Florian Brody...My Home is My Memory...Doors 2

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The old image we have of `Home Sweet Home' (this picture is of a house in Tyrol, Austria) is no longer valid as our family and friends are around the world and we relate to them via electronic paths. The memory, be it artificial or natural, consists of spaces, images and rules that correlate the images to the places. `Constat igitur artificiosa memoria ex locis et imaginibus' -- (the art of memory consists of rules for places and rules for images). These memory images are constituents of our perception of home -- the place, the people and the gatherings.

This movie about a family dinner -- taken from the CD `Ephemeral Films' by Voyager -- shows an American family getting ready to celebrate home at its best, in their view. Apart from the gender-related roles that seem inappropriate for the generation X, this clip is interesting for its event-driven approach to home: home is having dinner together.

But home is no longer confined to the house -- we create our moving house in the car and the communication industry provides the necessary contraptions. Many people spend more time on their car stereo than on equipment in the living room -- which makes sense as the car radio is used more often. Looking at cars and dinner tables, we have to keep in mind that home is a memory concept inside ourselves and laptop computers as well as family houses are only containers for our concepts. In Vienna, we have the Kaffeehaus, a place where you are neither at home nor in fresh air, an institution that is at the same time a home and a public space. Above all, it is a meeting place and a place for information exchange.

Vienna has the great advantage of a unique institution, the Kaffeehaus, which has nothing to do with the café. You are neither at home nor in the public; You are in your Kaffeehaus, in an environment known to you, where you are known and where you have information resources(Note_1) and partners to communicate with. It is similar to a networked environment with the advantage that the agents are really intelligent and the coffee is good.

A whole literary style has emerged from authors working in the Kaffeehaus rather than at home. One of them, Alfred Polgar, pointed out : `In the Kaffeehaus, you find people who want to be alone but need company to do that. And there are so many who hate the Kaffeehaus even though, or because of the fact that it is somehow a home to them. The Kaffeehaus has always been a home for people who cannot afford a real home, who cannot afford to heat their private rooms and resort to a cup of coffee as this was cheaper than the heating'.

We should always keep in mind that when talking about new, electronic, information-driven homes, that there are many people for whom a cardboard box is a better sleeping room than concrete. (The three photos are from a campaign by design students from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena for the Los Angeles Mission)

@Home -- `Cocooning' in new-marketing-speak -- is also a great advertising concept. Sony, like most other consumer goods producers, currently advertises for a better home -- a home with their products. Products that generate home by creating and presenting memories. While advertising makes us believe that we spend more time at home today, a far more interesting aspect is what @home means to us today.

While @home today is far more a feeling and a state of mind than a location, it used also to be an attitude, especially in England, where people were invited by telling them that the hosts will be `at home for their friends'. If you showed up at the doorstep without a proper invitation, you would be told by the butler that `Mrs. So-and-so is terribly sorry, but she is not at home'.

Even in a virtual world like the MediaMOO, a text-based world inside a computer at the MIT, you need a home, a place to start off from. The system helps you build a home. My home in the MOO consists mainly of my powerbook, which serves as a storage place for my memories as well as a gate to the internal Internet representation and a huge piece ofApfelstrudel requested by a Dutch friend.

Then there are different places you may call home -- Mr. Pickle, a children's figure designed by... of Jelly Fish, a subsidiary of the Seiko-Epson Group in Japan, lives in a book and you can walk through his house and visit all the rooms by flipping the pages. No matter where you are at home, in most cases home is a somewhat comfortable place.>

In the faces of the two women waiting for the bus in northern Austria to take them home, you can see that they do not really feel at home where they are. For me, this is an incredible image of being on the way, even as they sit still under the tree. As we go through the images, it becomes increasingly clear that in addition to being a memory place, home is also a very emotional place.

Note_1 Decent Kafeehäuser not only offer the major Newspaper of the world but also an encyclopedia and the waiter knows answers to most general and personal questions..Go Back Again

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Last updated: 26 jan 1995