Over the past two decades, the bedroom has been culturally reconfigured and revitalized. As neoliberal-policy induced housing precarity has become ubiquitous, we now spend much more time living with roommates, or maybe even moving back into our parents’ place. We feel as though our agency and control are in constant flux, slowly slipping away from us while the complexities of the global financial flows and politics which govern our lives consistently seem to undermine our interests. What, then, is left over? Where can we still exercise our agency? What place still belongs to us? I would posit that our bedrooms become almost like autonomous zones, at least in my experience. Particularly through networked technologies, which offer us another form of agency, the bedroom has undergone radical changes. Our bedrooms now serve as spaces for labor, play, entertainment, grifting, and–most importantly–being online. This text explores the bedroom and its theoretical underpinnings through contemporary cultural artifacts and various characters which emerged from the internet.
Written by Ruben Stoffelen and designed by Klaudia Orczykowska (orczi96)