[spectre] DATA DATING - Until March 1 - Watermans London

[Valentina Peri]

DATA DATING <https://www.watermans.org.uk/events/data-dating/>
!Mediengruppe Bitnik, Adam Basanta, Olga Fedorova, Tom Galle, Thomas
Israël, Moises Sanabria, Antoine Schmitt, Jeroen van Loon, Addie
Wagenknecht & Pablo Garcia, John Yuyi

Curated by Valentina Peri
The exhibition "Data Dating" attempts to explore new directions in modern
romance.
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 affect our sexual
intimacy? Are the new means of connection shifting the old paradigms of
adult life?

Exhibition running until March 1, 2020. Watermans, 40 High street,
Brentford, London UK.
https://www.watermans.org.uk/events/data-dating/
In partnership with Galerie Charlot Paris

/// After Paris and Tel Aviv, Data Dating
<http://www.galeriecharlot.com/media/public/news/exposition-data-dati-galeriecharlot-bfg530.pdf>
is running in London. ///

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 affect our sexual
intimacy? Are the new means of connection shifting the old paradigms of
adult life?

The advent of the Internet and smartphones has brought about a split in the
romantic lives of millions of people, who now inhabit both the real world
and their very own “phone world”. In terms of romance and sexual intimacy
these phenomena have generated new complexities that we are still trying to
figure 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
commodification 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 1960s,
to the video cameras of the 1970s, the bulletin board systems of the 1980s,
the Internet of the 1990s, 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 defined norms is creating a disconnected,
two-tiered world in which some exist in a pre-internet reality, while
others – who have grown up as individuals and sexual beings online – see
the Internet not as an arcane elsewhere where people go to escape reality,
but as reality proper.

What has changed is the “sexual script”: the roles that people feel are
available for them to perform, thanks to the fact that the Internet,
perhaps more than any other medium, enables self and identity to be played
with.

Several authors – like Aaron Ben Ze’ev and Lauren Rosewarne – have stressed
that the online affairs world is disrupting the monogamous nature of
romantic relationships and facilitating different sexual and romantic
behavior, eventually confirming the “prophecy” of Herbert Marcuse’s 1955
book, Eros and Civilization.

According to a recent study, 1 couple in 5 has met through a dating
website: the massive scale of this phenomenon is evidence enough of its
potential for profit and an extensive collection of user data.
Dating websites and hookup applications will be the most profitable
business in the future of the Internet.
Today they rank 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 endlessly
consumed.

As Eva Illouz has stated in Consuming the Romantic Utopia, “romantic love
is a collective arena within which the social divisions and the cultural
contradictions of capitalism are played out”.

Data Dating aims to promote debate on the ways in which society is
responding to one of the greatest challenges of today: mapping the new
connections between emotion, desire, culture, technology, and economy by
considering Internet as a social practice, a shift of society at large.

Valentina Peri, exhibition curator

Press Kit
<https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6wl2msl166xnosy/AAC4Ff1x7o1IR1S6PDq9gFT3a?dl=0&fbclid=IwAR0QMCIV2hTS_5FEbknBmUDB43wQaTsYJ5WFmY9ATfC32Vb4tv97Hvl6wJg>

More info
<http://www.galeriecharlot.com/media/public/news/exposition-data-dati-galeriecharlot-bfg530.pdf>
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