Meeting Room New – Vienna Design Week – 09.2021

A series of renders, videos and backgrounds produced for Vienna Design Week that reflect the speculative and absurd dimensions of work-from-home and atomised home lives. The different vignettes present speculative representations of different working scenarios, brining together different aesthetic tropes of work. 

The Covid-19 pandemic has altered not only – at least temporarily – our social behavior, but also the places, where we meet. Separating elements, hygiene barriers, and access restrictions have restructured physical space. And, at a stroke, a technology, whose victory had long been predicted by science fiction – video telephony –, was transformed from an emergency solution into the standard. Due to its sudden omnipresence in our everyday professional and private lives, there was a need to swiftly develop a social space, in which one could orient oneself within this new medium. One curious detail of this shift to the digital is the virtual backgrounds, which many video conference platforms enable us to use. From the carefully selected wall of books and beyond, these add extra levels to video communication or allow us to conceal untidy apartments.

In order to offer festival visitors new possibilities for presenting themselves in the virtual realm, CIVA and the VIENNA DESIGN WEEK commissioned the creation of five virtual architectures, which are on show in the Festival Headquarters and available for download free of charge.