Josephine Skinner is turning her awkward romantic misadventures on Tinder into poignant and subtly hilarious video and text installations about life, love and superheroes.

As she flicked through potential matches on the app last year, the Sydney-based UK artist found that men routinely presented themselves in very similar ways—so she started taking screenshots to document their profiles and conversations.

One recurring theme she noticed was men posing with waterfalls in their profile pictures. “There were so many men in front of Niagara Falls or swimming under little waterfalls or cliff diving into them,” she says.“I wondered why these completely disconnected men were all choosing waterfalls for their profiles, and the more I thought about it I realised that waterfalls were a really potent sign.”

The artist decided to ask the men of Tinder what they thought it all meant, and the resulting conversations turned into the video work Tender, recently exhibited at Sydney’s MOP Projects. “I started swiping right to any men with waterfalls, and if we matched I’d bring these ideas into the conversations. I had no idea if the chats would be interesting—but some were in quite surprising and touching ways,” she says.

To make Tender, Skinner screen grabbed the Tinder conversations and animated the speech bubbles over iPhone wallpapers of the cosmos. The artist worked with composer James Brown to produce a soundtrack utilising iPhone ringtones and ambient noise. She wanted the work to “sound a bit like you’re all alone in outer space.”

Waterfall profile pictures, Skinner theorises, suggest danger and adventure. “They kind of encompass these idealised traits—men can appear like romantic heroes and sensitive action men,” the artist says.

She was also reminded of the 1980 movie Superman II, where waterfalls are used as a backdrop for the eponymous superhero's daring deeds. “I remembered the Niagara Falls scene in the movie, where he rescues a boy,” Skinner says. “Watching it again I realised that later in the movie Superman flies to a beautiful tropical waterfall to pick exotic flowers for Lois Lane…he’s romancing her before they sleep together.” Her Tinder subjects seemed to agree that there were superhero fantasies at play.

Waterfalls, Skinner points out, also work as an analogy for the digital lifestyle. “In a more theoretical sense, digital culture is discussed a lot in terms of fluidity and information flow. With these Tinder profiles it felt like metaphor was meeting reality.”

In another installation, #mytouchscreenheroes, Skinner approaches the waterfalls theme in a different way. The artist presents an iPad slideshow of Tinder profile pics of men with waterfalls, superimposed with images of Clark Kent that she cut from the scenes in Superman II. Playing in the background, rather appropriately, is R&B singer Monica’s 2010 hit Superman.

“[It] was a way to display my archive of waterfall Tinder profiles without revealing the men’s identities, but it also plays on the fact that fiction and reality aren’t so far apart,” she says. The work also exists as an Instagram feed.

Whether they’re aware of it or not, Skinner suggests that by posing with waterfalls, Tinder users are attempting to convey the hypermasculine superhero qualities within themselves. In #mytouchscreenheroes, “Clark Kent poses in place of the Tinder guys so they all appear like the same character, suggesting that perhaps none of us are all that unique,” she says.

A photo posted by Josephine Skinner (@mytouchscreenheroes) on Jun 1, 2016 at 4:19pm PDT

In the two installations, Skinner plays with our ideas of digital fantasy and IRL experience. “Our hopes and dreams feel so unique, so personal, but in many ways we’re all remixing our identities from the same small pool of media,” she says. “Popular culture—TV, movies, music, even the latest iOS—are key because they all contribute to this shared language, which allows us to feel unified and connected, but it’s reductive and problematic too.”

Although they retain a sense of humour, both artworks have an inherent sense of loneliness. “Despite the ways digital culture has revolutionised the way we communicate, I want to suggest that it hasn’t changed what essentially makes us human, our desires and failures,” Skinner says. “That constant connectivity hasn’t satisfied our search for love and meaningful connection.”

Find out more about Josephine Skinner here, or follow her on Instagram.

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