Love Tester Machines
Ania Malinowska, PhD, Assoc. Prof.
e-mail: anna.malinowska@us.edu.pl
Love Tester Machines is a research task in media archaeology and a part of Ania Malinowska’s research project “Technologies of Love” (OPUS, NCN). It focuses on tracking the prototypes of match-making mechanisms and automata called Love Tester Machines, popular in Europe and the USA in19th and 20th centuries. The task entailed interviews with the collectors of old arcade games to analyse the types and models of love testers with regard to their construction, mechanisms, and the contemporary taxonomies of emotions. This is perhaps the first study of those machines based on empirical data, technological profiles, and a synchronic reading of emotional cultures of the previous centuries.
photo by Ania Malinowska