If you discovered that the personal and possibly slightly seedy messages you sent to strangers on a dating app were being displayed in a public square, you’d probably be fairly unhappy, right? A number of men in Berlin find themselves in this very situation this week, thanks to Dutch performance artist Dries Verhoeven.
Verhoeven’s art project, Wanna Play?, is currently on display in the center of Kreuzberg. The artist has installed himself in a giant glass box, and is contacting men on a series of hookup apps, including Grindr and Scruff, and then displaying the results on a series of screens, live streaming the whole experience.
The artist himself said of the project:
“For 15 days my life will only take place online. I will contact men in my vicinity and attempt to induce them into visiting me to satisfy my nonsexual needs. I will play chess with them, have breakfast, make pancakes, trim nails… I see this container as a research laboratory in which I will investigate the degree to which the internet can serve as a new meeting point.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, the artwork has already caused a stir.
Dazed report that one of the men featured tracked Verhoeven down and attacked him after discovering what was going on. Photographer Parker Tilghman says he began a chat with a user who asked some unusual questions, including a request to shave his beard, and decided to track the man, named “Dries”, down to his address.
When Tilghman got off the train at Heinrichplatz, he saw Verhoeven inside a big glass shipping container, and realised his entire Grindr conversation had been projected on a series of LED screens. “I would not consider myself an angry or explosive person, but I lost it,” he told Dazed. “I opened the trailer and lunged at him. I punched him. I screamed. I flipped a table.”
Verhoeven claims that his artwork is designed in such a way that it obscures the pictures and profile names of the users he contacts, although Tilghman says that his information was clearly visible, and that when he arrived on the scene, he was immediately recognised by several people there.
via Parker Tilghman, Facebook
In a subsequent Facebook post, Tilghman laid out his story, saying he does not feel embarrassed or humiliated, but instead feels violated in a way he “can’t fathom”. He also criticised Verhoeven for exposing his and others’ private information, saying:
“gays require safe spaces to exist in. we have been creating them forever. those safe spaces protect us from the hideousness of the outside world. granted, grinder is not exactly a “safe space”, but it is a space for us to communicate our desires and needs. in this digital world, its one of the few safe spaces we have. he is violating that. he is opening up that space for the sake of “art” and in doing so endangering people in the process.”
According to Dazed, the artist has since responded to the controversy, saying that he hopes his project will expose the fact that online anonymity is “a myth.” While that’s debatable, Verhoeven has certainly proven that you can’t always trust strangers you meet on the internet.
The question of what art even is remains unanswered.
Image via Facebook
