Machine-In-The-Middle is a research project and artwork that explores the limitations of technology as the mediator of human communication and emotions. Its first iteration was a chat application that allows a user to have a conversation with another human, while having a very insistent machine mediate that conversation, trying to fill in the gaps that text communication can’t convey.

It used machine learning to analyse the user’s facial expressions to determine emotions, it also tried to determine gender, age and ethnicity and look online for visual representations of those terms. Machine-In-The-Middle is an augmented chat conversation with extra information no one really needs, where the flaws of human communication get mixed in with the flaws of the algorithms we use to communicate, all into one absurd mediated experience.

The first demo of Machine-In-The-Middle was developed during a residency at V2_ as part of the Summer Sessions network in a co-production between Arquivo 237 and V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media, with support of the Creative Industries Fund NL.