and through it, the inhabitants are safely looking outward.

She argues that as the house becomes a space of moving images, it is a space of the media, of publicity.

In today’s era of the Influencers, the private realm is a stage to sell. It’s crucial to live out a model, as virality comes from idealized images of a life. “The best way to lose weight is to post it on social media, keep track of yourself through the images,” is one of the recent bodyshaping trends that Youtubers are carrying along today. The apartments chosen by the younger generations must be Instagrammable, good lighting, full kitchen in case they want to have a cooking video, spacious bedroom and bathroom to film their daily routines, living room furnished to suggests a healthy social life and entertaining

lifestyle offline.

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7.99 ETH THE CRAFT

0.99 ETH THE TYPICAL ENTERTAIN

8.99 ETH PARTICIPATORY GAZES

30.3 ETH THE CORRIDOR

6.99 ETH THE SUBJECT

12.99 ETH CASUAL GAZES

Adolf Loos, Josephine Baker House

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Downstage (adv.) at or toward the front of a stage.

Back-of house Mise-en-scène Mise-en-scène is a French term meaning “Putting on stage”. It combines elements such as lighting, composition, art direction, costuming, makeup, and texture. Mise-enscène is almost everything that happens in front of a camera in a particular scene. The term is borrowed to represent a controlled scene of reality, a singular reality that is believed because it is all we can see.

Spectacle A visually striking performance or display.

The invisible force behind most, if not all, events in human history. In today’s society, the term is deeply tied with culture of commodity consumption.

Front-of-house In theatre, the stage presented to the public.

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Commodity Things, often materialistic, that are of value and can be used transactionally.

Reality a representation Private the disappearing realm in question; is there true private when our today’s desire is to be connected?

Public if there is no private, is there a public?

Psychosis Psychosis is a condition that affects the way your brain processes information. It causes you to lose touch with reality. You might see, hear, or believe things that aren’t real.

Psychosis is a symptom, not an illness.

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Klaus Frahm, Backstage

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01 ABSTRACTION OF THE NEW DOMESTIC LANDSCAPE

THE THEATRE The theatre is a place of consuming singular realities. Things are represented in exaggeration for the sake of a fuller and realer narrative. It is where juxtapositions live out their fullest lives in order to portray the complexities of life on a single stage. A story unfolds in a few hours and that’s all it needs, unlike a home where the changing characteristics defines it in years time, a theatre changes quickly and adapts to the time of the arts.

Set designs are hollow in order to easily breaks apart. Their is no subtlety because there is no time for that.

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STUDIO20 “FACTORY OF DOMESTICITY blur into a massive technosocial whole. The border marking where the body ends and architecture begins slips out of view.”

“Of course, at Studio20, the rooms belong to nobody in particular, but rather a generalized and gendered identity realized through mass-produced furniture and decor.

These decorations—and the labors of identity construction and signification they outsource—are part of the appeal of working in a studio, alongside equipment, utilities, tech support, training, makeup tutorials, promotion, financial support for clothing, a loan program, and importantly, distance from their actual home.”

“Decorating for camming is not very different than decorating in general. It is referential, it involves a careful balance between the generic and the personal, and it is unpaid and under recognized while still producing value. That is, decorating is labor that enables a space to serve a particular function, be it camming or something else.

It increases the value of a space as well as the capital—social or sexual—of its inhabitants. Finally, it works alongside a wide-range of institutions and apparatuses to help manufacture the subject it claims to represent. In other words, decorating is less a reflection of one’s personality than a means to produce it; a collection of citations, an assemblage of associations. Studio20 is something like a factory for the standardized mass-production of subjectivities rendered through interior design. Studio20 not only resembles domestic space, but functions like it.”

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“Proliferating through digital networks, the pixelbody of the cammer and the pixelroom it inhabits meet the fleshy body of a consumer and are incorporated into it: a barrage of photons penetrate the consumer’s eye and are translated into neuronal signals that activate the paraventricular nucleus in the hypothalamus, releasing oxytocin into the bloodstream and producing a reaction in the spinal cord centers that, in turn, integrates the sensory pelvic neural inputs and drives a genital response.”

“forms of connection, creating supplemental sources of revenue through Amazon wish lists, where a fan can purchase gifts, both erotic and prosaic”

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02 FRAGMENTATION AND MULTIPLICITY OF DOMESTIC LANDSCAPE

“In a way, camming is all about homes. Ensconced within the privacy of their own home, the consumer gets off on glimpsing into the home of the cammer, even if, in reality, that home is a studio set. At any moment, thousands of homes are coupled together into a larger machinic assemblage, a vast domestic urbanism—and that coupling is itself part of the eroticism”

Warren J. Sandvick, Jim W. Hughes, and David Alan Atkinson, Method and device for interactive virtual control of sexual aids using digital computer networks, US Patent 6368268B1, filed August 17, 1998, diagram of the overall system for interactive use by two or more users in accordance with the preferred embodiment of the invention.

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03 “THE COLLECTIVE HOME” “If any post is inherently fragmentary and incomplete, the labor of imagining, reframing, and recirculating content can be performed with greater intentionality and openness to iteration. Impossible to manufacture the whole, the part can become something highly specific.

By accelerating the output speed of individual posts, the speed of the overall project—and our labor—can slow down.

By working on parts, and not wholes, it’s easier to build positive feedback loops that affirm care within our process. The energy we put into our work needs to be less than what we receive for it to be sustainable—and survivable. When we post, we demystify the nature of work. With labor no longer unseen, and dialogues no longer inaccessible, value is brought to the roles we occupy. When we share our ideas, it informs the ability to reshare each other’s. It shouldn’t take scandal or glory to initiate mass dialogue. Isn’t it meant to be a social platform after all?”

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Pro rojject 033

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01 REDEFINITION OF “HOME” domestic landscape defined by archive of objects #home #kitchen #chair #musthave #ad

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Italy: The New Domestic Landscape. New York 1972 / Venice 2020 Museum of Italian Design 035

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02 “HOME TO ONE FOR A COLLECTIVE”

home defined by objects, materials, reception and brandibility

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“If any post is inherently fragmentary and incomplete, the labor of imagining, reframing, and recirculating content can be performed with greater intentionality and openness to iteration. Impossible to manufacture the whole, the part can become something highly specific. By accelerating the output speed of individual posts, the speed of the overall project— and our labor—can slow down. By working on parts, and not wholes, it’s easier to build positive feedback loops that affirm care within our process.

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03 AN ARCHITECTURAL NARRATIVE

AN ARCHITECTURAL NARRATIVE

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1. Kim Yeon-Ho, Hellbound, 2021 2. Pedro Almodóvar, The Human Voice, 2021

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In Hellbound, there is this scene where the spectacle takes place. God puts on a spectacle to punish sinful people, and He gives the people a warning a week before. The woman allows the church to film her death, and the set is no other than her own home, shelled out to maximize the spectacle effect. The architecture of the ripped out wall maximizes the perversion of the whole situation, the seats placed too close to comfort costs $3000 a piece. But why does it have to be her house?

Our desire to see things in the most “natural” way in the most unnatural way possible. This perhaps is the exact thread that this thesis wishes to grab a hold of.

The private in this case speaks on a death that is meant to be private, yet displayed for the whole world to see. Shelling her home displaces it into a makeshift theater, police and lawyer fills the wall, and the audience fills the neighborhood.

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Similarly, the effect of the set in The Human Voice constructed a sense of a private life that does not belong to the main character.

The bright colors, living room, dining room, comfortable textures, right-sized kitchen, balcony: everything was a set in the scene. The architecture in the film is a masterplay of narrative, not only by extending the metaphor of the subject matter, but also by phenomenology. The moment the character steps off the set, the private is revealed to be contructed, displayed, perverse. Architecture here speaks volume for the things that were not said.

The thesis wants push this idea further by to reveal a truth of time through an architectural play.

Consequently, it will explores the narrative potential of architecture - using all of its profound histories and complicated todays.

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A-SIDE

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“You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes.

The rug.

Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.”

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club 040

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... Using the delineation of the current states of the private to embrace the fragmentation and the multiplicity of the domestic landscape. As it begins to be reduced to nothing but objects that define the inhabitants, the feed that define the brandibility of their identities, the “home” becomes a commodity for the collective entity. The thesis aims to narrate a critical technosocial phenomenon of the time using an architectural narrative that embraces its multimedia nature.

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Biographies 1. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media 2. spoak, Instagram 3. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle 4. Meem, Samiha. “Post Everything Architecture - e-Flux.” e.

Accessed April 4, 2022. https:// www.e-flux.com/architecture/ workplace/430310/posteverything/.

5. Korody, Nicholas. “Intimate Distance: The Technosexual Architecture of Camming - Architecture e-Flux.” e. Accessed April 4, 2022. https://www.e-flux.com/ architecture/positions/280819/ intimate-distance-thetechnosexual-architecture-ofcamming/.

6. Constant, Caroline. “Review: Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media

by Beatriz Colomina.”

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 56, no.

2 (1997): 244–46. https://doi. org/10.2307/991305.

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