Cached Collective

The Cached experience offers a glimpse of your digital self, revealing how the outline of your online activity is quantified, interpreted, and profiled by contemporary social media algorithms. It illustrates how machines are learning to perceive you as a social creature and the assumptions they make about you.

The visitor is prompted to login on a tablet with either their Facebook or Twitter profile. Once connected, a seemingly normal mirror activates, turning into a functional screen and addressing you by name. The mirror delivers a personalized, five-minute experience that relies on dynamic visual storytelling to form a better understanding of how your actions online are perceived by algorithms. Powered by the IBM Watson psychometric algorithm, Cached digests the text of your individual Facebook or Twitter posts, analyzing your word choice, syntax, the complexity of your sentences, etc. to generate a psychometric profile that describes your specific personality, habits, and predilections.

It is gradually revealed that this powerful analytical tool is used to create a detailed profile of users simply to allow advertisers or other entities to microtarget more precisely. By the end of the experience, all personal data is erased, and the visitor receives a unique printed receipt containing a summary of the analysis. It is the only record of their data, which can be shared, kept secret, or destroyed at their convenience.
Cached is a user-friendly wake-up call; the experience invites you to critically think about the reflection your personal online behavior casts.

Cached Collective

The Cached Collective is an international group of creatives of diverse backgrounds, who are dedicated to exploring how technology influences our individual lived realities. Because of the impenetrable way that modern technology functions, we strive to design impactful experiences that can be easily understood by a wide audience. We make the intangible tangible. Our experiential inquiries delve into data, algorithmic complexity, and obscure infrastructure, especially focusing on how these affect the individual.

The Cached Collective first met during a social innovation residency in the South of France, the Hive. Each member of the collective brings a distinct expertise to our collaborations that we leverage to create unique, multidisciplinary experiences. This broad base of specialities—from engineering to fashion design, from poetry to programming—allows us to approach our topics with a unique eye.

The members of the Collective are: Clément Bouttier, Ryan Dzelzkalns, Jon Flint, Vytas Jankauskas, Joana Mateus, Aline Martinez and Felipe de Souza.