Intervention in an AirBnB apartment during the Venice Architecture Biennale 2016 for Daniel Tudor Munteanu and Davide Tommaso Ferrando's "Unfolding Pavilion" within Casa alle Zattere by Milanese architect Ignazio Gardella. Exhibition text as follows:

These days, the commoditization of an internet phenomenon follows a well-worn path: first come branded housewares, followed by a book (usually one suitable for browsing in short increments, like when seated on the toilet). From LOLcats to Modernist Estates, the story has been more or less the same, such that the process has now been automated by startups. Web services now regularly offer to turn blogs “into real pages” or custom-print one’s images not only on the familiar t-shirts and stationery, but also coffee mugs, candles, quilts, calendars, or iPhone cases, among other things. This commoditization relies, first, on the versatility of content applied across different media, and second, on the desirability and permanence of physical artifacts. Yet the blog is a distinctive format that carries its own messages and affords particular modes of viewership that do not easily lend themselves to books or domestic baubles.

As operator of Fuck Yeah Brutalism (FYB), I have resisted the urge to commoditize for many reasons, one of which is that my preferred mode of viewing is Tumblr’s archive display, which arrays thumbnails of each FYB post on an endless vertical scroll. Revealing unexpected juxtapositions and allowing comparison across space, time, and type, the archive display is not unlike Aby Warburg’s famous “picture atlas” of Renaissance forms and gestures. But an adventitious, arbitrary collection alone isn’t enough to warrant such an eminent analogy. (This highlights the difference, one might say, between the overused contemporary buzzword curation and the reputable practice of curating.) Once a substantial archive has been collected, however, an increased degree of selection can yield more focused, more revealing taxonomies.

Offering an iteration of these concerns, the designed object before you therefore embodies two (perhaps ironic) conditions: Bilderatlas as functional home décor, and domestic equipment as discursive construct.