The Tyranny of the Image

Pre-Babel

Composing an image can take us back before Babel. Photography, a universal means of communication, serves as a levelling instrument. The number of reservations for a given Airbnb offer is proportional to the number and quality of photographs describing it.³

The site encourages its users to photograph each space and even goes so far as to offer them a session with a professional photographer in exchange for image rights, including advertisements. This sales strategy which invests a place with value in accordance with its ability to show itself transforms home-making into a “journey of the eye”⁴ characteristic of semiocratic Western society.⁵ In a way, we inhabit via the gaze: the capacity to quickly identify a certain space with our home makes it easier to settle there, whether as travellers in a stranger's apartment or as a co-worker in a collective space that seems familiar to us. But the compliance of a system of representation is not an innocent process. Michel de Certeau establishes two categories of action to which an object is subjected in order to fit in with the codes: removing and adding.⁶ For him, there represent corrective actions that form a “disciplinary apparatus”⁷ An analysis of the Airbnb platform, the world's biggest reserve of images of interiors, reveals an infinite mise-en-abyme of a single decor for living conceived both to encourage travellers to “book with confidence”⁸ by making the space recognisable and easy to appropriate, while trying to “receive more eyes, more interest”⁹ by standing out from the homogeneity of the offers generally. These two contradictory injunctions also arise in the communication of designers of spaces and furniture Fig. 2. The domestic imaginary that we contemplate and reproduce is interiorised. It becomes a norm for dwelling and conceiving space. A space becomes habitable only if it conforms to this likeness.

Gazes

The appearance of photography is inseparable from the erasure of the frontier between the private and the public and the constitution of a new category of the private, the one that is “consumed publicly,”¹⁰ as Roland Barthes says. But can the home always be described as a territory to be “protected from indiscreet glances”?¹¹ The creation of the image of the private world was preceded by an opening of the gaze towards it. Domestic interiors in painting, from Van Hoogstraten (1670, Fig. 3) to Hammershøi (1905),¹² via Friedrich (1825),¹³ were presented via a series of framings. Pre-modern privacy was constituted by a sequence of thresholds marking symbolic power relations between interior and exterior. The gaze imposed a procession, or even made us kneel in front of the keyhole, that “subversive access to meddle in forbidden spaces”,¹⁴ as Georges Banu says. The door, that opaque and protective barrage, was crossed via two holes: the keyhole–itself a vital part of the closure mechanism–which enabled a furtive gaze towards the interior, and the normalised peephole, which made it possible to look out towards the exterior. Today, vision has become generalised, its only border being that of our screens. The digital and panoptical oeil-de-boeuf is our prosthesis. From Big Brother in 1999 to Airbnb, the private is over-exposed.

Photography and its sharing over social networks has not only opened a breach towards intimacy, it has also changed the relation of the individual–a voyeur par excellence–to their environment. The image as means of communication has replaced the direct, sensorial gaze with a virtual gaze, which depends on mediation by an instrument. The commercial for Google’s Nest Hub, the last word in domestic assistance devices, illustrates the transition from the chez-soi of a personal, living place to a representation. The product being sold, a connected home (represented on a control screen), and the way of representing it–like a doll’s house, make explicit this transformation of a living space into a simulacrum. The film was not shot in a real setting, an authentic home, but in a studio where each room could be symbolically recreated. The camera moves in a continuous tracking shot from living room to bedroom, via the kitchen. The linear movement of the camera reveals the theatrical staging of dwelling, with each room being an optical box in which the assemblage of a sequence of signifying objects enables the viewer to identify the use of the spaces. The choice of a sugges­tive staging to the detriment of realism–of a real house, reveals the exacerbation of the spectacular dimension of private life and the sensorial fracture generated between users and their home. At home is a set, an installation, a box with a glass side. In contrast with the enfilade of rooms in the interiors of Hammershøi, today private space is laid out, linked up and unfolded. Everything is there to be seen and therefore to be mastered, including by those who occupy it.

Potted plants and vivaria

Potted plants are a recurring feature of these domestic stagings. Each room in the interior kitted out by the ad-man for Google Nest Hub, from living room to landing, is drowned in vegetation. What message do they convey, that justifies their place in interiors? They are there as a counterweight to the technological invasion of private life; falsely wild figures guaranteeing that life is unfolding naturally. Might they serve to guarantee the authenticity of a place, the proof that it is liveable? They are, most of the time, evergreens, “cosy to maintain and indefatigable.”¹⁵ Ficus, monstera and cacti belong to a new kingdom of decorative plants. Plants to be looked at, raw material for decorators and plant concept stores¹⁶ in charge of transforming them into ornamentation. They no longer cure, help improve the taste of our meals or taste of anything. They have lost all but their aesthetic role. Terrariums, “capable of developing almost autonomously,”¹⁷ that need only to be observed, reflect the almost exclusively visual relation that we have with our dwellings. These natural cosmoses, these handmade knickknacks, seem to illustrate the desire to manipulate and master all forms of alterity. That, indeed, is the main occupation of the “mother” in the Google commercial, that and control of her household. Private life, once a hidden world, verging on wildness, is itself under glass. Ail living form is contained and must remain faithful to its image: no seasons, no flowers or dead leaves. Domesticated nature is subject to the sterilising process of reducing everything to a surface. The potted plant is threatened with replacement by the attraction of these mini-worlds under glass that require no maintenance, or even directly by plant-patterned carpets and wallpaper Fig. 4 inspired by Douanier Rousseau.¹⁸

Eyes in space

The alienation produced by the sovereignty of the gaze is revealed by Juhani Pallasmaa, who attributes to vision the role of most important receptacle among human senses, with every other form of perception being obstructed by the monopoly of the visual. He argues that the isolation of the gaze, its lack of sensuality, prevent complete use of the perceptual system. There is a risk that the exacerbation of sight will cause destabilisation, “a loss of bearings in the very conception of reality.”¹⁹ This decoupling of the senses causes a fragmented understanding of the world leading to a sensation of distance, of psychosis. This may be precisely the distance we feel with regard to our home, which we need to be able to feel in order to show and share without having the impression that we are being stripped naked. The image encourages superficial contact. Pallasmaa evokes the role of the body in the experience of architecture and the importance of creating physical and sensorial links with the environment through the impulsions received from the body: “What is missing from our dwellings today are the potential transactions between body, imagination and environment.”²⁰ The sovereignty of the gaze has been treated on the basis of its purely physiological workings by the German philosopher Jonas Hans,²¹ but also through the analysis of cultural constructions formed under the authority of the eye.²² As part, again, of an ocularocentric approach,²³ the contemporary subject revels in the possibility of making visible and visual their private experience in order to attain the fiction of the ideal and standardised home.

A contemporary dwelling is packed with sensors that record our domestic life. Those eyes launched into orbit to observe us from space are now in our homes. Google Nest is one of the most complex systems designed to make the home more “comfortable,”²⁴ more “secure,”²⁵ more “useful.”²⁶ The system is an example of domotics, the technologies that make a home “smart.”²⁷ The creation of a network makes it possible to centralise and control the set of domestic apparatus at the same time as the lighting, heating and safety systems. In 2014 the first device with incorporate microphones was put onto the market, enabling vocal commands. Since then, perception by cameras and microphones has been augmented by movement, atmosphere and control sensors capable of picking up a wide range of variables: faces, movements, temperature, humidity and light as well as other apparatus. Like Google Maps, Google Nest maps the domestic universe in order to “survey its conditions”.²⁸ Serving to “keep an eye”²⁹ on our nests by emitting ultra-sounds and magnetic waves, the system provides a real-time reading of living conditions. What is emphasized is the reassuring aspect of such a device capable of identifying any foreign body. But this capacity is possible only if a degree zero is instituted as the natural state of the home. The device normalizes a certain atmosphere, a certain mode of behaviour, a certain materiality of the intimate landscape. The sensors are set to react when they record non-conformity, or deviations from the norm.

Google promises a connected home capable of taking care its occupant but also of the “world outside”.³⁰ As a result of this post-humanist approach the autonomized home, at last made effective, could, thanks to technology, become a guardian and watcher over human beings. It is no coincidence, surely, that in the advertisement it is the mother who argues the necessity of such a system. As in the advertisements for domestic appliances in the twentieth century, her advocacy of the machine is playful but protective. With the same tablet and the same identifiers³¹ as she uses for social media, she orchestrates the extraction of data from her home environment. Survey and smile is the Google formula for improving our living conditions.

With Percival Lowell

Beyond its optical role, the device that we have placed between ourselves and the world, be it sensors of a camera, imposes a certain code of interpretation on the object of the gaze. The instrument as medium through which we look is shaped by the person who conceived it. For over a century, representations of the planet Mars, for example, were based on observations by the astronomer Percival Lowell (1855-1916) and showed irrigation canals on its surface.³² Decades later it was discovered that these canals did not exist, and it has more recently been suggested that they were simply the reflection on the telescope lens of the blood vessels in Lowell’s own eyes.³³ Fig. 5 Lowell had not spent his time studying alterity, the other world, but looking at himself. Fig. 1 We are dependent on the technologies that now come between us and our home replacing the direct gaze. Lowell’s vision, made possible by the mechanical accumulation of a series of lenses, itself carried a meaning, an interpretation of the world. For Marshall McLuhan, the medium not only carries a message, but is itself the message. He shows how “To behold, use or perceive any extension of ourselves in technological forms is necessarily to embrace it”.³⁴ Intimacy, and its public aspect, the extimate, summon Foucault’s apparatuses of control. The difference, according to Serge Tisseron, is that the contemporary subject builds their “own specular and panoptical prison”³⁵ whether with Google sensors or the images of his own Airbnb interior.

From Big Brother to Snapchat the contemporary subject has an extraordinary appetite for expanding the field of the gaz, and is becoming the willing participant in a constant exchange of images of their “private life”. New networks like Airbnb, Pinterest and Google were built on the bridges created by theses exchanges. Opaque algorithms regroup, analyse and compose an imaginary of domestic space which operates on a planetary scale. These sociocultural transformations are dependent in technologies whose workings and ultimate goals we know nothing about. We can, however, observe the symmetry between the standardization of the home through its formulation as image and the development of visual apparatuses for mastery of private space. Like the terrariums in the Google advertisement, out homes are threatening to become ecosystems under glass domes that require nothing more than to be observed.

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