LADY CHATTERLEY’S TINDERBOT
Libby Heaney (GB)
Lady Chatterley’s Tinderbot is an interactive installation comprising conversations between an artificially intelligent Tinderbot posing as characters from Lady Chatterley’s Lover and other Tinder users.
Inspired in part by Lee MacKinnon’s text Love Machines and the Tinder Bot Bildungsroman, and following an experimental method of deconstruction, Lady Chatterley’s Tinderbot explores love in our 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 over 200 anonymised Tinder conversations from both men and women, where Bernie, a personal matchmaker A.I., converses with members of the public using dialogue from Lady Chatterley’s Lover following its own sentiment analysis algorithm.
The conversations range from positive to negative, human to non-human, and probe both familial and sexual love. Participants can swipe left and right to follow the negative or positive conversations, echoing Tinder. While the conversations are showing, descriptive parts of Lady Chatterley’s Loverare played aloud, critiquing the conversations on the screen and reminding us that while the technologies that disseminate love have changed, human nature perhaps hasn’t.
The artwork was made through the Systems Research Group at the Royal College of Art (RCA) investigating how one can use a geometrical structure from quantum computing — the Bloch sphere of a quantum bit — as a model or method for the deconstruction of concepts.
PROFILE
Libby Heaney is an artist, researcher and a lecturer at the Royal College of Art. She has a background in quantum physics and works at the intersection of art, science and technology. She has exhibited her work at Tate Modern; Blitz Gallery, Malta; PointB, New York; Christie’s Multiplied Art Fair, London; and Aboagora Festival in Turku, Finland. She was awarded a Lifeboat residency through the Association for Cultural Advancement through Visual Art (ACAVA/Artquest) in 2016.