Around the mid-afternoon mark, between emails and Zoom meetings, many young professionals and first time property owners make a momentary detour to property retail websites. Here aspiration and intrigue can play out alongside one another, punching a ZIP or postcode in and defining a search radius, you can surf the fluctuations of property prices and judge yourself against the interior design efforts of total strangers. A perverse satisfaction accompanies this gamification of home, embellishing the already hyper competitive housing market with a new layer of intrigue and schadenfreude.

Now consider how the machine views with these images and the dense sets of data surrounding them. How does the underlying code operating Zoopla feel about the immense amount of personal privacy it is invading? Does it care whether you’re scrolling through nearby houses because you legitimately need to upsize for your growing family or illegitimately keeping up with the Joneses? In two new series, Neale Willis gives aesthetic form to these ruminations, articulating the emotional labour we task our AIs.

Let me be clear: My dream bathroom doesn’t just look pretty – it works well and is built to last too (2020) and 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) communicate a machine’s interpretation of our most private sanctuary, the bathroom. To build a dataset Willis began with a bespoke bot designed to scrap Zoopla, in a blink of an eye he had 2.21TB of data sitting on a hard drive. Second step, because the computer cannot tell a shed from a bathroom a manual filtering is required, before finally the resultant dataset can be passed through a Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network, and bingo, after much dreaming we have a result, a fusion of surfaces offering no utilitarian comfort, though maybe hinting to the Biot future prophesied by sci-fi author and design critique Bruce Sterling.

In a parallel study, Willis turns his attention to the exterior. My dream house is simple yet it is a house where I think I can live happily and comfortably with my family (2020) and My dream house will be a place of joy, comfort and beauty. Right now it exists only in my dreams. But I hope my dream will come true (2020) the same systems are employed, this time generating images of suburban erosion. Two-up two-down houses are transformed into high contrast silhouettes not dissimilar to Whitby Abbey, famous gothic inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897).

Returning to themes of greed, Willis’s Pow! Pow! (2019) responds to a quadruple increase in Google searches for “what is bitcoin.” Taking a single arbitrary Bitcoin transaction as a point of departure, Neale relays the data through two phases of algorithmic reinterpretation. First, to shape it into a 3D form and second, to animate that form. Representing a proof of work of a proof of work, Pow! Pow! solidifies the ethereal qualities of cryptocurrency into a more comprehensible digital form, manifesting speculative markets and capitalist expansionism a degree more palatable.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:  

Neale Willis .