Imagine if you had a personal life coach – someone you could turn to for advice whenever you needed it – without the extortionate cost.
Well you can, with Karen.
Karen is a fictional life coach in a software-driven experiential art piece. Part story, part game, it offers a deliberately unsettling experience that’s intended to make us question the way we bare ourselves to digital devices.
How it works
You interact with Karen through an app. Things begin simply enough. She asks you a series of innocuous questions (drawn from psychological profiling questionnaires) about your outlook on the world – and builds a profile of you as you answer each question.
Karen is friendly and polite at first, but as the conversation progresses, it soon becomes apparent that she’s not as together as she seems.
The dynamic that unfolds is reminiscent of Spike Jonze’s 2013 film “Her,” in which Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls in love with an operating system. With Karen, however, it’s not the user, but the app that starts exhibiting inappropriate behaviour.
Karen develops a kind of ‘friend crush’ as time goes on, and her disregard for personal boundaries becomes quite unnerving. She starts contacting you late at night from her bedroom, and her questions get increasingly personal. Based on your answers, she feeds back things she’s learning about you, and seems to know you, and the way you think, far too well.
Data report
At the end of the week, you’re offered a personalised report based on the data you’ve supplied. Your report shows how you behaved and how the decisions you made affected Karen. You get to compare yourself with other players and see how the science of psychological profiling underpins the story.
Immersive experience
Created by interactive arts company, Blast Theory, Karen is more than an app – it’s a unique experiential activation.
Unlike real life-coaching apps, this one displays video rather than text — a tactic that makes it easy to forget the distinction between what’s digital and what’s human. Each time you interact with the app, the choices and responses you make are logged, analysed, and used to tailor the experience.
It’s a highly personalised experience, as the story is about you. It morphs to fit you, based on the information you provide, the choices you make and inferences the app itself begins to make.
Hotcow is a non-traditional creative agency that specialises in experiential marketing that goes viral. Our campaigns generate buzz through crowd participation, PR and content sharing. Contact us on 0207 5030442 or email us on info@hotcow.co.uk.
