I want you to want me

"I Want You To Want Me"
Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar
commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art for their "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition

Mining data from online dating profiles, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar have created a romantic, bittersweet peek into the human psyche. This video tour of the "I Want You to Want Me" installation ends on an up note - apparently "intelligence" is the top turn-on for online daters! Still, the sight of all those balloons bumping randomly past each other in the sky serves as a reminder that finding love anywhere, online or in meatspace, is a total crap shoot.

More like this

Congratulations to the Kavli Science in Fiction Video Contest winners!! 1st Prize Winner: Zachary Katko Video:   "Superluminal Communication" Age : 17 School: Dansville High School, Dansville, Michigan What are your favorite subjects? Science and Social Studies mainly, though I also enjoy English.…
My wife and I were congratulating ourselves on how nicely we (unlike others) had cleaned up after our fireworks last night. Then we realised that actually, most of the contents of those fireworks packages we didn't clean up at all. We used rockets to shoot the stuff into the sky, later to land…
Female Antarctic Seals Give Cold Shoulder To Local Males: Female Antarctic fur seals will travel across a colony to actively seek males which are genetically diverse and unrelated, rather than mate with local dominant males. These findings, published in this week's Nature, suggest that female…
Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years'…

This is perhaps the most unique portrayal I've seen of seeking a mate in the digital age (a subject that always intrigues me). Very interesting!