The story of a space (Part 1)

Our homes tell a story. They tell of our habits, our routines, our values. They tell a story of the things that repeatedly happen there — in our living rooms, our kitchens, our bedrooms and bathrooms. Some don’t know their own story, at least not consciously, but it lives in them and around them with every action they take.

This phenomenon has occurred to me in light of a new job in residential property management. That is, apartment complexes. Recently, I have visited many different apartments for many different reasons — sometimes to spray pest control, sometimes to inspect an empty unit after someone moves out. In every case, however, I also feel like I am entering latent space.

In computing, latent space is a map of information and generative AI models use it to create things like letters or images. When you ask an AI for an pictures of a brown dog, the image is created in the latent space between known concepts like photograph, the color brown, and dog, along with hundreds of other probable vectors like sunlight, outdoors, collar, cute — and boom. Your new image is generated.

When I walk into an apartment, I am surrounded by bits of information. Sometimes it’s an overwhelming amount of information, sometimes a deafening lack of information, but always, the story of the home begins to form in that latent space.

To put words to this idea is abstract as the feeling itself, but there is a connection between physical spaces and the human experience worth exploring.