“Let me be clear: My dream bathroom doesn’t just look pretty – it works well and is built to last too”

“They left us with a bathroom I could only have dreamt of. I would highly recommend them and their workmanship and would have them back in a flash” (2020)

“My dream bathroom would be a harmonious combination of stylish design and practical usability” (2020)

“Amazingly my dream bathroom might actually become a reality and at a very affordable price” (2020)

AI, bespoke algorthim, bathrooms (Digital print on Dibond)

Let us begin by asking a computer to collect a series of images from the property search website Zoopla. But the machine is heavy handed. In a blink of an eye we have 2.21TB of data.

What these images contain is of no interest to the machine, that it is data is enough.

But we have a morbid fascination when looking through these digital windows and into the homes of the anonymous, gazing upon their possessions, marvelling at these personal spaces vacated to make way for the action of the photograph.

Did you see that bathroom? Who’d ever have that wallpaper? My god, those curtains!

So let us now step into the most private of these spaces. Let us step into the bathroom – a space to perform our ablutions where we can feel secure in our nakedness, where we can lock the door.

These actions that come so naturally to us are truly alien to the computer. Now let us give these images to an AI, let it ponder on what it sees.

But these AIs are idiots. They can’t tell the difference between a shed and a bedroom, so we have to sort the images by hand so the AI can start to dream. This time, the work is passed to us.

All they know is brute force of thought - to look for repeating patterns, to bludgeon their way to a conclusion.

Let us watch as this happens.

Featured in:
— Art Review
— Sluice: Spring 2022