Jamie Antonisse

The Cache is a storage system, a recording. Technically, it's a collection of 3D motion-captured data, iterated (and interpolated) over time. To a user, however, it is a navigable catalogue of space and time. It is accessed through a single screen, which sits on board the now-abandoned Eliza. Through that screen, the user can experience the ship "as it was"... moving through it, fastforwarding and rewinding it, watching as its inhabitants interact.

The remaining logs in the Cache cover three consecutive periods, roughly 22 minutes each, in the life of the Eliza. The Cache is therefore limited in both space and time. No person can venture beyond the walls of the ship (for obvious reasons) and no user can see beyond the temporal limits of the recording. The user is further limited by the presence of security restrictions: the recording has been partitioned into different levels of security, and passwords are required to access different rooms and certain chunks of time.

In the course of the recorded hour, the Eliza went from being an active space station, populated by 29 people, to the abandoned hull it is today. It was a living experimental time capsule, sent out into deep space at high speed, containing a huge repository of human knowledge, in digital form and in the memories its passengers. The experimenters were obsessed with recording, with narrative, with testing the fidelity of human memory/history, and with passing on the experiences of their era. The subjects were told that their voyage was to last one year in their subjective time, five years in objective/Earth time. In theory, they are still on course.

The "user" (and his/her "avatar" on the physical Eliza) is able to interact with the Cache by manipulating space/time in the simulation, and annotating the space/time with their notes. However, the Cache is comprised of events that have already passed; therefore the user cannot deterministically affect them. They are simply the ghost in the machine.

Nestled within the belly of Eliza, the Cache holds the story of 29 lost souls and the ship that contained them. But it also contains and encompasses its own story, the story of the machine that captured it all and was, in many ways, responsible for the disaster that followed.