Girlroom
Samiha Meem
Ohio State University Knowlton School of Architecture
Knowlton Hall
275 West Woodruff Avenue
Columbus, Ohio
April 10–July 15
This summer I descended into the cavernous Knowlton School of Architecture, a space filled with traces of previous semesters but devoid of any other people. I stepped through a glass sliding door, down a darkened hallway, through a floor-length curtain, and into Girlroom, a solo exhibition and accompanying series of events curated by Samiha Meem, as a culmination of her Howard E LeFevre ‘29 Emerging Practitioner Fellowship at Ohio State University.
Atmospherically and phenomenologically, the exhibition is deliberately immersive, a physical set that references elements of the #girlhood movement. The work on display emerged from the algorithmic economy of recent years, and is part of a larger critical contemporary movement that includes artists like Molly Soda intertwined with feminine, spatial, computational, and queer theoretical investigations of the past century. In Meem’s work, a soft suspended curtain envelopes the entire exhibition, in which three clusters of relationally generated work speak to one another through their physical arrangement. A bed invites viewers to sit, lay, talk, sleep, and rot.
The lighting is soft and moody, produced from a series of indirect light sources. A diffuse light table covered with hundreds of projector slides and carefully suspended projected video works illuminate the space, each generated by girlcoded Tumblr archives fed through Large Language Models (or LLMs, a form of Generative AI). Soft lights covered in sewn gauzy lamp covers illuminate large black-and-white architectural drawings pulled from the video works, and their sewn textile translations. Meem’s process unfolds as a series of interconnected yet intentionally distorted physical expressions of her interpretation of #girlhood.
In A Room of One’s Own, an influential text for Meem during this process, Virginia Woolf framed the construct of the room as an encapsulation of the feminine experience as it exists within a patriarchal society. The room as a space of interior containment also provided possibilities for alternative realities centered around space, creativity, and identity. The cultural appropriation of practices traditionally associated with women’s domestic roles, while initially devalued due to their lack of perceived economic value, later were commercialized and professionalized for capital gain by men. The erasure of women’s contributions through craft to fields later reclaimed as “fine arts,” “design,” or “computation,” has historically confined and limited women to “lesser” spaces. One of these spaces might be the bedroom of the girl.
The bed that Meem has built in the center of her exhibition brings to mind Tracey Emin’s My Bed, exhibited at Tate Gallery in 1999, but in Meem’s polished exhibition I am also reminded of an image of a room that contains a layered, darker history. As radio was taking off around the world, Viennese modernist Adolf Loos designed a white bedroom, titled Bedroom for my Wife, draped in angora sheepskins and cloth for his first of four wives, the 19-year-old blonde, blue-eyed Lina. It was “a bag of fur and fabric to wallow in” during a time when information was growing, and agency was, too. His advent into—and bold publicization of—the feminine bedroom arrived in tandem with his particular views that women should be contained.
“Clusters”
For some, Loos was a figurehead of subverting societal powers, enforcing individuality. For the women in his domestic sphere, Loos’s dominance within the field of architecture meant that he could freely wield space as a tool of control. Now, however, our viral conversations are less about man vs. nature, or facade as a mask for protecting our individuality: We are contained within the mass conglomeration of information. Tech giants control the algorithm in which we present and represent ourselves. Meem’s bed, sited at the center of the exhibition, functions as a place of inclusion and conversation, and provides an experiential anchor to the rest of her work.
Meem discusses the idea of “clusters” within her own work: clusters of data, code, objects, image noise, matter, and so on. For Meem, the simulation or auto-referential nature of these clusters of information might develop the glitches that allow for marginal conditions to emerge. Through the development of a physical space, an attempt at glitching a vast array of information, Meem iterates an idea through physical matter and immersive space. Forced to interact with the work physically, we can observe alignments or misalignments: of the large-scale architectural drawings with their handmade textile counterparts, or the AI-generated sounds with the softness of the bed.
The raw materials can be contested, but that is perhaps the point: the data (Tumblr, TikTok, Instagram), the algorithm, the furniture, the drapery, the phenomenon of objects colliding. There will inevitably be successes and failures while allowing experimentation to collude with the evolution of new ideas and processes. Through the development of three “clusters” of spatial configuration, Meem demonstrates an attempt at activating space through iteration, testing, and experience. In a world where AI often does not result in the production of physical space, AI acts for Meem as a generative tool that moves the brain out of pure academic thought and into a practice of building. We think through the act of making, and through that act our built world becomes embedded with intelligence.
“Maximum Entanglement”
Within the tense model of production that exists within the academy, two things often oppose one another: a desire to theorize and a push to experiment. As described by Bill Massie, architect in residence at Cranbrook Academy of the Arts from 2005–2017, many architecture schools historically develop a “proto context, shared by every faculty member despite idiosyncratic intellectual specificity.” When I attended graduate architecture school at Cranbrook, that proto context was filled with a shared sense of creation. “The studio” as proto context allowed those who create physical space to develop a body of research that existed alongside others doing the same thing. When I encounter work that is fully realized into physical space, but in fear of being invalidated by the proto context of an academic institution, I intuit that the incipient framework may differ from a studio culture of investigation.
When work moves out of abstraction or theorization and into the real, the feedback loop shifts toward that thing which has been physically made, and miraculously can shed much of the theoretical content that allowed it to arrive there. This perspective, formed by years of not quite fitting into the impossible task of perfect academic cohesion, has also paralleled my practice of making: one that is untidy and deeply generative, and does not resolve itself into a perfect loop. One of my favorite moments with Meem was when she revealed a part of herself: “I like maximum entanglement, regardless of whether or not it is clear. I like testing ideas through chaos and figuring out what it means later. Maybe some of it doesn’t matter at all. And that’s totally fine.” Go, girl.
In a Kamala brat summer, the airs of nihilism as an option to fight TikTok’s hyper-participation are all too present. Meem’s physical space seems to attempt something. “To be a girl is to expire, I guess,” Meem said of her year-long investigation of self, body, and AI. Meem presents physical artifacts, labor, and quiet lament in an attempt to slow us down. If her algorithmically-produced room is terrifying or soothing, at least it is refreshing in its act of physical and atmospheric presence. The girlcoded bows Meem placed on her exhibition as a self-deprecating joke point to a self-awareness that can only exist in the quiet space of one’s own room.
In the grueling 12-month process of fabricating something that will—in TikTok time—be outmoded by the time the exhibition opens, she is generating a new thing to be analyzed: a condition of space that develops and generates possibilities for future spaces. The happenstance of things existing together, in immersive space, points to a phenomenological ask: Can we simply exist in the space Meem presents as it is now? Can we shed the skin that came before, or are we confined to it? Can we forget the name of the thing we see? I can’t wait to step into the next space she creates.
Hannah Dewhirst is a designer and cofounder of SUBSTUDIO and assistant professor at the University of Kentucky College of Design. In her research and teaching, the process of making is a vital act of discovery, wherein experience and intuition, alongside digital fabrication and material experimentation, allow for ongoing feedback loops.