Output details

The Big Brother House is watching you

Published by University of Brighton 2013, Milligan and Hollis’s chapter examines occupation of an asynchronous TV interior involving a cast of ‘actors’; public voyeurs (viewers), occupants (C-list celebrities) within an interior stage set. Contradictory concerns around isolation, privacy and a surveillance society are exposed and the chapter contributes to an increasingly politicized debate involving deviant and contested forms of interior occupation. These include temporal, memory, re-appropriation, gendered and invasion. This chapter establishes new insights linking televised and on-line multi-media occupation with other deviant occupations (e.g. prisons) extending understanding of interior practice and research in an increasingly digital and televisual age.

This televisual occupation is double edged. Exactly who is being manipulated is open to question. The public ‘assume’ roles as empowered voyeurs, they're viewing / web habits are observed and manipulated through product placement strategies. In this context, interior stage sets and props act as key protagonists in this manipulating viewers and continually switching power relationship.

One of 50 international researchers and double blind peer reviewed leading to an international publication and CD-Rom. Sub-plots and inversions play a role in how we read occupation of a TV interior. Parallels are drawn between the operational strategy of ‘Big Brother’ set-designs with 17th century Parisian building types - the Hotel Particuliers. These large city apartments, occupied by wealthy members of Parisian society, have an architectural layout mirroring the Big Brother House. In the layout exist a series of perimeter poches (‘spatial pockets’ that evoke similar perimeter zones in the set-design) surrounding a central core of occupied public rooms, (reminiscent of the stage set interior)- serviced by a servants whose role was to discretely service the occupants but avoid physical encounters.