Residents: Raluca Moldoveanu and Alice Prum (Amiss Collective)
Amiss Collective, Honey, I’m Home 😉 (2021) © Courtesy of the artists Raluca Moldoveanu and Alice Prum.
Project concept: (“honey, i’m home”);
Curator’s Words
Isabella Helms | Ed. Peter Traynor | 19 November 2021
What springs to mind when you think about the ‘domestic space’? Do your thoughts take you to the comforts of home or the place you can be most yourself? For many, the solace of domestic spaces are better found online, where avatars transcend the limits of the human body and the possibilities of our surroundings become limitless. However, the digital world doesn’t always provide spaces that incorporate visions of comfort and inclusivity. In their latest project as part of their Agora residency, Amiss Collective challenge the presumptions of the domestic space in their Mozilla Hub’s exhibition, Honey, I’m Home.
While studying for their masters in Architecture at the Royal College of Art, Raluca Moldoveanu and Alice Prum realised that they had a shared interest in the relationships between corporeal and spatial design. Together as Amiss Collective, they address hard-hitting questions about the gendered style of online spaces and their exclusion of non-normative bodies. Their aim is to foster the glitch of perfection that runs rampant in the digital world and hijack it to promote inclusivity within their projects. Honey, I’m Home is an opportunity to actually interact with this glitch and immerse ourselves in a heightened experience of what technology inflicts upon us every day, mostly without us even realising it.
The space acts as a window to the self. Influences of pop culture, vanity and domesticity encase us in an environment that is familiar and homely. Objects that are gender-specific take the spotlight; the kitchen utensils, the make-up, the bed, all have something to say about how deeply gender roles are ingrained in our environments. So much so that they are creeping into online spaces. These new, shiny environments have the potential to break free from the restraints of historical gender roles, yet consistently fail to do so.
Within this space, Amiss not only highlights the ways that online spaces are reflecting some of the deep misogynist aspects of our physical homes but asks us to imagine an online space in which we can finally break free of these social expectations. Using the work of scholars such as Legacy Russel and her Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, Raluca and Alice harvest the research of feminist curators and art writers and implement it within their work, giving viewers a chance to see these theories being put into practice within an online space.
Cocooned in the walls of ever-moving social media pages, open web browsers and YouTube clips, we are shown just how much influence the online world has over our daily lives. As we navigate around the space it becomes apparent that the clips reflect the constant exposure that our devices give us to online marketing schemes, all masterfully designed to target our deepest insecurities. Social media clips, shopping lists, music, all of which we are surrounded by daily, are utilised to emphasise the way outside influences can transform our domestic space. There is a focus on the way social media targets women, in particular, sparking an essential conversation on the impact that constantly changed beauty ideals have on the way that we see ourselves.
Amiss Collective’s work provides insightful commentary about our use of online environments, allowing us to experience the contradictory nature of social media platforms and their influence on our lives. Through impacting the way we think about architectural structures in relation to the body, Honey, I’m Home invites us to imagine a future of online and physical spaces which are free of the gendered expectations of society. This perceptive, immersive but most of all hopeful work shows that the issues with inclusivity within our internet spaces are truly being noticed and rectified. New relationships between bodies and machines are forming as technology advances, and although our experiences online are all subjective, this body of work shows how there is a potential for them all to be inclusive.
VR Exhibition in Hubs Mozilla
Conversation between Amiss Collective and Digital Curator, Isabella Helms (recorded on 9 Nov 2021)
Artist’s Portfolio
Raluca Moldoveanu, The Cybergaze: On the digitisation of corporeality, space and feminist practices (2021)
Alice Prum, an archive of movement (2021)
About the artist
Amiss Collective is an artist duo founded in 2021 composed of Raluca Moldoveanu and Alice Prum. The pair met while completing their Masters in Architecture at the Royal College of Art as part of ADS8: Data Matter, with Ippolito Pestellini, Kamil Hilmi Dalkir and Rhiarna Dhaliwal.
Raluca’s practice regards to design as a catalyst for social cohesion, which can serve as a drive for new communal infrastructures. Her work is centred on visual arts and narrative, with an interest in film, exhibition design, interactive installations and digital technologies, addressing a concern for digitisation of physical processes.
Alice’s practice as a designer aims to unveil the invisible relationships between space, the body and technology. While at the Royal College of Art, she developed a sensibility for the corporeal experience of space, investigating the relationship between everyday movements and our environment. Her research is translated through a poetic narrative and visual imagery.
Artist’s Statement
Amiss Collective is a multidisciplinary studio that focuses on the study of the relationships between human bodies and technological processes. Through a rejection of cartesian thinking, Amiss’ work advocates for a spatial practice that accommodates non-normative bodies. Usually developed for precision, symmetry and perfection, Amiss uses digitisation processes to foster the glitch, as a possibility to redefine the corporeal representation, as well as such representations consequent spatial experience.
Synonym for ‘nonconformity,’ the name of the studio encompasses the ambition of our work — to hijack tools of digital world building and use them to strengthen an impartial representation and design of space. Thus, the workplaces all human bodies, especially the ones which may have been disregarded as of gender, class and ethnicity, in the centre of their research.
Digital environments reflect and amplify issues of the physical world, as biases instated in the physical are perpetuated in the digital. The collective sees technological malfunctions as an opportunity to represent bodies that may have been marginalised.
Working with both tools of the digital and physical world making, Amiss nurtures the moments at the intersection between the two realms. Tools of world-building are not used as intended by their makers in the collective’s work, in order to challenge the standards and norms for which such apparatuses have been designed for. Through visual imagery, narratives and direct interaction, the research takes the form of interactive installations, digital environments and thought-provoking short films, which encourage the audience to question their surroundings.
Thus, Amiss Collective aims to promote an inclusive spatial design practice, reflecting on the non-conformity of the human body and the impact of its digital existence.
