Blind(ly) Reaching Out Rhizoids and Anchoring Them to a Rock, Date, 2025
Installation view, CCA Derry Londonderry.
Photographs by CCA Derry Londonderry and Paola Bernardelli.
Material: Mussel, scallop and limpet-based bioplastic.
Blind(ly) Reaching Out Rhizoids and Anchoring Them to a Rock Date is an installation that examines how the gamification of dating has shaped contemporary intimacy, from early TV formats to board games and today’s reality dating franchises. These systems often reduce connection to strategy, speed, and surface, reinforcing transactional and disposable dynamics. The work responds to this shift by asking what is lost when intimacy becomes a game, and by proposing more porous models of attachment, interdependence, and care.
The installation draws on the structure of Blind Date and the MTV dating show 'Singled Out', staging a TV-studio-like set in which a contestant chooses between unseen potential partners based on scripted prompts. Visitors are invited to step into the role of the contestant and read from a teleprompter, becoming complicit in the mechanics of selection and performance. Informed by coastal ecologies and multi-species relations, the work unsettles binary outcomes of romantic success or failure, suggesting intimacy as something drifting, osmotic, and entangled.
Video and text written by Maeve O’Lynn.
Installation view, CCA Derry Londonderry.
Photographs by CCA Derry Londonderry and Paola Bernardelli.
Material: Mussel, scallop and limpet-based bioplastic.
Blind(ly) Reaching Out Rhizoids and Anchoring Them to a Rock Date is an installation that examines how the gamification of dating has shaped contemporary intimacy, from early TV formats to board games and today’s reality dating franchises. These systems often reduce connection to strategy, speed, and surface, reinforcing transactional and disposable dynamics. The work responds to this shift by asking what is lost when intimacy becomes a game, and by proposing more porous models of attachment, interdependence, and care.
The installation draws on the structure of Blind Date and the MTV dating show 'Singled Out', staging a TV-studio-like set in which a contestant chooses between unseen potential partners based on scripted prompts. Visitors are invited to step into the role of the contestant and read from a teleprompter, becoming complicit in the mechanics of selection and performance. Informed by coastal ecologies and multi-species relations, the work unsettles binary outcomes of romantic success or failure, suggesting intimacy as something drifting, osmotic, and entangled.
Video and text written by Maeve O’Lynn.
