Dries Verhoeven is projecting other people's private Grindr texts in the middle of Kreuzberg, Berlin – and many aren't too happy about it

Text Zing Tsjeng

What would you do if you arranged a Grindr hook-up, only to turn up at the guy's address and realise that he was broadcasting your PMs in a public square as part of an art performance? Because that's exactly what happened to Parker Tilghman, a Berlin photographer who was approached by "Dries" on the dating app. Tilghman says that he wasn't that into 'Dries', a bearded slim man who said he was "exploring the undiscovered areas of Grindr" on his profile. But he was intrigued by Dries' unusual request for Tilghman to shave his beard, and set off for the man's address on Heinrichplatz in the centre of Kreuzberg, Berlin. "Are you going to murder me?" Tilghman typed. Dries replied: "No, but I'm afraid you might be the one to murder me." As Tilghman got out of the U-Bahn station, he saw what looked like an glass-walled shipping container on the pavement with projections on its walls. Walking over, he realised that his entire Grindr conversation with Dries had been blown up and projected on a huge LED wall panel. Anybody walking down the busy street of Oranienstrasse could effectively read all of Tilghman's private messages to Dries. "I would not consider myself an angry or explosive person, but I lost it," Tilghman says. "I opened the trailer and lunged at him. I punched him. I screamed. I flipped a table." Tilghman had unknowingly become the latest participant in "Wanna Play?", a live art installation by Dutch artist Dries Verhoeven. For the past two days, Verhoeven has been living in a glass trailer in Kreuzberg in order to – as he puts it on his website – "expose the opportunities and tragedies of a phenomenon in gay culture: the sex date app".

Courtesy of Parker Tilghman

"'Wanna Play?' is a social experiment," Verhoeven writes in an article on the piece. "For 15 days my life will only take place online. I will contact men in my vicinity and attempt to induce them into visiting me to satisfy my nonsexual needs. I will play chess with them, have breakfast, make pancakes, trim nails… I see this container as a research laboratory in which I will investigate the degree to which the internet can serve as a new meeting point." In the process, Verhoeven is also projecting the screen of his smartphone for anybody to read – and that includes the profiles and private messages of anybody who contacts him on Grindr. Oh, and he's live streaming it 24/7, too. Needless to say, Tilghman was not impressed after he realised he had been set up. "I screamed how dare you, you are violating people's lives, you are publicly mocking people and projecting the pictures and words onto a screen that an entire city block in one of the busiest parts of Kreuzberg for everyone to see," he says.

Dries Verhoeven via Facebook