“They define home as feelings, not property”. Home vlogs are a way to express a sensual ideal, in our makeshift, precarious times
How I Stopped Being Self Conscious And Caring What People Think About Me (2020) by Molly Soda
The “home” space is bearing a lot of burden these days - haven from a disrupted biosphere, place of tele-work, container for family frustrations and recovery. And in the age of social media, we are expressing our idealism about home life through audiovisual apps, as this piece by Hyejoo Lee in the fascinating life-over-tech magazine Real Life shows:
The warmth of a flickering candle as part of a night time routine. Freshly washed towels, dried and stacked, bask in sunlight. Bright red tomatoes sit atop a counter, ready to be used. If you’ve watched any form of home-oriented YouTube videos — from apartment tours to cottagecore to “day in my life” videos — these sorts of images may sound familiar.
While some videos about homes make a spectacle of lavish real estate (e.g., Erik Conover’s channel), “home vlogs” — a more quotidian and subdued genre — document and aestheticize what might otherwise appear as domestic mundanity: waking up early, watering plants, vacuuming, cooking dinner.
Utterly entrancing at times, home vlogs revel in not just indoor activities but in the senses of comfort, coziness, and even beauty that the ideal home and its rituals bring. Not concerned with architecture or property values, they instead fixate on what happens inside, on objects and practices that generate moods, vibes, feelings.
Unlike shows such as MTV Cribs or those on Home & Garden TV, home vlogs make domestic mundanity slow and exquisite through alluring cinematic visuals often reminiscent of still-life paintings. Even in more “chatty,” personality-based home vlogs by influencers with large followings, there will almost always be a montage of some domestic task — making a smoothie, say — backed up by a low-key soundtrack.
Though such sequences are not explicitly meant to be how-tos, they are instructive in that they exemplify what vitality and refreshment at home should look like. As you watch a close-up of the smoothie being poured into a glass, then a shot of the vlogger at a window, looking out at their morning view with smoothie in hand, before raising the cup to their mouth, you are being shown and taught how to feel.
In these kinds of distillations of domestic moments, home vlogs depict not so much a place and its occupants than they extract a particular sensation: home not as place but an amalgam of affects.
But as the writer notes, there’s a crisis in living spaces across the cities of the world - whether that’s rental rates, or confinement from viruses, or WFH (working from home). Accordingly,
[There is a] need to experience “home” in a different way, as something to consume rather than occupy. Home vlogs offer one such alternative. They are not merely escapist but a potentially reparative media, giving solace to those encumbered by anything from rising rent to familial pressures, providing or inspiring feelings of spatial autonomy and refuge when they may be materially absent.
If various scenes, like relishing a freshly brewed cup of coffee in the morning or lighting incense before bedtime, can be staged to signify home, then they might seem to make “home” more manageable and affordable. Home vlogs don’t dangle an enticing fantasy of homeownership beyond reach but present a different conception of home entirely, of home defined as feelings, not property.
Reconceptualized in this way, “home” is untethered from land, family, and lineage. It is siphoned off from the liberal fetish of homeownership — that quintessential image, derived from a short-lived American postwar prosperity, of a picket-fenced house with parents, kids, car, dog.
Of course, the feeling of home is not a substitute for actual shelter, but it demonstrates that the need for shelter can be detached from the need for homey-ness or domesticity. “Home” becomes conducive to a more makeshift life, possible potentially anywhere.
Of course, this fluid, moveable concept of “home” is eminently exploitable by companies and advertisers - like Vitra and HelloFresh. As Lee writes:
…Home vlogs can be complicit in the imbalance they seek to repair. If they also provide feelings of calm, peace, home, they likewise instrumentalize those feelings as commodities and exclusionary aesthetics, as the Vitra and HelloFresh ads show…
The feeling of home — under threat by a general unaffordability, incursions of work, or whatever else deemed hostile from outside — seems to necessitate a self-voyeuristic exhibition of respectable living. An affective conception of home can’t simply be consumed but must be constantly staged and constructed with the right feelings and visuals.
Dissolving physical space into affective scenes, home vlogs rescue “home” from being just a matter of property. Against a backdrop of precarity, this can be experienced as a creative and freeing alternative beyond homeownership and assets. But when new conditions are attached to home as feeling, home is again fetishized and reified, enclosed into a predictable, rarefied aesthetic.
Reparation, it turns out, is in need of its own repairs. Kept away are other styles of life and dwelling deemed less respectable. These are the “neon signs” flickering outside the frames.
From Ecopoiesis
We came upon the above piece as we were working our way through quite a tough academic paper on the concept of ecopoiesis. But it seems that “establishing a home” is at the root of some familiar terms:
Ecology, a term coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866, is the study of the ‘homes’ or ‘households’ of organisms. It examines how organisms provide the conditions for each other, recycling nutrients, transforming the non-living environments in the process…
…Ecosystems become increasingly complex and diverse as new niches are created and new organisms establish themselves and evolve within these niches, creating new living forms.
Life develops in ecosystems, including organisms, through a process of ecopoiesis, that is, household/home-making, providing the conditions for components to emerge and develop, which then provide the conditions for new levels of creative emergence.
[Culture, science and institutions] can be seen as part of the human environment, being components of their ‘households’ or ‘homes’, understood very broadly and including the ‘households’ of communities at different scales. As well as the forms of communication and ways of living and thinking required for their functioning.
It is these cultural developments that have enabled humans to advance to an ecological understanding of the world.