This projects uses newly available computational and sensing tools to study the home as a site of intimate life. The title invokes Le Corbusier’s modernist framing of the house as a machine to interpret the promise of contemporary smart home technologies. The project has two distinct phases: the construction and inhabitation of a functional smart home system, followed by an exhibition of processed data as a multi-part digital art installation. In a process of joint human-machine authorship, this system produces a complex portrait of the home: as a space of language, intimacy, bodily practice, and quotidian narrative. Compositionally, it contrasts utopian illusions of beautiful, frictionless utility with artistic strategies generating insight into the messy, material realities of the everyday.

My written dissertation on the project, “Machines for Living,” is online here.

One Day (excerpt from machine analyzed audio and video recorded in the house)

Sensor Narrative (video excerpt)

Installation