When Tinder entered popular culture, there was much ballyhoo in the media about it -- the famous Vanity Fair ‘dating apocalypse’ article being the most hysterical and widely-circulated — but after a few years it’s just become another fact of modern life. I’ve stood on the Helsinki metro overlooking multiple seated passengers all using Tinder at the same time, swiping their hearts out. It’s no longer a faux pas to admit to meeting someone this way.

Temporary is a platform for experimental interactions, and it strikes me that Tinder is also this, though I doubt it is used much in this way. And also like Temporary, Tinder is also where the social and the technical meet. We have a tool that can introduce us to hundreds of potential strangers, all of whom are theoretically ‘open’ on some level, who would never otherwise know about what we do at Temporary.

If you would like to participate in Tinder Lounge, install Tinder and find between 3 and 5 matches who are willing to come along to the experiment with you. During Tinder Lounge we will interact in structured and semi-structured ways through a series of exercises and games, with results to be collected from all participants (ideally 20-30 people) through a series of surveys and other feedback forms. There will also be ample time to ‘hang out’, since it’s a lounge, after all.

If this experiment receives enough pledges to be scheduled: Please do not be deceitful or manipulative to any poor strangers who you match with on Tinder. Please send them a link to the experiment webpage and make sure they know what they are getting into. Tinder Lounge is not intended to be a group date, swingers club or anything romantic in nature, though we will safely explore the complicated concepts of ‘intimacy’ and ‘openness’. You need not be single to participate in Tinder Lounge, though again we insist that you are up-front about this to whichever Tinder matches you might invite.

I have been wondering: what is the quantitative impact of our cultural creations? As much energy as we may put into making art installations, short films, sound recordings, paintings, etc., we usually only reach a small number of already-in-the-loop, culture-consuming people - or just our friends. At best we might experience an incursion into popular culture forms, or perhaps some international recognition or commercial success. Call me cynical (and many do), but I see our regular cultural products as existing in a ‘safe’ space, a space carved out to accommodate a predetermined spectrum of expression. Our lifestyles continue as before, whether we see such-and-such exhibition or not, mediated by our consumer choices and other pressures.

So what actually has changed the way we live, on a mass scale? Social media technology, of course. This is hardly an original or deep observation, but I wonder how we might utilise these technologies to challenge our own daily realities instead of just being passive victims of their marketing research and data-mining.

Also: what happens when a tool like Tinder, which admittedly is very minimal and hands-off in how you behave, is 'mis-used' in ways that its creators did not intend?

And finally, there is the basic experiment of what happens when you put 30 strangers in a room for an evening and ask them to indulge in various games and interactions.

A summer night (late June or July), because everyone is more 'open' in the summer

Anyone who is curious about interacting with strangers who you match with due to superficial reasons