Editing & Narrative

Tinderscapes & Matchings

INTRO

Out of personal interest I started using Tinder, not for having a date, but purely out of curiosity how people present themselves in order to have the chance to meet a partner. The focus lies on the profile, what people choose to show. The purpose of a profile, in my opinion, is to present yourself. In general there are a lot of options, but on Tinder you only have the option to upload a certain amount of pictures together with a short description of yourself or your interests. So out of these limitations, you have to get the maximum result, which is to attract a partner of your interest. The way to do that is, I believe, to make an unique profile where you distinguish yourself from the/an average. You can possibly reach that by having very unique pictures and description of yourself.

After using Tinder for some time, I noticed certain recurring topics, like the Eiffeltower, girls with dolphins and girls riding a horse. It is interesting to see that first people make photos with a similar topic, second that people use the same sort of photos for a dating-app in order to attract another. The question then arose in which extend are these girls then unique from each other and what does this say about the way we use photography? We could argue in a way that most people on this dating-app are not so unique from each other since the topic of the photos are the same and/or give the same impressions about our interests.

I decided to look for topics and take screenshots of them. Together the collection consist of several gigabytes and thousands of screenshots.

TINDERSCAPES

From my total collection I want to transform certain topics into a project called Tinderscapes. With Tinderscapes I want to show a landscape made out of Tinder-screenshots. The screenshots consist of girls looking into the distance to a landscape. Then I want to connect those pictures by stitching together the horizons. Together they form a new mountain scenery. The girls in the screenshots are then all close to each other and wandering around this newly created scenery.

The individual screenshots of these girls looking in the distance remind me of the work of Caspar David Friedrich - Wandering above the sea of Fog (1818). Interesting works which might be related to Tinderscapes are Grand Canyon and Golden Gates by Aaron Valdez.

Another landscape I want to make consists of screenshots where there is a seashore in the background. When I overlook the screenshots I have, I notice that most seashores are roughly at the same postion in every screenshot. Is there an unconscious 'urge' to do this? Are we maybe programmed to make the pictures in this way? NOTE: research golden ratio.