The physical presence within the digital “Other”

Central Image credits: Georgina Pantazopoulou

Living in an era where the digital body and the physical one coexist, how can design be used as a tool to carry out the familiarities of domesticity if the boundaries between human and more-than-human subjects have blurred? Since wireless communication networks have replaced material networks, do artists and designers have the skills and ambition to dis-identify themselves from the existing approach of the familiar space design?

The Covid-19 era brought the meaning of “home” to the fore again. What does it mean to be “at home”, what does it mean to be away from the “public”, constantly in front of this that most of us call “familiar”? And, how much intimacy does this “familiarity” provide indeed? We were asked to reconstruct the spatial dimensions of our rooms, shaping them into offices, fitness studios, playgrounds and social places such as cafes and restaurants. Meanwhile, we were confronted more than ever with the “digital” and “online” reality. On the one hand we were located as human bodies inside a physical spatial reality and on the other we were living most of our lives within the digital one. The screens were there to serve most of our needs during the day. Legacy Russell in her book “Glitch Feminism”¹ points out that the digital world provides a potential space where this can play out. Through the digital, we make new worlds and dare to modify our own.

Being in this intermediate condition, our bodies could not remain uninvolved; the body stimuli, even our postures seemed to change. Consequently, we started to enter into a new revision of reality - as we knew it until then - , discovering new limits, determining new human and more-than-human behaviors, aiming to create our own “comfort zone” in order to survive. 

MetroNaps sleeping pod, 2014 | Image source: flickr.com

At the same time, we are proceeding with a search for new methods and survival toolkits focusing our interest on the meaning of “well-being” and “easy life”. At this point, technology and cyber networks are there to contribute to that. You have probably noticed the sudden rise of “white noise” devices, which basically promise a quiet and calm domestic life, away from external or distracting noises. But this distraction comes often from the technology itself. Most of us have experienced at some point - or rather experience on a daily basis - this feeling of not being able to control the time that we spend in front of computer screens, tablets or mobile phones while exposing ourselves to a plethora of information, being unable to escape. In other words, we are constantly in a searching mode which drives us to apply technology in order to weed technology out. The body is going to learn, step by step, to collaborate with technology, entering a continuous addictive "loop", which for some works out and for some others still seems eerie.

White noise devices | Image source: nytimes.com

Considering that most of our current architecture is still rooted in older spatial imaginaries reminiscent of the Vitruvian or modular body, we come across a conflict between the “need” and the “availability”. The digital reality that surrounds us partly intends to fill this gap or, if not, it does so as a side effect. “Far from a given, this figure of the human is manufactured in a complex exchange in which it is being disciplined, even imprisoned, by the geometry that supposedly emerges from it. The default human is alone, white, male, athletic - a highly ideological fantasy figure presented as the norm, a model human on which all architectural design will be based.” ² Already in the middle of the 20th century and even before humanity entered into the digital era, we started to notice various examples that promised to improve the domestic bodily action. Michael Webb, from the Archigram group, with the small scale project “Suitaloon” (1968) as a built prototype, underlined the humanitarian aspect of the technological advances regarding the domestic environment and the daily routines of the users.  

Michael Webb, suitaloon 1968 | Image source: arquitecturamovil.tumblr.com

Coming back to the concept of “intimacy”, questions arise regarding how much domestic action is familiar indeed. On one hand, it has been based by default on an architectural design concept that concerns a specific part of the human world and, on the other hand, it becomes a receptor of radical changes, which we sometimes feel to be necessary, while other times they overwhelm us. How can the dialogue regarding the design of a domestic environment be re-approached? How can we work with more equal and inclusive methods to deeply integrate what belongs to the Self and what belongs to the digital Other?

Screenshot from nytimes Wirecutter reviews, “The Best White Noise Machine” written by Joanne Chen, 14 December 2022 | Image source: nytimes.com

Last year, during the Athens Digital Art Festival (ADAF) entitled FutuRetro, Georgina Pantazopoulou, in collaboration with architect and multidisciplinary artist Martha Panagiotopoulou, presented an interactive installation titled “Data Confession”, based on the traditional confessional booths that we are familiar with in western culture but this time the visitor has to confess not to a human presence but to the digital “Other”. A simultaneous action of typing, searching and sharing of our unique data is being performed through our physical and digital body often under the prism of loneliness. The physical self coexists with the digital and they confess data to each other. At the same time, the digital Other is there to hear, collect, save, share or even use these data. In this retro-futuristic communion, the data world replaces the human presence. Without often being able to understand whether such a condition makes us feel comfortable or not, we should nevertheless take it into account and start to process the creation of a new index that is based on a post-anthropocentric and a post-dualistic way of designing and thinking about intimate spatial infrastructures.

Data Confession, Georgina Pantazopoulou and Martha Panagiotopoulou, 2022 | Image credits: Georgina Pantazopoulou | 2022.adaf.gr

Helen Hester in the book Xenofeminism supports that we must, in a sense, defamiliarize the biological family, whilst refamiliarizing alternative networks of solidarity and intimacy in such a way that they can become both generalizable and maximally accessible, without falling into the trap of reproducing the same.³ We have to start the de-naturalization of the domestic bodily action and the only way to approach the posthuman bodies is to consider them as multi-directional, cross-species and figures of interconnection. Unveiling realities existing between the physical and digital infrastructures, we might be able to re-narrate the familiar in possibly unknown or unexpected ways.

¹ Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, Verso Books, London, 2020, 11

² Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, Are We Human? - Notes on an Archaeology of Design, Lars Müller Publishers, Baden, 2016, 148

³ Helen Hester, Xenofeminism, Polity Press, Oxford, 2018, 66

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Georgina Pantazopoulou (GR, 1994) is an interdisciplinary artist and designer based in the Hague (NL). She graduated from the Royal Academy of Art, the Hague (Master Interior Architecture) receiving the Stroom Young Talent Award 2022 for her graduation project “Her Practice: Biases, Glitches and Oppressive Values or a Happy Domesticity”. She has also studied in the Architecture Department at the University of Patras (MArch, 2018). Her practice, starting from the observations of domestic realms, aims to question and reinvent the levels of familiarity, creativity and imagination, using the design and artistic practice as a soft power for more equal and inclusive interactions. She co - founded Common Ground Practice in 2022.