Getting Started

The image above is a watercolor and pen interpretation of what Tinder kind of looks like in my head. Sometimes I think about how many people are on this green earth and it overwhelms me to think that each person has their own little universe so to speak. Their own friend circles, family, day to day routines. Their life may never overlap with mine and maybe it will. That's a whole other topic that blows my mind on a weekly basis, so back to this. In my minds eye I see stacks and stacks of profiles that make up each city or place. Living between Philly and New York I can see profiles from both cities and there are constantly new profiles. For those of you who don't know how Tinder works let me give you a quick run down of how it works. You start up a profile and you really don't have to do much else besides have a Facebook profile and the app pretty much does the rest for you. You can decide which gender profiles you would like to view, either male, female, or both, the distance you would like to view ranging from 1 mile away to 100 miles, and the age range you would like to see ranging from 18-55+.

So why the name? The reason I chose to title the piece "Tinderitis" is because I quickly found that the app has an addicting quality to it and that many of the people using it had caught this kind of disease to keep swiping, swiping swiping, exploring the thousands of profiles available at their fingertips at any given moment. It's an exciting "game" to see who is out there and who finds you attractive. I will develop this idea a bit more in the next post.

Soon after I started this project and started organizing my thoughts from my experience with the app as well as the thoughts of some of my matches I was told by a few of my matches that I should read comedian Aziz Ansari's book Modern Romance. His book explores pretty much everything that I was questioning and had thoughts about and after I started reading, I was amazed that he and I had similar thoughts about certain topics and was excited to read how someone else processed this information. Here is a link to read more about his book ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23453112-modern-romance ). I will be referencing some of his writings throughout the blog and I recommend you check it out! 

Each week I will try to organize the posts by topic and include a few drawings and illustrations that will be in the book. Some of my thoughts and writings will make it to the blog but some of them I will leave as exclusive to the sketchbook. That way once the sketchbook is in the Art Library there is something new for you to see!

The next post is going to be about first impressions. Stay tuned!

The Beginning of the Journey

Welcome to the Tinderitis blog! 

Let me explain what is going on here. 

Open 12/28-12/30 10am-7pm

As an artist I am fascinated by the different social constructs that make up our daily lives and am in constant awe of humanity and how we function, why we do what we do, what everyone's passions are, etc. I really enjoy thinking about what home, community, knowledge, friendship and love mean to different people and find so much joy in hearing people's thoughts about anything they're willing to share about. Humans are beautiful and the act of sharing thoughts with another human is a very special thing that I think people take for granted. I believe there is beauty to be found in every situation even the ones that leave you speechless, tearless, breathless, and broken. 

So. The project. I realized that since I am now a college graduate I guess I can officially call the art that I make "pieces" and not "projects." It's hard to break old habits though. Bear with me if there is an inconsistency with my wordage? So Tinder. Why art about Tinder? Well I'm so glad you asked. My experience visiting the Sketchbook Project was running parallel to my introduction to the Tinder universe and after purchasing a blank sketchbook with the purpose of filling it and returning it to the collection, I was realizing that my very brief Tinder experience was filled with a comical collection of screenshots of profiles that made me either actually LOL or shake my head in disgust yet still took a screenshot because of how ridiculous they were. I thought, "man it would be so fun to do little illustrations of some of these and make some kind of artistic piece about what I've found on here." Then it dawned on me. The Sketchbook. I could make a journal that illustrated not just my own experience with Tinder but the thoughts and opinions of the other users that I match with and come into contact with.

I will be using this blog as a space to process my thoughts about different topics that Tinder has sparked as well as share conversations that I've had with others about these topics. If you care to share, please do! I don't want this to become a battlefield of any kind but rather a place where thoughts and ideas can be shared in a neutral way, respectful way. Don't like what I'm saying? I would be interested in hearing your opinion as well and am open to looking at things in a different perspective but let's all be respectful of each other's thoughts. I'm not interested in changing anyone's mind, just am interested in analyzing different situations and hope to share a bit about the way I think about things.

This video is the first idea of what I think I am going to make the front cover of the sketchbook look like. Please excuse the poor quality.