Telematic domesticities. Between control and phantasmagoria

Abstract

The electromagnetic atmosphere that is increasingly permeating the human habitat of 21st century is today one of the great tools of territorial colonization. Implemented through the concept of “coverage”, its raw material is “signal”. “Having coverage” is beginning to be an essential condition of the inhabitable. In the domesticities mediated by this sort of digital ether, privacy is becoming porous; the interior is both interior and exterior, home and city, shelter and outdoor, and is no longer metric and stable but topological and fluid. In these hybrid and blurred permanently connected environments, we live blending identities, scales and worlds, generating untold spatial practices of which we are both producers and consumers, and where the idea of interface is key. Such practices, where control and phantasmagoria live together, allow to re-enchant domestic space and objects through the digital objectification of the spectral. In that new telematic domesticity managed by emotional interfaces, the experience of everyday emerges from the interaction between parallel layers of a space-time made equally of presence and absence, closeness and distance, affects and oblivion.