Permeation

Each digitally registered living space is made into a ‘camera obscura’, captured on camera, and the final image gets reversed by 180 degrees. The images had been taken in the period between early 2020 and 2021, documenting people’s lives during the pandemic. At the time, some of the spaces belonged to people close to me, and others were completely alien (like a hotel room - one of the very few places accessible at the time). Rotating the images by 180 degrees causes the foreground to draw attention to what is behind the window, not the interior itself. The human eye works in a similar way - the brain corrects and reverses the image registered on the retina, and makes selections. Finally, the subversion here works also as a metaphor, for an ‘inverted’ reality, where the home environment became at the same time their workplace, a place of virtual meetings. Overlaying the outside on the inside is a gesture of establishing distance. The furnishing of a room becomes its very own background, it becomes alien. Such an effect perpetuates a certain paradigm of perception, typical of contemporary society, for which the social is intertwined with the technical.