For the first two weeks of my master’s program at the Royal Danish Academy, I participated in a cross-disciplinary workshop about sharing and the future perspective of the home. During the course, we discussed aspects around housing, sharing, materials, and home. As an assignment, we were divided into groups and asked to design an inclusive and interactive experience for 120 people that captured the essence of “A future perspective of the home.” In addition, all materials had to be used, recycled or borrowed - nothing new was bought.
During the concepting process, I initially approached the project thinking about particular issues in the home and future opportunities for sharing. When working with the group, I discovered that some were more concerned with personal connections to the home, while others were itching to materialize their sketches. Not really able to land upon a clear concept as a group, I suggested that we utilize a method that we learned in the workshop to randomize our ideas and combine to make unexpected combinations. Through that, we discovered a theme of awkwardness when sharing experiences with others. From there, we broke down concepts and tried to come up with scenarios around awkwardness specifically in the home. I took it upon myself to help synthesize our ideas with proposed directions with diagrams in order to start building out the scenography. In this particular group setting, I learned to be a little less rigid in my process and adjust to different ways of proposing ideas. However, I do think it was my professional experience in the workplace that helped me connect the group’s thoughts and guide us to our final concept.
On Display creates an interactive experience that utilizes visitors as a material to build out a space where “the walls have eyes.” The concept explores how we consume media into our home and how much we share of ourselves through our phone. We are put on display but also we are constantly on our personal digital displays: phones, computers, TVs ect. During the performance, the actor comes home from a rainy night speaking German and lives out his evening rituals before going to bed. Visitors are even asked to become fixtures and furniture of the home - holding lights, windows and tables. Viewers experience an awkward voyeurism and closeness to the actor as he performs some very personal but relatable actions. For example, a visitor holds an empty frame to represent a mirror and they are face-to-face with the actor brushing his teeth and attempting to closely look at something stuck in his eye. As the actor goes to bed, we only see the light of the phone display on his face as he endlessly scrolls through social media. As lights turn black, the room blinds open and a new day comes signaling the end of the performance. We wanted visitors to think about how they present their lives to the world and also the time spent consuming media.
Group Members: Eva Whitney, Christian Mayer, Christopher Tuyay, Mathias Kristensen, Isac Lindberg, Emilie-Sofie Hillmann, Trine Nielsen
Mentor: Tim Söderström
Royal Danish Academy | Masters Program