Fantasy Lane's dream homes are scraped from Pornhub

You drift through an empty bedroom while a calm voice walks you through the floor plan. The room is soft at the edges, half-remembered rather than modeled, because it was not modeled: in Fantasy Lane, Lotte Louise de Jong ran clips from Pornhub's PropertySex channel through a neural radiance field, and the resulting 3D reconstructions — blurry, dreamlike, structurally sound — became the houses you tour.

The work, a work-in-progress made with Antonia Hernández, sets three of these game-engine spaces to narration drawn from ASMR videos about contracts and floor plans, and it showed last week at [untitled games event] at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. De Jong is a Rijksakademie resident whose work keeps finding the places where digital desire and digital economy turn out to be the same interface.

Scattered through the rooms are comments left by the original viewers of those PropertySex videos; people ignoring what the channel is for and asking about the apartment. She and Hernández talked through the project's thinking in a published conversation on the intimacy of empty spaces, which is worth your time.

Games got to this argument early. Molleindustria's Nova Alea abstracted speculative housing into a city of soft cubes back in 2016, and we traced how games invented virtual real estate before the property sites caught up. Fantasy Lane adds the missing scenery: the seductive voice in your ear telling you this could all be yours.