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.