What cools down people 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 places participants in an anthropomorphic world where they create 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.

Built as a real time, multi-device interactive web-based installation, 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.