If every need can be satisfied through a screen, what remains outside?

Telematic Solitude: Living without Leaving

Alba Lucia Aviles Semjevski

Irene Besana

Denise Pichler

Student

Alba Lucia Aviles Semjevski Irene Besana Denise Pichler

Academic staff

Course

The project investigates the relationship between domestic space, social withdrawal, and digital connectivity through the phenomenon of hikikomori. Originally identified in Japan, hikikomori describes a condition of prolonged social withdrawal in which individuals remain isolated within their homes for extended periods. While commonly associated with loneliness and disconnection, contemporary forms of hikikomori reveal a more complex reality in which physical isolation coexists with constant digital connectivity.

The installation explores this paradox through a triangular structure inspired by Ugo La Pietra’s Cellula Telematica (1972), incorporating video and photographic material related to hikikomori and hoarding. Drawing on the work of Tetsuya Ishida, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Ugo La Pietra, the project examines how the bedroom can evolve from a temporary refuge into a self-contained environment where communication, entertainment, consumption, and social interaction take place through technological mediation.

As withdrawal becomes prolonged, the domestic environment itself often changes. The bedroom may become a multifunctional space that simultaneously serves as a place for sleeping, eating, working, entertainment, and social interaction. Within this context, accumulation becomes increasingly significant. While hoarding is not a defining characteristic of hikikomori, documented cases frequently show bedrooms crowded with possessions, packaging, media objects, and everyday materials. The accumulation of objects reflects the gradual concentration of life within a single room. As the outside world becomes less accessible, the room increasingly functions as a complete ecosystem.

A project made in the course

The Media Bedroom

The Media Bedroom is a bachelor-level course in Interior & Exhibit Design that introduces students to the fundamental principles of exhibition design through the critical investigation of the bedroom as a post-domestic space. Drawing on Paul B. Preciado’s notion of post-domesticity, the course approaches the bed not as an intimate, isolated object, but as a media-saturated device—an infrastructural node where bodies, images, data, labor, and desire converge. Once understood as the ultimate site of privacy, the bedroom today is continuously perforated by communication technologies that transform it into a stage, a studio, a workplace, and a broadcast interface.

Explore this course

More projects by Alba Lucia Aviles Semjevski, Denise Pichler, Irene Besana