Late Night Art May Platforming the Home by Dave Loder

Platforming the Home presents a series of image-based speculations on imaginaries of home and practices of domesticity emergent from short-term rental platforms.

Exploring the impact of platform economies on the home, these speculative prototypes render the digital reordering of the domestic sphere and the production of the algorithmic interior.

DAS presents Platforming the Home by Dave Loder for Belfast Design Week.
Late Night Art, Thursday 7th May, 6-8pm.

Platforming the Home presents a series of image-based speculations on imaginaries of home and practices of domesticity emergent from short-term rental platforms. Exploring the impact of platform economies on the home, these speculative prototypes render the digital reordering of the domestic sphere and the production of the algorithmic interior.

Short-term rental (STR) platforms have taken on an essential role in mediating imaginaries of home, with platforms such as Airbnb presenting an immense archive of domestic interiors. The atmospheres of ‘home’ displayed via digital images on these platforms have been critical to the success of a disruptive housing market. The consumption of these interiors activates established sensibilities of the home, but equally, the image-based engagement, guest-host relations and realities of inhabitation provoke new imaginaries. Established ideals such as comfort and cleanliness are co-opted under consumerist intent, but alternative expectations and desires are evoked that exceed the familiar conventions of the home. The disturbed reality of these doubled interiors – the interior and its platformed mirror image – offer confrontations and dis/connections with the aesthetic regimes of domesticity.

Informed by findings from semi-structured interviews and discourse analysis, the visual speculations are developed via GenAI techniques that give critical focus to the algorithmic condition of interiors on STR platforms. Leveraging the intersecting patterns of homogeneity and novelty that exemplify image-based GenAI, the speculations prototype new ideals and practices to manifest dis/connections with the algorithmic condition of STR interiors.

These outcomes are from the ‘Digital mediations of home through short-term rental platforms’ research project funded by British Academy/Leverhulme.