Josafinni Porter Chambers
THE SCREEN THE BEDROOM AND THE BODY
How much of my private domestic space is being viewed weekly on public display on Zoom?
“The bedroom is a refuge and a space where a young person can “truly” be themselves.”
(Lincoln S. (2015) Bedroom Culture)
One’s home has become institutionalised, being used as a work space, shared and combined with others. Zoom has reconfigured our perception of space and allowed others to perceive our space also.
On 23rd of March the UK government announced a national lockdown. The nation retreated from their work spaces in busy offices and studios to the comfort of their own home. By April 2020, ‘46.6% of people in employment did some work at home’. As a Masters student, I began working from home in September 2020.
My research explores themes such as private vs public and the changing functionality of domestic spaces. Additionally the effect on the body and the body within space. I touch on the concept of performance of self and performance of space. I have used my own experience of undergoing my Interior Design Masters Degree from my bedroom as a catalyst for this project.
I created a plan and section drawings of my bedroom displaying the locations of my laptop from the 4th of June. I wanted to use arcitecture drawing conventions as a methodology.
As an interior designer- not only did this feel a natural progression
but gave an interesting perspective from a different viewpoint pre-covid 19 my room felt warm, cosy and soft. Not only has working from home altered my perspective of my bedroom. But using these calculated plan drawings as a methodology replicate the feeling of the room becoming institutionalized by undertaking my masters degree from it.
On the 22nd of June I embarked on a large-scale 3D experimentation in my bedroom. I recorded myself on Zoom using my laptop’s embedded camera and used the recording as a reference. I followed the border of what my embedded camera captures of my room with red Washi tape. I used red Washi tape so that it would be easily visible. I taped the red tape along walls, over curtains, from leaf to leaf to follow the 2D rectangle border my screen outputs. The recording is available to view on YouTube.(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ur1IYjxSLPc)
When the recording ended and I closed the laptop I was left with an abstract 3D shape that contoured my room, see figure 4. There was a physical mark left on my bedroom walls and window leaving an observational trace of the previous activity.
The calculated volume of the space captured by the embedded camera is 1.1088 meters cubed. When subtracting the volume of space captured by the camera from the volume of the whole room, we get 1.1088 meters cubed which is 2.7 % of the volume of the whole room.