Vanity Chamber: Reflections Upon Domestic Boundaries and Frontiers in a Post-Pandemic Home

Through the development of a spatial installation entitled Vanity Chamber, this article reflects upon the role of specular devices within the home and asks how their increased use might affect boundaries between the domestic interior and the world outside.

As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and its associated lockdowns many activities previously reserved for the public domain suddenly had to take place in the home, via videotelephony platforms such as Zoom, Skype, Facetime and Microsoft Teams. Cultivated by a pre-existing intrusion into the home of digital specular devices, such as PCs and smart phones, which supported the increased use of videotelephony software observed during the pandemic, many people experienced a breaching of established domestic boundaries. Facilitated by these leaky thresholds, a simultaneous scrutiny from the spectator and a concern by the voyeur for the public display of the private interior was observed during lockdown.

An analysis of historical specular devices has shown that acts of voyeurism and vanity on the limits of the home are far from novel occurrences, and that these porous boundaries were often important liminal thresholds bridging the domestic with the public. Through the Research by Design method that led to Vanity Chamber, this article argues that the domestic interior has once again become an essential part of its surrounding neighbourhood and that it is on this frontier, or rather, within this in-between realm that we must now establish home.