This House which is not a Home, 2025
The house was described online as a Mid-Century Masterpiece. It had been built in 1965 and used, until recently, as a family home. Now, it featured on Airbnb, following suit from the many properties around the globe that had made the transition from house to hotel. The term ‘masterpiece’ is what drew me in – a beckoning word for an artist intending to make work – but there were other descriptors too, which caused me to linger on the page.
The house was also described as a time capsule of a house, and it was. This house, which was not a home, but a museum, put the profits from Airbnb towards the property’s restoration and maintenance. Like a museum, to step into this house would mean to be at odds with time. In this sense, the lure of the Airbnb is its uniqueness and authenticity. Airbnbs offer experience, for instance through their locations which are often situated in neighbourhoods rather than hotel districts, thereby promising the experience of a local rather than a tourist. In Platform Capitalism, Nick Srnicek considers how deindustrialisation has led to the importance of the immaterial product, including “cultural content, knowledge, affects and services” (2016: 27). On Airbnb, this marketing of “experience” is being pushed further, with efforts from the platform to offer additional experiences alongside stays – such as dinners with chefs and workshops with professionals.
Yet even without electing to have an experience to accompany a stay, it is possible to experience, to some measure, the lifestyle of others. I have stayed in Airbnbs where the hosts offer a list of their favourite local restaurants and activities. In this sense, Airbnbs often create a more elaborate set than the hotel, personalised to the host’s preferences and lifestyle. In the living room of the house, a Charles and Ray Eames leather lounge chair from the 50s is displayed by a window. Other features included a sunken conversation pit, original carpets and a wood-clad dining area. The Airbnb is a monument to taste – but to whose taste isn’t always clear. Just as the Airbnb can inscribe the host’s personal taste, or a period of history, it also traces a digital economy which privileges a particular surface aesthetic, concealing the true work of the immaterial product.
Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism explores a digital economy which is based upon the obtainment and accumulation of “behavioural data” (2019: 74) in order to predict future behaviour and secure profit. Information capitalism, Zuboff notes, was used first by Google and later taken up by other digital organisations who used search data to generate personalised advertisements. Ultimately, surveillance capitalism draws from human experience. In Networked Images in Surveillance Capitalism, it is noted that “most of our everyday networked practices are image based” (Moskatova, Polze and Reichert, 2022: 6). Selfies and Airbnb listings, amongst other visual data, are markers of a technological movement in which the physical is undergoing digitisation. What Zuboff describes as organisational and digital infrastructures is that which Srnicek terms ‘platform capitalism’ (2016), referring to virtual architectures that appear as empty spaces (to be filled by users) but are, in fact, political (2016: 31). Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Airbnb and other platforms predominantly use the digital image to engage users. In Selfie Culture in the Age of Corporate and State Surveillance, Henry Giroux considers that selfies are symptomatic of a violation of privacy rights and ultimately, a resource for the surveillance state (2015: 160, 162).
The link between image and surveillance, and its correlation to power has been explored in depth (Himmelfarb, 1965; Foucault, 1975),[i] but Moskatova, Polze and Reichert (2022) write that its relevance to digital technology today is limited since the techniques of surveillance are increasingly unobtrusive. Surveillance and platform capitalisms do not rely upon the visibility of the gaze but rather supervision that is automated and algorithmic, as Lucas Introna observed the new gaze is not “salient” but “silent” (Introna & Wood, 2004: 184). Images are now being made for viewing by computers, not just people. Yet, the visual economy is becoming increasingly concerned with aesthetics, since images with aesthetic strategies support the reproduction and usage of these platforms. ‘Masterpieces’, such as this house, adorn platforms and attract new users. This leads to the feeling that everything, now, is made to be viewed – homes, selfies, women.
The relation between the selfie and the Airbnb is their role within the sharing economy. Airbnb, originally a small start-up, began as a means to share underutilised space with others. Certainly, the platform continues to market the idea of space – contrasting Airbnb properties to the restrictive hotel room. In its television advertisements, animated families are shown struggling to share the small site of the hotel room, which is then contrasted to them enjoying the space offered by an Airbnb. Airbnbs provide space, yet it is also true that Airbnbs take up space; through driving up property prices and creating unaffordable rent, they force people out of their neighbourhoods. Airbnbs are representative of the unhomely, displacing people and communities. As hotels masquerading as homes, they also inscribe Sigmund Freud’s writing on the unheimlich in The Uncanny (1919) as something familiar that has become alienated through processes of repression.[ii]
In true mid-century style, the house on Airbnb has floor-to-ceiling windows throughout. I imagined this must evoke a sense of being watched; of being on display. This house, which was not a home, but a theatre, demanded performance in the same way a hotel might (Walsh, 2015). To even access an Airbnb property requires performance: the platform asks that you “introduce yourself” and gives an example of how you may do so. The script suggests a polite introduction, followed by the reason for your stay at their property and where you are travelling from. If you are bringing along a guest, it is polite that you tell your host who they are. Staying at an Airbnb also depends on your performances during previous stays, as the host and guest are both rated by one another. However, there is always another gaze present. You are not simply being hosted by a person, but by a platform and its algorithms.
The politicisation and regulation of space is a topic that has been explored by many but these discussions are often of spaces which we already assume to be public, rather than private.[iii] Airbnb politicises the private space of the home in the same way that selfies politicise the body: transforming it from home to resource. What is familiar has become suddenly strange. The Airbnb is a haunted house: an uncanny version of the home, troubled by digital ghosts. The term masterpiece begins to take on sinister connotations: who is doing the mastering and what or who is being mastered?
The house was available for a two-night minimum stay, but I didn’t have the money to stay for more than one night, so I messaged the host. I laid down my intentions to use their property to take photographs. I had never previously admitted to taking photographs in the places I have stayed – my work was always done secretively, carried out as private acts under the pretence of a relaxing getaway. Online, the house admitted to having a secret room on the main floor. I admitted my own secrets.
The host replied quickly, thanking me for my honesty. They explained that they didn’t usually let out the property for less than two nights, but if I was flexible with my dates then I could stay for just the one. I replied, writing that I could be flexible and would travel whenever suited them best. I didn’t hear back from the host until 3 weeks later.
I would travel to the house in October. The host was expecting my performance.
[i] The Panopticon was explored by Himmelfarb and Foucault as a tool of social oppression and control.
[ii] Freud also lists the double (the doppelganger) as an example of the uncanny. These can be found in mirrors and shadows (1919: 235).
[iii] See De Certeau (1980), Augé (1992) and Russell (2020).