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Two Artists Met on Tinder. What Happened Next Will Make Your Day

This is what it's like to be a fly on the wall of 'Two Sides of a Tinder Date.'
All images screenshots from Two Sides of a Tinder Date

When artists Tinder, the performativity of dating can go full-on Fluxus. Case in point: UK artist Andy Leek (who, last time we checked, was giving out gold stars to street artists) and Finnish documentarian Daniela Sea met on Tinder, and proceeded to eradicate the line between art and life by filming their first date from both of their points of view.

Leek and Sea share an almost-archetypical Tinder date: Neither of them are expecting anything too serious. She’s late, because she is doing her hair, while he wears the same clothes he wore to work. He looks for a bar that isn’t too crowded, planning to get drunk, but not too drunk. He finds her “hot,” and gets a little weird when other men talk to her at the bar. She thinks he looks like Sebastian, her gay best friend, and in an aside, wishes he were a little more attractive. He's scheming a way to film their first kiss, while she’s concerned about seeming “pathetic and easy.” What happens next is as unexpected as it is totally charming. “It was fun,” she muses.

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An unspecified amount of time passes and they sit down, reality TV confessional-style, to talk about their experience together. Artmaking prevented either from getting ghosted, but was the chemistry real, or performance art? It almost watches like a how-to on blind dates, or a millennial update to Jørgen Leth’s The Perfect Human—an art film about living, eating, fucking, and caring for yourself, from an outsider's perspective on the human race.

The Tindering artists might not seem head over heels, but they like each other well enough to blend the lines between art- and lovemaking, and anyway, what's the difference? In the end, it shows the power of technology to bring people together, to broadcast their private lives to the world, and to say… Well, to say something about modern love.

Watch Two Sides of a Tinder Date below.

Two sides of a Tinder date. from Andy on Vimeo.

See more of Andy Leek’s work here.

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