In these cabinets are eleven singles who are all looking for love online.

We have worked in collaboration with each of the

participants to expand their profiles for this public space. If you are interested in meeting with any of the singles profiled here, you
are invited to contact them via the email address: lonelyheartsatplatform@gmail.com. Send us the username of the person you
are interested in, some information about yourself and contact details, and we will forward your email on to the individual.
As artists we are interested in the complex conditions and contingencies required for people to meet and come
together. As such Lonely Hearts is a chance to consider failed moments of connection, as well as create opportunities
for new encounters. Through this project we want to dwell on the ethical and aesthetic challenges of working with
people as an art form.
After posting a call out for participants on Gumtree and Craigslist we were contacted by an unexpectedly large and
diverse range of people interested in developing real life versions of their online dating profiles. Over the month of
February, we have talked to singles across Melbourne, from Altona to Clayton. They have told us some fascinating and
bleak stories about the online dating scene and granted us the opportunity to expose them to public and artistic
scrutiny. We thank them for participating in this experiment with generosity and enthusiasm.
Just like online dating profiles, these cabinets are an inadequate and incomplete representation of the people involved.
But if they intrigue you, we encourage you to contact them. Meet them here, get to know them better.
Amy Spiers and Lara Thoms, March 2012.

Lonely Hearts: Five Fragments.
To love is to try to explicate, to develop these unknown worlds that remain enveloped within the beloved. - Gilles Deleuze
Come into my world. - Kylie Minogue
I. (How) Does a Profile Work?
There are 1.5 million online dating profiles in Australia. People select elements of their lives for these profiles what
they like, what they dont, what theyre looking for, what they just cant stand.
What gets captured in these lists? And what slips through?
If these facts indicate important things about yourself or the person you want to love, then does including more data
make the process of finding someone more accurate, less risky? Do you add more and more information so that you
can be precise about just who you are, and just what your exacting standards are for the person who is going to love
you?
These cabinets are also profiles. The elements in them arent words, but objects. Its not just the persons favourite
activity, its the things they wear when theyre doing it. (Is that, perhaps, the book they read which formed their view of
the environment?)
But do things give any more sense of a person than information?
II. A Lover is a Spectator.
From your bed, you can see a disparate set of objects. A framed picture. A shirt, washed and ironed, ready to be worn
to work. Where you left them, where you hung them, where theyve accumulated as youve gone about your day, day
after day. Walk into the kitchen, walk into the living room books on the shelf, a motivational note above the desk. Go
through your daily activities. Supermarket shopping, imagining tomorrow. Make a plan for the weekend. A bike ride, a
game of lawn bowls. Knick-knacks, posters, equipment, books all strewn about the interior of your house. An
agglomeration of stuff, passed through daily.
What does a lover do? When a lover is present in your life, what do they add to all these objects?
When you tell them about their history, perhaps they allow you to imagine that there is a single point of view, external
to yourself, that is taking it all in. A lover remembers for you. They can be the point to which you direct your stories.
A lover forms a world. You can imagine them as a witness to your life, creating the possibility that all the events that
march by, one after the other, might be observed from a single perspective. You need an imaginary point external to
you. Someone, an other, you can count on to keep track of things, to give the universe meaning.
If no one knows what the privileged elements of your life are, if no one can distinguish the incidental from the
sentimental, then whats the difference between the things going out in your garbage bin and the trinkets on your shelf?
The same thing happens if you go home with someone. You wake up in their room. What do you see? A bedroom full
of stuff. Neat or messy, shelves full of mementos, clean bright sheets. A scene, a background, in which the person you
have selected (or who has selected you) plays out their life. It is coherent, this picture makes sense.
(After all do we only fall in love with a person? Or is the scene of their life what dazzles us? Do we fall in love with an
atmosphere, with a backdrop? An exciting suburb, the suggestion of plans being followed and put into place by someone
who is, as yet, mysterious, partially concealed.)
So think about that, as you pass your eyes across these photos, these things. Someones gaze might fall over these
objects, then one day they might end up in the room from which they came. (You might find yourself underneath that
doona. You might learn the significance of that tiny squirrel.) These are real worlds.
III. Artists Visit Your House.
Why would you let them? Why did you want them to visit anyway? Why would you answer their strange request: select
objects that convey who you are?
Two artists visit your house. What do they see? What happens when you try and explain yourself to an artist?
Two artists visit your house. They ask you questions. You tell them about your life. What are they listening for? What
do they take in? And what are they going to do with it?
Two artists tell you, choose some objects that represent you. Give them to us. So you do. And then they say, no, we
want different objects.
Why would you open yourself up to an artist? Is it a confessional?
Perhaps its because of what artists dont do. They dont set up a website database of lovers, make themselves
middlemen, show you a promising glimpse of people who might love you, then charge you for the chance to talk to
them.
IV. Whats a Lover For?
Why would you want a lover? Because they improve your life? Is there an empty space waiting for them amidst your
routines? Or will they just muck up the order you have established, the world you have made for yourself? If you are
happy, then what can a relationship add that you dont have already?
Perhaps you desire the chance to share things that can only materialise when there are two people. But what are these
things?
V. What World Does Art Make?
The objects of an interior, removed and displaced, arranged sparingly under bright lights in eleven cabinets. Household
items, now behind glass, detached from their usual lifeworld (the bookshelf, the bedside table, the wall in the back
room). Frozen, here they are, reverentially arranged, as if observing the rules of a rarified ikebana for domestic knick-
knacks.
What are all these cabinets? A series of specimens (woman looking for love, man who is ready) with the life drained
out of them.
None of the anecdotes and confidences shared between artist and participant are present here. What is excised is
narrative, the story of the lives in which these objects are usually rooted.
Most of each cabinet is space. Movement, narrative, the sound of a voice: all this has been filleted out, leaving an
abundance of space. In relief, out of the material of eleven lives, an artwork has been made.
Does a life become art when parts of it are cut away?
What is in the gaps between these objects?
Catherine Ryan, March 2012.