The aesthetics of digital intimacy: Resisting Airbnb’s datafication of the interior

Abstract

This article presents a practice-based research enquiry to investigate and develop the concept of digital intimacy. Contextualised by the Airbnb peer-to-peer accommodation sharing platform, this enquiry proposes the interior-as-image as located within the mediation of the ‘Instagram-able’, providing a distinct aesthetic category. Airbnb delivers an infrastructural condition, a global circulation system that penetrates the domesticity of the home, with value emerging to attach itself to qualities of individuality and authenticity of the interiors and their hosts. The mediation of the interior-as-image is co-constitutive of digital intimacy as the confluence of structures of power and inequality, troubling established conventions of public and private across a complexity of scales, from the home to urban and the global. The research explores the regimes of machine sensing inherent to the circulation of the interior-as-image and the potential strategies for technology platforms and surveillance capitalism in extracting surplus value through the datafication of the interior. The practice-based enquiry gives particular focus to the digitisation practice of photogrammetry, and the reconstruction of 3D environments from 2D images, as a methodology to explore and decrypt the apparatus of machine vision in the context of the Airbnb interior. The research indicates how digital intimacy in an active condition in the contemporary experience of the home and speculates potential tactics to evade the datafication of the interior.

Keywords:

• Interior-as-image
• digital intimacy
• photogrammetry
• infrastructure
• machine vision
• surveillance capitalism
• Airbnb
• Instagram
• Facebook

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Responding to these stresses that have emerged on the urban fabric, some cities have sought to regulate the shared accommodation sector, with measures that include the registration of properties for sharing, limitations on number of days the house may be shared, and requirement for property owner to be ‘in residence’ a minimum number of days per year. Other than these relatively crude regulations, city authorities are perhaps still trying to adapt at an urban framework resolution with strategies that could include the revision of zoning and residential development controls (Gurran and Phibbs 2017).

2 For Airbnb, “machine learning is imbued within the product, it’s been there for quite a long time” (Hoh 2019), with individual programming teams developing their own machine learning infrastructure to suit their own needs that include search ranking, smart ranking and fraud detection.

3 The panorama on which platforms leverage their business, empowering connections between individuals to invisibly wield the data from those encounters to enhance not only their own services, but further regimes of personalisation with the distribution of patterns of behaviour to other parties, manifests a stratum of behavioural modification that can impact a wide range of social and economic factors and concerns, from the consumption of products to a challenging of democratic freedom.

4 Not limited to heritage visualisation, photogrammetry is used most recognisably in geographic mapping systems such as Google Earth where 3D models of buildings, vegetation and other features are extracted from a range of 2D photographic material.

5 Since its inception in 2001 the Google Earth geo-mapping platform has endeavoured to turn its flat maps into 3D environments. A strategy initially developed through crowd-sourced user-generated 3d modelled content which had partial success, Google shifted wholesale to photogrammetry in 2012 where the process could be automated, literally on a global scale using satellite imagery and aerial photography.

6 Such a primitive experience maybe shows the limitations of the data-set used and a still-in-progress machine learning procedure, but nevertheless expressed as a novel “pointillism effect” allowing the viewer to “feel like you are in a dream” (Zuckerberg 2018).

7 Facebook has as its disposal countless billions of images, from its core social media platform, but also Instagram which it acquired in 2012, and its recent focus on Virtual Reality aimed towards the domestic market, outlines a distinct direction with the capacity to increasingly impact on the domain on digital intimacy.

8 While the photogrammetric workflow is broadly identical across all packages, with identifiable common processes such as Structure from Motion, Depth-mapping, and Texture-Mapping, each platform will have developed its own particular algorithmic programming to result in the outcomes being dissimilar to varying degrees.

9 Indeed, when using photogrammetry for challenging small artefacts uniform in shape and texture, it is recommended to introduce additional graphical textures – newsprint cited as an exemplary example – on challenging surfaces or as a base, to provide additional reference points in the scanning.

10 Arguably other processes such as laser-based LIDAR can measure much more accurate models, but this process is not without a second issue with the impossibility to see every surface possible, where the fixed-point capturing creates distinctive digital shadows.

11 The manifestation of such experiences exemplifies what has been described as the ‘New Aesthetic’ (Bridle 2012; Sterling 2012) with attention given to qualities that reveal the “grain of computation in digital visual media” (Contreras-Koterbay and Mirocha 2016, 22).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dave Loder

Dr Dave Loder is a visual artist, spatial practitioner and educator, working across art, design, interiors, architecture, landscape and public art, with experience in commercial architectural design practice, studio-based academia and artistic research methodologies. He is currently a Lecturer in the Interior Design department at The Glasgow School of Art and received his doctorate in practice-based research from Ulster University in 2015. Dave’s research and teaching are contextualised by Feminist New Materialist discourses concerning the contemporary spatial and temporal positions of the (non)human as a planetary and postdigital subject, and investigates paradigms of landscape, decoloniality, futurisms and the human-to-come. Dave has exhibited nationally and internationally in Spain, Sweden, Germany and China and presented research on international platforms including the 56th Venice Biennale, dOCUMENTA(13) and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Email: [email protected]/[email protected]