The starting point for my proposed Artcore work is a collection of images collected from the property site Zoopla. The photography produced by and for estate agents is something that has always interested me. This vast amount of imagery is made of people’s homes, often in a quite haphazard manner and uploaded to the internet to be gazed upon by who ever choses to look. These are disposable images and are the driving force behind what is often the biggest purchase made in persons life.

In early 2019 I set about collecting this imagery. I wrote a little program that sat on a computer and listened for new posts to Zoopla and downloaded what was posted. I thought there’d be quite a lot of it, but to see the amount produced was a surprise. 2.2Tb of images, hundreds of thousands, collected to a hard drive in only a short time.

The single biggest problem is what to do with all these images?

I knew I wanted to use bathrooms as a starting point – those private spaces often behind locked door – but how to separate bathrooms from the sheds, kitchens and lounges?

This has proven a mammoth task of almost physical labour, image sorting heavy lifting, if you will. It has to be sorted manually, going through each file and moving it to an appropriate place. Luckily, with a quick bit of coding I was able to knock-up a little program that allowed me to resize and move the appropriate image to the correct place with the press of a key – phew.