Historically, our homes have served as an apparatus for physically rendering society. From delineating gender roles to reinforcing distinctions of class and race, domestic enclosures were instrumentalized beyond their function as mere dwellings. The four walls and gable roofs became entangled with broader economic and political dynamics, perpetuating inequities rooted in established power structures.

Enclosures that generated divisions of “us” versus “them” were often extended beyond their scale. American suburbs, for instance, were developed with the intentional exclusion of non-Caucasian populations, a consequence that still resonates today. In emerging nations, commodified Ville Radieuses have shaped the economics of the real estate market, not only affecting the design of homes but also influencing social norms and values. Speculators of distorted utopias have secured the means to apprehend the system’s logic, dominating urban mechanisms and spatial ideologies.

Media have long been intertwined with societal norms and ideologies, particularly in the context of domestic architecture. Through images, films, and advertisements, representations of domestic life promote particular lifestyles, gender roles, and cultural hierarchies. Early media, such as the 1895 Lumière Brothers film Le Repas de Bébé, idealized white, nuclear families and reinforced female-centered tropes of self-sacrifice. These portrayals shaped public expectations of skewed realities, casting mothers as “selfless figures” at the center of domestic backdrops. Television and film continue to influence domestic architecture, turning specific tastes into cultural phenomena. Shows like Friends and Sex and the City popularized urban loft living, while Fixer Upper brought farmhouse chic into the mainstream. These media representations not only reflect trends but actively shape them, encouraging viewers to emulate these styles in their own homes. The impact of media extends beyond aesthetics; it reinforces social values, subtly upholding cultural norms and power structures related to class, gender, and race.

Machined algorithms, together with human curation, are increasingly playing a role in shaping domestic representation. Photographs today, often viewed as accurate representations of reality, are no longer direct transcriptions of the real. Our phones, for example, now estimate and inscribe spatial information using machine learning co-processors, actively altering the representation visible to human eyes. What we perceive as reality—mediated through screens—is an altered version of the world, shaped by collective datasets and human subjectivity.

The domestic apparatus gives agency for editing, manipulating, and curating these representations to end users. Multiple users can sit around the interface, shuffling and collaging the measured, machined, and curated artifacts as an artist by pressing keys and tuning knobs. The resulting collages are then recorded and transcribed into a hybrid drawing that defamiliarizes our conventional understanding of domesticity.

Through this apparatus, the end user gains agency to estrange everyday domestic representations, narratives, and their surrounding implications. Richard Hamilton’s domestic collages are a major influence, yet we imagine a scenario where the artist is the end user. Narratives of everyday households can be shuffled, superimposed, or manipulated to generate unexpected spatial conditions. Photos, machined representations, and human drawings collide in an intra-active collage.