By Elizabeth Vazquez
I should probably clarify that I did not fully immerse myself into the online dating scene when I was working on this project. The intrigue initially came from hearing friends discuss their OkCupid dates and from reading the messages they received, all tittering between distressingly disturbing and tragically humorous. Upon creating my own tongue-in-cheek profile, I became fascinated by the notion of the curated self and how we are constantly trying to present an image of ourselves that we like the most, especially on the internet. The messages I received were completely otherworldly to me, and I began to treat the experience like ethnographic fieldwork; drawing some of my OkCupid 'suitors' in a sketchbook alongside their messages, hoping that somehow ‘experiencing’ online-dating first hand and documenting this experience would help me better understand this social, digitizing world.
