Searching for a Psychometric Lover

2012

A 3-week residency at the Royal College of Art that explored peoples willingness to hand over their most personal and intimate data to an anonymous online service.

Searching for a Psychometric Lover presented an algorithmic dating experience with a twist, participants were asked to answer a series of psychometric tests used by popular dating sites. Under the guise of finding a perfectly matched sexual partner, the tests asked for increasingly intimate and personal details about the participant’s sexual fantasies and desires. Participants were incentivised by a gamified strategy that offered prizes for participants with the closest matching psychometric scores.

Before entering the system, participants had to agree to terms and conditions that gave total ownership of their data to John Wild for future use in the installation stolen.data/confessions.

stolen.data / confessions

2012

stolen.data/confessions was an installation consisting of a large screen and an arcade joystick mounted on an illuminated Perspex plinth.

A scrolling database dump, harvested from the Searching for a Psychometric Lover dating site, was projected on the screen.

The data scrolled at a speed that allowed some words to be picked out but was too fast to comfortably read.

The joystick allowed viewers to slow down and read the personal data implicating themselves in a voyeuristic act of data theft.

stolen.data/confessions was an installation presented at [brutalizer] on 30.10.2012.