A More Perfect Union
works on paper, 2010-2011
A More Perfect Union is a large-scale artwork based online dating and the United States Census. In progress since 2008, the work attempts to create an alternative census, based not on socio-economic fact but on socio-cultural identity.
In the summer of 2010, I joined 21 different online dating services and “spidered” their contents, downloading 19 million profiles of single Americans. These profiles were sorted by zip code and analyzed for significant words. A series of national, state, and city maps (43 in all) that show this data in various ways. Most notably, a set of prints shows a road atlas of the United States, with the city names replaced by the word used by more people in that city than anywhere else in the country. This lexicon of American romance, as it were, consists of more than 200,000 unique words, and gives an imperfect, but extremely interesting, perspective on how Americans describe themselves in a forum where the objective is love.
The piece was premiered at bitforms gallery in New York City in January, 2011, and received major national and international press coverage, resulting in an interview on National Public Radio, a review in Artforum magazine, an article in National Geographic magazine, and many posts on dating, political, and news blogs, including ABC News, the UK Daily Mail, and MSN.
