Data Dating: Love, Technology, Desire

What does it mean to be in love with technology? Does data improve our emotional interactions? The collection approaches the query with critical essays and works of new media art to look into the construction of love and its practices in the time of digitally mediated relationships. With expertise coming from recognized researchers, critics and artists in the field of media and cultural studies, it analyses relationship trends and affect cultures that have emerged from technological acceleration.

Data Dating: Love, Technology and Desire is a comprehensive study of love and intimacy under digitalism that reflects on the structure of feeling(s) and libido environments in the high-tech and media-bound landscapes of contemporary technocracies. Organized around ten chapters and ten works of new media art, the collection offers an extensive critical analysis of technologized romance (and other emotional relations), as well as provides an insight into the codification, execution, deployment, and evolution of the patterns of togetherness in the so-called 'Tamagotchi era'.

The chapters engage in the problems of new material planes that have emerged from the abstraction of networked communication and dispersion of traditional notions of physicality. They close-read the templates of contemporary fantasy, fetish and eroticism, as shaped by platform capitalism, datafication, and new commodity cultures, in which self-promotion for bonding relies on the new possibilities that are coming in with new media self-mediation formats. Central to the analysis is the carbon-silicon dynamics of love’s contemporary DNA and libidinal techne – practiced in the environment where screens, interfaces, algorithms, data protocols and non-organic objects of affection and affect delineate, organize and program the trajectories of encounter, limerence and erotic pleasure. All the chapters are authored by recognized researchers in the field of love, emotion, media, technology and cultural studies, and they critically explore various aspects of love/intimacy under technocracy, approaching them with expertise that goes beyond the typical high-modernist and post-structural reading of the media-ridden life practices and environments.

More importantly, the collection includes landmark works of new media art coming from prominent new media artist gathered around 'Data Dating' – new media art exhibition, curated by Valentina Peri (co-editor of the collection) and presented in Paris, Tel Aviv and London. As such, the collection proffers a unique and original critical approach – one that combines artistic practice and cultural criticism – to comment upon the transformation of human relationships and emotional standards under technological development with reference to the social change and cultural condition.

The collection of essays, each accompanied by a work of media art, that provides a comprehensive insight into the construction of love and its practices in the time of digitally mediated relationships.

Primary readership will be among educators, researcher and students in disciplines including cultural studies, media and communications, philosophy, sociology, psychology and gender, LGBTQ+ and sexual studies. It will be an extremely valuable resource for those in these fields.

It will be of interest to other groups including art curators, online platform designers, social media content managers and designers and data specialists.

Ania Malinowska is a culture theorist, author and professor at UiT The Arctic University of Norway (and formerly at the University of Silesia in Poland). She has published widely on media and emotions, cultural robotics, and the technologies of social relations.

Valentina Peri is an art curator and cultural anthropologist with expertise in new media and digital art. She runs Galerie Charlot with locations in Paris and Tel Aviv, where she exhibits projects focused on new media art. She is also a co-founder (with curator Anne Roquigny) of SALOON Paris, an international network for women working in the art scene.