PARAPRAXIS MIRROR

A minimal psychoanalytic interface.  Above: the user types in response to the query of a listener.  Below: a misreflective unconscious/subconscious plane where words may Freudianly slip into other words.  Analysis of the Brown Corpus was used to target frequent start-letter/word-length combinations. A regular expression places each of these deformations/revelations at a random "depth" within the user's (the patient's) discourse so that they are triggered only after sufficient typing. 





LOCAL OPTIMUM

Contemporary digital media curates and even creates media according to some model of our desires — a form of anti-human psychopolitical work that removes responsibility from media consumers and leads to the loss of skills/knowledge (Bernard Stiegler). Hence, Byung-Chul Han (quoting Jenny Holzer): "The capitalism of *Like* should come with a warning label: Protect me from what I want." But, to know what we want, companies rely on Big Data and computationally-expensive machine learning.  Such things cannot fit into the 2KB program. This piece — an example of hand-operated machine learning (an evolutionary algorithm à la Karl Sims, only much simpler) — demands human thought+labor in order to traverse a search space of randomly-generated poems, approaching an "optimal" text. However, the user is also highly restricted by the algorithm's mechanisms, especially its binary, bit-like choices.  *Clicking* is the premier form of human labor in our attention economy.  If one is to *Like* something, one should have to work for it.