The Dumpster

By Golan Levin with Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg

The Dumpster, launched on Valentine's Day 2006, is the first in a series of three works co-commissioned in collaboration with Tate Online.

The Dumpster is an interactive online visualization that attempts to depict a slice through the romantic lives of American teenagers. Using real postings extracted from millions of online blogs, visitors to the project can surf through tens of thousands of specific romantic relationships in which one person has "dumped" another. The project's graphical tools reveal the astonishing similarities, unique differences, and underlying patterns of these failed relationships, providing both peculiarly analytic and sympathetically intimate perspectives onto the diversity of global romantic pain.