YourCribs
Digital mass culture is increasingly self-referential, generating social media that displays an endless series of private spaces. Even while most of these spaces are intended only as backdrops in videos or photographs, this is the first time we are able to see inside so many private homes. YourCribs is a video series that combines the cultures surrounding YouTube videos and the early 2000s reality television program, MTV Cribs, which features tours of celebrity homes. Like MTV Cribs, we broadcast a selection of domestic spaces, but unlike the orchestrated tour-guided format of Cribs, we adapt the conventions of YouTube genres that inadvertently expose private interiors to the public sphere.
As fixations shift to screens and mobile devices, architecture’s hold on its user’s attention is absorbed by the production and consumption of online content. These videos reveal the competitive nature between physical and virtual, permanent and impermanent environments, where fleeting social media content is quite literally foregrounded against architectural backdrops. Season 1 was aired in New York on Storefront TV at Storefront for Art and Architecture February-August 2015. This project is a collaboration with Farzin Lotfi-Jam.
