HOMECTRL: An Example of Practice-Based Artistic Research as a Methodology in Surveillance Studies

This essay provides an example of how practice-based artistic research can contribute to surveillance studies. It does so by reflecting on the development of the installation HOMECTRL for The Danish Museum of Science & Technology. The installation offers speculative fabulations regarding how the Internet of Things (IoT) is rearticulating and transforming the home as a site of control, on a spectrum ranging from the mundane everyday use of robot vacuum cleaners to domestic abuse facilitated by IoT technologies. By sharing excerpts from narrative monologues that probe the question of where control is located, and still images that experiment with representing how technologies perceive their surroundings, the essay demonstrates that practice-based methods can open up understandings of the home as a distributed spatial structure permeated by smart technologies that have new abilities to access, control, and manipulate domestic space.