Dutch gay artist Dries Verhoeven is currently in the middle of a three week "live art installation" called Wanna Play? wherein he is engaging men on the dating app Grindr and projecting the conversations on a huge LED wall in a German storefront for the world to watch.
He is doing so without informing the men that the public can see the interactions.
Not surprisingly, many of the men are very upset.
Via Gay Star News:
Parker Tilghman is one of the men furious over the art show. When he started chatting to Verhoeven, they traded pictures and chatted for awhile before he was asked whether he was interested in shaving the artist's beard.
'Given the odd nature of our conversation I comically asked, "are you going to murder me?" to which he responded, "no, but i'm afraid you might be the one to murder me."
When Tilghman went to the address the artist gave him, standing on the corner of Marienenstrasse, he saw his Grindr chat out there for everyone to see.
'Someone involved in the project confronted me and I shouted at him louder than I have ever shouted in my life. The entire block stopped, at one point they started clapping. I screamed, "How dare you?
'"You are violating peoples lives, you are publicly mocking people and projecting the pictures and words onto a screen that an entire city block in one of the busiest parts of Kreuzberg for everyone to see.
'"What you are doing is unethical....At no point did you have my consent or notify me that you would be doing anything of the sort. You cannot exploit people like this for your bullshit hipster Berlin art world crap."'
The live-stream of the project is here, but it looks like the screen is not currently projecting conversations.
Word has gotten around about the little "social experiment." As such, some of Verhoeven's conversations go like this:
(via JMG)
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