Spend long enough on dating apps like Tinder, and the faces of your algorithmically-selected eligible partners start to blend together. In an incredibliy on-the-nose metaphor for this phenomenon, French digital artist Pierre Buttin has melded 1,000 pictures of Tinder profiles into 10 glitchy explosions of color for his new media project entitled Ten Days on Tinder.
Buttin spent 10 consecutive days swiping right on every Tinder account he came across until he hit the dating app’s daily ceiling of 100 profiles. He took a screenshot of every profile as he went, ending each day with 100 images of single women in his area. He would then throw all those images into a single file on Photoshop, which is essentially like digitally stacking each picture on top of one another, and changed their blending mode from ‘Normal’ to ‘Difference.’ He repeated this process for a total ten days, developing a single synthesized image for each day’s worth of screenshots, amounting to a total of 1,000 profiles spread across 10 pictures.
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Unlike projects like Dries Depoorter’s TinderIn or Frances Waite’s Tinder message-inspired nudes, 10 Days on Tinder isn’t trying to make an overt statement about the app or dating culture, but instead serves as a reflection of the artist’s own disorienting experience of online dating culture and a visual manifestation of the “overflowing stream of new relationships” generated through Tinder. He tells The Creators Project, “In some cases, I was not happy with the result so I swapped some layers in order to get a satisfying result. That is why this is neither data viz, nor pure generative art.”
Instead, he’s simply taking advantage of this new source of information as material to glitch. “It’s hard for me to say in detail how this project is different from other Tinder-based art,” the artist says. “I just liked the idea and have never seen it done before—so I did it.”
Check out some of the other days of condensed Tinder profiles:
Day 3
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Ten Days on Tinder will be on display at The Plug in London on the 27th and 28th of May. For more information on the showing, head over to the event page, here.
You can check out more work by Pierre Buttin over at his website, here.
Related:
Tinder Business Cards Mix Work with Play
An Artist Put Tinder and LinkedIn Profile Pics Side-By-Side
Two Artists Met on Tinder. What Happened Next Will Make Your Day
