5th Clark Bursary
LoveMatch
by Dane Watkins
Posted Fri 30 Jan 04
    
The initial proposal for LoveMatch is to make use of what is already
happening in Watershed's Café/Bar - people meeting, checking
each other out, flirting - and layer on top of this a digital experience which
allows people to make a mark, in the hope of finding a love match, and
view the progress of others.
So people would use PDAs to input their personalities and find
compatible partners. In fact the idea is very similar to the "I
saw you.." [ran by Venue magazine in bars in Bristol including Watershed].
I wanted to create a way for people to create a virtual representation
of themself and use it to communicate with others in
a digital landscape. I also wanted to get the commission/bursary
and I thought that they'd go for this idea.
The publicly funded art world isn't too dissimilar from the commercial
sector. You have to pitch your idea. Which is quite different to
the attitudes I was educated in at art school where there was an emphasis on
studio practice and developing a visual language. "Don't tell me
about it, show me."
Meanwhile inbetween being awarded the bursary in Sept 2003 and starting work
on it in Dec 2003 I spent two months in a remote East German Village. This
was for a European Media Artist's Residency Exchange program. It was similar
to I''m a Celebrity...' but without the media interest, or any interest come to
that. There was no form of entertainment other than a large collection of
experimental videos. So I spent my days making work, which you can see at www.emptydays.co.uk and
learning about the history of experimental film. The two months were completely
non-interactive and gave me a desire to produce repetitive animated objects that
are unable to relate to anything other than themselves.
This was quite a diificult desire to reconcile with the bursary
which was all about communication.
In Dec I met with Jon and Caroline from www.cybersuiters.com,
an on-line dating agency. They have a special formula called the
Compatibility Quotient to determine compatibility between
two people. They were very generous and I could use it as the basis
for my project but then it would just have become a design brief.
I have found it difficult in adjusting to the idea of producing
something interactive, something that communicates with other users
especially as my "studio practice" was bent on producing isolated
objects.
The problem I have had is in thinking about making something interactive
instead of incorporating the audience into the work so that their
responses to the images are stored and change the sign value
of the images through use.
I am producing a range of drawings and it will be up to the audience
to represent themselves through the drawings and define what they
find attractive.
Posted Mon 22 March 04
How LoveMatch is designed
The first part of LoveMatch, the personality profile is a development
of my previous project TargetArt (2003, commissioned by Radiator
festival in Nottingham), another personality profile test. In developing
TargetArt I spent about a month researching personality tests before
I realised that it would take me a few more years to produce an
accurate profiling test, after all I’m an artist who has spent
most of my time developing a visual language. So for LoveMatch
I drew things that I thought would make nice drawings rather than
attempt to create images that reflected accurate personality types. They
are almost arbitrary. The comments the viewer receives on completing their
profile were written quickly and with little care or attention to creating
an accurate or insightful description of their choices. My reasoning for
this approach was that if the images and words were sufficiently vague
the viewer would create their own meaning.
Like TargetArt,LoveMatch is a visual questionnaire. The user
selects different images to construct a representation
of their identity,
and then LoveMatch gives them a written analysis of their personality.
It uses a second person narrative, that is LoveMatch addresses
the viewer directly. The second person narrative is the language
of the individual attempting to understand themself. Horoscopes
are a good example of this format. I thought
that if LoveMatch spoke
directly to the viewer and gave the appearance
that it was trying to
understand them, making comments on their choices,
then it would give the viewer
a reason to engage with the application. I supposed
that most people want
to talk about themselves and understand how they
come across to other people.
Once the viewer has created their profile and received comments on
their choices LoveMatch goes on to show them
an image of their perfect partner, apparently
selected from searching through a database. This
is an entirely random
process and the attributes of the perfect partner
have no relationship to
the viewer’s inputs. This is designed to give
closure to LoveMatch. It
is also a way of showing all the drawings just
in case the viewer hadn’t
scrolled through all the options. The scrolling
text at the top of theanimation is
entirely random and has no relationship to the
images.
LoveMatch is designed to be viewed on a PDA (personal digital
assitant), a small handheld computer. I like them because they offer
a way of showing discrete animations. I was already interested
in making work for PDAs before I heard about the Bursary and so
I adapted some of my ideas to fit the Bursary’s expectations,
that is I proposed that my animations could be networked.
Focus Groups
LoveMatch was tested on three user focus
groups at the Watershed Media
Centre in Bristol in March 2004.
The focus groups were initially organised to test the user interface.
I would then go on to develop LoveMatch’s network capabilities which
would enable participants to communicate with each other
through a chat interface.
No one had a problem with navigating through the different sections
of LoveMatch and they were aware of all the options in the profile section. I
was worried that the profile section was too complicated so it
was good to see that LoveMatch is easy to use.
LoveMatch proved to be an engaging experience. The users suspended
their disbelief and looked for meaning. Some of the users did think
that the profiles represented aspects of their personality and
they tried to understand why their perfect partner had the
particular traits displayed. They believed that
the application was doing what it said it was doing.
The physical nature of the PDAs, which are small enough to hold
in your hand, helped to reinforce the intimacy
of LoveMatch. The
users held the PDAs close to their body so that no
one else could view their inputs. The users felt
that this added to the experience because it
created a sense of
privacy.
Most people didn’t want to see a public outcome of their inputs,
either by having their profiles broadcast on a large screen or
by having their profiles printed out. They liked the ephemerality
of the process and that the results were left unrecorded. They
felt that LoveMatch captured how they were at that
particular moment and that if they came back at a different time
they would make different choices.
Although privacy seemed important, during testing friends sitting
next to each other and using LoveMatch would
show each other their
profiles and laugh at the results.
I intended LoveMatch to be a satirical comment on profiling. I
thought that the users would recognise the arbitrary nature of the
imagery and object to the conclusions. But they didn’t. Perhaps
it is because LoveMatch is a safe environment, there is nothing
negative in the suggestions. In the tests LoveMatch
proved to be an engaging experience but it failed in its attempts
to satirise profiling. If it was more satirical and openly questioning of
the format it might have proved to be less enjoyable.
The focus groups could see many ways that LoveMatch could be developed
as a networked piece, through chat interfaces etc. But
the experience of using LoveMatch appeared to be complete
in itself. Although the tests were designed to be a step towards
creating a networked application they showed that LoveMatch
worked as an independent application.
For me LoveMatch has become a piece about the power of suggestion
rather than an exploration of wireless technology.
Further notes and the Online Version of LoveMatch by can be seen of
at: /www.eatmydata.co.uk/LoveMatch/
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