Architectural remediation: the Nautilus project, a glass house immersed in media devices and electromagnetic waves

In the summer of January 2000 — a few months after the first television programme Big Brother was launched in the Netherlands — a couple of young architects in Santiago designed and placed in the city centre a three by four metres glass house. The project, called Nautilus, La Nueva Casa Transparente para Armar en su Lote Suburbano, became for a couple of days the house of an actress who performed domestic routines in front of hundreds of passers-by and the media. The project ended up questioning the motivations and expectations of the architects, who in deploying their own conception of modernity, underestimated the technological transformations and role played by the media. Nautilus is not only constructed by its architecture and performance as an art installation but also through the multiplication of the media image; the house becomes a virtual artefact which is produced through its media dissemination. In this context, Nautilus will be explored in relation to the rise of reality television shows and the presentation of the self via distributed digital platforms. The project opens up a series of questions regarding contemporary forms of exhibitionism and voyeurism activated by intensifying socio-technological mediation, wherein domestic space emerges as an instrumental medium through which to discharge our mediatised subjectivities.