What cools down intimacy in contemporary Chinese dating culture? Are people still trying to emotionally connect with one another, or have they become accustomed to judging others through swipes, scores, labels, and first impressions? As dating platforms increasingly organize relationships through visibility, filtering, and optimization, people are gradually moving away from choosing others through genuine emotional connection and toward evaluating them through measurable value, desirability, and social performance.

PREDATE is a real-time interactive web-based project that explores the phenomenon of “cold intimacy” and the normalization of social judgment in digital relationships. Inspired by Chinese matchmaking parks, dating apps, and online relationship discourse, the project constructs a speculative anthropomorphic dating world where participants build profiles, evaluate others, and are evaluated in return. The work focuses less on romance itself than on the social habits surrounding modern matchmaking: ranking, categorizing, interpreting, and packaging people through fragments of information.

Participants create profiles through a combination of personal choices and randomly assigned conditions related to assets, lifestyle, desirability, and relationship history. Not every trait can be controlled. Some conditions are determined through a limited dice-roll system, where luck directly shapes social value. Participants immediately see their scores rise or fall according to these assigned conditions, turning identity into something quantified, comparable, and publicly visible.

After creating their profiles, participants swipe through others, leave comments, assign labels, and react in real time. Rankings continuously shift as collective opinions shape visibility and desirability. The installation creates a cycle in which people judge others while simultaneously adjusting themselves to fit the same standards of evaluation. In this environment, judgment becomes automatic, performative, and socially reinforced.

PREDATE engages with broader questions surrounding emotional capitalism, algorithmic culture, and the commodification of intimacy in contemporary Chinese dating culture. The project examines how dating platforms encourage people to present themselves, interpret others, and navigate relationships through learned templates of evaluation. From profile construction to first impressions, intimacy becomes increasingly shaped by categorization, optimization, and social performance rather than emotional connection.

If audiences find the experience entertaining, that response becomes part of the work itself. The humor only functions because participants already recognize the logic behind it from their own lives.

What cools people down in the matchmaking process in contemporary Chinese digital culture? Are we choosing people, or simply and rapidly evaluating profiles by swiping, swiping, and swiping? In today’s dating apps, intimacy is no longer felt but calculated, filtered, and optimized through systems of visibility and judgment. PREDATE is a real-time, multi-device interactive web-based installation that immerses participants into a simulated world where they construct an alternative identity to navigate dating. Through constrained labels such as background, assets, lifestyle, and desirability, users are required to present themselves within predefined criteria while evaluating others in the same way. In this process, individuals are compared, ranked, and interpreted as units of value. The project allows participants to join through personal devices, construct profiles, and interact by swiping, judging, and labeling. These actions affect scores, rankings, and visibility, while collective feedback continuously reshapes how they are perceived. By placing users under constant evaluation and exposure, PREDATE creates a controlled and uncomfortable environment that reveals how digital systems transform intimacy into calculation and reproduce anxiety, hierarchy, and performative behavior in contemporary online relationships.

cold intimacies emotional capitalism

people are getting harder and harder to use their true heart to interact with people in this matchmaking process

Park Put on the table

It is more about evaluation of one person’s value.

One of the reason might be the process of getting access to and swiping a large number of profiles. It will let people get used to a certain template that they can use to judge everyone.

This project is aimed at showing the phenomenon of how people are judging others and also at the same time getting judged within a certain grading template. In the Chinese culture, the realistic factors are extraordinarily emphasized.

People will package themselves.

But in this app, you can’t package yourselves all as you want. Based on your luck, everyone might have to receive some ordinary conditions and even very dramatic conditions because the relationships between people are getting more and more complicated. So you will gonna try to make your score higher and guess which condition might bring higher scores. And no one is perfect there will always be red flags. And people may pass just because of one red flag. Or people just don’t care because there is one green flag.