The concept of the interior appears to be challenging to understand. In Chinese for example, there is no term for 'interior' but it rather translates to 'inside room.’ What makes it more challenging is this concept of the interior in a way that is continually evolving with the changing/development of time, culture and society. There may be various different definitions, but here is how I perceive the term ‘interior.’
To me, the interior is defined by encounters, the virtual, and the actual. It is a connection produced during and with the interaction of every factor perceived in the environment.
What is the interior? This question has always been buried in my mind when thinking about...interior. The definition of the interior appears to mix with the public assumption of something that 'makes my room looks pretty.' I wondered what we are doing with the interior? Is it potentially a notion that is informed by our senses?
I understand the space through layers of narrative cues. It seems there is always that one narrative cue appears most dominant in the collection of narrative, while the level of dominance may shift with our virtual interaction.
During the final year of my bachelor’s in interior design, I began thinking that narrative is a ‘preset,’ produced by a 'background story' or knowledge that acts as layers that shifts and filters one's perspective when sensing a non-subjective (not yet subjective) reality. '- Methods to negotiate the existing narrative.
The interior could be an interaction; it could be a notion; it could be a narrative. What holds these then?
Us? Could be the culture we live in, the rules and laws we obey, these assembled by our selfish nature.
It is my understanding that to satisfy our desire to continue existing, we must always strive to understand things and situations. To generate or assemble or to understand a 'new' narrative or experience, we refer to the narrative cues within it. We interact with senses and process these through our existing subjectivity, apply existing knowledge and experience so that we can understand and merge it back to the subjective experience.
I recognise the boundary of the interior through light and the textual reflection of materiality; through sound, taste and smell. These senses and their represented meaning that we inherited from our ancestors and through our genes could be one of the features that establish how we behave. An early study on behaviour genetics titled, ‘Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart,’ illustrated the influence of our genes on how we behave (Bouchard et al. 1990). Notably, identical twins, called the Jim twins, were raised in different families and circumstances and were separated for thirty-nine years, and their character and hobbies were incredibly similar (Kong & Wang 2006).
This may then extend into the form of society and culture. Examining religion for example, light is a common medium that performs this extension. Naturally, we have this fear of darkness, perhaps brought on by the fear of predators in the dark and the fact that we have limited vision, lack of food sources, etc. In contrast to this natural fear, the light then becomes a representation of goodness and eventually, in various regions, a representation of divinity.
'Then, the Buddha emitted a ray of light from the tuft of white hair between his eyebrows. It illuminated all the eighteen thousand worlds in the east, down as far as the lowest hell, Avici, and up as high as the Akanistha Heaven' - Lotus Sutra (ed Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research 2007).
Through the development of contemporary society, social media and digital technology, the concept of our subjective reality, our world, our pains and our happiness, are no longer limited by physical conditions and forms. This is my understanding of these critical issues some of us are facing. We did not choose to be born, we have never been given a choice to choose, the suffer, the pain, the struggle we are or have experienced.
This is similar to what the contemporary artist and theorist, Simon O'Sullivan stated in his book, ‘On the Production of Subjectivity,’
'In the first kind of knowledge then we are subject to the world and,
we might say, victim to it' (O’Sullivan 2014).
From the book of the media theorist, Berardi Franco, ‘Futurability,’ I noticed that our reality is produced by the collapse of our subjective selection and non-subjective forces/selection. Once non-subjective force meets our subjective force, it, or a part of it, will then become a subjective force and become part of our narratives and reality.
I felt we are, in a way, locked in by our narratives like characters in a comic book. We can never leave it; we can never sense the real. While entering the world, we are starting to make selections that are assembled by our backgrounds, narratives that we are born with. We have no choice ... we think we can never change it. It is the past, our history, our narrative is done, our future is fixed.
We can't fight against our narrative because we can't fight against our existence and reality. We can only negotiate.
