a certain uncanniness sets in when showing your apartment. you are still living in your home, but you are showing prospective tenants the space which could become their home. an excruciating liminality sets in, swaddled in loss and longing.

at the time of showing my apartment, i’d been on a vaporwave kick. i set out to disorient potential tenants by playing vaporwave throughout the apartment, accompanied by static blasting radios. i placed a microphone on one side of the apartment, ran through a slight bit of delay, to both playback the vaporwave and to grasp at bits of conversation. as people milled about, i tracked a camera on the steps to my bedroom hole, protecting their exploration of my home onto the wall. few noticed that they were being surveilled, more intent on surveilling my home. by the end of the showing, it became clear that my goal of scaring would-be tenants off had failed as they found the vaporwave audio installation a charming expression of an artist’s life.

reflecting on my experiment, i decided to invert the vaporwave formula: as opposed to turning musak into unreal representations of mundane places, i took recordings from the showing and attempted to create an unreal representation of my very real home. throughout this recording, the voices of apartment hunters and the building manager dance around washed out vaporwave. distortion and delay create a space distinct from the one that i had spent so many days and nights inhabiting.

in the end, i needed to make the space uncanny in order to leave. the burden of leaving my home as it was weighed too heavy. so instead i melted into air.