What does it mean to love in the Internet age? How are digital interfaces reshaping our personal relationships? What do new technologies imply for the future of the romantic sphere? How do screens a ect our sexual intimacy? Are the new means of connection shifting the old paradigms of adult life? In terms of romance and sexual intimacy these phenomena have generated new complexities that we are still trying to gure out.
By bringing together the work of several international artists, the exhibition Data Dating attempts to explore new directions in modern romance: new forms of intimate communication, the process of commodi cation of love through online dating services and hookup applications, unprecedented meeting and mating behaviors, the renegotiation of sexual identities, and changing erotic mores and taboos.
Over the past century, the history of dating practices has shown that the acquisition of new freedoms is often accompanied by suspicions and stereotypes: what appears disturbing to one generation often ends up being acceptable for the next. From the early computers algorithms of the s, to the video cameras of the s, the bulletin board systems of the s, the Internet of the s, and the smartphones of the last decade, every new format of electronically mediated matching has faced a stigma of some kind.
Today, the lack of broadly de ned norms is creating a disconnected, two-tiered world in which some exist in a pre-internet reality, while others β who have grown up as individuals and sexual beings online β see the Internet not as an arcane elsewhere where people go to escape reality, but as reality proper. According to a recent study, 1 couple on 5 has met through a dating website: the massive scale of this phenomenon is evidence enough of its potential for pro t and an extensive collection of user data.
Dating websites and hookup applications will be the most rentable business in the future of the Internet. Today they are ranking third among paid content sites online, outpacing even pornography. This aspect raises questions about the planned obsolescence that is supposedly inherent in this business model: the idea that online dating companies, having a latent interest in matches failing, acknowledge the search for partners as a recreational activity and product to be endless consumed.
