Elisa, 24, lives in Rome.
It strikes me that she has no photo, just a solid black background. She does not even have a biography describing her, but generic tags that indicate some of her traits: she is of the sign of Pisces, likes wine, dog lover, active in social networks, occasionally plays sports, studies at university and does not smoke. She likes brunch, theater and mountains. Not knowing what a person looks like piques my curiosity and I begin to obsess over what she might look like. I imagine her as a brunette, because her only image is black. If she likes to go to the mountains and drink wine, it would be nice to organize a picnic. If she occasionally goes to the gym, I can think of her as quite thin, but not obsessed with her figure. Also, she has a dog, so I think she walks a lot to walk him. All this while waiting for her to reciprocate my swipe right.
Opening dating apps, we are faced with selecting the best images of our potential partner.
What does the person we match really look like? Will it be how s/he represents him/herself in the pictures? What, on the other hand, does a person who chooses not to show him or herself to anyone look like?
After asking people without photos on Tinder for a description, these texts were used as a cue to generate images in Dall-E 2, creating photorealistic portraits of people I have never met. I repeated the process for each person until the AI's idea matched my idea of a certain person, projecting my idea of a certain person onto them, but without ever having seen them. I knew what the people I was talking to looked like, but at the same time I did not know.
