House and Universe

From left to right:
lonelygirl15: First Blog / Dorkiness Prevails
michellephan: Barbie Transformation Tutorial
juicystar07: Forever 21 Haul
beenerkeekee19952: Teenage Dream(with me)

House and Universe is a series of videos created for Memery: Imitation, Memory, and Internet Culture, an exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). The works function as interior studies in the classical tradition, stage sets, and an accidental sampling of private domestic spaces that become public as a by-product of webcam broadcasting.

The phrase "house and universe" refers to a chapter title from Gaston Bachelard's seminal book The Poetics of Space, which proposes architecture as a kind of dream space, and to the imagery of bedroom worlds created by webcam users. The work proposes that the Internet can be viewed as a vast mythic territory, and the emergence of themes like haul videos, lip-syncing, and video blog confessionals contain powerful archetypal elements just below the surface.

The House and Universe series was created by retouching still frames from videos to produce new composite images consisting only of the background, which were then re-filmed to make video loops.

Memery: Imitation, Memory, and Internet Culture at MASS MoCA

lonelygirl15: First Blog / Dorkiness Prevails

michellephan: Barbie Transformation Tutorial

juicystar07: Forever 21 Haul

beenerkeekee19952: Teenage Dream(with me)