Tinder offers you exactly two choices: Swipe right if you like someone or left if you don't. Some people swipe right in a desperate bid to hook up. Some swipe right to kill time. Pierre Buttin swipes right for art.
The artist swiped right on 100 consecutive profiles each day for 10 days for his series Ten Days on Tinder, then blended the images into an indistinguishable mass of color and saturation. It captures the nauseating effect swiping through one face after another until your eyes blur, something Buttin experienced himself. "On one hand, it's exhilarating to have so much access, but it also creates confusion," says Buttin. "It's hard to cope with that influx of so many new people."
The French artist often combines images, pop culture, and the Internet to do things like illustrate the lyrics to Kanye West's "Wolves" on Instagram. When The Plug gallery in London invited him to participate in an exhibition about first dates, Buttin considered Tinder the perfect example of everything weird about dating today.
Logging into the free version of Tinder, Buttin decided to swipe right on every profile that came his way, and make a screenshot. He blew through the 100 profiles a free membership allows each day. Buttin then dumped his screenshots into Photoshop, layered them on top of each other, and created strange colors with the Difference blend mode. All together, he used nearly 1000 profiles to make his 10 portraits.
The resulting images are a kaleidoscope of confusion. They're also a bit creepy, much like the app.
