I Want You to Want Me
Thursday - March 13, 2008, by Daniel Gjøde
Over the past several years, online dating has entered the mainstream (…) En masse, people have condensed their identities into page or paragraph-long descriptions, sometimes complemented by a handful of photographs or peppered with responses to canned questions. These personal profiles are modern messages in a bottle, short statements of self, telling not only who people are, but also what people want.
Jonathan Harris designs systems to explore and explain the human world. He has just done an installation about online dating at MoMA called I Want You To Want Me. It aims to be a mirror, in which people see reflections of themselves as they glimpse the lives of others.
His excerpt alone kind of embodies all that scares me about this impersonal space that facebook and other social software creates. It is in a weird way constraining and stupefying human relationships.
One Comment
I took a look at the exhibit. It covers a topic of interest because my blog requires similar research (although the resulting product is undoubtedly different). It would be interesting to see how the artists would represent a balloon such as my own, lol. Perhaps they could dunk a portion into a charcoal mixture and guide the liquid in a way where it would seem that one of the balloons exploded into noxious gases. Thanks for sharing this link it’s really cool.
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