A rework of the new iPhone 15 commercial featuring a singing wall socket. In place of the machine loneliness of the original, a different song from the early Vito Acconci playbook. A direct address to the viewer/listener from a virtual assistant. The new ambient intelligence promises security, rapid response, predictive analysis, microgeneration, efficiency. Here it delivers funwashing messages from the cloud for users in a performative essay on domotics. Talk back from the data harvest and Orwell’s “never sleeping ear.” To challenge them is to “fight the future.”
“the ‘evolution’ of the household is seen as an expression of some autonomous technological ‘progress.’ The dream is a domestic machine-utopia … in which human agents are passive and infantilized. In such technocratic scripts the household is severed from its surrounding (economic, social and political) contexts.” (Robins & Hepworth, 1988)