Sunday, December 1, 2019
Grindr Remembers
[This site was brought to my attention] a few weeks ago after a picture of presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg posing at the Berlin Holocaust memorial [surfaced online]. This site documents people from the gay dating/hookup app Grindr who have posed for similar photos. While I think it's pretty tasteless to take these pictures, I am curious as to what other people think of this? Is this an appropriate response? What understandings of public space does this blog have? What does it mean to remember in such a way? How does this blog understand historical, cultural, and technological memory? How does it relate to ]"Shoahtecture"' and other large-scale memory architecture?
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A similar question was raised a few years ago when a German artist created the website Yolocaust, which featured images of people “having fun” around and in the memorial taken from public Instagram profiles (I think the artist found them because people had geotagged their pictures). I, too, wonder what would be the proper etiquettes (if any) to circulate images of memorial sites online since embodiment is so important to their larger cultural understanding and what does circulating these images is supposed to mean or achieve in our oversaturated visual ecosystem? While, yes, using a holocaust memorial selfie on your Grindr account is tacky as hell, is there a situation where it wouldn’t be tacky to do so and they could serve a purpose? But in this case, I wonder how the technological memories might be different than the experiential ones since I visited the Memorial and the museum a few years back, people were acting a fool anyways on the premise. Are we just not able to remember anymore? Or don't care about history outside of our own experience of it?
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I definitely think it's tacky to feature Grindr images of people "having fun" at the Memorial, combined with some of the racial stereotypes in the preferences listed in some of the photos. Tacky 2.0
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