Lady Chatterley’s Tinderbot

Lady Chatterley’s Tinderbot, 2016, bespoke code, 901 jpeg images displayed on a touchscreen monitor, dimension variable + Book (is included in the edition). 

Lady Chatterley’s Tinderbot is an interactive touch screen artwork comprising conversations between an AI Tinderbot (blue text) posing as characters from Lady Chatterley’s Lover and other Tinder users (grey text).

Lady Chatterley’s Tinderbot explores love in a post-digital age by bringing together humans and non-humans and pre- and post-digital love machines, namely the literary novel and Tinder.

The installation features around 800 anonymized Tinder conversations of both men and women, where Bernie.ai, “your personal matchmaker A.I. who understands your “type”, and finds them on your favorite dating networks” has conversed with members of the public using dialogue from Lady Chatterley’s Lover following its own sentiment analysis and facial recognition algorithms. The conversations probe how human relationships are mediated through digital technologies.

Progression through the conversations is controlled by a swipe left/right action. The narrative through the Tinder conversations is thus controlled by the participant, reflecting users own potential journeys through Tinder.

Lady Chatterley’s Tinderbot is accompanied by a book, presenting an edited data set of around 300 conversations revealing Tinder archetypes. The conversations between the bot and other Tinder users are woven together with selected descriptive excerpts from Lawrence, reflecting similarities and disparities in love, sex, class, gender and family between the 1920s and now.