The Venn Room 2019

The introduction of virtual portals in the home –such as the television, the computer or the smartphone– has had considerable consequences in our day to day but has left the architecture of the home pretty much untouched. 

The Venn Room by Space Popular depicts a series of possible scenarios of cohabitation in which issues of integration, interface, exposure, overlap, representation, storage and ownership in the augmented future for our domestic environments are put into perspective through everyday narratives.

 One of the attributes by which new virtual media is described is DoF, which stands for ‘degrees of freedom’. 3DoF means you can roll, yaw and pitch (rotate along any axis) and 6DoF adds translation along the 3 axes (you can walk in any direction). This seemingly small difference has tremendous implications in the requirements for physical space: whilst one could be visually transported to a forest without leaving the sofa through a 360 video with 3DoF, this is far from the true sense of presence brought by the embodied experience of walking through it with 6DoF. In this way, new virtual media that offers 6 Dof poses the true challenge to our everyday environments as it offers the possibility to visually inhabit spaces that might have very little in common with our living-rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms or kitchens. The home will be to the experience of virtual space what the body is to the physical experience of architecture. 

Our bodies dictate which doors we can pass through, what size our beds –and therefore our bedrooms– need to be, or how high a tread can get. In the same way, the size and layout of our homes dictate where we can stand, sit, walk or reach in a virtual world (without teleportation or other means of virtual transportation). Therefore, as long as you choose to access virtual worlds from within the safety of your privately owned property, your physical home will inevitably become the skeleton upon which these are built.

As you bring your domestic blueprint into the virtual environments that you share with others, hybrids are formed, overlapping formal and functional categories in unprecedented ways and thus challenging our social codes and rituals. In doing so you expose patterns of movement that, if accumulated over time, will reveal your physical home and habits. Inevitably, the way you choose to hide or reveal them will say  as much about you as my clothes do today. Collectively with others you will create shared environments where you hang out, play, and watch movies. You will codecorate these environments and make them meaningful with colours, objects, and patterns that may be just built for the occasion or highly valued and kept over time. And as you build your virtual home that is at once a part of many others’ forming Venn Rooms you contribute to the forming of the placeless?, lawless?, unowned? Global Home.