with Lotte de Jong
The current financialized housing landscape, filled with speculation and elusive homeownership, is an unsettling scenario where fears and desires converge. Arguably, this mix is at the basis of new forms of entertainment, such as real estate TV shows, celebrity house tours, infinite scrolling on online properties websites, or real estate role-play pornography. Real estate role-play pornography, also known as PropertySex, is a niche porn genre that sets sexual activity within the context of real estate transactions,—offering, in this way, a unique perspective on the libidinal aspects of the housing crisis. Often presented as a POV video from the perspective of the potential buyer, PropertySex merges the attractiveness of the real estate agent with the desire for the home being offered, blending sexual arousal with homeownership longing.
Drawing upon this combination of desires, Fantasy Lane presents an interactive non-linear narrative through a game engine. The navigable 3D environments are constructed by using still images from PropertySex videos and feeding them into neural graphic primitives, with the human presence masked out by object recognition software. The created 3D scenes are exported to Unreal Engine, where they are combined with ASMR narration that role-plays a homebuying scenario. Visitors have the possibility to explore multiple environments and discover different parts of the narrative, uncovering as they go comments left by viewers underneath the original videos—often humorous and discerning of the different layers of desire connected there.
Fantasy Lane interrogates the topology of computing longing and unusable affect through computer vision and 3D modelling, exploring how machines render desired spaces from abstraction and probabilities. At the same time, and in a sort of desiring feedback loop, viewers complete these renditions with their own projections, using real estate porn sets as proxy spaces for the unfolding of unattainable homeownership fantasies.
