Good Luck is a generative visual artwork developed from a seven-month search for housing in Berlin, during which I relied on temporary stays with friends. While grounded in personal experience, the work uses this situation as a point of entry into an increasingly shared condition shaped by platform-mediated housing systems.
Drawing from user-generated flatshare listings and rejection messages, the work reconfigures fragments of these encounters into visual structures that continuously accumulate and deteriorate. It adopts a generative and pixelated visual language not simply to reference the digital sphere, but to mirror the way housing platforms abstract individuals into compressed metrics.
The video opens with pixelated mosaic elements assembling into an online flatshare listing. Filters such as location, room type, size, and rent structure the interface. Listings repeatedly assemble on screen before being abruptly interrupted by red flashes signalling rejection. New listing layer over the previous ones, stacking and partially overwriting text and image fragments. As the sequence continues, progression is continually deferred, mirroring the escalation of anxiety and exhaustion produced by ongoing refusal.
Over time, fragments from separate listings begin to align, briefly forming the outline of a ‘home’ composed of disparate sources, before collapsing into isolated terms and recurring numbers. In the final moments, the phrase “Good luck” repeats until it collapses into noise.
By translating bureaucratic refusal into visual fragmentation, Good Luck examines how online housing systems normalise exhaustion through repetition and largely invisible digital labour. Rather than offering resolution, it raises questions about how anonymity, interface-mediated distance, and algorithmic sorting reshape agency and belonging within contemporary housing searches.
