The Modern Interior

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gondolas of Italy’s Venice have been recreated in an inside space with a
blue sky/ceiling overhead. It provides an opportunity for tourists to
fantasize about being in that exotic European city, or even believe that
they really are there, and above all to consume the goods in the shops
constructed in that space. Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show provided
a filmic parallel to the inside/outside ambiguity of Las Vegas’s
shopping malls. Seemingly set in a small American town on an island,
it is revealed that the entire film has taken place within a huge dome
containing a television set, and that the audience has been watching a
television programme being made within a film, and a television set
within a film set. What Truman believed to be an open horizon was in
fact a backcloth with a blue sky painted on to it. The film represents media
intrusion into the private sphere, hidden surveillance and the ambiguous
relationship between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ at their most extreme.
The increasing levels of complexity that characterize realized, represented
and idealized interiors in early twenty-first-century private and
public spaces suddenly seem unproblematic, however, when they are
considered alongside the implications for the interior of the concept of
‘virtual space’. Perhaps in that context, in which new inside and outside
spaces can be accessed through a computer screen – which can be viewed
at home, at work, in the gym, in the garden, in an aeroplane or on the top
of a mountain – the idea of modernity, of the separate spheres, and above
all of the modern interior, cease to have any meaning.